One More Kilometre and We’re in the Showers

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.