Kitabı oku: «One More Kilometre and We’re in the Showers»
ONE MORE KILOMETRE AND WE’RE IN THE SHOWERS
Memoirs of a Cyclist
TIM HILTON
COPYRIGHT
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2004
Copyright © Tim Hilton 2004
Tim Hilton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780006532286
Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2012 ISBN 9780007391752
Version: 2016-10-03
PRAISE
‘An exhilarating work … just the book for anyone who, shooting past a traffic jam on the way to work, imagines himself wearing the winner’s yellow jersey at the head of the Tour de France pack’
Independent
‘Remarkably infectious and richly atmospheric; so much so that the effect is like being hoisted up on to his handlebars and swept along for the ride. His enthusiasm drives everything forward at an exhilarating lick’
Sunday Telegraph
‘A hugely engaging history of the sport’
SIMON O’HAGAN, Books of the Year, Independent on Sunday
‘A charmingly eccentric account of his love of cycling, mixed in with a history of the sport’
JOHN PRESTON, Books of the Year, Sunday Telegraph
‘This strange, funny and moving memoir is irresistible. A quirky, oblique elegy’
Financial Times
‘A deeply affectionate mental scrapbook … Hilton has the skill as a writer to make the subject of cycling fresh and compelling again. Fascinating … Exuberant’
MATT SEATON, Guardian
‘Hilton is a brilliantly quirky, inventive writer … A wonderful testament to a life in the saddle’
Daily Telegraph
DEDICATION
For Daniel
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Praise
Dedication
Introduction to the Ebook Edition
Introduction
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
XXV
XXVI
XXVII
XXVIII
XXIX
XXX
XXXI
XXXII
XXXIII
XXXIV
XXXV
XXXVI
XXXVII
XXXVIII
XXXIX
XL
Index
Acknowledgements and A Note on Sources
About the Author
Other Books By
About the Publisher
INTRODUCTION TO THE EBOOK EDITION
The ebook edition of this book allows me to thank fellow cyclists whose help I forgot to acknowledge in the previous introduction. First among them is Eric Auty. Years ago he gave me his ‘Shake’, the Monckton Boys and the Hercules Professionals (Cheltenham, n.d.), which describes 1930s cycle racing in the East Midlands coalfields. His book also gives an account of riders who, like Shake Earnshaw, were the first to join the ‘paid ranks’, to use the old journalists’ expression. Not that there have ever been large numbers of British professionals. For good or ill, our sport is predominantly amateur. But we all admire the band of lonely cyclists who left their British clubs for an uncertain professional life on the Continent. I should have acknowledged Rupert Guinness’s The Foreign Legion (Huddersfield, 1993), the classic history of their pioneering adventures.
The first sentence of my own book has turned out to have been an invitation to friends old and new. To my delight, nearly one hundred people have sent me their life stories, photographs, poems, programmes and club magazines. Their letters show that cyclists – of the older generation, for they are the best cyclists – are generous historians. Something about cycling life encourages reminiscence. We all wish to pass on the lore of cycling tradition. Lore is nothing if it is not shared, as my correspondence proves. So, in this second introduction, I give thanks to people who have augmented my brief snatches of history and have, gently, questioned the evidence for various prejudices.
Some memories take us back through many years, happy days and wars. Ethel Brambleby (Aldershot Wheelers), for instance, is the daughter of an Edwardian who discovered cycling in 1902. She began racing in 1934. A little later, Ethel tells me, she made herself a teatime guest at Pear Tree Farm. She must be the last of the few visitors at Frank Patterson’s strange home. But was the farm as unusual as I have imagined? There may have been dozens of Englishmen who built such castles around their yeoman dreams. I am not hostile to Patterson’s art, which is a genuine part of our national life, and hope not to have upset his devotees.
In One More Kilometre … I did not write enough about women racing cyclists of former years. The records are lacking, though somewhere they must exist. I still have no definite information about the Rosslyn Ladies. Harridans or heroines? Surely the files are with a daughter of the club. I know – this is to counter one of the myths about them – that some of the Ladies had husbands. It’s still true that young women cyclists became independent when they ceased to be tandem stokers, especially at the time of Hitler’s war. They were, and remain, spirited people. Connie Charlton, née Stubbs (Priory Wheelers), has excellent recollections of North London and Hertfordshire cycling. And she writes: ‘I must be the only woman to catch Alfie Engers. I was riding up Hornsey Rise when I drew level with a very young lad. He told me his name, said he worked in a bakery and was thinking of joining a cycling club …’
Connie Charlton advised him, so was at the birth of a marvellous career. Connie also recalls the especial friendship between the Priory Wheelers and the Coventry Road Club. Every year they had a Warwickshire reunion. Stalwarts of the Coventry RC, as I have mentioned, were Ron and the late Edie Atkins. I thank Ron for the gift of some of his memorabilia and urge readers to look at his wife’s end-to-end bike. Its frame is by R. O. Harrison. The machine is now preserved in the Coventry British Transport Museum. Snowy Woodhall (Addiscombe CC, formerly Redhill Clarion CC) recalls, as does Ron Atkins, tyro cyclists who were also in the Young Communist League. He questions my brusque statement that there were no cyclists in the navy. He knew a number of them in the Portsmouth area. Thanks, Snowy. We agree that it’s better to be on a bike than in a boat.
Mike Daniell (Stevenage CC) has joined with me in adding to our lists of cyclists who are artists. He could write a fine book on this affecting topic.
I wrote that there was a mystery about Reg Harris’s training methods. Now I can add information from Trevor Fenwick.
One winter (1953) I was his sole training companion for six weeks … every morning winter and summer he rode 36 miles. I would call at his house … this was the first time I had seen fitted carpets outside a cinema.
We would ride 20 miles at a brisk pace … then stop for a coffee at Knutsford … after coffee we would do 6 miles flat out bit and bit to Holmes Chapel … When I first went out with him he rode 74″ fixed.
One day I drew level with his bottom bracket in the final sprint at Holmes Chapel and he asked me what gear I had sprinted in (88″). He did not comment … Next day his bike had gears, and after that he always used gears training on the road …
This is an extract from a much longer letter. I say again that more cyclists should write books. Trevor Fenwick, who these days goes out with a ‘gentleman group’ in Wessex, shone in the first four Tours of Britain (1952–5) and competed as a professional in France and Belgium. Other memories of League days have come from Dave Orford (The League International), John Scott (Twickenham CC) and Terry Thornton (Sheffield Phoenix RC), who loves the spirit of the 1950s, so much allied – he and I believe – to social change. Terry, who in the early 1960s ran all the new Sheffield modern jazz clubs, says of his teenage life: ‘What a thrill to strut into a tea room to hear the whispers of “It’s the League” and no-one would leave until we had left …’ Today’s young people do not realise that some of the battles of the British League of Racing Cyclists were fought (or their lines were drawn) over cakes and teapots in rural cafes. But so it was.
Such Leaguers – who love their reunions and publish an excellent quarterly, The Veteran Leaguer – have put me right about details of old events and their riders. I have corrected my slips, silently. My greatest debt is owed to a French scholar, Eric Stables, now in his seventy-fourth year, who was an active cyclist in South Yorkshire in the 1940s. With much courtesy and understanding, he has made a list of my errors. On one matter we disagree. Mr Stables is sure that many of the miners he rode with were coal-face workers. I persist in my view that racing cyclists from the collieries were mainly employed at the pit head, though they would not have had desk jobs. Perhaps there is not much difference between us, and we should both ask for advice from Eric Auty.
T. H., Uggeshall, 2005
INTRODUCTION
This is a book about cycling and my enthusiasm for cycle sport. Its title was provided, in five seconds, by my son Daniel Hilton – a super invention by a boy who was then in his twelfth year of life. I had complained that cycling books often have conventional tides, such as Reg Harris’s Two Wheels to the Top (1976), Russell Mockridge’s My World on Wheels (1960) or Eileen Sheridan’s enchanting Wonder Wheels (1956). I enjoy these books. They remind me of the days when I grew up and first became a cyclist. That was some time ago. I have been cycling for half a century, so feel ready to contribute to the literature on ‘wheelfolk’, as we used to call ourselves. Like the poet he subsequently became, Daniel could not say how he devised his name for my book. ‘It just arrived in my mind.’ Was it by any chance a metaphor, words spoken by defeated riders at the end of a long, hot race, just as elderly people might think of death? ‘No, Dad.’
Ours is a father-to-son sport and parents who are cyclists love to tell stories of the road to their children. I include some personal comment and passages of autobiography, and why not? Other people can describe the sport in a more measured way. I am not a sports historian, just a veteran club cyclist with a typewriter. None the less I have academic interests, of an undisciplined nature. My bound books on cycling are on shelves, more or less in order. The lists, Road Time Trials Council handbooks, pathetic training diaries, newspaper clippings, start sheets, photographs (some signed ‘yours in sport’ or fraternellement), programmes, poems, Holdsworth’s Aids, gear tables, plus lovely maps of the high Pyrenees in the mid-1950s, are in cardboard boxes which I keep in the attic space above the library. I might hammer a bat box to the side of the building.
It is a curious fact that maps lose their beauty when framed and hung on the wall. They are beautiful because they want to be books rather than pictures. I wish that magazines could be regenerated as books. Other boxes and black bags, also roughly piled in the attic at the bottom of the garden, hold thousands of old cycling magazines, mostly English, many French, some Italian. All too few are the journals in Flemish: I must get some more next spring and work at the language. Modern-day cyclists ought to be linguists. Basque magazines would be interesting, though I do find the tongue daunting and am more at home in Belgium than en el Pais Vasco.
American cycling magazines mean little to me. I want old Flemish mags because – like so many racing cyclists of my generation – I feel increasing love for cycle racing in Flanders and wish that, when young, I had taken the boat to Ostend as often as to Calais. Wielersport is so old-fashioned and full of local patriotism. Like Flemish art, it is provincial in an admirable way. I mean old Flemish art – a preference which indicates my antique view of the world. But the Ronde van Flaanderen, the Het Volk and similar events (let us include Paris – Roubaix, though that race traverses French soil) are marvellously and essentially traditional. If they were to change with the times, all would be lost.
Paris – Roubaix is criticised by some competitors, led by no less a man than Bernard Hinault, as absurd and having no place in the contemporary world. Hinault (the winner of the 79th edition, in 1981) speaks with feeling about its ‘nonsense’. My view is that of the thousands of fans who do not have to ride over those hideous roads to the north-east of Le Cateau-Cambrésis. We attend the Roubaix epic and the Ronde van Flaanderen because these races – the Classics, the ‘monuments’ of cycling – take us back to grimy but glorious years in the past.
Is the Tour de France a ‘monument’? Unquestionably, because of its long and magnificent history. It is always an epic. Yet I join the whispers of discontent. The managers of the Tour always seem to be looking for extra revenues, new territories to conquer, a more contemporary style. I believe that the greatest years of the Tour came after the 1939–45 war, and before the mondialisation that was an objective in the mid-1980s. Younger people will no doubt have a different perspective. After all, the Tour is now more than 100 years old. Many lovers of la grande boucle prefer the race as it was in the 1920s and 1930s. To me, that’s prehistory. I am a war baby, will be a war baby until death and associate cycle sport with the new European life after 1945.
My view of the Tour de France was formed in the 1950s. I can just glimpse that it was a period when, for the peoples of southern Europe, cycle racing provided a vague metaphor for the human condition. Those times have gone, but have left a legacy in the quasi-religious admiration of Fausto Coppi. We sense rather than define the end of European folk religion. But it is certain that the fortunes of dozens of riders tell us about the changes from peasant subsistence to life under industrialisation. Cycle sport also touches many other concerns of the twentieth century. First and maybe foremost, the freedom to go where one wills. Then, the development of technology; the attractions of positive leisure; commerce and advertising; the despoliation of the countryside; and the values of sport and popular culture.
In Paris in my teenage years I saw Fausto Coppi in action – and took a photograph of him! Not a good one. At the same period I observed the rituals of English club runs and rode every spring to the cyclists’ annual gathering at the church at Meriden in Warwickshire. These dissimilar experiences were part of my novitiate, and the present book is concerned with differences between British and continental cycle sport.
A declining number of people know about the Meriden service. I doubt whether there is anyone who is not an old British cyclist who would recognise a Frank Patterson drawing, or salute the long history of the Clarion clubs, or give renewed applause to Ray Booty’s 100 or Eileen Sheridan’s End-to-End. I’ve written about such matters because they ought to be placed in a book. Our native cycling has long traditions that will soon be lost. Many cycling bodies are now about a century old. My own allegiances are of more recent times. They are owed to a network of clubs and individuals who came together in the later years of the last war, the British League of Racing Cyclists. Great rebels! Up the League! The BLRC was not merely about racing. It was a social movement. The League was made up of men (they were almost always men) who felt little respect for their elders and wished to have some experience of French and Italian life, if only from afar. They liked the thought of money but expected that their jobs would always be of an ordinary sort. Leaguers had had a strong sense of style and enjoyed glamour almost as much as they relished their disputes. They had no political agenda but would not be told what to do. And they have not gone away.
It is now difficult to trace the history of the British League of Racing Cyclists. The confusion is part of the League’s anarchist legacy. Half a century on, its veterans often revisit old battles. Are these twinkling-eyed, grizzled men stirring the embers of memory? No. Their purpose is to pour paraffin into the fireplace. Many of them are still racing, though now in their seventies. That’s a part of cycling, a sport in a world of its own. Old wheelers continue in our youthful ways and do so until we drop from the tree. As the motto puts it, ‘We’re all young on the bike’.
I
Everyone has their story of the way they became a cyclist, and this is mine.
I was an only child. My parents were communists. They had joined the Party – the Communist Party of Great Britain, that is, but known to us simply as the Party – when they were Oxford undergraduates in the 1930s. My father had won a splendid scholarship from Manchester Grammar School. He was the son of a weaver, John James Hilton of Middleton, who later became the manager of the local co-operative society. Nowadays a suburb of Manchester, Middleton was in John James’s time an independent village with customs and traditions of its own, some of them still rural, others connected to the weaving trade. By ‘John James’s time’ I mean long ago, at the beginning of the twentieth century. My father never knew his father. A motor car had run over him as he was cycling from work to his home.
My father’s mother was also a weaver. She was sent to the mill at the age of twelve. I remember her Lancashire accents describing how, at mid-morning, she and other girls were allowed to leave their places at the looms to run down to the nearby fast-flowing river ‘to play’. Those little wage-earners were still children when they were made to work. In later life my father, Rodney, was her youngest and favourite child. She wished that he would never leave her.
I refer to my father as ‘Rodney’ because I was never allowed to call him ‘Dad’. This was one of the conventions of the intellectual wing of the Communist Party. Children spoke to, and of, their parents by using their first names. I do not know what anyone hoped to gain from this practice. It certainly did not promote family love and intimacy. Probably the idea was that children should consider themselves as part of a larger family, or something bigger and better than any family could be – the Party.
My parents were mismatched and had grown apart in the years when Rodney was fighting in the north African desert. I remember them mainly as hosts to other Party members. Our Birmingham home was the centre of a quite large community of local Marxists. The local Party branch had a strength of about twenty comrades. Their meetings were held every Thursday evening at our house, 90 Bristol Road, near the corner of Speedwell Road, from 1948 to 1956. My task was to pour beer for the comrades after they had finished their business. At a quite early age I was allowed (‘compelled’ might be a better word) to take part in the discussions. Little wonder that, ever afterwards, I have done my best not to attend meetings of any kind. I don’t even go to the AGM of my own cycling club.
Our Party branch, which was based in the University of Birmingham, had quite a good run. There were eight years of regular meetings and other activities – demonstrations, summer schools, pamphlet distribution, and so on – before the collapse of British communism in 1956. This was the world of my childhood. It made me into a cyclist. Cycling is not a middle-class sport and in the 1950s was certainly not practised by university people. But I wanted the life of the bicycle. I became a cyclist because I was brought up as a communist, which made me classless. I am also devoted to the bike because it represents freedom. And, as I was soon to find, cyclists had a generosity that did not exist among the crazed Stalinists of my early days.
Before I got a bike it was already obvious to me that there was a life of friendship and pleasure beyond the four walls of the Party branch meeting. From my chair near the door (comrades always sat in the same places, week after week) I could gaze through the window and dream while some paper on culture or industrial strategy was being read. During the past half century capitalism has ceased to be a progressive force; the bourgeoisie has ceased to be a progressive class; and so bourgeois culture, including poetry, is losing its vitality. Through the window I could see the pear tree and thought of its fruit. Our contemporary poetry is not the work of the ruling class – I wonder how long this talk will last what does big business care about poetry? – but of a small and isolated section of the community, I wish I had more mates at school the middle-class intelligentsia I can see to the very top of that pear tree spurned by the ruling class when he shuts up I can go to the kitchen to get the beer but still hesitating to join hands with the masses of the people now that the cloud has come over by the Pershore Road the pear-tree leaves look silvery, not green the proletariat, who alone have the strength why doesn’t my mother play the piano any longer? to break through the iron ring of monopoly capitalism!
It was characteristic of these talks that, just when a boy thought that a conclusion had been reached, the comrade coughed, lit another cigarette and started up again, like a car revving up after a breakdown. And so bourgeois poetry has lost touch with the underlying forces of social change. I wonder if I could be a poet. It is no longer the work of a people, or even of a class, but of a coterie. Hasn’t he said that before? Unless the bourgeois poet can learn to reorientate his art, he will soon have no one to sing to but himself…– And my present-day reader will understand that, as soon as I had a bicycle, I could indeed sing to myself. The bike was my escape from the dullness and conformity, and I would even say the ugliness, of a communist household.
When I was eleven Rodney and Margaret, trying to maintain or revivify their marriage, went to France and Italy without me. I was to stay with Margaret’s parents in their big house in Raynes Park, which is at the further side of Wimbledon. (Raynes Park is notable as a catchment area for the Redmon Cycling Club, whose name is an anagram of Morden.) My grandparents were gentle people, old, each of them absorbed in their own thoughts. Early on the morning of my parents’ departure I went and hid in a creosoted shed in the garden and then in the Raynes Park church. I thought that Rodney and Margaret would not dream of searching the church, and I was right. And I reckoned that they had to catch their boat train or all would be lost to them. So it was. Off they went without saying goodbye, which is what I wanted.
I received a couple of postcards in the next few days. They must have meant a lot to me, for I kept them and have them still, after forty years and more. This was Margaret: ‘Dear Tim, where oh where were you when we wanted to say goodbye this morning? We are on deck on this boat now and it is very cold and blowy. We shall be in Paris at suppertime.’ Bon appétit, comrades everywhere. The next week my father writes from Italy – Florence actually, now I look at the postmark. ‘Dear Tim, we had a very jolly ride in a bus today. In every village the people were having feasts in the open air to celebrate the paper which is the Italian Daily Worker. Lots of Love Rodney.’
I resented these messages, since I liked being in France and thought that I should not have been left in Raynes Park. My grandparents did not know what to do with me. By good fortune, they had a library in their house, a real library with fitted bookshelves. Within this room I dreamt of becoming a writer. Its windows opened on to a large garden. There was a veranda, a workshop, a garage, lawns, a tennis court, the orchard, the kitchen garden and then the chicken runs. One day in that summer of 1951, bored, lonely and not a happy boy, I wandered into the garage. My grandfather had a Bentley but scarcely ever drove it, preferring to potter among his redcurrant bushes. So the garage was not much used. I pushed open the door and saw a bicycle behind the Bentley. And that is how I began.
II
Most boys or girls need to be taught how to ride a bicycle. In my case no tuition was needed. I was a natural. Just as some young animals swim as soon as they are thrown into the water, I was immediately balanced, fast and athletic. The machine from the garage was too big and I perched between the saddle and the top tube. None the less I managed. Within half an hour the bike and its rider were on the road, down Grand Drive towards the Kingston by-pass, whose concrete blocks and expansion gaps I recalled in many a later time-trialling effort.
My first days as a cyclist were magical. Never in my short life had I felt anything like the aerial liberation the bicycle granted me. Yet the Raynes Park bike was nothing special. Later on, I had another crucial physical experience. That was when I first rode a light racing machine. Suddenly I was a bird: uncatchable, self-contained, soaring and zooming towards the horizon, free from human worry and therefore happy. Cycling is about physical pleasure and happiness. I know that the bike can also make you weep, especially when you’re a teenager and don’t understand your body. Pleasure is none the less our goal and daily bread; and at some point in a good ride – as any time triallist will tell you, but will not be able to explain – pleasure and suffering are one and the same thing.
After long pleading with the ruling class of 90 Bristol Road I was finally granted my own bike. It was not to be a new machine. Some puritanical ukase of the communist ethos forbad expenditure on goods that were easily advertised. For years, I’m amazed to recall, my family didn’t even have a radio. However, from the cycling point of view I was fortunate that my first bike was patched together. It was built by an old metalworker who produced cheap machines as a hobby. Bikes of his sort were known as ASPs, the initials standing for All Spare Parts. Superficially, my ASP had the look of a racing machine. It had dropped bars, a bottle cage and Benelux gears. In reality the ASP was cumbersome and went dead on the hills. But it taught me to appreciate good equipment. Nowadays one of my spacious garden sheds contains twelve good bicycles, all in use at various times of the year. I have never been a motorist and have never owned a car.
The man who assembled my ASP was a club cyclist. By this term I mean someone who is dedicated to the culture of the bike, as well as being a member of a club. He showed me his own best machine, which was of great beauty and had the céleste colour of Bianchi frames from Italy. Perhaps it was indeed a Bianchi? Or had he somehow, in 1951–2, realised that this was the colour of Fausto Coppi’s frame? He said that his son, who was then entering an apprenticeship and for a couple of years had been a member of his father’s club, would not be allowed such a bicycle until he was much older. Father and son lived alone together, the boy’s mother having died, and the son was no doubt taught that cycling is a serious business. I never met this boy and didn’t really like his father. I guessed he thought it correct that the experience of bereavement should be a part of growing up.
Cyclists of my generation were usually brought up within local divisions of the Cyclists Touring Club and then joined more specialised clubs when they began to race. This was my experience. I had the good fortune to have a mentor in Albert Burman, a family man who was active in both the Birmingham CTC and the Warwickshire Road Club. Many people who did not know him will recall Albert with affection for the cartoons he contributed to our weekly paper, Cycling. A collection of his drawings, Laugh with Burman, is a treasured possession. Albert and his wife Gwen died long ago. Their daughter, my adored Joan, went away to somewhere in Canada, her lovely, liquid brown eyes a legacy from her father.
In the 1950s Albert Burman was still a useful time triallist, especially at the classic 25-mile distance, but was taking it easy when I, as a boy, became his clubmate. Not too easy. A club run when Albert was captain would have a fast pace. He had also been a pioneer of cyclo-cross and off-road riding. So his routes were always difficult, with forays on unmetalled roads, across fields, along canal banks and through the tracks of the Forest of Arden or Yarningale Common. Albert also insisted that the lunch break should be taken in the garden of some country pub. One of his favourites was to the west of Bewdley, on the hill towards the Wyre Forest. I always sat next to Joan. Her father would settle himself opposite us, take the first sip from his pint of mild and then produce a folded copy of that day’s Reynolds News, his preferred Sunday reading, for Albert was a co-operator and a trade unionist.
So also were many of the adult cyclists whose company I joined. At that period cycling still had many links, or at least a general friendship, with the labour movement. The ethos – still with us – was of egalitarianism and hands clasped in fraternity. We do not always live up to this ideal, but it is accepted that cyclists always talk to each other, and mostly as equals, whether they are boys or men, the racing members of an elite club or the most leisurely of tourists. Beside this camaraderie there is no political agenda among cyclists, which is one reason why I found them much more agreeable people than communists; and I still believe that the ‘fellowship of the road’, or whatever similar phrase was used, reflected a great social reality.
Cyclists thought themselves set apart from the rest of the world, as they were and are; but in the 1950s it was gladdening that we were so numerous. There were hundreds of cycling clubs throughout the land and as many as sixty people might join the Sunday club run, especially if the club was in a city. Club runs were often organised so that racing members – whose events had been held much earlier on Sunday mornings – could be joined by their clubmates at the elevenses halt, maybe 20 miles or so from the ‘meet’, which for us was a point on one of the roads leading south from Birmingham: the Maypole on the Alcester Road, the Robin Hood roundabout on the Stratford Road, the Barley Mow in Solihull, which was on the way to Warwick, or the Northfield Baths on the road that led to the Lickey Hills and Worcester.
Practically everybody raced occasionally, even if they didn’t race every week. Cycling as recreation was mingled with cycling as sport. Then as now, people talked about ‘going out training’ when they were simply leaving the house for a ride. Racing members of a club also took part in social activities that had none of the dash and excitement of competition. There were many camping weekends, map-reading competitions and pantomimes. ‘Rabbit pie suppers’ could be good. They were begun in the days of austerity and rationing. Many were the whispers about the poacher-cyclists who provided the rabbits. I thought it strange that fit young men were prepared to attend the lantern-slide lectures that were held not only by sections of the CTC but also by clubs whose first concern was with racing. But cyclists did go to such events; and these are some of the talks they might have heard:
How to use your camera
Blue skies and good companions
The infinite variety of cycling
Their abiding splendour
Where the mountains blush
The quest
Over the Welsh hills with a cycle and a camera
British railways
The Cotswolds
France: its customs and characteristics
Peeps through the microscope
Scotland through the lens in colour
Hill tracks and valleys in central Wales
The hillside figures of Britain
Holidays with cycle and camera
These lectures were free, but sometimes a souvenir programme was offered, its price usually 1s. 6d. The lecturers themselves had some renown within the cycling community and their discourses were heard in more than one place. A large wooden box containing lantern slides would be put on a train and would precede the lecturer, who of course went from one venue to the next by bicycle.
Don’t the lectures sound dull? But they served a purpose and supplied a need, or there would not have been so many of them. The reason for their popularity must have been that people simply did not know other parts of their own country and were eager to explore the land on two wheels. This curiosity and desire for travel was not confined to cyclists with little holiday time. Passion for research has led me to the 1950s file of a magazine issued by the Civil Servants’ Motoring Association. It would be hard to imagine a more bourgeois society. Yet the CSMA magazine carried touring articles that were very like the cyclists’ lectures and journalism – except that the motorists were recommended inns rather than cafes, hotels rather than youth hostels or bed and breakfast places.
Touring articles, often written by the same men who gave the lectures, continued in Cycling until the mid-1970s. Reports of the Tour de France alternated with reminiscences of gentle rambles through the Berwyns or the villages of the Isle of Wight. The accompanying photographs were often of a high standard. My lecture titles suggest that 1950s cyclists were often preoccupied with the camera. Articles and advertisements in the CTC Gazette describe quite new, even racy, pieces of photographic equipment. The cameras concerned were often quite expensive, adventurous purchases by cyclists who were seldom affluent and on the whole had conservative tastes. I can illustrate this conservatism by describing the cycling seasons.
III
The cycling year had its own feast days or observances and a racing man’s calendar was almost a matter of routine. In the twenty-eight Sundays between March and September many races had an allotted and unchanging slot, whether they were important events – the Bath Road 100, the Anfield 24 Hours, the Solihull Invitation 25 – or less significant local time trials. Massed-start road races did not have these definite dates, firstly because there were so few of them and secondly because roadmen did not have a firm and long-established governing body. However, bunched road racing was always celebrated in the ‘Isle of Man Week’ at the end of every June.
Trackmen also knew when and where they were going to compete. They would go to meetings held at regular intervals in the summer months, generally in the evening. For trackmen who raced on grass there were many ‘sports days’. Agricultural sports days were often part of a country show and were held on Saturdays. Urban sports days, organised by a factory, a colliery or a local police force, took place on Wednesday or Thursday afternoons, depending on the early closing day. These afternoons were shared with athletics. The runners often wondered at the feats of men on wheels, so cycling made some converts. It looked so specialised and brawny. Good grassmen were indeed among the sporting mighty and their muscular prowess over slippery, uneven ground also served them well in hill climbs – the peculiar races that end the cycling year.
Hill climbs are organised by cycling clubs in later October and November. In essence, they are time trials from a low to a high point. On the continent there are some extremely taxing mountain time trials, notably on the roads above Nice and on the Puy de Dôme. These are sometimes part of a stage race. They were introduced to the Tour de France in 1939. British hill climbs became popular in the 1920s and have a quite different character. They are festive and look forward to Christmas. But they are also hard. You need legs that are filled with months of racing – though we have known climbs to be won by the agility of delightful, underweight teenagers. They get special applause.
Depending on your part of the country, the climbs are long or short, but never very long. They are either ‘technical’ or straightforward. Some demand guile, others brute strength. Famous longer hills, like the Horseshoe Pass or Nick O’Pendle, are in the Peak District or North Wales. They are used by Manchester and Merseyside clubs. Birmingham clubs use hills in Mid Wales or the valley of the Teme. Londoners go to the North Downs or the Chilterns. In flat East Anglia clubs use what they can find. Hill climbs in Suffolk, for instance, are sometimes ridden in only forty seconds. Welsh climbs, however, can occupy a competitor for ten minutes.
Not longer, or the drama of the race would be lost. Hill climbers need a clapping audience. The climbs attract much larger crowds than other events against the clock. They are also held later in the morning, so as to race in light but also to attract knowledgeable spectators. The people who devise the hilly courses want to make their races into theatre. They look for a narrow road, preferably a lane with poor surfaces, stretches of faux-plat and – exquisite touch – a cattle grid at the hardest corner. If there is a pub near the hill, so much the better.
Some purists believe in hills that can be ridden on a fixed wheel. Others like varying gradients that demand the use of gears. Either way, the spectators are connoisseurs of a ritualistic race. The crowd will be on either side of the lane, all the way to the top, crying ‘Up! up! up!’ to each panting rider. At the summit are ‘catchers’ to grasp and hold the cyclists who, totally spent after the extreme effort of the brief climb, fall with their machines. The finishers are warmed in blankets, or sometimes by a brazier. Steam and smoke mingle with the cold air.
Next, beer and mince pies. Racing is over until the following year. Now the ‘social season’ begins. Miscellaneous entertainments, club runs and other gatherings reach a climax with the club dinner. Like so much else in the cycling world, these dinners have a standard pattern. They are held in late January and early February. On these occasions the club’s prizes and trophies will be awarded by an honoured guest, most often a well-known racing cyclist from another club. At the dinner there is a mixture of formality and licence. A three-course meal is served by waiters. Men wear suits, ladies wear gowns. At the end of the dinner there is a series of toasts, to ‘The Club’, ‘The Visitors’, ‘The Ladies’, sometimes ‘The Road’ and finally ‘The Queen’.
After the Loyal Toast – still observed by a surprisingly large number of clubs – cross-toasting is permitted. Anyone can bang on the table, jump to his feet and say, ‘I wish to take wine with …’ and then name some person or group of people with a jesting or semi-private reference. Then another person will say, ‘I wish to take wine with …’. This can go on for some time, and with hilarious or disappointing results. The custom of cross-toasting is an old one, and perhaps now belongs only to cycling clubs; I know of no other organisations which follow the ritual. Its cycling origins are in the convivial dinners held by clubs in the 1890s and Edwardian times, the golden age of bohemian dining.
Bohemianism never wins the day. The turn of the last century was also the period when respectable working men first dined together with their wives as members of voluntary societies. To this day, cycling club dinners are properly managed. Hotels are preferred to pubs. The tables have a placement. The top table is occupied by the club’s committee members and local dignitaries, often including a mayor or local councillor and a representative of the county police force (it is politic to be on terms with the police: we need their permission to race on the public highway). So club dinners have a social dimension, expressed in various ways. There is no cross-toasting between those seated at the top table and other diners. It is not done. In this way cycling club etiquette obeys a quite ancient taboo. English has a technical term for drinking with a person of a different class. It is called ‘hob-nobbing’.
The new cycling year begins after the club dinners. The ‘social season’ was too long for many keen racing men, who – after the mid-1950s – took up the new winter sport of cyclo-cross. Some people considered the ‘mud pluggers’ a little raffish. That was because, in the early days of cyclo-cross, courses were improvised and the racing unregulated. One or two clubs offered short time trials on the mornings of Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. The best known of these yuletide events, in which competitors often wear fancy dress, is organised by the Chesterfield Spire Road Club. In February we find ‘reliability trials’, fast training rides open to all comers. Then come the first time trials of the year, often on restricted gears, and two-up events, the riders competing in two-man teams. Serious competitive riding begins with the North Road Hardriders 25 on the last Sunday in February. This superbly uncomfortable race is on the Hertfordshire lanes north of Potters Bar and is often ridden in snow or on icy roads. That’s why tricyclists like it.
The next high point in the cycling calendar was the movable feast of Easter. On Good Friday all trackmen and their fans would be at Herne Hill for the meeting organised by the Southern Counties Cycling Union. This is among the oldest of cycling traditions, for track riders have made their way to Burbage Road, SE24, every Good Friday since 1903. An even more ancient Easter event is the annual rally of the Clarion clubs, generally held in Sheffield and consisting of a 25 championship followed by a great picnic. The Easter weekend offered a full programme of racing everywhere in the country. For some reason it was also regarded as the best time for family touring, though the paschal weather is often cold.
There were regional differences in the repeated festivities of the club cycling year and many local celebrations. I have been told tough stories about the way that Scottish cyclists rode to the Gordon Arms for their Burns Night reunion, passing the night in a large shed-cum-dormitory behind the famed hostelry before the dawn ride back to Glasgow or Edinburgh. There were other reunions and rallies at Cumnock in Ayrshire, Chigwell in Essex, Matlock in Derbyshire, Harrogate in Yorkshire and Mildenhall in Suffolk. These gatherings often take place on the weekend of August bank holiday. The biggest reunion is the York Rally, which occupies a weekend in June and was first held in 1945. Five hundred people were expected. Five thousand turned up. This event marked the beginning of the post-war cycling boom. The York Rally is still held every year, and many are the quarrels about its organisation and purpose.
In the mid-1950s I had begun to learn about such matters, and am still learning. Nobody gave me direct instruction about the culture of British cycling: I picked up my knowledge here and there. It was none the less good knowledge. I realised that it was important to know what cyclists valued. The lore of wheelmen was more interesting than the things that schoolteachers thought important. Difficult teenager that I was, I rejected many of the old ways and wanted change. Yet love for the bike encouraged me to listen to all sorts of tales that, on first hearing, seemed inconsequential or tedious. As, for instance, when dedicated cyclists spoke – with growing enthusiasm as spring turned to summer – of their future expeditions to the Isle of Man, where they would spend the week that includes the year’s longest day.
Why go every year to this small island in the middle of the Irish Sea? Here is my short version of the Isle of Man story. It takes us from the grass roots of British leisure riding to the heights of racing cycling; for on Mona we will meet Fausto Coppi, to this day the vital symbol of the sport; Louison Bobet, three times winner of the Tour de France; and Tom Simpson, who in 1967 would ride himself to death on the Ventoux mountain in Provence. One late June day in 1959 all three men were in Douglas, the Isle of Man’s unremarkable capital. And so were thousands of other cyclists. Here is an odd corner of our collective history, but an instructive one.
The Isle of Man has always been a cycling island, thanks I suppose to a certain backwardness and a tardy adoption of the motor car. There are 500 miles of lanes for the tourist. At least three clubs have looked after the native wheelmen. Racing was always popular and in former days there was a macadam track in Douglas’s Oucham Park. The person who made his native place into an international centre of cycling was a journalist, Curwen Clague. When he wasn’t on the bike Clague worked for the Isle of Man Examiner. Since he was a competent editor he was on terms with the island’s right-wing but eccentric government. Clague also knew the leaders of local industry. There wasn’t much money in fishing, nor in agriculture, so that industry was mainly tourism.
In the 1920s and 1930s there had already been contacts between the clubs in Man and their counterparts in Ireland and the British mainland. Merseysiders went to Man for holidays. Manx cyclists put their bikes on the ferries to compete in Cheshire and Lancashire. Curwen Clague saw how these cycling habits could be expanded. His idea was to promote a road race within the series of events that, since 1907, had given the Isle of Man its position in the world of motorcycle sport.
A harmless and maybe profitable venture, said the Tynwald, the Manx parliament. The island’s elders also offered to close the roads to other traffic on the day of the cycle race, which would never have happened on the mainland. Furthermore, massed-start racing was opposed, even forbidden, by the governing bodies of British cycling. Fortunately, the men of the House of Keys had no interest in the policies of the National Cyclists Union or the Road Time Trials Council. They would govern their own island as they wished. So, in 1936, the first of the Manx international road races was held on a course that had already been established by motorcyclists. A 373/4 mile circuit took riders from sea level at Douglas, first to Ramsey and then up a 5-mile climb to a point at 1,384 feet on the mountain of Snaefell. There was a thrilling descent before a return to the finish at Douglas. The winner of the race was a Birmingham man, Charlie Holland of the Midland Cycling and Athletic Club. In later years competitors have ridden this circuit three times, covering 1133/4 miles.
From the height of Snaefell on a clear day it is possible to see the mountains of Mourne in County Down, more mountains in Galloway, yet more mountains in the Lake District and the peaks of Snowdonia in Wales. There is a theory that the Isle of Man has a share of four countries and possesses some of the character of each of them. It is hard to define such a mixed character. What data might we use for evidence? The names of the boarding houses that formerly gave a welcome to cyclists must tell us something. For the modern essence of Man is not in its agriculture or religion (Methodist), nor in anything preserved by the National Trust, since nothing at all on Man has attracted that Trust. It is rather in the wealth of small houses, terrace after terrace of them, that were lodgings for holidaymakers.
An abbreviation of my master list of their names goes as follows.
Ballasalla
Rosegarth
The Oban
The Winston
South View
Greg-Malin
Thiseldo
Stoneleigh
Woodside
Mannin
Annandale
Hollyrood (sic)
Ellesmere
Palatine
Wavecrest
A bit of mainland patriotism here, some Scottishness, a more pronounced hint of Ulster than of the Republic of Ireland, one or two remnants of the ancient Celtic tongue of the Manxmen. Palatine is an obscurely boastful name for a boarding house. These places of lodging have masculine-sounding names, with the exception of Thiseldo, which I think must be a contraction of ‘this will do’.
Also masculine and gritty are the indigenous family names of Man. Here were born the Caines, Cregeens, Crellins, Kermodes, Kewleys, Killips and Quayles. Once they worked the land and scratched for its sparse mineral deposits. Some went to sea in the herring boats. Then they entered the lodging-house business or were employed in catering, amusement arcades, dance halls and the adventurous network of electric railways.
After the war the pattern changed again. Agriculture and fisheries went into further decline. The native population decreased. Young people were the most likely to leave. The older people of Man were joined by retired couples from the surrounding four countries, who often supplemented their pensions by opening guest houses. Old British club cyclists were among this influx. They had enjoyed their Manx holidays and preferred to live in Douglas than in Liverpool. There is also an Italian community on the island. Most Manx Italians were in Douglas because they were interned there during the war. Then they saw no reason to return to mainland Britain, especially if they were in the catering businesses. Some of the Italians, like the Signorio family of the Mannin guest house, were cycling fans and took block bookings from clubs.
The British interned Italians; and the Germans kept Curwen Clague in a prisoner-of-war camp for the duration of the conflict. Back home and back on the bike, Clague used his demobilisation period to make plans for the future of cycling. The Manx holiday calendar worked by the week rather than by day trips. Clague saw the opportunity for six consecutive days of varied cycling events and realised his vision in the Manx Cycling Festival, which was to grow until the early 1960s. In the 1950s thousands of cyclists regularly packed into the steamers for their holiday in Douglas, Ramsey or Peel. By day they raced or toured. Each night they went to the dance halls or the pubs (which had notably long opening hours). Clague was certain that his festival should occupy the same week of every June. He was right. Under his direction ‘Isle of Man Week’ became cycling’s equivalent of the Lancashire Wakes Week or the Birmingham Industrial Fortnight, when so many factories were closed or operated at half strength.
Clague’s programme included time trials, team time trials, the long mountain time trial around the Snaefell circuit, kermesses, Britain’s only summertime hill climb, various holiday games and contests (‘Miss Bicycle Belle’) and of course the international road race. In 1946 it had a French winner, Jean Baldessari, who went on to a professional career and rode the Tour de France in 1950–1. A more notable winner at Douglas would be Ercole Baldini. He won in his last year as an amateur, 1956, and a couple of months later, even before he had signed professional forms, took the hour record on the Vel Vigorelli. In 1958 Baldini was the world professional road champion and also came first in the Giro d’Italia.
By 1959 there were continental professionals at the Isle of Man Week, with entries from France, Italy and Spain. The pros included Jacques Anquetil, Federico Bahamontes, Louison Bobet, Fausto Coppi, André Darrigade and Raphael Geminiani. The top men of the day, they arrived in state at the little airport at Castletown. They didn’t race hard, but at least they had come to the Isle of Man. Their presence pleased everyone, especially no doubt Jim Hinds of the Southern Roads CC, who won the international race in front of these legendary champions.
So, in the unlikely venue of the Isle of Man, some of us could feel that British and continental cyclists were becoming closer. But we were still British, in our old ways and modest aspirations. I remember 1959. It was my year of dreams. Bahamontes won the Tour. Alf Engers, of the Barnet CC at that time, reduced the British 25 record to 55.11. I was shaving my legs and doing 300 miles a week, fantasising about going to spend a week on the Isle of Man. What a steamer journey from Fleetwood to Douglas, chugging across the wide straits of Colwyn Bay … I imagined a place where tailless cats chased red squirrels, where I might meet a Bicycle Belle and perhaps ride in the lesser races. Fun and glory in the land of kippers and fairy lights! The plan came to nothing, like most of my cycling projects at that date and ever since.
On a bike you can go anywhere – and in my own book, if I wish, I can go on and on about the Isle of Man. Curwen Clague died in 1981, but his enterprise continues to this day. For some time the cycling festival has been directed by Desmond Clague and the annual ‘Curwen’s Race’ is ridden in his father’s memory. Long may it continue.
But now I return to the 1950s. My list of lodging houses tells me that the price of bed and breakfast on the Isle of Man was generally between 8s. 6d. and 12s. 6d. The steamer fare from Fleetwood to Douglas was 17s. The ferry would take your bike for an exorbitant 6s. Tandems cost an even more exorbitant 9s.
The prices I mention are part of our cycling story. Nearly everyone had to make prudent calculations in shillings and pence, either to race at any level or to go on holiday. Ours has been a sport for people who had to count money saved from their wages. Unlike some sports – athletics, rugby, rowing, tennis, cricket, boxing – competitive cycling never had any wealthy adherents. There were gentlemen amateurs during the short fashionable craze for cycling in the 1890s, but none thereafter. A handful of people made money from racing but there was no professional class. In the 1950s British cyclists were almost always employed in sound and unglamorous ways. I will describe their jobs in a moment. My point now is that they never had any spare money, cash that they could spend in a careless way.
All the same, there were signs that quite big money was almost within reach – money and glamour too. The Manx international race had such prestige. So many people wanted to see it that Curwen Clague used grandstands at the race finish on Douglas promenade. He was able to charge £6 for grandstand seats. That was about the cost of a week’s lodging in a Douglas boarding house – a pretty high price – but the stands were none the less filled. The fans were no doubt prepared to pay more to be near the continental stars, especially if they could mingle with them after the race, as often happened.
Ücretsiz ön izlemeyi tamamladınız.
