The runners often wondered at the feats of men on wheels, so cycling made some converts. It looked so specialised and brawny. Good grassmen were indeed among the sporting mighty and their muscular prowess over slippery, uneven ground also served them well in hill climbs – the peculiar races that end the cycling year.
Hill climbs are organised by cycling clubs in later October and November. In essence, they are time trials from a low to a high point. On the continent there are some extremely taxing mountain time trials, notably on the roads above Nice and on the Puy de Dôme. These are sometimes part of a stage race. They were introduced to the Tour de France in 1939. British hill climbs became popular in the 1920s and have a quite different character. They are festive and look forward to Christmas. But they are also hard. You need legs that are filled with months of racing – though we have known climbs to be won by the agility of delightful, underweight teenagers. They get special applause.
Depending on your part of the country, the climbs are long or short, but never very long. They are either ‘technical’ or straightforward. Some demand guile, others brute strength. Famous longer hills, like the Horseshoe Pass or Nick O’Pendle, are in the Peak District or North Wales. They are used by Manchester and Merseyside clubs. Birmingham clubs use hills in Mid Wales or the valley of the Teme. Londoners go to the North Downs or the Chilterns. In flat East Anglia clubs use what they can find. Hill climbs in Suffolk, for instance, are sometimes ridden in only forty seconds. Welsh climbs, however, can occupy a competitor for ten minutes.
Not longer, or the drama of the race would be lost. Hill climbers need a clapping audience. The climbs attract much larger crowds than other events against the clock. They are also held later in the morning, so as to race in light but also to attract knowledgeable spectators. The people who devise the hilly courses want to make their races into theatre. They look for a narrow road, preferably a lane with poor surfaces, stretches of faux-plat and – exquisite touch – a cattle grid at the hardest corner. If there is a pub near the hill, so much the better.
Some purists believe in hills that can be ridden on a fixed wheel. Others like varying gradients that demand the use of gears. Either way, the spectators are connoisseurs of a ritualistic race. The crowd will be on either side of the lane, all the way to the top, crying ‘Up! up! up!’ to each panting rider. At the summit are ‘catchers’ to grasp and hold the cyclists who, totally spent after the extreme effort of the brief climb, fall with their machines. The finishers are warmed in blankets, or sometimes by a brazier. Steam and smoke mingle with the cold air.
Next, beer and mince pies. Racing is over until the following year. Now the ‘social season’ begins. Miscellaneous entertainments, club runs and other gatherings reach a climax with the club dinner. Like so much else in the cycling world, these dinners have a standard pattern. They are held in late January and early February. On these occasions the club’s prizes and trophies will be awarded by an honoured guest, most often a well-known racing cyclist from another club. At the dinner there is a mixture of formality and licence. A three-course meal is served by waiters. Men wear suits, ladies wear gowns. At the end of the dinner there is a series of toasts, to ‘The Club’, ‘The Visitors’, ‘The Ladies’, sometimes ‘The Road’ and finally ‘The Queen’.
After the Loyal Toast – still observed by a surprisingly large number of clubs – cross-toasting is permitted. Anyone can bang on the table, jump to his feet and say, ‘I wish to take wine with …’ and then name some person or group of people with a jesting or semi-private reference. Then another person will say, ‘I wish to take wine with …’. This can go on for some time, and with hilarious or disappointing results. The custom of cross-toasting is an old one, and perhaps now belongs only to cycling clubs; I know of no other organisations which follow the ritual. Its cycling origins are in the convivial dinners held by clubs in the 1890s and Edwardian times, the golden age of bohemian dining.
Bohemianism never wins the day. The turn of the last century was also the period when respectable working men first dined together with their wives as members of voluntary societies. To this day, cycling club dinners are properly managed. Hotels are preferred to pubs. The tables have a placement. The top table is occupied by the club’s committee members and local dignitaries, often including a mayor or local councillor and a representative of the county police force (it is politic to be on terms with the police: we need their permission to race on the public highway). So club dinners have a social dimension, expressed in various ways. There is no cross-toasting between those seated at the top table and other diners. It is not done. In this way cycling club etiquette obeys a quite ancient taboo. English has a technical term for drinking with a person of a different class. It is called ‘hob-nobbing’.
The new cycling year begins after the club dinners. The ‘social season’ was too long for many keen racing men, who – after the mid-1950s – took up the new winter sport of cyclo-cross. Some people considered the ‘mud pluggers’ a little raffish. That was because, in the early days of cyclo-cross, courses were improvised and the racing unregulated. One or two clubs offered short time trials on the mornings of Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. The best known of these yuletide events, in which competitors often wear fancy dress, is organised by the Chesterfield Spire Road Club. In February we find ‘reliability trials’, fast training rides open to all comers. Then come the first time trials of the year, often on restricted gears, and two-up events, the riders competing in two-man teams. Serious competitive riding begins with the North Road Hardriders 25 on the last Sunday in February. This superbly uncomfortable race is on the Hertfordshire lanes north of Potters Bar and is often ridden in snow or on icy roads. That’s why tricyclists like it.
The next high point in the cycling calendar was the movable feast of Easter. On Good Friday all trackmen and their fans would be at Herne Hill for the meeting organised by the Southern Counties Cycling Union. This is among the oldest of cycling traditions, for track riders have made their way to Burbage Road, SE24, every Good Friday since 1903. An even more ancient Easter event is the annual rally of the Clarion clubs, generally held in Sheffield and consisting of a 25 championship followed by a great picnic. The Easter weekend offered a full programme of racing everywhere in the country. For some reason it was also regarded as the best time for family touring, though the paschal weather is often cold.
There were regional differences in the repeated festivities of the club cycling year and many local celebrations. I have been told tough stories about the way that Scottish cyclists rode to the Gordon Arms for their Burns Night reunion, passing the night in a large shed-cum-dormitory behind the famed hostelry before the dawn ride back to Glasgow or Edinburgh. There were other reunions and rallies at Cumnock in Ayrshire, Chigwell in Essex, Matlock in Derbyshire, Harrogate in Yorkshire and Mildenhall in Suffolk. These gatherings often take place on the weekend of August bank holiday. The biggest reunion is the York Rally, which occupies a weekend in June and was first held in 1945. Five hundred people were expected. Five thousand turned up. This event marked the beginning of the post-war cycling boom. The York Rally is still held every year, and many are the quarrels about its organisation and purpose.
In the mid-1950s I had begun to learn about such matters, and am still learning. Nobody gave me direct instruction about the culture of British cycling: I picked up my knowledge here and there. It was none the less good knowledge. I realised that it was important to know what cyclists valued. The lore of wheelmen was more interesting than the things that schoolteachers thought important. Difficult teenager that I was, I rejected many of the old ways and wanted change. Yet love for the bike encouraged me to listen to all sorts of tales that, on first hearing, seemed inconsequential or tedious. As, for instance, when dedicated cyclists spoke – with growing enthusiasm as spring turned to summer – of their future expeditions to the Isle of Man, where they would spend the week that includes the year’s longest day.
Why go every year to this small island in the middle of the Irish Sea? Here is my short version of the Isle of Man story. It takes us from the grass roots of British leisure riding to the heights of racing cycling; for on Mona we will meet Fausto Coppi, to this day the vital symbol of the sport; Louison Bobet, three times winner of the Tour de France; and Tom Simpson, who in 1967 would ride himself to death on the Ventoux mountain in Provence. One late June day in 1959 all three men were in Douglas, the Isle of Man’s unremarkable