Back in the 1980s, if you got in a taxi in Glasgow, Scotland, and asked to be taken to this or that particular bicycle shop, you sometimes got a stream-of-consciousness response from the driver that went something like this:

"Aye! - I was a cyclist - a fair while ago, mind - I had a Flying Scot bike, by the way - hand-built - with they French gears - made in Luxembourg or somewhere daft - it was a lovely wee machine ..."

It didn't matter that the taxi driver’s Cyclo Benelux derailleurs were made in Birmingham, England (as they were) or made in ‘somewhere daft’ like the Principality of Luxembourg (as they, decidedly, were not), there was no getting away from the fact that they were FRENCH gears.

As the taxi driver had correctly detected, the spiritual home of the derailleur is France - and this is not just because of the inherent, unfamiliar, Frenchness of words like ‘derailleur’ (not often pronounced in Glasgow - hence the simpler term ‘French gears’) and brands like ‘Huret’ (pronounced in Glasgow to rhyme with ‘turret’). It is because of half a century of relentless innovation in France that eventually led to the birth of the derailleur bike as a mass market item.

There were three giants of this period:

• Cyclo - the authentic original derailleur company, inexplicably not represented in this collection.
• Simplex - the populists, with a genius for marketing, a commitment to affordable prices and a passing interest in engineering.
• Huret - the mad inventors, with a peculiarly French ability to combine the fabulously exotic and the cheap and nasty in the one product range.