WHILE BRITISH BIKE racing’s successful beginnings owe everything to the Paris-based James Moore, it wasn’t long before the French craze for all things bicycling also appeared on the northern side of the Channel.
Indeed, the very day after the first-recorded bicycle races in the Parc de Saint-Cloud, where Moore won his race, Britain’s first official bike race was staged, close to the Welsh Harp (or Brent) Reservoir in north London. It was won by Arthur Markham, whose son, A. G. Markham, later set the Road Records Association’s (RRA) unpaced tricycle record for 100 miles.
That same year – 1868 – Rowley Turner, the Paris-based agent for the Coventry Sewing Machine Company, had witnessed at first hand France’s passion for the velocipede and took a Michaux boneshaker back to Coventry to show to his uncle, Josiah Turner, who was a manager at the sewing-machine company. Sales of sewing machines had not been going too well, and so the company subtly changed its name – to the Coventry Machinists’ Company – and its focus to building boneshakers, which soon flew out of the door.
Not that everyone was initially convinced about the newfangled machines. John Mayall Junior, a friend of Rowley Turner’s, set off from Clapham in south London in January 1869 on such a machine with the intention of riding to Brighton, but had to give up, exhausted, at Redhill after only 17 miles, and catch the train home again.
In the Suffolk Sporting Series’ 1898 book, Cycling, George Lacy Hillier – whose idea it was to build the Herne Hill Velodrome – describes Mayall’s second, slightly more successful attempt at his London-to-Brighton ride in those early days. This time, he made it, in 16 hours, but ‘as some three weeks later the brothers Chinnery walked to Brighton’ – Hillier’s italics – ‘in eleven hours and twenty-five minutes, the advantages of the new steed … were considerably discounted’.
The Coventry Machinists’ Company soon switched to making the new penny-farthings, although, like the boneshaker, that form of the velocipede was also relatively short-lived, and had all but been superseded come the 1880s by the ‘safety bicycle’ – so named simply for the fact that the rider was no longer perched dangerously high off the ground; instead their weight was evenly distributed between two evenly sized wheels.
Like Josiah Turner, James Starley was a manager at the Coventry Machinists’ Company, but it was his nephew, John Kemp Starley, who popularized the safety bicycle in 1885 with his mass-produced Rover model, which morphed later into the Rover car manufacturer. The safety bicycle was also rear-wheel-driven by way of a chain, which made steering a lot lighter, easier and far less dangerous. And very little has changed in terms of bicycle design between then and now; indeed, modern bicycles are safety bicycles in all but name.
Coventry became the bicycle-producing capital of the world, and, from being home to seven bike companies in the 1870s, by the 1890s it boasted more than fifty.
By the late nineteenth century, bicycling in Britain was in full swing, as was bike racing, on all kinds of machines, and the establishment of the Road Records Association in 1888 ensured that the popular distance, time and ‘place-to-place’ record attempts being made all over the country were officially logged and verified.
Ten years earlier, in February 1878, the Bicycle Union had been founded to oversee bicycle racing in all its forms, established by members of both London’s Pickwick Bicycle Club and the Cambridge University Bicycle Club. The Pickwick Bicycle Club was one of Britain’s first cycling clubs, formed in June 1870, when their first meeting, of six founding members, took place at Hackney Downs.
At first, they didn’t have a club name, but at their second meeting in July, and in honour of the writer Charles Dickens, who had died that year, on 9 June, it was decided to name the club after the Pickwick Club in Dickens’s first novel, The Pickwick Papers. It was also decided that each member of the cycling club should adopt the name of one of the many characters from the book, and so today the 200-member club still operates a rather macabre waiting list for prospective new members. There’s less actual cycling going on at the club these days; it’s more about meeting up to eat, drink and be merry, which they do twice a year at a luncheon at the Connaught Rooms near Covent Garden. Members – all male – wear the club uniform, which includes a straw boater, and, at least until recently, a clay pipe was placed at the table setting of each member, in a box on which was printed the friendly command: ‘Gentlemen – you must smoke.’
The Cambridge University Cycling Club, as it’s called today, was founded as the Cambridge University Bicycle Club in February 1874, and was soon – quite rightly – locked in battle with its Oxford rivals the Dark Blue Bicycle Club in an inter-varsity 80-mile race held that June between the two cities. And it was Cambridge who came out on top through Trinity College pair Edward St John Mildmay and John Plunkett, who took first and second place.
The first official British national cycling championships were hosted by the Bicycle Union three months after its formation, on 11 May 1878, at the new Stamford Bridge arena in London, which later, in 1905, became home to Chelsea Football Club.
Cambridge University’s own Ion Keith-Falconer – another Trinity man – became Britain’s first national champion by winning the two-mile event in a time of six minutes and 29 seconds, before A. A. Weir won the longer 25-mile event in a very respectable one hour, 27 minutes and 44 seconds.
In 1883, the Bicycle Union was renamed the National Cyclists’ Union (NCU), having merged with the Tricycle Association.
Tricycles were as ubiquitous as two-wheeled velocipedes as the world whizzed its way towards the twentieth century; the three-wheeled machines were popular with women, in particular, as their skirts and dresses didn’t get tangled in either of the two rear wheels set either side of the rider, as opposed to underneath the rider on a conventional safety bicycle. Riders who found it tough to balance on just two wheels could be comforted by the stability-giving security of a third wheel, although the tricycle also had – and still has – a legitimate racing class of its own; cornering at speed requires a deft technique to ensure that rider and at least two wheels retain contact with the ground.
Tandems – the ‘bicycle made for two’, immortalized in the song ‘Daisy Bell’ of 1892, sung by Harry Dacre (‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do …’) were indeed aimed at couples. But as it was most polite to allow the lady to go first – i.e. at the front of the machine – many of the early tandems had rods leading from the woman’s handlebars at the front to the man’s handlebars behind her in order to put him in control. A married couple sitting one behind the other with their handlebars connected, however, sounds as though in ‘real life’ it could be a recipe for disaster, or at least for falling off.
In his autobiography It’s Too Late Now, the creator of the Winnie-the-Pooh children’s stories, A. A. Milne, recalls riding a ‘rear-steer’ tandem-tricycle (a tricycle made for two!) as a young boy with his brother, in around 1890: ‘Ken sat behind, and had the steering, the bell and the brake under his control; I sat in front, and had the accident.’
Worry about falling off a bicycle, tandem or, less so, a tricycle was very real, right from the word go when Parisians first took to the velocipede and James Moore showed the world how to race them. ‘Riding schools’, which operated in a very similar manner to horse-riding schools, with wide, usually indoor, arenas in which cyclists could learn, and then show off, their skills, sprang up in cities across Europe to help people join in with the new craze.
It was still a little early in the day to say that riding a bike was as easy as riding a bike, but certainly some people took to it like a duck to water.
By 1901, some riders had become so comfortable aboard their bikes that they had started to experiment with balancing and doing tricks, and the publication that year of the book Fancy Cycling: trick riding for amateurs, by Isabel Marks, makes fascinating reading and viewing. Manoeuvres such as ‘Backward Stationary Balance – Removing Jacket’ and ‘Stationary Balance – Foot on Saddle and Pedal’ are just as impressive-looking as they sound, while poses such as ‘Coasting – Knees on Handle-Bar, Feet on Saddle’ are just asking for trouble.
Viewed with today’s world-weary eyes, the book’s innocent ‘moves’ look somehow almost unreal; it’s as if they’ve been set up simply to illustrate a modern ‘comedy’ greetings card, lacking only a pithy, deadpan sentence along the lines of: ‘Julie hadn’t realized that you were supposed to look where you were going when commuting to work by bike.’ Even more impressive is the fact that this was still in the relatively early days of the bicycle, and the irony is that much of the trick riding caught in the black-and-white photographs at various London riding schools puts many modern-day freestyle BMXers’ tricks to shame.
Those BMXers could be said to be the natural progression, but the truth is that trickery to the extent illustrated in Fancy Cycling simply never caught on in the UK, although it clearly had more of an audience elsewhere in Europe. While Britain has embraced track and road racing, as illustrated by our more recent achievements in those disciplines, in Germany what’s called artistic cycling is immensely popular: a competitive discipline in which riders – in singles or pairs – perform gymnastic-style moves to music on bicycles. Also in the same category of ‘indoor cycling’ is cycle-ball, which is more or less the opposite of artistic cycling; players use their wheels to flick the ball towards their opponent’s goal in a game not too dissimilar to polo – a cycling discipline again dominated by the Germans, and the Swiss.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cycling was still a fun gimmick for many, but increasingly a viable means of transport for others, while the hardcore racing men revelled in the ever-increasing number of competitive events. In 1890, however, the NCU banned all racing on public highways in Britain, having deemed it too dangerous, and it would remain that way until the Second World War. The RRA was still permitted to stage its official place-to-place attempts, but racing was otherwise confined to closed circuits and velodromes, which had sprung up all over the UK, with some two dozen in London alone, built mainly in the 1880s and ’90s.
One of those tracks, which has arguably become the best-known and most-loved velodrome in the world, was Herne Hill, which opened its gates on Burbage Road in south London in 1891. The banked track was the baby of George Lacy Hillier, who was unhappy that the track at Crystal Palace, which was built in 1880, didn’t feature any banking (although it later did), and it was on the new wooden Herne Hill track in 1893 that Frederick Thomas ‘F. T.’ Bidlake set his 24-hour tricycle record of 410 miles.
Bidlake, who became president of the RRA in the 1920s, was always dead set against both mass-start road racing and women’s racing, and was happy to state such opinions in his regular contributions to the pages of Cycling magazine, although he had nothing against a lady riding a bicycle at a more genteel pace. He also founded the Road Racing Council in 1922 to oversee clubs that organized time trials. Their races differed from RRA events in that multiple riders took part, but they started at minute or two-minute intervals, and therefore raced alone against the clock.
F. T. Bidlake’s 24-hour tricycle track record was never broken in his lifetime – he died in 1933 – and his sporting and administrative achievements are remembered through the F. T. Bidlake Memorial Trust, which, since his death, has awarded the Bidlake Memorial Plaque to the person the committee considers to have achieved the most outstanding performance in, or contribution to, the sport each year. What he would have thought of top women racers such as Eileen Sheridan, Beryl Burton, Mandy Jones, Yvonne McGregor, Nicole Cooke and Julia Shaw later winning ‘his’ prize is anyone’s guess; perhaps he would have mellowed by then.
But Bidlake’s opposition to women racing was far from uncommon, and women riding bicycles at all was frowned upon until well into the twentieth century. Female vélocipédistes may have joined James Moore during the first massed-start road race, Paris–Rouen in 1869, but they were to suffer years of disdain, even from within their own ranks.
For the 1898 book, Cycling, George Lacy Hillier was joined by two co-authors in the form of H. Graves – ‘councillor of the CTC [Cyclists’ Touring Club] and NCU, and former captain of the Oxford University Bicycle Club’ – and Susan, Countess of Malmesbury. ‘Susan’ was Susan Harris, née Hamilton, who’d acquired her title through marriage to James Howard Harris, 3rd Earl of Malmesbury, later remarrying after the earl’s death and becoming Susan Ardagh.
Anyone who’s seen BBC comedy Harry Enfield and Chums’ sketches in which spoof public-information films warn women that they should ‘know your limits’ and only talk about things they truly understand, such as fluffy kittens, rather than join in with their husbands’ complex conversations, will be only too familiar with the tone as the countess, in the book’s final section, ‘Bicycling for women’, at least appears to warn women not to go too far.
‘The tricycle was used by a few [women] who felt they needed more vigorous exercise than could be obtained by walking or playing a quiet game of croquet, and were unable to provide themselves with the more expensive luxury of a saddle-horse,’ she writes. ‘Cycling in traffic is a vexed question; many consider it better for the weaker sex to abstain from doing so, but the matter really depends on the skill, nerve and judgment of the rider,’ she continues. ‘A woman who cycles in the streets of the metropolis or any other large city must learn the police regulations which prevail, and conform to them. She must not suppose her sex excuses her from doing exactly the same as others. Any act of courtesy on the part of cabmen and other drivers of vehicles should be acknowledged.’
Her words do, however, smack rather of a perhaps-disapproving male editorial hand, especially when contrasted with an earlier article by the countess for the Badminton Magazine of Sports and Pastimes, in 1896, in which she writes a somewhat sarcastic appeal to the drivers of hansom cabs – London’s horse-drawn taxis – to be considerably more careful: ‘I cannot help feeling that cycling in the streets would be nicer … if he did not try to kill me.’
Hillier, meanwhile, is the book’s racing expert, described as ‘amateur champion at all distances in 1881’. His writing style is measured and sensible, and he writes in praise of racing as a means of furthering cycling’s popularity more generally.
‘Cycling has many claims on the community outside the race path, and it is quite conceivable that it might in course of time have attained its present position without the aid of racing, but its rapid advance is indubitably due in a very great degree to cycle racing and racing men,’ writes Hillier. ‘The roadster of today is simply the racer of yesterday,’ he adds, which is an opinion that could easily apply to today’s cycling boom, too: that manufacturers meet bike racers’ demands by making better bicycles and equipment, the technology from which then trickles down to lower-priced bikes.
The book’s principal author, H. Graves, begins by explaining how to ride, and look after, your bike in what is a viciously condescending tone, although one that was popular at the time: ‘Too many beginners are under the impression that when once they have mastered the difficulties of steering, mounting, and dismounting, their cycling education is complete,’ he writes. ‘How general this fallacy is can be seen by looking at three out of every four cyclists one meets, who, while sufficiently expert at controlling their machines, are entirely lacking in that finish which stamps a good rider.’
It’s tantamount to writing, ‘You’re all rubbish, and I’m brilliant,’ although, to be fair to Graves, he does go on to explain, in some detail – if still quite condescendingly – just how the reader can become as brilliant as him, which, really, would be the purpose of buying such a book. His tips include how ‘nursing the machine’ can prevent a fall, and he ensures the reader understands that ‘nervousness is absolutely fatal’ when dealing with ‘greasy roads’. It sounds as though he’d be a hoot to ride with.
Graves’s own associations – the NCU and the CTC – are, naturally, fantastic, although he admits that there is ‘much needless duplication of work and jealous competition between the two bodies; we look forward to seeing all matters affecting the public rights of cyclists dealt with by a joint board of both Associations’.
Understanding his demeanour, it’s no wonder, then, that the NCU were very much against the dangerous practice of road racing on open roads. If you have to do it, the message appears to be, at least minimize that danger by doing it on closed-road circuits.
Graves also initially praises the RRA for their past good work of ‘certifying the authenticity of claims for records on the road over the classic routes and distances’. But then he turns nasty, and gives it to them with both barrels: ‘We are however strongly of the opinion that, as road records are now rarely attacked by amateurs, this institution, which exists for little more than the purpose of hallmarking trade advertisements, is marring a glorious past by a sordid present, to say nothing of the odium raised against cycling in general by the widespread publication of these advertisements.’
Why advertising is so terrible is unclear, but the sporting-amateur idealism of the day can’t be very far away as a reason.
Graves’s parting shot reveals what he thinks the solution is: ‘If the Association were gracefully to dissolve itself, the inherent corruption in modern road record-breaking, freed from its one antiseptic influence, would spedily [sic] work out its own destruction.’
George Pilkington Mills would never have agreed with H. Graves’s assessment of the RRA. Mills was a prolific record-breaker, and it was achievements like his penny-farthing record from Land’s End to John o’Groats of five days, one hour and 45 minutes – which still stands for a penny-farthing – that garnered him invites to other events, such as the first running of the Bordeaux–Paris in 1891. The French race’s 600-kilometre distance was no great challenge to Mills compared to what he was used to; he polished off the lot in just over 26 and a half hours, beating fellow Briton Montague Holbein by an hour and a quarter. Holbein later re-invented himself as a cross-Channel swimmer, but failed at his first attempt in 1901. The following year, he tried twice more, but never made the full distance.
Five years later, at the 1896 edition of Bordeaux–Paris, a British rider again put his mark on the race, although this time it was as joint winner. Arthur Linton went off course when he looked certain to win in Paris and, after a brief consultation by the judges, was deemed to share first prize with the man who was first across the line, Frenchman Gaston Rivière. Little did anyone know that this would be the last time a British rider would win a ‘Classic’ – the term used to describe the most prestigious one-day races – for sixty-five years, until Tom Simpson won the Tour of Flanders in 1961. Simpson also won Bordeaux–Paris himself, in 1963.
But the late nineteenth century was a period in bike-racing history when new events came thick and fast. In 1888, the German federation had suggested an official world championships to its fellow cycling federations, but it wasn’t until 1893 that the first of these were held, in Chicago.
There were no British riders present for those first Worlds, but there was British representation at the second world championships in 1894, held in Antwerp in Belgium. Jack Green was the runner-up in both the 10km and 100km paced event, but the following year, in Cologne, Germany, Welshman Jimmy Michael, a professional with the Dunlop team, went one better. At eighteen years old and just five feet tall, Michael took the top honours in the paced 100 kilometres, and Britain had its first official world champion.
But what connects the Bordeaux–Paris – the Classic in which British riders had such early success – and the world championships is a man named James Edward ‘Choppy’ Warburton. A former professional runner himself, two of Warburton’s charges in his role as a rider-manager were 1896 Bordeaux–Paris winner Arthur Linton and Britain’s 1895 world champion Jimmy Michael.
Less than two months after winning Bordeaux–Paris, Linton’s health declined dramatically, and, suffering from typhoid, he died, aged just twenty-seven. Michael’s death in November 1904 – also, like Linton, at the age of twenty-seven – came on the back of a period of drinking and gambling. Having spent all of his money, Michael had signed a lucrative contract to race in the USA, but died on the ship on his way there, the cause of death consistent with the symptoms of alcohol withdrawal. Linton’s brother, Tom, was one of Warburton’s boys, too, and, like his older brother, also died of typhoid, again young, at thirty-nine, in 1915.
Just what was it that their manager, Choppy Warburton, would habitually give them from his ‘little black bottle’ before a race? Although it was no great secret that bike racers took stimulants in those days to help them stay alert (and awake), it’s certainly unlikely that the little black bottle contained anything particularly good. Even if its ‘magic’ – Warburton’s own explanation for what was in it – was something completely harmless and just had a placebo effect, the early deaths of the Linton brothers and Jimmy Michael nevertheless don’t sit well.
Warburton died himself of heart failure in December 1897, at the age of fifty-two. There was never any concrete proof that he had doped his protégés – it’s one of those stories that has almost become truth, and we’re unlikely to ever know – but, either way, in Jimmy Michael, Warburton will also be remembered for having given Britain its first world champion.
James Moore’s old veterinary pal, John Boyd Dunlop, invented the pneumatic bicycle tyre in Belfast in 1887, which was used in anger for the first time in 1889 when Dunlop handed the captain of the Belfast Cruisers Cycling Club, Willie Hume, a pair of his new tyres to try at a race meeting held at the city’s Queen’s College (later Queen’s University). They were an instant success: Hume won all four of the races, and eagerly headed to Liverpool with his Dunlop-equipped safety bicycle for another series of races later that year, at which he was victorious in all but one event.
It was a significant leap forward in the bicycle’s development, immediately improving its comfort and speed, if compromising a little on its reliability over the old solid, puncture-proof metal ‘tyres’.
By 1896, all the riders at the first modern Olympic Games in Athens were kitted out with pneumatic tyres. Britain’s love affair with the Olympics started at the very beginning, and Britain’s cyclists enjoyed a modicum of success, too. Edward Battel, who worked at the British Embassy in Athens, took part in the first cycling event: an 87-kilometre road race, out and back between Athens and Marathon, in which he finished third, despite crashing.
Battel’s embassy colleague, Frank Keeping, then went one better in the 12-hour race – held at the velodrome! – taking the silver medal after having been beaten by a single lap by Austria’s Adolf Schmal. Keeping’s son, Michael, would later follow a different sporting path, playing professional football for Southampton and Fulham, before becoming manager of Real Madrid between 1948 and 1950.
When the Olympics were held for the first time in London in 1908, it was a veritable gold rush for British cycling, with the team taking five golds from seven events. Benjamin Jones was the star of the cycling events, winning both the 5,000 metres and the team pursuit, and taking silver in the 20-kilometre event, which was won by Jones’s teammate, Clarence Kingsbury. Victor Johnson won the 660-yard event: a one-lap sprint of the track at the stadium in White City – the area that would later become home to the BBC. And Charles Bartlett was the winner of the 100-kilometre race, out-sprinting compatriot Charles Denny, while Jones and Kingsbury linked up with Leon Meredith and Ernest Payne to also take gold in the team pursuit, beating Germany in the final.
For the first and last time, track cycling events weren’t held at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm. The British team – which stood to do rather well, going by the London Games four years earlier – had protested, but, as Sweden’s sole velodrome had been razed to make way for the new Olympic stadium, there was nothing to be done.
There was no road race, either – just a huge 196-mile individual time trial on the terrible rutted roads around Lake Mälaren, just outside Stockholm. The race doubled as a ‘team time trial’ with the four best finishers from each nation counting towards the team prize. The race was won by South Africa’s Rudolph Lewis by more than nine minutes from GB’s Fred Grubb, while there was another silver for Grubb, and teammates Leon Meredith, Bill Hammond and Charles Moss, who were beaten by hosts Sweden in the team competition.
After the First World War, at the 1920 Games in Antwerp, Tommy Lance and Harry Ryan won Britain’s sole gold medal of those Olympics in the always spectacular 2,000-metre tandem race. Their win marked the last time that Britain would win a gold medal in cycling for seventy-two years, all the way up until the ’92 Barcelona Games, where Chris Boardman thrilled the nation by winning the individual pursuit, and which eventually – by the turn of the century – helped open the floodgates to a raft of cycling golds.
The post-war years of the 1920s saw Britons taking to the roads on bikes in their thousands, and one of their best sources for where to go, what equipment to use and where to stay was ‘Kuklos’, or cycling journalist Fitzwater Wray.
Kuklos – the Greek word for wheel, which Wray used as his byline – wrote regular columns for the London Daily News (founded, and initially edited, by Charles Dickens) around the turn of the twentieth century, while The Kuklos Annual was published in 1923 (and reissued in 2013 as The Modern Cyclist, 1923, using the author’s original copy illustrated with pictures of the day from Cycling magazine).
Longer weekend rides became popular with riders of all abilities, who would stay overnight at a relatively inexpensive guesthouse or hostel (it was often called ‘hostelling’ by club riders, who saw the practice as a good way to extend their training, and it was still popular in the 1970s), and Kuklos’s book lists scores of what must now be mostly long-gone places to stay across Britain, Ireland and France.
The rest of the book is packed with solid advice and the voice of experience to help Kuklos’s fellow cyclists enjoy a day or two out on their bikes. The anonymously written foreword, written in the third person but quite possibly penned by Wray himself, explains that Kuklos is quite happy to correspond with readers who require any further information on, charmingly, ‘matters of the wheel’, the only stipulation being that ‘a stamped addressed envelope for reply must be enclosed’. Who needs email or Twitter?
While earlier literature teaching people how to ride and behave on a bicycle appears to have had quite a curt, condescending tone, Kuklos’s popularity may well have been thanks to his more encouraging voice. ‘Any cyclist, man or woman, who is good enough in physique and health to ride 50 or 60 miles on a Saturday or Sunday holiday, can double it in the course of a long summer day without undue fatigue and without special preparation,’ he writes, ‘supposing that he is decently mounted and does not encounter a strong head wind all the way.’
Riders wishing to circumnavigate London, meanwhile, are encouraged to follow Kuklos’s directions on the quieter roads that these days trace nigh on exactly the route of the M25, although he does concede that ‘there are cyclists who want to ride right through London, for various reasons, and have no strong objections to traffic riding. It is worth remembering, too, that on Sundays the complete transit of London is easy’.
There’s sage advice, too, for riders brave enough to take a trip to the Continent. Getting through Customs can sometimes be costly, Kuklos warns; even visitors are likely to have to pay import duty when taking new bicycles into France. He’s ready to help his fellow rider with a quick fix for that, though: ‘If your bicycle is new, or looks new, rub it over with mud.’
He assures readers that they’re unlikely to have any such problems at the Franco-Belgian border, however, where proof that you’re only visiting will mean that no duty has to be paid: ‘If the officials at some inland frontier station are disposed to be awkward, point to this sentence: “Je suis ancien combattant, et je fais la visite des champs de bataille – séjour de quinze jours seulement,”’ Kuklos suggests. (‘I’m a former soldier visiting the battlefields, and am only here for a fortnight.’)
But while bicycling fans enjoyed the green and pleasant lands of Britain – or, even, the then less salubrious environs of Belgium’s battle-ravaged countryside – on two wheels between the two world wars, the racing scene was hotting up as British riders ventured ever further afield in pursuit of new races and challenges.
The Tour de France had first been held in 1903, and, like many races of the day, was a marketing exercise – in the Tour’s case, to sell more copies of the sports newspaper L’Auto. Initially it attracted mainly French racers, as well as a handful from Belgium, Switzerland and Germany, and in the years that followed the Tour grew rapidly to become the world’s most famous bike race of them all – although it took until 1937 for it to welcome the first British riders to the start line.
Charles Holland had won an Olympic bronze medal in the team pursuit at the 1932 Los Angeles Games, and finished fourth in the road-race world championships in Leipzig in 1934. But the opportunity to ride the 1937 Tour de France only came about because, out of curiosity, Holland simply entered as an individual rider, which you could still just about do in those days. He was put together with fellow Brit Bill Burl, who crashed out of the race on stage two, while Canadian Pierre Gachon, who was the third member of their British Empire team, didn’t even make it through the opening stage.
Holland pushed on alone, but was forced to retire from the race on stage 14c – split stages were rife at that time; 14c was the third stage in the same day – between Ax-les-Thermes and Luchon after losing too much time due to a puncture, although the not-overly-shiny silver lining appears to be that he was brought a beer by friendly roadside spectators to slake his thirst while working on the repairs.
Putting the Tour behind him, Holland, sponsored by Raleigh–Sturmey Archer, set about trying to break various RRA place-to-place records, successfully setting new times for Liverpool to Edinburgh and Land’s End to London. The war spelled the end of his professional career, but he later made a successful return to veterans’ bike racing.
Being one of the first two Britons to take part in the Tour de France should really have brought him a lot more recognition in his lifetime – Holland died, aged eighty-one, in 1989 – but Britain’s current interest and success in the event has meant that the efforts of riders like Holland and Burl are finally being acknowledged.
Holland’s also remembered as one of the early winners of the British Best All Rounder (BBAR) competition, which he won in 1936, the year before he rode the Tour. It was a competition dreamed up by Cycling magazine as a way of finding the season’s best time triallist over a 50-mile, 100-mile and 12-hour time trial, ranking riders by their average speeds.
Today, the BBAR is run by Cycling Time Trials (CTT), which used to be called the Road Time Trials Council (RTTC), which started life before that as the Road Racing Council (RRC), which in turn had been started by that man F. T. Bidlake in 1922.
The NCU just about tolerated time trialling on the open road – individual riders racing against the clock wasn’t too dissimilar to individual riders trying to beat RRA records – but participants were nevertheless careful to be as discreet as possible, lest they attract the attention of the police and risk not being able to race on the roads at all: they did this by dressing all in black, and ‘not talking about Fight Club’ to anyone they couldn’t trust; early-morning starts and code numbers for each course ensured the secrecy of their little cult.