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

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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.

My fellow Brummie John Turner (Moseley Road Junior Art School and then of the Midland C & AC) has a telling story about the end of the international road event in 1959.

I had a short talk with Louison Bobet and André Darrigade at the end of a pro race in the IOM one year … Bobet was polite, immaculate, not a hair out of place, apologised that he needed to sponge himself down with Eau de Cologne before talking on the wall by the grandstand. Darrigade joined us looking very fierce and all I could see were his massive thighs and lower legs totally criss-crossed with varicose veins that stood out like ropes on his muscular limbs. Simpson came along … just out of sympathy I said … ‘remember what Bobet has been through’ (a major op to remove masses of pus from his back, taking seven hours of surgery). Without a change of expression Simo looked straight at me and said ‘Who cares a **** about Bobet?’

I can annotate John Turner’s reminiscence. By the time of Isle of Man week in late June of 1959 Tom Simpson had gone to France (with £100 in his pocket) and had been offered a professional contract. He was not in Douglas to compete in any of the races. Probably he just wanted to look at his future opposition. He was by nature a quick learner, had surveyed the continental scene and was not overawed. Simpson knew that Bobet’s career was over, or in its twilight. And this young man was competitive. Hence his uncouth remark to John Turner. There is another possible interpretation. Simpson may have been thinking of his hero Fausto Coppi, who was also on the Isle of Man. Here was a person whose racing days should have been concluded a couple of years before. But his prestige was immense. Although he had done nothing at all in the Man race the other riders rose to clap as Coppi entered the dining room of the Douglas Bay Hotel.

IV

Before this summer of 1959 Tom Simpson had been a draughtsman, which is a typical job for a cyclist. It had not always been so. For a few brief years at the end of the nineteenth century cycling was an upper-class fad. Ladies rode in Rotten Row. Gentlemen with cheroots chatted about the new pneumatic tyres. Then the rich gave up their enthusiasm for the bicycle: it was becoming common. There was still quite an amount of genteel cycling, and ‘collar and tie’ clubs lingered until the late 1920s. Their members were generally clerks, low-ranking civil servants or the employees of the great London department stores.

On the whole, however, the cycling sport and pastime has belonged to a lower social class. I have no name for this stratum, but refer to a class that is modest, mostly respectable, city-dwelling, waged rather than salaried, whose members generally work with their hands, who may well have gone through an apprenticeship and are very rarely educated beyond secondary school level. No statistics or analyses of cyclists’ professions are known to me, so my comments on employment are simply a report of personal observations.

Over the years since the 1950s I have known or have met cyclists who were printers, fitters, turners or other lathe operators, railwaymen, compositors, mechanics and electricians. I also think of a cobbler, a glazier, a washing-machine repairer, a man who installs cash machines and a lampshade maker. Large numbers of cyclists, particularly in the Midlands, are engaged in the metalworking industries. It is characteristic of them that they prefer small-scale engineering shops over factories. There is a marked connection between cycling and the photographic and film industries, whose employees also work in small and neat units, ‘flatted factories’ as they used to be called.

Builders and decorators are found in cycling clubs, as are cabinet makers and carpenters. Labourers are not common. In general, cyclists avoid heavier manual work, though there are exceptions. I used to train around the Eastway track with a dustman. He specialised in those big round containers you see behind hospitals and other public buildings, and said that the job was good for top-of-the-body fitness. In the afternoons he did thirty or forty fast laps before going in search of women. The Eastway circuit is a hilly mile, and this is one of the tracks where there are showers. ‘I have three showers a day,’ said the refuse collector.

I have ridden quite often, on different roads, with two male hairdressers (one ladies’, one gents’). Alf Engers was a pastry-cook. Eddie Adkins, Alf’s successor as 25-mile champion, is a motor mechanic. Frank Edwards, who rode the Tour of Britain in 1953, was the proprietor of the Woodbine Cafe near the Lowestoft fish docks. Then he had a fish and chip shop. There are a number of policemen in cycle sport and dozens of firemen. Some cyclists spend their working life in the army and many, many more are attached to the RAF. There are few cyclists in the navy. We have a scattering – no more – of shopkeepers, far too many schoolteachers (who often are their clubs’ secretaries) and some lab technicians. In the old days there were miners, especially in the East Midlands and Yorkshire. I suspect that their jobs were usually at the colliery’s surface.

A number of cyclists, especially women, work in market gardening or park maintenance. That great champion Beryl Burton was in the rhubarb-forcing business. The Land’s End – John O’Groats record breaker Andy Wilkinson and the former Tour de France rider Sean Yates are both landscape gardeners. Some women cyclists work as jobbing gardeners or in general duties in garden centres, for they are not expert horticulturalists. Other women are nurses. They are never, ever, secretaries.

In Hertfordshire one morning I passed a young man who was late for work and asked to get on my wheel. We did bit-and-bit towards outer London. It turned out that he drove a tube train for his living. He clocked on at Cockfosters, went to and from Heathrow on the Piccadilly Line, then returned to his bike and rode home to Ware. This dull employment was worth a bit of chat. ‘Everyone asks me that question,’ he said. ‘They give you counselling. If you don’t want to drive again you’re shifted to a platform job. Personally I’d just leave altogether.’ Thus spoke the underground driver. Quite apart from the problem of suicides, it seemed odd to me that a cyclist should voluntarily spend so much time in a distant tunnel. Were there not other things to do, nearer home? My new friend explained that the tube gave him time for training. In the summer months he could combine the Piccadilly Line with 60 miles a day, fast on the old Cambridge road, hard and hilly near Essendon.

Saturday was a day off. He raced on Sundays. Therefore his working life helped him towards the rational goal of speed and power on the bike. Cyclists often choose their jobs so that they can cover numerous ‘work miles’. They seek employment 20 or 30 miles from their homes; or they make sure that they knock off in the middle of the day. Here is the first and most obvious reason for the large number of racing cyclists who are postmen, or have some other role within the old General Post Office, once the country’s biggest employer. There are other reasons. Postmen are early risers. So are cyclists. Postmen are wary of dogs. So are cyclists. Postmen like coarse fishing. That enthusiasm is shared by cyclists. The postman’s functional walk corresponds to the cyclist’s daily routine of training over familiar roads. Postmen usually know that they are in their job for life. Cyclists also sign up for all time. There is not much of a hierarchical structure within the postal service: you don’t expect to rise within the GPO. Cyclists also avoid hierarchies. Postmen are often the sons of postmen. Cycling is essentially a sport in which sons are taught by their fathers.

We will hear more about postmen. Now I turn to a social group that is particularly difficult to explain, even to describe. Many racing cyclists are or have been artists. By the term ‘artist’ I mean someone who once went to a college of art. This is the only sensible way to differentiate between an amateur artist – who might be anyone and might be personally rich – and a professional artist, whose profession often brings no financial reward. Cycling artists begin at art school. And, to this day, one can walk round the studios of many an art college to find the iconic photograph of Fausto Coppi pinned up in a student’s personal enclave, surrounded by other tokens, favourite images and gallery postcards – forty years after Fausto’s death.

Why are so many art students and artists committed to cycling? As with other groups, it comes down to their background. The great majority of art students come from the same social band that produces racing cyclists. And, as I have described, that band is the skilled working class. To these people, art meant work. In Birmingham and other places, notably Sheffield, boys might go to art school at the age of twelve. They were not encouraged to be creative: they learnt how to draw designs for manufacture. This helps to explain the numerous cyclists nowadays who are graphic designers. A mystery remains. How do we account for the cyclists who practise the fine rather than the applied arts? That is, the painters and sculptors?

I imagine a boy – an adolescent, hardly yet a young man – with the bright eyes of youth and eagerness for life, who likes looking at things and gets on well with his friends; and yet is not sociable all the time, for there is some loneliness in his character, perhaps born of a frustration he cannot comprehend. He quite often roams after school and in lessons he does not do well, because of a reading difficulty. His parents and teachers know that he is gifted. They do not understand dyslexia. So all parties agree that Adam, as we may call him, shows precocious talent in drawing and might find his right place in the local art school.

Art school would be fine, Adam thinks. No more maths, no more book-learning. There is a painting in the municipal gallery he has always gone to look at when he gets off the tram in Navigation Street. And so Adam goes to college, where he finds that he can make friends with older people. One of his tutors in the printmaking department is a cyclist. It happens that Adam enjoys riding a bike, sometimes taking expeditions into the country. And he has seen the brilliant machines belonging to racing cyclists who live quite near his home. One way or another Adam finds the money to buy a racing bike. A man in the specialist shop advises him and gives him the address of the secretary of the local club. Adam joins club runs. He goes out training. Soon he rides his first time trial. At last he is fulfilled: another cyclist who went to art school.

For some of us, to be an art student and a young racing cyclist represented the height of happiness, a height within reach. My vision of Adam is not a fantasy. I grew up with boys of his sort and met more of them when teaching in art schools. That was in the 1970s and early 1980s, when art education was still a pleasure for all concerned. Students kept finding things within themselves, which is a reason why they were so highly motivated. There were still a number of problems for the cycling art students. Growing cyclists need to coordinate body and mind. They learn about themselves by training. And then, often, their efforts on the bike take the edge off their creativity in the studio. I am not talking about tiredness but about the deep contentment one experiences after a good 50-mile training ride. That particular glow is unhelpful for a young artist needing to live on his nerves.

Our young Adam, like so many people with their first bikes, may have got his real education in the world when he joined his cycling club. To learn about the club would take him a couple of years. To learn about all the other cycling clubs – as we should – is the task of a lifetime.

Some of them are as ancient as oaks. Today there might be a couple of dozen clubs that were founded in the nineteenth century. Hundreds more have lived and died. There are around 500 in existence in the United Kingdom at the time of writing (2003). They are local or regional, mainly local. They take their names from some town or suburb, as in the case of the Finsbury Park Cycling Club (always known as ‘The Park’ to its members), the Ipswich Bicycle Club (which is one with a nineteenth-century foundation date) or the Cardigan Wheelers. When you meet another cyclist it’s not long before you enquire about his club. Then you know a wheelman’s home base and can also guess who his mates are. ‘So you’re in the Saracen. Then you must know Johnny Roberts!’ Other bits of this kind of conversation, mainly jocular, include ‘Never heard of them’ – when of course you have – or ‘So you’re one of those, are you?’, which is an invitation to debate.

The Cyclists Touring Club, founded in 1878 (motto: ‘This Great Club of Ours’), was often the parent organisation for smaller local clubs. The CTC was concerned with leisure riding and cyclists’ rights. If younger CTC members were more interested in racing than touring they would band together to call themselves a ‘road club’. Thus we have the Warwickshire Road Club, already mentioned, the Corsham Road Club, the Oxford City Road Club, the Yorkshire Road Club, and so on. If the word ‘path’ appears in any title it means that the club also specialises in track racing. Hence the name of the Redditch Road and Path CC. Older cyclists still use the word ‘path’ when they are talking about a cycle racing track.

How many people make a cycling club? About half a dozen, at the lowest count. And the maximum is about 100. The history of British cycling tells us that defections will occur, or a formal split, if this number is exceeded. A sociologist, perhaps aided by a psychiatrist, might be able to explain why it’s best if a club has sixty to seventy members. There are or have been much larger clubs, but they are seldom tied to a locality. The RAF CC once had more members than any other club (maybe it still has) but really was an umbrella fellowship organisation. Other fellowships include the Army Cycling Union, the National Clarion CC and the Tricycle Association, whose members are spread throughout the land.

Do cycling clubs differ in their nature? Some people say that all clubs are the same; others maintain that there are vital differences between one club and the next. The truth probably lies somewhere between these two claims. Individual clubs do have their own traditions and personalities, but these resist description and are difficult for an outsider to grasp. So we rely on rumours and odd remarks that we have heard on the road.

Here is a list of some clubs past and present in more or less alphabetical order, but occasionally straying from the A – Z.

A5 Rangers. Still in existence? I believe so. Their base was somewhere in the Rugby – Nuneaton area. They used to follow the straight and determined route of the A5 to Shrewsbury and thither into Wales. Other names of clubs announce their usual runs and destinations. The Kentish Wheelers, for instance, rode into Kent: but the club’s home was in Brixton in south London. Do not be misled by the name of the Rutland CC: its members lived around Rutland Road in Sheffield. Other club names indicate peripatetic habits. There was the Wanderers CC, based I know not where, the Tyneside Vagabonds CC, the Colchester Rovers CC, the Bedouin CC, from Croydon, the Thirty-Fourth Nomads CC and the Nomads (Hitchin), who for some reason like to have this parenthesis in their name. I have an enemy in the Nomads so I hate the lot of them. He says that I cut him up in a race. It’s just that I was faster.

The Buckshee Wheelers is a fellowship club. By reason of its constitution the club is in terminal decline. The members of the Buckshee were in north Africa in the last days of Hitler’s war and somehow managed to organise bike races in the desert. Their motto, one Buckshee Wheeler told me, was ‘Growing and Growing and Growing’. Shouldn’t that be ‘Dying and Dying and Dying?’ I pertly said. ‘Tim, the roll of honour is growing and growing.’ Though not rebuked, I felt chastened. The Buckshees allowed some post-war national servicemen to join their ranks, with a cut-off date of 1953. The youngest Buckshee Wheeler is said to be the fine roadman Brian Haskell, who is now seventy-four. It is understood that the very last member of the Buckshee Wheelers will bequeath all the club records to the Imperial War Museum.

My father should have been a Buckshee, just as he should have ridden with the Clarion. The opening lines of one of his favourite songs were learnt, I believe, in Alexandria in 1943 or 1944. If any Buckshee Wheeler reads this book I hope he will now smile. Lil is a stripper in an Alexandria brothel.

Oh her name was Lil, she was a beauty,

She lived in a house of ill reputy,

She drank whisky, she drank rum,

She smoked hashish and o-pi-um …

Also under B there’s the Bon Amis CC (thus spelt), which calls to mind other British clubs with French names. Among them we should applaud the San Fairy Ann CC (they live in Kent), reputedly flourishing as never before, the Compagnons du Petit Braquet, the Vélo Club Pierre (who come from Stone in Staffordshire) and the Vélo Club Lanterne Rouge – a bunch of north London veterans who may be encountered at the Halfway House on the Cambridge Road just to the east of Enfield.

The Barrow Spartans CC doesn’t sound a convivial club. I’ve ridden from Barrow-in-Furness, a depressed industrial town, once the home of shipbuilding and nuclear submarines, into the Lake District. That morning I nearly died from cold and lancing rain. A lovely lady at Grange-over-Sands gave me shelter in her off-licence. We drank two miniatures of brandy, so as not to be too spartan, while the downpour washed her windows. No doubt this comfort was illegal. If you’re wet through on the bike a good plan is to head for a launderette, strip off and put all your clothes in the dryer. Good fun on a club run, if the local housewives don’t call the police.

CCCP are the initials on the all-red road jerseys of the Comical Cycling Club of Penshurst. They don’t seem like communists to me. I know from experience that at least two of them are very fast and fit. The Curnow CC represents cycle racing in Cornwall. (The Vectis CC does the same for the Isle of Wight, as do the Manx Viking Wheelers in the Isle of Man.) The Chesterfield Cycling and Athletic Club has now gone, though other clubs that once united cycling with athletics are still in existence, notably the Halesowen A & CC and the Midland C & AC.

Letter D. The Dartford Wheelers were in great rivalry with the Medway Wheelers. The De Laune CC is a south-of-the-river London club. The Derby Mercury CC, the Dudley Castle CC and the Dursley CC speak for themselves, as far as their origins are concerned.

The Elizabethan CC (defunct) and the Festival Road Club (still going well) remind us of the birth of so many clubs in the early 1950s. The Festival RC still uses the logo of the 1951 Festival of Britain. On the subject of logos (club signs which you drew when registering at a youth hostel, or in correspondence), that of the Unity CC is of two hands clasped in fellowship. Unfortunately, fellowship sometimes collapses. The names of the Kettering Amateur CC and the Kettering Friendly CC record a split between the cyclists of a quite small town. I do not recall the details of their dispute but know that it was a tremendous business.

On now to the Lancashire Road Club, always to be thanked for their promotion of twelve- and twenty-four-hour time trials, the Liverpool Co-operative CC and the Ladies Cycling Fellowship. Members of the Liverpool Century Road Club probably had to prove their worth with a 100-mile ride. The League International exists to promote massed-start events for veterans. The London Italian RCC was a forerunner of the Soho CC, which had a brief glory in the late 1980s. Its members were Italian waiters or were concerned in other ways with the catering trades.

Montague Burton’s Cycling Club must have been composed of the store’s employees. The Monckton CC took its name from the colliery in which so many of its members earned their living. The Monckton was a very strong club in the 1930s, with little to fear from their neighbours in the North Nottinghamshire Road Club.

The Out-of-Work Wheelers belonged to a time of high unemployment during the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, while the Pickwick Bicycle Club is a century older, founded in the late 1880s. Nowadays it is mainly a social club with membership by invitation. It keeps to the original rule that a prospective member must show knowledge of The Pickwick Papers.

Speaking of which book, nowhere in Dickens’s pages is it explained why his various characters came together to form their Pickwick Club. Thus the novelist gives us a clue to the pointless affability of so many voluntary societies, which exist solely to promote the pleasure each member finds in other members’ company. Within cycling (as elsewhere) advanced age and a liking for carousal are characteristic of such clubs. I point to the Potterers CC, whose members must be old and retired. There is one notorious club for old men in the West Country, known as the Scrumpy Wheelers.

The Sunset CC, now long gone, also had elderly people on its club runs, while the Stourbridge CC, the Stockport Wheelers, the Shaftesbury Wheelers and the Sydenham Wheelers all have well-deserved reputations for looking after fast young racing men.

Letter T. Nowadays, most people who ride ‘twicers’ are at the other end of life, and they may belong to the Tandem Club. If you want to buy a tandem, look at the small ads in their well-produced magazine. Upper Holloway CC, the Unicorn CC, the Uxbridge Wheelers, all gone; and now we arrive at the letter V. Who are the members of the Valkyries CC? The name of the Vegetarian C & AC – which flourished until the late 1950s – takes us back to the early days of this kind of idealism. The Vegetarian Road Club was probably an offshoot whose members were devoted to hardriding and racing.

Under V I also note the Vancouver Bicycle Club, the Vancouver Cycling Club and the Vancouver Cycle Touring Club. These clubs probably register an affiliation with British governing bodies because they were founded by emigrants from the British Isles. There were quite a number of these cycling emigrants, often from Scotland. They went to Vancouver because it’s the best area in Canada for cycling. The best known British cyclist in Canada is Tony Hoar, formerly of the Emsworth CC in Portsmouth. He was the popular lanterne rouge of the 1955 Tour de France, then came back to England, got fed up and sailed away.

The Wandsworth and District Cycling Club was originally titled the Wandsworth and Balham Co-operative Society Cycling Club. The Waverley CC is of course a Scottish foundation, while the Welwyn Wheelers and the Stevenage CC were formed by people who moved out of London at the time of the ‘new towns movement’.

Continuing with letter W, the Westminster Wheelers is long gone. It was probably a collar-and-tie club for civil servants in the days before the Kaiser’s war. The Wobbly Wheelers exists only as a widespread joke, made up I believe by Johnny Helms, cycling’s favourite cartoonist, who must have been guest of honour at more club dinners than anyone else in the sport. The Wolverhampton RCC is famous among us because it was the cradle of the British League of Racing Cyclists. I recently met one of its former members, and asked him what Percy Stallard, founder of the BLRC, was like. ‘He was okay when he was drunk!’ This particular Wolverhampton RCC member hails from Kinver, the last place in Britain where people lived in caves – as lately as the twentieth century. They burrowed into the cliffs of the soft red local sandstone. No doubt there were many people who thought that Stallard had emerged from a cave. I’ll come to him later.

The Yorkshire Road Club is so distinguished (and pompous) that it even has a hardcover club history that can be bought in bookshops. Most club histories, if they exist, are in the form of enlarged pamphlets and have no circulation beyond the club’s members. West Yorkshire has a complex network of cycling clubs, currently numbering two dozen and formerly even more. Perhaps the number of small and distinct towns explains why there are so many cycling clubs in the West Riding, along with the splits and breakaways caused by cycling politics. The Bradford RCC, for instance, took many of its members from the conservative Yorkshire RC; and that was because the Yorkshire RC was so opposed to the British League of Racing Cyclists.

V

A sign of my age, apart from riding in the small chainwheel most of the day, is a wish to find the records of old clubs, preferably modest ones. I also make pilgrimages to cycle sport’s ‘sacred’ places: Pangbourne Lane, or the further Savernake turn of the Bath Road 100, or Tanners Hatch. These destinations are seldom grand, but they appeal to my interest in early council estates, seaside housing development, piers, canals, ports, maltings, early factories and small town halls. I dislike parish churches, consider most British castles ugly (besides being the strongholds of injustice) and don’t believe cathedrals and abbeys can be appreciated when you’re cycling. I’ve had these prejudices since childhood.

First thing one Sunday morning, when I was grown up and indeed a father, I left the Arundel youth hostel for an awkward ride along the south coast. The plan was to give a wave to the Isle of Wight, soldier through Southampton, and then I wanted to pass through the New Forest before spending the night at the hostel in Winchester. The outing was a little delayed almost as soon as it had begun. I paused in Chichester, a place new to me. On the north side of the cathedral, still in the saddle, right foot in the toe clip, left foot on the pavement, I dutifully looked at the flying buttresses and gothic windows.

All was quiet. An early service of Holy Communion had just ended. Towards me walked a man in long black canonical garments. He was good at whistling. Through his shrivelled lips came the thin but accurate strains of a canticle. I supposed that he was one of the cathedral’s clergy. Still whistling holy music, this man approached me. A look of contempt came into his eyes. Perhaps the bright cycling clothing had annoyed him. He cleared his throat and spat into the gutter at my feet, then walked on his way. His spittle might have landed on my bike! I was so astonished that I could not reply to the affront, rode off and have never visited Chichester again.

Speaking as a cyclist, I have never had much truck with English ecclesiastical buildings. Perhaps because I come from Birmingham, I prefer late nineteenth-century municipal architecture, if possible in red brick. About ten years ago, curiosity about that sort of building led me to make a discovery at Wrentham in Suffolk. Wrentham is on the A12, 10 miles south of Lowestoft. My hope was that the Eagle might still be in business. I wanted to raise a glass to a Victorian chambermaid – a girl who ought to be celebrated by all cyclists. More of her in a moment.

Sadly, the Eagle had closed down. A few yards down the road was an unattractive brick place called Wrentham Hall, recently converted into flats and an antiques emporium. Placing the bike against its façade (gear side next to the wall, as always) I made my inspection from the other side of the road. Surely the building was too large for a village hall, and of the wrong date? Perhaps it had once been a school. There was a tower for a bell and a circular hole for a clock. This nondescript edifice had a mouldering tablet which read:

This tablet was erected

[illeg.] people of Wrentham to mark [illeg.]

the many improvements which have been made by

Sir Alfred Shirlock Gooch, Bart.

in this building and especially with the clock,

which has been altered at his sole expense

to commemorate the diamond jubilee of H.M. Queen Victoria.

June 22 1897.

Something puzzled me about this testimonial from the people of Wrentham. It recorded an event of little interest, but there was a distant familiarity in its wording. Suddenly, memory took me to the sooty buildings of central Birmingham. In Balsall Heath there had been an Alfred Street, a Wrentham Street, a Gooch Street and a Shirlock Street. My map showed a Benacre Hall next to Wrentham. That must have been the baronet’s home. And there had been a Benacre Street in Balsall Heath.

Empty, melancholy lanes skirt the grounds of Benacre Hall. You can’t see the house from these roads, only parkland, woods and a home farm. My communist upbringing gave me a feeling of political anger about the Benacre estate. Years ago, I had been given much childhood instruction on the evils of rentier capitalism. My guess (an accurate one: I later checked it in the library) was that there were people who lived at their ease in Suffolk because they took their money from the poor of my home city.

Shirlock Street, Gooch Street, Benacre Street were once well known to me. My mates lived there. We were friends because we went to Bristol Street Primary School. We sat together at shared desks, where we learnt nothing, then played dangerous games on the bomb sites, where we learnt how to make bonfires. On Saturday mornings I returned to Balsall Heath, for there I sold the Daily Worker.

It was an easy job because I had a round with regular customers. They didn’t buy the Worker in the week but on Saturdays the paper carried an extra page, i.e. six instead of four, and offered the tips of ‘Cayton’, its incomparable racing correspondent. Most of my regulars lived in houses built on the close-court system, with no back doors or back windows. They had water and electricity but no bathrooms or lavatories. Each court was entered through a ‘snicket’, an arched and enclosed brick alley. The courts themselves were rectangular, with eight dwellings on each side. In the middle of each court was a block of privies.

Now I return to Wrentham in 1990 and the nature of my pilgrimage to the Eagle. Wrentham was a place of good fortune for Robert Blatchford. Though he is largely forgotten today, Blatchford had an enormous effect on British cycling. Paradoxically, he wasn’t really a cyclist himself. He did ride a bike occasionally, but not often. And it seems that he had no contact with all the cycling clubs that were formed in alliance with his weekly paper, The Clarion.

That splendid periodical belonged to the 1890s. Blatchford was himself a happy-go-lucky adventurer of the nineteenth century. He reminds me of the Victorian motto ‘A clean shirt, a merry heart and a guinea’, the point of which was that with these three requirements you could get through the day and have a good time. Blatchford was a child of Bohemia who never knew his father. His mother, an Italian singer and actress, probably didn’t know Blatchford senior for very long. In her young widowhood (that was her cover story) she toured the country, mostly in the north, her son on the back of the cart among stage props, costumes and a few personal belongings.

Blatchford did not say how he lost touch with his mother. I know that he ran away from an apprenticeship and, at the age of twenty, found himself in Yarmouth, Norfolk. With five shillings in his pocket, he decided to go to London. In 1871 the best way to reach London from Yarmouth was by boat, but Blatchford decided to walk to the capital. Twenty miles down the road, in Wrentham, he came to an exhausted halt. He asked for shelter at the Eagle, too grand a place for such a lad. But the chambermaid I have mentioned took a fancy to him and smuggled him to her room upstairs. In the morning she sent him off from the back door with a farewell kiss and a sandwich – and he still had the five shillings.

Next, like many another runaway apprentice, Blatchford took the Queen’s shilling. He was a soldier until 1880, then started on the road that was to make him a social campaigner by doing ‘press work’, as he called it, soon earning good pay on the Sunday Chronicle. A journalistic assignment in the slums of Manchester converted him to socialism. The former vagabond had previously thought that poverty was a natural fact of life, but Manchester housing convinced him that something had to be done.

Blatchford began to read political treatises, the most influential of which was H. M. Hyndman’s and William Morris’s What is Socialism? ‘Directly I grasped the collective idea I saw that it was what I wanted.’ In 1892 he began a weekly newspaper, The Clarion, which expressed the ‘collective idea’. By the next year it was a national success and carried the first text of Blatchford’s William Morris-inspired Merrie England. This appeared in book form in 1894 and is said to have sold 700,000 copies in a few months.

Now a strange thing happened. Without intending to do so, Blatchford’s paper gave birth to cycling clubs rather than a political movement. The Clarion was all the more popular a paper because it was not in the least doctrinaire. Its politics were those of its founder: an independent, pleasure-loving man who believed in equality, preferred his native land to any other place, still had some fond feelings for the classlessness he had found in the army and took his lead from William Morris’s dictum ‘Fellowship is life. Lack of fellowship is death’.

It is clear that Blatchford’s unscientific form of socialism was suited to cyclists. In a short period following the launch of The Clarion, seventy cycling clubs were founded with ‘Clarion’ in their names. They used the paper’s masthead logo (winged young goddess blowing a trumpet) and repeated, time and again, that ‘fellowship’ was their bond. Thus a tradition was created. Even in the twenty-first century, ‘fellowship’ and ‘fraternity’ are the watchwords of British cycling associations of all sorts.

A number of the original Clarion clubs are still in existence, though many more have been disbanded. The first Clarion Cycling Club was founded in Birmingham in 1894. Later in that year more Clarion clubs were formed in Hanley, Liverpool, Bradford and Barnsley. In 1895 there were further foundations in Nottingham, Newcastle, Leeds, Rochdale, Blackburn, Wigan, Hyde and Nelson. Clearly, there was a northern bias, although there were Clarion clubs in London and other places in the south of England, notably Bristol and Portsmouth. The pattern probably reflects the circulation of the newspaper that was the clubs’ inspiration.

The Clarion phenomenon may be called a truly popular movement because the clubs were unregimented, non-hierarchical and had no specific political goal. The more political a Clarion club, the greater the danger that its spirit would be lost. A movement based on fellowship found it difficult to tolerate leaders or to develop committee structures. At the same time there had to be a certain amount of organisation. Someone had to look after the lists of members, send out comradely addresses, receive subscriptions and promote the inter-club time trials. Volunteers could always be found to perform these functions. Divisions arose in the Clarion clubs only when some members grew too keen on running things, or tried to make clubs more active within the formal labour movement.

In these ways the Clarion clubs have given us two leading characteristics of British cycling. First, cycling is not a political sport, but it does belong to the leftward side of humanity. Second, cyclists do not on the whole wish to be governed and are often unable to govern each other. The administration of cycling, from the smallest clubs to the largest, has often been a shambles. That’s the way most of us like it.

In the early Clarion movement, Blatchford sensed the coming dangers and showed himself to be on the side of disorder. It was well known that Clarion committees simply re-elected themselves in the warmth of the pub before getting back on their bikes. Some people disapproved of this easy-going wisdom, but not Blatchford. He thought that the Clarion clubs’ annual Sheffield conference ought to be a merry lunch and that speeches should be banned, except for toasts. He repeated the message in many Clarion editorials: ‘No leaders, no rules, no delegates, no machinery!’

Writing much later, in 1932, Blatchford remembered his editorial cry. He then lamented:

All went merrily for some years and then a number of earnest young men joined up, and there arose a demand for ‘organisation’. I pointed out at the time that the Fellowship was a genial crowd of congenial spirits and that it was impossible to organise friendship. But the Fellowship was organised and its glamour slowly faded. The old Fellowship gave us something precious which no organisation had to offer, the organised Fellowship could only go a little better than any other party organisation. And now the clouds began to gather …

That reference is to the onset of the First World War. The Clarion movement was at its height – at least in terms of membership – in 1913, with around 7,000 members. A pretty good figure, and one reason why the movement survived the Kaiser’s war. Many clubs then died, but there were enough people to keep up the cause of Clarion fellowship. A casualty of the war was The Clarion itself, which ceased publication in 1916. But the cyclists were not extinguished, and they are still up the road. If one cyclist says of another ‘He’s an old Clarion man’ or ‘She’s got a Clarion background’, we know that we are talking of someone with an especial pedigree.

Another reason for the longevity of the Clarion clubs is that they always included women. Cycling girls married fellow members and started Clarion families. At the last published count, on the occasion of the National Clarion Centenary in 1995, there were eighteen separate Clarion clubs with a combined membership of around 800 people. So life goes on as the wheels go round, and a number of celebrated veteran cyclists owe their lives to the Clarion movement. The most famous of them is Barry Hoban, multiple stage winner in the Tour de France in the 1960s and 1970s. Barry is the son of old Joe Hoban of the Calder Clarion CC, who on the occasion of the 1995 centenary was still riding his bike at the age of eighty-four and was one of the members who could reminisce about the half-century reunion fifty years before.

VI

Although I love the thought of the Clarion movement the British League of Racing Cyclists gives me more exciting memories.

The story of the BLRC is one of protracted warfare with other cycling bodies. Internecine disputes lasted for sixteen years before a sort of truce was signed. The hostilities are not yet concluded. Much has been lost in futile bitterness. In the 1950s previously happy clubs were torn apart, and cyclists and potential sponsors left the sport. On the whole, though, the League was successful. It made British cycling modern and international. Furthermore, the BLRC represented a glorious rebellion. In what other sport, of any type, do we find the rank and file gathering together to overthrow their officials and governing bodies?

The civil war might not have been necessary if those rulers of cycling had not been so hidebound. Here, in brief, is their political history.

The Bicycle Union was founded in 1878 as an alliance of a few London clubs. By 1893 it was much enlarged, had absorbed members from outside the capital and decided to change its name to the National Cyclists Union. In the new century more and more clubs sought affiliation. As they did so, the leadership of the NCU appears to have become more conservative and autocratic. The NCU believed in cycle touring – as did everyone – but not in much else. In particular, it was wary of competitive cycling and held that all racing should be on cycle tracks.

The NCU opposed, indeed forbade, road racing. But what about record breaking in solo rides from one place to another? This kind of competition was already popular in the 1890s, but the NCU was hostile. Consequently, another body was formed, the Road Records Association, and in 1937 the Road Time Trials Council was founded to supervise the fast-growing sport of time trialling: that is, events in which the contestants start at intervals and ride alone. Both the NCU and the RTTC were united in opposition to road racing: that is, ‘massed-start’ events in which the riders start together, en ligne in the French expression.

This was the situation until the war years. Now enters a hero of the British bike game, Percy Stallard of the Wolverhampton RCC. He was a natural roadman and had a good record in domestic and international sport. Stallard represented Britain in the world amateur road championships at Monthléry in 1933, Leipzig in 1934 and Copenhagen in 1937. It is astonishing to note that when he went to Monthléry Stallard had ridden in only one massed-start event, at Donington Park, which was a motor racing circuit. So the race was not on open roads and could not contravene NCU regulations. Massed-start races had also been held at the Brooklands motor racing track and on the Isle of Man. But there had been few such events when Percy Stallard began his campaign in 1942.

It was nearly a decade since Percy had ridden in his first world championship, and he had never had enough racing to satisfy him. He was a man of physical prowess, sometimes shown in unconventional ways. In Wolverhampton pubs he won pint after pint by jumping from a squatting position onto table tops. Percy was a rough leader of men – the kind you can imagine in command of an army unit – and was frustrated at not fighting in the war. He remained in Wolverhampton in a reserved capacity as a cycle mechanic. Percy was also a frame builder. May I tell connoisseurs that I have ridden a Percy Stallard frame. It was lovely. The owner wouldn’t sell it to me.

Stallard’s qualities were unrecognised in the Doughty Street headquarters of the NCU. He was provincial, had a lowly social status and was without skill when it came to writing letters. I think that the NCU officials may have been deceived by Percy’s Wolverhampton accent, which gave a note of wonderment to his voice, as though he could not fully believe in the existence of a quite simple fact that he himself was describing. This accent, combined with his unlovely features, gave some people the impression that he was one of society’s and nature’s underlings.

That was wrong. Percy Stallard was as revolutionary as Wat Tyler, an opponent of the hierarchy (any hierarchy) who would never give up and never admit defeat. And all he wanted to do, in the spring of 1942, was to organise a cycle road race along the lines of the continental racing he had briefly tasted. Letter after letter in Percy’s uneducated hand went to the NCU, asking for co-operation or at least permission. Always the answer was no, just no.

Percy Stallard would not obey. He decided to go ahead with a race. The birthplace of his plan, and therefore of the League, was a remote farmhouse at Little Stretton in Shropshire. This village is 30–40 miles west of Wolverhampton, in a river valley before the land rises sharply towards the Welsh border. There ought to be a commemorative plaque on the farm. I have made a pilgrimage but could not locate the building. Veterans such as myself can recall the nature of such places. It was one of those homes recommended by the Cyclists Touring Club (‘appointed’, in CTC language) where cyclists could find a cheap place of rest and, with luck, some food. They slept in makeshift dormitories and washed under the farmyard tap.

Racing men were gathered at this farm during Easter of 1942 because they were to compete in the Wolverhampton RCC’s hill climb. There was a course of a mile and three-quarters on the unmetalled Burway Hill, which goes up the Long Mynd. A nice little event, but all the riders wanted more. In the farmhouse kitchen Stallard led the future agitation. It was ridiculous that their races should be in remote places and held in secret. There were massed-start events in continental countries, applauded by spectators, even in wartime. Why not in Britain?

Repeated applications to the NCU were rejected. What explains their mindset, the lack of sympathy and indeed the folly of their prohibition? I imagine that they liked being in charge, feared a vulgarisation of cycling, didn’t like Percy Stallard, and wished to put down the Black Country bighead. The enemies of ‘Stallard’s race’, as they called it, referred to its contravention of the genteel spirit of their pastime. They had only one argument that made sense: that if massed-start racing were to be seen on public roads, then the government would be inclined to ban all cycle sport.

Stallard had foreseen this argument. His proposed race was to cover the 59 miles between Llangollen and Wolverhampton. He secured the co-operation of the chief constables of both Shropshire and Staffordshire, having assured them that the forty riders were experienced racing men who would obey the rules of the road. Any profits from the race would go to a police-force charitable fund. Stallard also provided a programme, a press car and publicity via the Wolverhampton Express and Star.

The race took place on 7 June 1942, animated by the same men who had banded together in the Shropshire farmhouse. There were no incidents. An exciting sprint finish in Wolverhampton’s Park Road was cheered by a crowd of 2,000 people. Two local riders were first and second, Albert Price of the Wolverhampton RCC crossing the line in front of Chris Anslow of the Wolverhampton Wheelers. The event had been a success in every way.

The NCU’s response was to suspend, sine die, Stallard, all the riders in the race and all the officials named in the programme: three dozen of the best wheelmen in the country were forbidden to race again. People immediately resigned from the NCU in protest. Some Midlands clubs formed a new organisation, the Midland League of Racing Cyclists. Further leagues were formed in the north and in London, later amalgamating to form the BLRC. In November the NCU, now joined by the RTTC, issued the following warning: ‘As from today’s date, any person or club associating itself with the British League of Racing Cyclists or any of its constituent parts will be suspended.’

The committee of the NCU simply did not understand the wishes of its membership. The same went for the RTTC. Neither body attempted diplomacy, and therefore could not stem the flow of defections. By 1943 about 450 people had joined the League in defiance of the NCU’s threat of suspension and in scorn of the editorials in Cycling, in which they were regularly condemned. If their own club had taken the NCU side they resigned, often to form new clubs. The BLRC gained further and further strength. Eighteen months after ‘Stallard’s race’ it had five regional sections and thirty affiliated clubs.

The sudden rise of the BLRC has something in common with the speedy formation of the Clarion clubs in the 1890s. A spirit was everywhere, but dormant. All that was needed for revolution was a catalyst or pioneer, whether in the form of Blatchford’s newspaper or in the person of the obstinate Percy Stallard.

A difference between the Clarion movement and the rise of the BLRC is that the first led to fellowship, the second to division. After the summer of 1942 there was schism in club after club. Old friends were no longer friends. People who had never met regarded each other as enemies. Sons of cyclists were told by their fathers to avoid certain other cyclists. A height of the wrangling was reached when servicemen came home after 1945. Let us imagine two cases. A young man returns from fighting and is not inclined to obey the edicts of old non-combatants in the NCU. So he becomes a Leaguer. Another war veteran returns to civilian life and finds that his beloved club has been torn to pieces by Leaguers. So he resents them, especially since they – like the NCU committees – had also not been combatants. He joins another club or loses interest altogether.

From 1945 to 1946 the League wished to send its members to race on the continent and – yes please! – to accept any invitation to enter a British team in European stage races. The problem for racing cyclists, who were neither linguists nor diplomats, was to get on to terms with the world’s governing body, the Union cycliste internationale. The UCI recognised the NCU as cycling’s governing body in Great Britain. How then was the BLRC to proceed?

Help came from the Belgian-born sister of Alec Taylor (2nd, Tour of Britain 1951, National Amateur Champion 1947). Miss Taylor went to Brussels at her own expense, for the League had no funds, to put the BLRC case. More assistance was given by Victor Berlemont, the landlord of the York Minster in Dean Street, Soho, always known as ‘the French pub’. This small bohemian bar had been the unofficial headquarters of the Free French during the war. Berlemont had an interest in cycle sport and was the UCI’s London consul. Victor’s son Gaston (who as a young man can be seen in Willi Ronis’s famous photograph of the pub, part of his record of the life of French people in England) inherited the York Minster after his father’s death in 1951.

Victor advised the BLRC. Gaston, like his father, did a bit of commissaire work for road racing until late in his life. The Berlemont family have all gone now, but there is an annual Victor Berlemont Memorial Road Race, organised by the Surrey League. The French pub still has a connection with our sport, a place of rendezvous for racing cyclists as well as bohemians. Photographs of old champions are on the walls, where they always have been. That handsome woman in the middle of the display is Lilian Dredge.

If we lived in Belgium we would know dozens of bars of this sort. But we are British. In the 1950s, when you could buy Miroir-Sprint from the foreign-language newsagent Solosy, Leaguers from the London area would go to Soho on Saturday mornings. They would sit in the French pub in winter, and in summer they would ride to race on the circuit that goes round the perimeter of Finsbury Park. Its surface was bumpy, there was no proper hill, kids and prams and footballs were all over the road, people took illegitimate laps out, since there were no real commissaires – but it was urban bike racing of a kind never seen before, nor scarcely since.

Looking back on Gaston Berlemont, I feel that he ran his Soho bar in much the same way that a commissaire controls the riders in a continental bike race. Even the maddest of us had respect for him. Gaston could stop fights in a few seconds, and was never angry. If you were barred from the French he would reinstate you the next day. When in need he would lend you money. And always there was the same calm, the twinkle in the eye, the same ample stomach and enormous gallic moustache.

There were many famous people in the French pub. Gaston gave them no more deference tham he would accord to any art student. He was like a commissaire in the Tour de France who listens to the domestiques as well as the champions. In person and demeanour Gaston resembled the greatest of modern commissaires, Jean-Marie LeBlanc, who has directed the Tour de France since 1994 after previous careers as a professional cyclist and a journalist. Gaston, like LeBlanc, was a linguist of sorts. He could make his decisions clear to anyone from any country, usually in simple French. An essential skill in Soho, and also in the man who supervises the affairs of the peloton.

The League needed a patron in the Berlemont mould. There was no single person who could unite so many difficult racing cyclists. Members of the BLRC fought with each other as well as with the NCU. They even managed to suspend Percy Stallard, the man to whom the League’s very existence was owed. In some areas there were totalitarian demands that records of errant members be excluded from the minutes and account books. But minutes were not often kept and finances were always in disarray. Meetings were inefficiently chaired and the arguments went on for twelve hours or more.

The indiscipline was a caricature of democracy and the political process. The wonder is that the Leaguers were able to put on so many good bike races and to assemble international teams of high quality. But so they did, and furthermore were usually victorious when it came to outwitting the NCU. This was the work of many remarkable characters, generally the more experienced Leaguers, among whom I single out Jimmy Kain.

Jimmy, a shoe repairer from Enfield, was probably the oldest of the rebels. In his sixties when he took a hand in the League’s affairs, Jimmy had fought in the First World War and claimed that, in its darkest days, he and his comrades had been issued with guns that were ‘ex-Crimea carbines’ that ‘must have come from condemned stores’. If so, this modern racing cyclist had been in a war carrying a gun that had been manufactured in the 1850s. He was an ancient patriot, was Jimmy Kain, and he ended his days in uniform as a Chelsea Pensioner.

From his hand came the most ludicrous triumph of the BLRC over its enemies in the NCU. He devised and wrote the ‘Loyal Address’ to King George VI on the occasion of the League’s chaotic (and, according to the NCU, illegal) 1945 stage race between Brighton and Glasgow. A precious photograph of this document shows its elaborate penmanship. I wonder whether Jimmy’s shoemaking trade helped him to find a source of parchment? Anyway, the address begins

Most Gracious Sovereign,

We, the Chairman, Members of the National Executive Committee, Honorary Secretaries and Members of the British League of Racing Cyclists, your Majesty’s loyal and dutiful subjects, on the occasion of a ‘Victory Race’ being held by its members …

and ends many paragraphs later with the hope that, with the end of European hostilities,

all Sports, including the sport of Cycling with which we, your Majesty’s loyal and dutiful subjects are particularly concerned, may be resumed and long continued so that the objects of our League, namely, the development of healthy competition and friendly rivalry in Cycling Events may proceed unhampered.

James Kain, 24 Disraeli Road, Ealing, in the County of Middlesex.

The address was delivered to Buckingham Palace by four Leaguers (Alex Hendry, Ernie Clements, Alan Colebrook and ‘Acker’ Smith) on their bikes and in racing gear. Only a day later Jimmy got a reply from the Palace in which he read, ‘The King will be grateful if you will convey to the members of the League his sincere thanks … etc. etc.’. How could the NCU compete with such a propaganda coup? The sovereign himself seemed to have become an ally of the rebels.

Back at 24 Disraeli Road Jimmy Kain faced a crisis in his cycling life. The names of two local clubs indicate a schism that was partly of his making. The Ealing CC and the Ealing Paragon CC were once one body, but split because of a local war between Leaguers and non-Leaguers. Which side was to inherit the original club’s records, its bank account and its precious silver trophies, many of which had been donated by the cycling parents of the club’s present members? How many people were on the NCU side? They could be counted. How many people were on the League side? Did the League keep an accurate list of its members, and had subscriptions been paid and properly accounted? (Very often the answer was no.)

The problems in Ealing were repeated all over the country. It was a hard time for clubmen – and for their wives. They had joined the Wobbly Wheelers through simple love of the bike. Now they had to make decisions that would brand them as conservatives or partisans. Stallard always said that there could be no compromise. ‘You were either with us or against us.’ He also claimed, untruly, that within the League ‘we were one big happy family’. It is hard to explain the mixture of high spirits and nihilism in the collective League mind. Jimmy Kain’s rare pamphlet Britain’s Cycling Frankenstein: A Disunited Colossus (n.d. but 1953) takes as its motto a quotation from The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám:

To grasp this sorry State of Things entire

… Shatter it to bits … and then,

Re-mould it nearer to the heart’s desire …

I wonder whether the quotation represents one kind of post-war attitude, the frustrated feeling that everything had to be torn down before we could begin anew. Those years, we know, saw the largest recruitment to the company of British anarchism and ‘libertarianism’. Jimmy Kain, however, was a monarchist. He sometimes sent long telegrams to Clement Attlee threatening to report him to the King, like this one about possible Home Office objections to road racing:

REPRESENTING THOUSANDS LAW ABIDING MEMBERS BITTERLY RESENT LETTER ZV STOP STROKE 22 JULY AND DISCRIMINATION EXPRESSED WHILE YOU STOP TRAFFIC FACILITATING SURGING CROWDS ATTEND SPEEDWAY AND DOG RACING STOP SPEEDWAY RACING BREEDS SPEED CRAZED PILLION RIDERS OF GRISLY RECORD STOP THUS KEEPING DEATH ON THE ROADS STOP REPEAT DEATH ON THE ROADS WILL TAKE THIS MATTER TO HIS MAJESTY THE KING IN EFFORT TO OPPOSE YOUR DISCRIMINATION…

As for the spirit of the League – perhaps it depended on your generation. Jimmy Kain sent his angry telegrams to a prime minister who was younger than himself. His objections to dog tracks and speedway sound like those of an old man. Percy Stallard, the original rebel, had begun racing in 1927, and was a family man. The other pioneers from the Little Stretton farmhouse were also grown up. A number of them worked in the Sunbeam body shop, a reserved occupation because they might be needed to build military vehicles. They knew the boredom of wartime. It was folly to deny them a cycle race.

Then comes a later generation, typified by another Wolverhampton man. In 1945 Bob Thom came back from war service, signed up with the BLRC and rode the Brighton – Glasgow. He was BLRC champion in 1948 and in that year became a small-time professional for Viking Cycles. Team mechanic for the BLRC team in the 1952 Warsaw – Berlin – Prague, he was also mechanic for the British team in the 1955 Tour de France and managed British teams abroad until the mid-1970s. He and his wife Jeannie still ride their bikes, always in the colours of the Wolverhampton Wheelers.

The third generation, younger than Bob Thom by a decade or more, were those racing men who joined cycling in the early 1950s, at the end of austerity and rationing but before mass motoring had begun. These adherents to the BLRC displayed a new working-class sense of modishness and were sometimes said to be the Teddy Boys of sport. I never saw any cycling Teds, but there was certainly a smart and disobedient look. In the 1950s you could identify a Leaguer by his roadman’s position on the bike, his continental equipment, his preference for derailleur gears, Campag if possible, a flashy Italian road jersey and dark glasses. Unlike more traditional cyclists, a Leaguer was likely to be a (modern) jazz fan, would frequent coffee bars, might go out with a girl from the local art school, was a snappy dresser on and off the bike and had no respect for the culture of touring and youth hostelling.

Something else made a difference between the Leaguers and traditional cyclists. They were so good! They trained harder, rode harder, had high ambitions and studied the sport with Europe in mind. The League was inspired by France and Italy, countries with a mass following for the bike game. Leaguers always wanted to ride on equal terms with the continentals, and soon they did.

The BLRC alone introduced road racing to Britain, gave us stage races on the continental pattern and looked for sponsorship and publicity from newspapers and other interested parties. The first Tour of Britain was held in 1951, under the banner of the Daily Express and with much help from Butlin’s holiday camps (which often gave hospitality and shelter to the caravan of a British stage race). Quite soon, however, the Daily Express pulled out of cycle sport, fed up with the feuds between the BLRC and the NCU. The League’s Dave Orford approached the Milk Marketing Board, and the Tour of Britain was reborn with a different name, by which it is still fondly remembered: ‘the Milk Race’.

The Tour of Britain and The Milk Race invited foreign competitors, and British teams went abroad. There was friendliness between the League and the sporting bosses of the Warsaw Pact countries, probably because the communist nation-states saw no need to obey the dictates of the Union cycliste internationale, which was always suspicious of the BLRC. So a major triumph was Ian Steel’s victory in the tough 1952 Warsaw – Berlin – Prague, the ‘Peace Race’, in which Leaguers from Great Britain also won the team prize.

The BLRC also developed a British professional or semi-professional class. Apart from Ovaltine and BSA, the sponsors of the new professionals were usually small bike firms – i.e. shops that also made frames – or importers of Italian accessories. I like to remember the pioneering racing men who wore the colours of such marques and lament that, today, we don’t have the events that made them famous. Here are some of them, in no particular order – for who can impose order on the League?

Dave Orford (Belper), Ovaltine/Langsett Cycles, Ist BLRC Junior Road Race Championship, 1948, Ist Circuit des Grimpeurs, 1955; Bev Wood (Preston), Viking Cycles, Ist London – Dover, 1950; Ken Russell (Bradford), Ellis Briggs Cycles, Ist Tour of Britain, 1952; Peter Proctor (Skipton), BSA Cycles, King of the Mountains, Tour of Britain, 1952; Alec Taylor (Marlborough), Gnutti Accessories, 2nd Tour of Britain, 1951; Les Wade (London), Frejus Cycles, Ist Nottingham – Butlin’s Holiday Camp, Skegness, 1950; John Perks (Birmingham), Falcon Cycles, Ist Tour of Wessex three-day, 1954; John Bennett (Derby), Mottram Cycles, Ist Battle of Britain Road Race, 1954, Ist Birmingham Road Race, 1959; Phil Ingram (London), Dayton Cycles, 2nd London BLRC Time Trial Championship, 1944.

All the British riders who were good enough to ride the Tour de France in the years after 1955 came from a BLRC background. Let’s remember one person who didn’t ride the Tour but was present at its worst moment, Tommy Simpson’s death in 1967. This was the British team’s mechanic, Harry Hall (Manchester), Harry Hall Cycles, Ist Three Shires Road Race, 1952, Veteran World Road Champion, 1989. He tended to Simpson on the Ventoux mountain before the stricken rider died and heard his friend’s last words. ‘The straps, Harry! The straps!’

VII

Just a boy and a teenager in the 1950s, I had no part to play in the BLRC disputes, though it was easy to know which side to join. Up the League! Veteran cyclists still greet each other with the slogan and use other phrases we learnt many years ago. We shout ‘Ally ally ally’ as encouragement in races – and not everyone realises that this old League chant is an innocent corruption of the French Allez!

I am a child of the League and of communism, a powerful and ineradicable mixture. The League formed my adolescence, while I had been drinking the red milk of communism since birth. My real first name is Timoshenko, after the renowned marshal of the Red Army. I doubt whether my parents’ politics inclined me towards the League, which attracted everyone who wished to flex the muscles of youth. But its internationalism and pariah reputation suited a person with my background.

I first visited France in 1948, when my communist father drove his small family to the Midi in my maternal grandfather’s Bentley. Little boy though I was, I could master books like a journalist. A box at the back of the car held my reading matter. There were books about Robin Hood, Geoffrey Trease’s Bows against the Barons (1934) and such Soviet works as Timur and his Comrades, a children’s story about a young member of the Komsomol and his work in building a new socialist state (a book which I secretly dismissed in about twenty minutes). On the journey I was content to look at France through the windows of the Bentley: long avenues of trees, rivers, castles, vineyards, towns which seemed partly to have fallen down. My diary is in existence, but memory serves better to recall the wine I tasted, the strange, wonderful food eaten out of doors at twilight. The weather was hot. What was that noise of crickets? Then it became cold and windy, and my father drove to high Alpine villages whose people were goitred. Their swollen faces were brown with filth, they dressed in rags and lived in taudis, hovels, with their animals.

A few years later, when I became a cyclist, thoughts of that 1948 expedition increased my wish to understand the Tour de France. Cycling is not merely about physical pleasure. It is also about knowledge and living memory: the memories we can share with those who are still alive.

The Tour is now a hundred years old. Every year it is an epic; and every year there are stages of the race that are epics in themselves, containing dozens of human stories of heroism, toil and suffering. The Tour is both theatre and poetry. It reflects all the history of France, and indeed Europe, in the last century. The ideal historian of the Tour would also know about social geography, international relations and folk religion; together with the nature of immigration, the use of drugs, television, money, political power and advertising. This historian should also be a linguist, French, and a racing cyclist with a feeling for the tragedy of the twentieth century.

Such a writer has never been born, so we must look elsewhere. No need to waste time with, for instance, the vile scribes of Les Temps modernes, except to say that French intellectuals have missed a wonderful subject that lay right before their eyes. Personally I prefer French journalists. They have more relish for life than academics. The vast majority of people who have added to our knowledge of the Tour have been from the press; but, alas, their accounts and interviews are mainly hidden in the archives of newspaper libraries. Many general books recount the history of the Tour, generally beginning with its origins in the press.

The Tour de France was founded in 1903 by Henri Desgrange, a racing cyclist (the first recordman de l’heure, with 35.325 kms) who was also a journalist. Desgrange had the idea of a very long race as a publicity vehicle for his paper L’Auto. It was in rivalry with Le Vélo, which organised the two longest cycling events of the time, Bordeaux – Paris and Paris – Brest – Paris. A race all the way around France, Desgrange thought, would give L’Auto an advantage over the other publication. The pattern of the Tour was established very early in its life. First, it was to be a circuit of the country. Second, there were to be long stages between different towns and cities. Third, the difficulty of the Tour would be augmented by climbs in the Alps and the Pyrenees. Mountain stages were an essential part of the race from 1910. The winner of the Tour – the person who rode back to Paris with the shortest aggregate time in a race that lasted for three weeks or more – would need to be a climber.

The development of the Tour de France was interrupted by the two world wars but enjoyed a ‘renaissance period’ between 1947 and 1953, the year of its golden jubilee. It is difficult to say when the ‘modern’ Tour de France began. Was it formed by commerce, or by publicity, or by globalisation, mondialisation? Did it begin with the rise of trade teams rather than regional or national teams, after 1961? Or with television coverage, which began in 1955 and was first transmitted en direct in 1957, and with the help of helicopters after 1975? Or with the failure of French cyclists in their own national event, for a Frenchman has not won since Bernard Hinault in 1985?

On another view, the ‘modern period’ belongs to riders who have won the Tour three times or more. There had been multiple winners before Hitler’s war, notably the Belgian Sylvère Maes (in 1936 and 1939), but the tendency to win again and again began in 1953. Here is a list of the dominating multiple winners:

Louison Bobet, 1953, 1954, 1955.

Jacques Anquetil, 1957, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964.

Eddy Merckx, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1974.

Bernard Hinault, 1978, 1979, 1981, 1982, 1985.

Greg Lemond, 1986, 1989, 1990.

Miguel Indurain, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995.

Lance Armstrong, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003.

These seven men have achieved thirty-one victories between them.

In the years when the multiple champions did not take the Tour there were some equally memorable victors. On rare occasions they won because their team leader had crashed or had been taken ill. In 1966, for instance, Jacques Anquetil – suffering from bronchitis and, at the age of thirty-two, exhausted by a career that had begun in his teens – climbed off when there were only six stages left before Paris, having first ensured that the Tour would be gained by a modest teammate. Lucien Aimar saw his opportunity and took it, riding into the Parc des Princes in yellow, but without a single stage win to his credit.

Let no one imagine that Aimar was a cyclist of the second rank. It is true that he regarded Anquetil as a revered elder brother. Although they shared rooms for five years Aimar always addressed his team leader as vous. But Aimar was a vital presence and a potential winner in any race. In 1968 he won a stunning victory in the French national championship, beating Roger Pingeon, who had outdistanced him in that year’s Tour de France. Pingeon, like Aimar, could have won the Tour more than once. Both men had their victories and failures in the political team tactics of the Tour in the 1960s. Pingeon was the more calculating of the two. Aimar often said that he had the relaxed attitude of his homeland, the Cote d’azur, while Pingeon was reserved (he would not share a room with anyone) and a perfectionist. After 1968 his career and his spirits were destroyed by the rise of Eddy Merckx.

The most surprising winner of the Tour has been Roger Walkowiak, a miner’s son from the Polish enclave in Alsace. He rode the 1956 Tour as an unnoticed member of the Nord-Est-Centre regional team. When he finished in yellow there were no extended plaudits, though the Tour had been run at a record overall speed of 36.268 kph. Walkowiak gave his winnings to his old dad, raced intermittently for three more seasons and then went back home to a job in a factory. It is said that ‘Walko’ was a stupid man who lacked the will to dominate. In 1956 he was certainly directed by his team manager to get into the right breaks and then to take it easy. Would it have been better if he had gone for senseless adventures off the front of the bunch, and then lost the race?

Another unexpected winner was Joop Zoetemelk, who wore the yellow jersey on the Champs-Elysées in 1980. As a competitor, he was the superior of Aimar or Walkowiak. The reasons why people were surprised that he won were, first, because he was Dutch; second, because he was old (thirty-four); and, third, because they were used to him failing to win. Zoetemelk’s palmarès is in some ways unmatched. He started and finished no fewer than sixteen Tours and was second on six occasions. His long and admirable career was concluded when he won the world professional road race tide in 1985, at the age of thirty-eight. On the Giavera di Montello circuit he used finesse and then sheer speed to defeat Greg Lemond and Moreno Argentin.

That may well have been Zoetemelk’s favourite victory. ‘There are those who win the Tour once and then no longer speak about it,’ says Zoetemelk. ‘I was one of them.’ The Dutchman is also one of the sizeable number of former Tour heroes who become reclusive in later life. Some of them are very odd and anti-social. We hear of them living on a farm in a remote part of their native region, or in a forest, not much liking human contact, a gun-dog their preferred companion. Others, by contrast, make their living from former sporting renown. Old Belgian champions often own bars. The more renowned a cyclist, the more likely that he will enter the public relations business. French Tour veterans contribute to the vast, and still growing, hospitality industry that accompanies cycle sport. Or they drive team cars and supporting vehicles. Retired cyclists are better at this task than rally drivers or other professional motorists.

A select number of Tour winners become team managers. One of them is Bjarne Riis, the Dane who put an end to Miguel Indurain’s reign when he dominated him on an Alpine stage in 1996. I would rather not call him a great man of the Tour de France. The same applies to Marco Pantani. In 1998, a year in which he had already won the Giro d’Italia, Pantani flew up the roads of the Alps and the Pyrenees to become only the third man (after Fausto Coppi and Stephen Roche) to win both the Italian and French tours in the space of only a few months.

1998 was the year of the Festina drugs scandal, when it became clear that EPO was used throughout the peloton. Whatever the illegal fuel that helped him ride, Pantani was a climber in the grand tradition. After one day in the mountains he sprinted to the heights of Les Deux Alpes nine minutes clear of his nearest rival. He was never again to ride so well.

Like most long-time lovers of the Tour, I mull over the years in which la grande boucle was won by a specialised climber.

Now follows a list that gives a different slant to the history of the post-war Tour. On page 66 I gave a list of the multiple winners, cyclists with three or more wins. Here are the Tour winners excluding the multiple victors.

1947 Jean Robic, France

1948 Gino Bartali, Italy

1949 Fausto Coppi, Italy

1950 Ferdi Kubler, Switzerland

1951 Hugo Koblet, Switzerland

1952 Fausto Coppi, Italy

1956 Roger Walkowiak, France

1958 Charly Gaul, Luxembourg

1959 Federico Bahamontes, Spain

1960 Gastone Nencini, Italy

1965 Felice Gimondi, Italy

1966 Lucien Aimar, France

1967 Roger Pingeon, France

1968 Jan Janssen, Netherlands

1973 Luis Ocaña, Spain

1975 Bernard Thévenet, France

1976 Lucien van Impe, Belgium

1977 Bernard Thévenet, France

1980 Joop Zoetemelk, Netherlands

1983 Laurent Fignon, France

1984 Laurent Fignon, France

1987 Stephen Roche, Ireland

1988 Pedro Delgado, Spain

1996 Bjarne Riis, Denmark

1997 Jan Ullrich, Germany

1998 Marco Pantani, Italy

Let readers imagine that we are in a cafe, bar or buvette in rural France. It is the late morning of a warm day in mid-July. The television is switched on and it is following the Tour de France from, shall we say, Figeac to Superbesse, a distance of 221 kilometres. The village is quiet and so is the cafe. Fewer than a dozen customers, all male, are sitting with their morning drinks, wine mostly, maybe a Suze, in my case a Ricard, ‘un peu de soleil dans une bouteille’, as its inventor, the Marseillais genius Paul Ricard, liked to say.

We have newspapers which give reports of yesterday’s events on the road and a page of the Tour’s General Classification, from the maillot jaune to the lanterne rouge. There are flies on the ceiling. The television grinds on. Nothing much happening in this early part of a transitional stage. Some of the men smoke Gauloises, others Caporals. I am making marks in biro against the Classement général. In an hour or so lunch will be offered, probably hors-d’oeuvre, chicken, fruit, cheese. From my place at a formica table I can see the village priest walking up and down the street. What big black boots in this summer weather. Time for another Ricard. Some children run in and out of the cafe. The television says that there has been a breakaway, not an energetic one, and after 80 kilometres of racing the peloton has come together. The TV commentator talks of the old days.

‘Messieurs!’ I might cry to other men in the bar. ‘I am myself a former racing cyclist, from Birmingham near Wolverhampton, of little merit, it is true, but I am a true lover of the vélo. I have with me a list of all the winners in the Tour de France in the last fifty years which excludes every rider who has won the Tour more than three times. Tell me, my friends, tell me this, were not those Tours more interesting, more émouvant, than those in which we saw the repeated triumphs of the greatest champions in the race which has occupied us for all of our lives?’

Try this conversation in a provincial French cafe before lunch and you will still be in fierce or genial debate all afternoon, and until the dinner plates are cleared. This is the way that the Tour is – or used to be – discussed. I wish I had spent more time in such cafes. Perhaps it is not too late. A few months ago I had a café-cognac sur le zinc in a Parisian bar before the next day’s Paris – Roubaix, and the drink was with my son. So there may be a future for us all – though I can never rid myself of hankering for the old days of English poetry about club runs, which I shall now describe.

VIII

The first British cyclist to ride the Tour de France was Charlie Holland, a hero from Birmingham. A member of the Midland C & AC, he spent most of his life as a newsagent but had a short professional career before the war. In 1937 (the year Roger Lapébie won) he survived the Tour until its eleventh stage. He could have gone further, but was eliminated as a result of one of Henri Desgrange’s most absurd regulations. The father of the Tour had decreed that riders could not carry more than two spare tubulars. Holland suffered from punctures during the stage between Perpignan and Luchon, so was ruined.

It had been a brave contribution to the Tour. Charlie Holland had never even seen a bigger mountain than Snaefell on the Isle of Man, so the Galibier – the fearsome, snow-capped col that rises above Briançon, the highest town in Europe – was a challenge beyond his experience or imagination. That year the riders had to struggle through thick mud from melted Alpine snow. On his dogged way to the summit of the Galibier Charlie passed Maurice Archambaud, sobbing by the wayside, unable to continue. And Archambaud was a champion, the holder (like Desgrange before him) of the hour record sur piste, an experienced man of the Tour who was willed on by thousands of French fans. Holland had no one at all to support him. As far as the bosses of British cycling were concerned, he might have been riding on the moon.

Charlie Holland’s pioneering ride in 1937 was a high point in British cycling. High, and also remote. Eighteen years would pass before, in 1955, there was again a British presence in the Tour de France. To this day (2003) only fifty-one British cyclists have ridden the Tour and only twenty-one of them have completed the race. This is a modest number. But let us be grateful to the BLRC. If it were not for the League there would have been even fewer British riders on the continent. All of the earlier British riders in the Tour were brought up in the BLRC. Tom Simpson – the dead king of British cycling – was an utterly characteristic Leaguer whose early career was formed by BLRC attitudes.

Why have there not been more British cyclists in the Tour de France? Dozens of our boys had legs for the job. Alas, they were not encouraged by our official bodies. The professional class was weak and big cycle companies like Hercules and Raleigh retreated from sponsorship. We were all absorbed in the domestic sport of time dialling. And always in the background was the innate pastoralism of our cycling culture. This attachment to rural rambles and the gentle pleasures of the countryside is most obviously seen, I think, in cycling poetry.

The Britons who raced on the continent are a different breed from those who wrote poetry after riding their bikes in the English countryside, but there is some common ground. The racing men and the poets understand each other, for they come from the same background in British cycling club life.

Poetry!? By racing cyclists!? Yes, though mainly by recreational cyclists. Hundreds of people, maybe thousands, have become poets with no other reason for writing poetry, or writing at all, than their devotion to the bicycle. On my shelves is a collection of their verses. It is a small anthology in proportion to the huge total number of cycling poems written since the 1890s. The tradition continues and flourishes, not quite in secret but in privacy, for the poems are published in club magazines and nowhere else.

The themes of cycling poetry are quietly stated and the verse is not obscure. Cycling poets write in conventional ways. They describe the weather and the alternation of the seasons, matters that everyone can understand. Time dialling is a common subject. Our poets are also inclined to discuss age and death, for the further ends of life are a cycling preoccupation. Yet they don’t treat death as a drama. Oddly enough, I have never come across a poem about the death of Tom Simpson. Perhaps they don’t get published. I wouldn’t be surprised if Simpson poems exist or once existed. They would be sealed in a feeding bottle and then buried under the stones at the horrible monument on Mont Ventoux. People take anything to this shrine.

Passionate love poetry is rare. Cyclists do of course write about attractive women. The most favoured women are barmaids. Next most popular are the owners of traditional cafes and teashops. In third place, some way behind, are other cyclists. Here is the author of ‘Lines written after a chance encounter with a charming member of the Merseyside Ladies’ Cycling Association’:

A presence brought enchantment to the ride

A presence, riding with me, by my side …

There are also many poems which address a favourite bicycle as though it were a good old wife:

We’ve had some pretty good times together

Awandering up and down the hills and dales …

Other categories of cycling verse include the very important rolling-road poems, with their tales of memorable rides:

At the witching hour one winter’s night, snow thick upon the ground

Some Clarion lads from Manchester left Handforth homeward bound …

And there are many good-cheer poems:

There’s an inn down in Surrey that’s known far and wide

For the welcome extended to all those who ride …

At one time it was also common for clubs to sing as they went along the road together. The club run, especially after it turned for the homeward ride, but before the final ‘blind’, became a wheeled choir. If the run was well attended there had to be a choirmaster in the middle of the bunch to coordinate the tempo and remind clubmates of the words of songs. The effect was probably ragged, but a singing club run must have been an impressive thing, astonishing to a bystander.

Some songs – I write of days long gone by – were from the music hall or were well-known ditties such as

Summer rain brings the roses again

After the clouds roll by …

Less often, clubs sang the classics of choral music. Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ was a favourite, though no one knew the German words and there has never been a translation into English. Ignorance of the words of songs led cyclists towards mockery. ‘The Soldiers’ Chorus’, for instance, was sung as ‘Beer, boys, and bugger the Band of Hope’, probably as the Sunday club run passed some nonconformist chapel.

Some clubs had their own poet who wrote songs and coached other members. The Catford CC was one of them. This song comes from the Catford:

We’re boys of every sort, in all the branches of the sport,

The road and track boys, the lady-back boys,

Our object is good sportsmanship, our racing is good fun,

Our motto is Good Fellowship, for each and ev’ry one …

A ‘lady-back boy’ is the owner of a tandem who has a girlfriend. This Catford song probably has an early date, since the singing club runs were most popular in the 1920s and 1930s. The last report I have of a club wheeling through the lanes in song (a CTC section: it would be, wouldn’t it?) comes from the mid-1950s. I never myself experienced a singing club run though I know some people, rather older than me, who recall the phenomenon. One of them points out that only cyclists would have joined in such a practice. ‘Other people aren’t crazy enough.’

The songs, recitations and poems began with the first Clarion ‘smokers’ and the birth of club magazines. Some of them relate to a minor development in English literature. In the 1890s there was a vogue for rolling-road poems from the pens of such official writers as Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton and John Masefield. They made an addition to English nature poetry simply by writing so much about roads. Many of their sentiments were transferred to verses by cyclists. The same official writers often give us descriptions of gypsies. And, sure enough, a preoccupation with the wandering people of the countryside also has a place in the literature of cycling. For what is a cyclist, if he is not a postman who dreams of becoming a gypsy?

The Romany is weather-beaten, misunderstood, ungovernable and free. So he entered the lore of cycling as soon as the sport became truly popular and became an alternative way of life for the low paid. Many of the clubs founded in those days – plenty of them still in existence – have the words ‘nomads’, ‘wanderers’ or ‘vagabonds’ in their names. It had been easy for the young spirits who founded such clubs to make an association with the gypsy. Cyclists went their own way through the lanes or across the heath, as the wind or fancy took them. They carried few possessions, wore bright clothing, were refused entry to the more genteel pubs, tinkered with their mounts at the side of the road, took their meals behind hedges and slept in haystacks.

I am old enough to remember the haystacks and still think it was a good way to spend Saturday night. Today, veteran cyclists bore their sons and teenage clubmates with tales of rough nights when they burrowed into barns and ricks, fearful of the farmer even after the pint or two they had probably drunk. How scratchy the haystacks were, how rural they smelt, how a lad longed for a lass to be with him in his hayhole!

Haystacks were useful to us for quite practical reasons. They provided cost-free lodgings close to the start of time-trial courses. You could spend Saturday night in a haystack and be there and ready to race on Sunday morning. Many time triallists camped before an event, but there was more than a touch of respectability about their Bukta or Blacks-of-Greenock tents, their shaven faces and wifely wives. A racing man from a haystack was a more dangerous sort of cyclist.

Haystack nights disappeared in the 1960s, when people had more money and looked for a different style. The old prestige accorded to haystackers came from their vagabond or wild-man demeanour. Cycling lore contains many stories about strangers who appear in the night or who join the road from a woodland path. A lone cyclist enters a remote country pub. He asks for a pint and an empty smaller glass, then produces half a dozen duck eggs from a brown paper bag. The mysterious wheelman pours a little beer from his pint into the smaller glass, cracks an egg into it and drinks the mixture. He does this five more times. Then he finishes his beer and leaves the hostelry, away on his bike to who knows where.

All stories signify something beyond themselves. What does this story mean? Perhaps the cyclist is really a fox. Are there parallels in the folk legends of, for instance, Belgium, a country of beer, cycling, early dark nights and short distances between country and town?

Another cycling legend – one that does have equivalents in British folklore – concerns the old-timer. In song and story he is not awheel but is encountered at the side of a road. He wears unfashionable clothes, carefully washed and stitched where necessary. He is not the sort of person who takes his rest in a haystack. He might be a ghost. The old-timer’s bike is ancient. Some of its accessories, in this story usually the mudguards, are held to the frame by twisted pieces of wire. But the transmission – chainset, chain and back sprocket, the heart of a bicycle – is expertly and beautifully maintained. The old-timer has climbed off to eat his sandwiches or to smoke a pipe. Other cyclists riding the same road instinctively brake and stop to say a word in fellowship or homage. He replies only with the words ‘It’s a grand life’. Just as no one has seen him ride, nobody knows where he comes from. But some versions of this myth give the old-timer a Black Country accent.

Is it merely coincidence that the photographs of Reg Harris, advertising his Raleigh bicycle, used to put the world champion in this old-timer pose, on a grassy verge by an English hedge, with pipe in hand, smiling in kindly fashion?

One final country legend. Almost as memorable as the old-timer is the icon of the peripatetic poet. He is on his bike in the countryside, sometimes glimpsed by other cyclists, shepherds and thoughtful rural folk. On occasion he is lying on the verge of the road, apparently asleep. What does this mean?

The cycling figure is surely formed from two more familiar icons. The first is the scholar-gypsy, who, as we know, flits from river to inn to hilly path. The second is the wandering minstrel. Why do minstrels wander? Any bright young Birmingham Marxist of the 1950s will immediately put his hand up with the answer. It is because they have been expelled, by capitalism, from their true home in the feudal hall, and so must endlessly travel, with no warm place to lay their heads and few people to hear their melancholy song. Sir Walter Scott will tell you the same story. And, as the cycling poet recounts,

His head on his battered musette, a dreamy look in his eye, The cyclist lay by the roadside, watching the world go by.

And his mind went off on a journey, to the land of make-believe,

Where the laws no longer run that bind the sons of Adam and Eve.

Etymologically, the French musette means, originally, a sheep’s bladder; then, a bag; then, a primitive form of bagpipes, made from the bladder; and so we have the more familiar notion of the bal-musette, a rustic dance or jolly occasion in some quartier where country met city, and in which the ceremonies were led by traditional and informal music.

For the modern cyclist, a musette is a small fabric bag slung over the back for carrying provisions such as maps, Mars bars, ‘speed mixture’ (which is a cake of prunes and rice that wards off the bonk), amphetamines, inner tubes. British cyclists often call them ‘bonk bags’*. Leaguers made them from that striped material used in deck chairs. In long races musettes containing food are handed up to riders by someone at the roadside. The professionals then throw them away, while the rest of us fold musettes and keep them in the pocket of a road jersey. I always carry one, just in case; and in autumn days I use a musette to ride home with shaggy woodland parasol mushrooms, or perhaps a pheasant that has been struck dead by some murdering bourgeois in a big black car. A freshly killed pheasant in a musette gives a little warm nudge to the lower vertebrae, a strange feeling that I suppose is known only to cyclists – and poachers, now I come to think of it.

* ‘The bonk’ is a cycling term for a sudden loss of power and energy. It is accompanied by depression and sometimes tears. The condition is unknown to other sports and therefore to anyone who is not a cyclist. It can hit you very suddenly, when a cyclist will say ‘I’ve blown’. There are many other demotic terms. We speak of ‘The knock’, ‘hunger knock’, ‘the sags’, and fear the time when ‘Old Mr Saggy comes knocking at the door’. The rather official French word is défaillance. Bonk is caused by a lowering of the blood sugar level. The remedy is in food and drink. Hardriders always carry bonk bars, in former days prepared to gruesome recipes. Try oats slowly baked with syrup, lard, margarine and cocoa powder, together with chopped mixed fruits previously soaked in Guinness. But never eat anything that will make your handlebars sticky. Always have a bonk bar after two hours, even if you’re not hungry. The first time my son had the bonk (aged 12) I got him home, my arm around his shoulders. Then he had four giant helpings of Coco-Pops and milk before falling asleep, still wearing track mitts. No bonk is worse than the bonk you suffered as a teenager.

IX

The connection between cycling and Georgian rolling-road mythology found a visual poetry in the art of Frank Patterson, which captures the spirit of cycling in the years before the motor car occupied our highways and byways. Patterson drew illustrations for cycling magazines for half a century. His career coincided with the period of the bicycle’s most popular appeal. Drawings by Patterson first appeared in Cycling in 1893. They filled its pages until his death in 1952 and are still reproduced, for this unique artist had neither a rival nor a successor.

It is said that Patterson produced some 26,000 drawings for publication. I believe this figure. Patterson was fluent, regular and knew exactly what he was about. His style, established early in life, was constant. Very thin pen lines, often elongated, each line close to the next, describe rural scenes, landscapes and quaint country buildings. Patterson never used cross-hatching or a wash. His line, though not distinguished, did everything he needed. The original drawings were three or four times larger than their published reproductions, so readers of Cycling and the CTC Gazette marvelled at his virtuoso penmanship.

Patterson’s drawings always included a cyclist or a bicycle. They depicted the things that old-fashioned cyclists like – a drovers’ road over Welsh hills, Lakeland passes and Peak District rough-stuff tracks, the Great North Road at Eaton Socon, so familiar to time triallists; market towns with coaching inns; castles, wishing wells, thatched country pubs, the Roman Wall, remote parish churches and the final miles home by moonlight.

Sometimes Patterson would make it clear that the cyclist who appeared in his drawing, speeding along traffic-free roads, was riding in a time trial. This was the only kind of cycle sport that he drew. He never shows us a massed-start race, a track meeting or a club run. His cyclists are usually alone. Occasionally they are in pairs or greet each other at crossroads. Very rarely, Patterson allowed a woman cyclist to appear, invariably on the back of a tandem.

‘Pat’, as he was called by his few intimates, had an enormous but imprecise effect on the nature of English cycling. Both he and his near contemporary Robert Blatchford, founder of The Clarion (Blatchford 1851–1943, Patterson 1871–1952), were journalists who established the mood of their era. They did not resemble each other. Blatchford knew that cycling meant comradeship, escape from the city, political optimism, tandems, marriage, the future. Patterson by contrast was reclusive. He scorned the idea of fellowship, never visited a city and had no passion for cycling. Frank Patterson was not the member of any club, not even the CTC. After a little early touring he gave up the bike in 1906.

The purpose of his art was to embalm the England he had known as a boy. He grew up to know old country life, the obscurity of distant villages and the eccentricities of such rustic folk as appear in his drawings. Sometimes they wear smocks. They seldom appear to work. This was the England that Patterson wished to preserve. And, in one little corner, he was successful. Patterson built himself a Utopia that was under his autocratic rule for half a century. Pear Tree Farm, near Billings-hurst in Sussex, is a rambling Tudor building which Patterson first saw, almost in ruins, in the late 1890s. He rented it, repaired the dilapidated parts and eventually was able to buy the property.

Pear Tree Farm was suited to Frank Patterson’s tastes and modest social ambitions. This marine engineer’s son from Portsmouth aspired neither to riches nor to a wider fame in his profession. He did not think of himself as an artist. His one desire was to own a piece of English land and to live on that acre or two as a countryman. He did not wish to appear as a gentleman, since he cared little for grandeur or good manners. He also realised that a farmer’s life was laborious, so he decided to live on a farm and earn his bread in another, secret way. Patterson’s neighbours were never told how he and his family were employed.

The first romantic advantage of Pear Tree Farm was its antiquity. The second was its location. It was inaccessible. No road, nor even a path, led from the farm to the outside world. Visitors were strictly discouraged. Wheelfolk might have come to his door, expecting a genial welcome from a fellow cyclist; but the approaches to the house were difficult, wooded, muddied, over fields. And if a cyclist had managed to arrive at Pear Tree Farm he would have been met by a balding, portly, cantankerous man wearing tweeds and carrying a gun, for Patterson was keen on firearms and had a rifle with him at all times.

Now for the artist’s habits. Up from his slumber at dawn, in summer and winter, Patterson’s first task was to shoot his supper. Through fields and coppices he roamed. Rabbits, hares, partridges, pheasants, pigeons fell to his fire. The game was carried back to the house. As far as was possible, Pear Tree Farm was self-sufficient. Its owner wished to be isolated from the wider market economy. Ground was cleared for vegetables, berries and fruits. Patterson’s wife dug his potatoes and tended his hop bines. Her husband drank her beer throughout the day, even when he was in bed.

Lighting was by candle, rush light and oil lamp. The children were disciplined within the house, though they could do as they wished in the fields and woods. Patterson had dogs and a horse. I do not know whether he kept a pig. Conceivably not. To own a pig was the sign of a cottager. Patterson was of no social class, but he was sure that he was not a peasant.

Patterson’s wife died in her early forties. Then his two daughters ran away from home. He married the woman who had been his wife’s nurse and she bore him two more children. Family traditions were always maintained. Every day, without fail, Patterson did his artistic work after lunch. The heart of Pear Tree Farm is an antique room with a huge inglenook fireplace. In Patterson’s day it was decorated with crossed muskets, pewter tankards and an ancient clock. In the middle of the room was an oval table. Patterson spent the afternoon at this convenient surface, where were placed his pens and ink, to the right, and his visual aids to the left. Nobody was allowed to see him draw.

Every week ten elaborate illustrations were made into a package. Patterson did not care if he never saw them again and never made a collection of his art. His wife took the drawings, on horseback, to Billingshurst, where there was a train service to London. Soon they would arrive at the offices of Cycling. And this routine was maintained for forty years.

The public-house inglenook that so often appears in Patterson drawings – where a cyclist sits on a curved oak settle by a log fire, enjoying his pint – in fact depicts Patterson’s favourite place in his own home. Pear Tree Farm was not merely his house; it was his local. He did not have to ride to a country pub, because his home was the perfect hostelry – the more so because travellers and strangers did not cross its threshold. Patterson never even met the writers of the touring articles he illustrated, though they were colleagues for years.

His two magazine editors, H. H. England and George Herbert Stancer, did make an annual visit to Pear Tree Farm. Every Christmas they brought Patterson presents and were allowed to sit in the inglenook. It was in their interests to keep their illustrator content. That was surprisingly easy: Patterson never complained about the wretched fees that the Temple Press, the publishers of Cycling, paid to the magazine’s most popular contributor. ‘G.H.S.’ (as he was always known) and the reactionary Harry England realised that their visits to Pear Tree Farm should be few and that Patterson’s secret had to be guarded. They ensured that the many thousands of people who loved his drawings never knew that Frank Patterson, who seemed to embody the spirit of cycling, was not a cyclist at all.

Even today, few cyclists are aware that Patterson was not really of our number. But he does belong to cycling, and to cycling alone. His art, which is unmistakable and resembles no one else’s, has no recognition at all beyond the world of British clubmen. The drawings are not reproduced in surveys of illustration, are not sent to auction and are never found in galleries. Most of Patterson’s output was destroyed by a fire in the Temple Press building in the Second World War. There may be some sheets somewhere and if there were opportunities to buy Patterson’s original work some people would pay large sums, for all cyclists beyond a certain age have a bit of Patterson in them.

The reason for his place in our hearts is uncanny, and without parallel. Patterson’s drawings give the impression that, wherever you ride, he has ridden there before you. We feel that his wheels had explored every lane in every English county. On hundreds or even thousands of occasions, we imagine, he had paused before some view and had climbed off his bike to take a sketch-book from its saddlebag. The truth is that Patterson scarcely went anywhere beyond the purlieus of Pear Tree Farm. His knowledge of places and scenery came from photographs and picture postcards.

Patterson’s life coincided not only with the era of popular cycle touring but also with the golden age of the picture postcard. He must have had an immense collection of them, no doubt supplied by Harry England or someone else at the Temple Press. Patterson made good use of his sources, so good that we don’t realise what those sources were. One can usually tell when a drawing has been copied from a photograph. Not so in Patterson’s art: his style is so distinctive that the photographic origin is erased. Patterson is also immemorial. Although we feel that he has visited the places he portrays, the drawings seem to record the spirit of some past time, not an actual moment.

Consciously or not, Patterson evoked the period after the First World War. The emptiness of his drawings, which make much use of white space, reflects a real emptiness in rural England. Fathers and sons from so many villages had left for foreign fields, never to return. Like so many parents of his generation, Patterson was interested in ghosts. Some drawings include spectres from another world, while many more have a generally ghostly quality. Here is another reason why they appeal to cyclists. We all have quasi-spiritual memories that come to us when we traverse roads we have known before, quietly gliding between hedgerows, changing rhythm with the lie of the land or the strength of the wind, rising a little from the saddle to catch a glimpse of a stream. Pedestrians do not know these experiences. Neither of course do motorists. Only cyclists know what I’m talking about and it’s useless to try to explain it to anyone else.

The mood that Patterson represents was also captured by a group of writers famous for their touring articles. Some were staffers on cycling magazines. Others had ‘day jobs’ and wrote in the evenings. The touring writers were also the lecturers who went round halls and clubrooms and institutes with heavy boxes of lantern slides. Often these lecturer-writers used pseudonyms. Here are some of their assumed names: ‘Kuklos’, ‘Chater’, ‘Wayfarer’, ‘Winona’, ‘Cotter Pin’, ‘Ragged Staff’, ‘The Gangrel’, ‘The Potterer’ and‘George a ’Green’.

‘Kuklos’, the most interesting of them, was a man called Fitzwater Wray. His writing was held to be authoritative until about 1950, partly because of his great age. (One of his stories recounted a ride from Bradford to London in 1898, when the Great North Road still had grass in the middle of its rutted surfaces – or so he claimed.) ‘Kuklos’ was shrewd. He acted as an agent for sending ‘city dwellers’ on farmhouse holidays, so he has a place in the history of the tourist industry. He wrote a cycling column for the Daily News (some of his pieces were collected in A Vagabond’s Notebook, 1908) and he had enough French to recognise and translate Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu

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