One More Kilometre and We’re in the Showers

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.