One More Kilometre and We’re in the Showers

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.