Читать книгу One More Kilometre and We’re in the Showers - Tim Hilton - Страница 12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh her name was Lil, she was a beauty,

She lived in a house of ill reputy,

She drank whisky, she drank rum,

She smoked hashish and o-pi-um …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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