Acknowledgements and A Note on Sources
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