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.
A sign of my age, apart from riding in the small chainwheel most of the day, is a wish to find the records of old clubs, preferably modest ones. I also make pilgrimages to cycle sport’s ‘sacred’ places: Pangbourne Lane, or the further Savernake turn of the Bath Road 100, or Tanners Hatch. These destinations are seldom grand, but they appeal to my interest in early council estates, seaside