The prices I mention are part of our cycling story. Nearly everyone had to make prudent calculations in shillings and pence, either to race at any level or to go on holiday. Ours has been a sport for people who had to count money saved from their wages. Unlike some sports – athletics, rugby, rowing, tennis, cricket, boxing – competitive cycling never had any wealthy adherents. There were gentlemen amateurs during the short fashionable craze for cycling in the 1890s, but none thereafter. A handful of people made money from racing but there was no professional class. In the 1950s British cyclists were almost always employed in sound and unglamorous ways. I will describe their jobs in a moment. My point now is that they never had any spare money, cash that they could spend in a careless way.
All the same, there were signs that quite big money was almost within reach – money and glamour too. The Manx international race had such prestige. So many people wanted to see it that Curwen Clague used grandstands at the race finish on Douglas promenade. He was able to charge £6 for grandstand seats. That was about the cost of a week’s lodging in a Douglas boarding house – a pretty high price – but the stands were none the less filled. The fans were no doubt prepared to pay more to be near the continental stars, especially if they could mingle with them after the race, as often happened.
My fellow Brummie John Turner (Moseley Road Junior Art School and then of the Midland C & AC) has a telling story about the end of the international road event in 1959.
I had a short talk with Louison Bobet and André Darrigade at the end of a pro race in the IOM one year … Bobet was polite, immaculate, not a hair out of place, apologised that he needed to sponge himself down with Eau de Cologne before talking on the wall by the grandstand. Darrigade joined us looking very fierce and all I could see were his massive thighs and lower legs totally criss-crossed with varicose veins that stood out like ropes on his muscular limbs. Simpson came along … just out of sympathy I said … ‘remember what Bobet has been through’ (a major op to remove masses of pus from his back, taking seven hours of surgery). Without a change of expression Simo looked straight at me and said ‘Who cares a **** about Bobet?’
I can annotate John Turner’s reminiscence. By the time of Isle of Man week in late June of 1959 Tom Simpson had gone to France (with £100 in his pocket) and had been offered a professional contract. He was not in Douglas to compete in any of the races. Probably he just wanted to look at his future opposition. He was by nature a quick learner, had surveyed the continental scene and was not overawed. Simpson knew that Bobet’s career was over, or in its twilight. And this young man was competitive. Hence his uncouth remark to John Turner. There is another possible interpretation. Simpson may have been thinking of his hero Fausto Coppi, who was also on the Isle of Man. Here was a person whose racing days should have been concluded a couple of years before. But his prestige was immense. Although he had done nothing at all in the Man race the other riders rose to clap as Coppi entered the dining room of the Douglas Bay Hotel.
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