The indiscipline was a caricature of democracy and the political process. The wonder is that the Leaguers were able to put on so many good bike races and to assemble international teams of high quality. But so they did, and furthermore were usually victorious when it came to outwitting the NCU. This was the work of many remarkable characters, generally the more experienced Leaguers, among whom I single out Jimmy Kain.
Jimmy, a shoe repairer from Enfield, was probably the oldest of the rebels. In his sixties when he took a hand in the League’s affairs, Jimmy had fought in the First World War and claimed that, in its darkest days, he and his comrades had been issued with guns that were ‘ex-Crimea carbines’ that ‘must have come from condemned stores’. If so, this modern racing cyclist had been in a war carrying a gun that had been manufactured in the 1850s. He was an ancient patriot, was Jimmy Kain, and he ended his days in uniform as a Chelsea Pensioner.
From his hand came the most ludicrous triumph of the BLRC over its enemies in the NCU. He devised and wrote the ‘Loyal Address’ to King George VI on the occasion of the League’s chaotic (and, according to the NCU, illegal) 1945 stage race between Brighton and Glasgow. A precious photograph of this document shows its elaborate penmanship. I wonder whether Jimmy’s shoemaking trade helped him to find a source of parchment? Anyway, the address begins
Most Gracious Sovereign,
We, the Chairman, Members of the National Executive Committee, Honorary Secretaries and Members of the British League of Racing Cyclists, your Majesty’s loyal and dutiful subjects, on the occasion of a ‘Victory Race’ being held by its members …
and ends many paragraphs later with the hope that, with the end of European hostilities,
all Sports, including the sport of Cycling with which we, your Majesty’s loyal and dutiful subjects are particularly concerned, may be resumed and long continued so that the objects of our League, namely, the development of healthy competition and friendly rivalry in Cycling Events may proceed unhampered.
James Kain, 24 Disraeli Road, Ealing, in the County of Middlesex.
The address was delivered to Buckingham Palace by four Leaguers (Alex Hendry, Ernie Clements, Alan Colebrook and ‘Acker’ Smith) on their bikes and in racing gear. Only a day later Jimmy got a reply from the Palace in which he read, ‘The King will be grateful if you will convey to the members of the League his sincere thanks … etc. etc.’. How could the NCU compete with such a propaganda coup? The sovereign himself seemed to have become an ally of the rebels.
Back at 24 Disraeli Road Jimmy Kain faced a crisis in his cycling life. The names of two local clubs indicate a schism that was partly of his making. The Ealing CC and the Ealing Paragon CC were once one body, but split because of a local war between Leaguers and non-Leaguers. Which side was to inherit the original club’s records, its bank account and its precious silver trophies, many of which had been donated by the cycling parents of the club’s present members? How many people were on the NCU side? They could be counted. How many people were on the League side? Did the League keep an accurate list of its members, and had subscriptions been paid and properly accounted? (Very often the answer was no.)
The problems in Ealing were repeated all over the country. It was a hard time for clubmen – and for their wives. They had joined the Wobbly Wheelers through simple love of the bike. Now they had to make decisions that would brand them as conservatives or partisans. Stallard always said that there could be no compromise. ‘You were either with us or against us.’ He also claimed, untruly, that within the League ‘we were one big happy family’. It is hard to explain the mixture of high spirits and nihilism in the collective League mind. Jimmy Kain’s rare pamphlet Britain’s Cycling Frankenstein: A Disunited Colossus (n.d. but 1953) takes as its motto a quotation from The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám:
To grasp this sorry State of Things entire
… Shatter it to bits … and then, Re-mould it nearer to the heart’s desire …
I wonder whether the quotation represents one kind of post-war attitude, the frustrated feeling that everything had to be torn down before we could begin anew. Those years, we know, saw the largest recruitment to the company of British anarchism and ‘libertarianism’. Jimmy Kain, however, was a monarchist. He sometimes sent long telegrams to Clement Attlee threatening to report him to the King, like this one about possible Home Office objections to road racing:
REPRESENTING THOUSANDS LAW ABIDING MEMBERS BITTERLY RESENT LETTER ZV STOP STROKE 22 JULY AND DISCRIMINATION EXPRESSED WHILE YOU STOP TRAFFIC FACILITATING SURGING CROWDS ATTEND SPEEDWAY AND DOG RACING STOP SPEEDWAY RACING BREEDS SPEED CRAZED PILLION RIDERS OF GRISLY RECORD STOP THUS KEEPING DEATH ON THE ROADS STOP REPEAT DEATH ON THE ROADS WILL TAKE THIS MATTER TO HIS MAJESTY THE KING IN EFFORT TO OPPOSE YOUR DISCRIMINATION…
As for the spirit of the League – perhaps it depended on your generation. Jimmy Kain sent his angry telegrams to a prime minister who was younger than himself. His objections to dog tracks and speedway sound like those of an old man. Percy Stallard, the original rebel, had begun racing in 1927, and was a family man. The other pioneers from the Little Stretton farmhouse were also grown up. A number of them worked in the Sunbeam body shop, a reserved occupation because they might be needed to build military vehicles. They knew the boredom of wartime. It was folly to deny them a cycle race.
Then comes a later generation, typified by another Wolverhampton man. In 1945 Bob Thom came back from war service, signed up with the BLRC and rode the Brighton – Glasgow. He was BLRC champion in 1948 and in that year became a small-time professional for Viking Cycles. Team mechanic for the BLRC team in the 1952 Warsaw – Berlin – Prague, he was also mechanic for the British team in the 1955 Tour de France and managed British teams abroad until the mid-1970s. He and his wife Jeannie still ride their bikes, always in the colours of the Wolverhampton Wheelers.
The third generation, younger than Bob Thom by a decade or more, were those racing men who joined cycling in the early 1950s, at the end of austerity and rationing but before mass motoring had begun. These adherents to the BLRC displayed a new working-class sense of modishness and were sometimes said to be the Teddy Boys of sport. I never saw any cycling Teds, but there was certainly a smart and disobedient look. In the 1950s you could identify a Leaguer by his roadman’s position on the bike, his continental equipment, his preference for derailleur gears, Campag if possible, a flashy Italian road jersey and dark glasses. Unlike more traditional cyclists, a Leaguer was likely to be a (modern) jazz fan, would frequent coffee bars, might go out with a girl from the local art school, was a snappy dresser on and off the bike and had no respect for the culture of touring and youth hostelling.
Something else made a difference between the Leaguers and traditional cyclists. They were so good! They trained harder, rode harder, had high ambitions and studied the sport with Europe in mind. The League was inspired by France and Italy, countries with a mass following for the bike game. Leaguers always wanted to ride on equal terms with the continentals, and soon they did.
The BLRC alone introduced road racing to Britain, gave us stage races on the continental pattern and looked for sponsorship and publicity from newspapers and other interested parties. The first Tour of Britain was held in 1951, under the banner of the Daily Express and with much help from Butlin’s holiday camps (which often gave hospitality and shelter to the caravan of a British stage race). Quite soon, however, the Daily Express pulled out of cycle sport, fed up with the feuds between the BLRC and the NCU. The League’s Dave Orford approached the Milk Marketing Board, and the Tour of Britain was reborn with a different name, by which it is still fondly remembered: ‘the Milk Race’.
The Tour of Britain and The Milk Race invited foreign competitors, and British teams went abroad. There was friendliness between the League and the sporting bosses of the Warsaw Pact countries, probably because the communist nation-states saw no need to obey the dictates of the Union cycliste internationale, which was always suspicious of