One More Kilometre and We’re in the Showers

ONE MORE KILOMETRE AND WE’RE IN THE SHOWERS

Memoirs of a Cyclist

TIM HILTON

COPYRIGHT

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2004

Copyright © Tim Hilton 2004

Tim Hilton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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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.