One More Kilometre and We’re in the Showers. Tim Hilton
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Название: One More Kilometre and We’re in the Showers
Автор: Tim Hilton
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007391752
isbn:
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 housing development, piers, canals, ports, maltings, early factories and small town halls. I dislike parish churches, consider most British castles ugly (besides being the strongholds of injustice) and don’t believe cathedrals and abbeys can be appreciated when you’re cycling. I’ve had these prejudices since childhood.
First thing one Sunday morning, when I was grown up and indeed a father, I left the Arundel youth hostel for an awkward ride along the south coast. The plan was to give a wave to the Isle of Wight, soldier through Southampton, and then I wanted to pass through the New Forest before spending the night at the hostel in Winchester. The outing was a little delayed almost as soon as it had begun. I paused in Chichester, a place new to me. On the north side of the cathedral, still in the saddle, right foot in the toe clip, left foot on the pavement, I dutifully looked at the flying buttresses and gothic windows.
All was quiet. An early service of Holy Communion had just ended. Towards me walked a man in long black canonical garments. He was good at whistling. Through his shrivelled lips came the thin but accurate strains of a canticle. I supposed that he was one of the cathedral’s clergy. Still whistling holy music, this man approached me. A look of contempt came into his eyes. Perhaps the bright cycling clothing had annoyed him. He cleared his throat and spat into the gutter at my feet, then walked on his way. His spittle might have landed on my bike! I was so astonished that I could not reply to the affront, rode off and have never visited Chichester again.
Speaking as a cyclist, I have never had much truck with English ecclesiastical buildings. Perhaps because I come from Birmingham, I prefer late nineteenth-century municipal architecture, if possible in red brick. About ten years ago, curiosity about that sort of building led me to make a discovery at Wrentham in Suffolk. Wrentham is on the A12, 10 miles south of Lowestoft. My hope was that the Eagle might still be in business. I wanted to raise a glass to a Victorian chambermaid – a girl who ought to be celebrated by all cyclists. More of her in a moment.
Sadly, the Eagle had closed down. A few yards down the road was an unattractive brick place called Wrentham Hall, recently converted into flats and an antiques emporium. Placing the bike against its façade (gear side next to the wall, as always) I made my inspection from the other side of the road. Surely the building was too large for a village hall, and of the wrong date? Perhaps it had once been a school. There was a tower for a bell and a circular hole for a clock. This nondescript edifice had a mouldering tablet which read:
This tablet was erected
[illeg.] people of Wrentham to mark [illeg.] the many improvements which have been made by Sir Alfred Shirlock Gooch, Bart. in this building and especially with the clock, which has been altered at his sole expense to commemorate the diamond jubilee of H.M. Queen Victoria. June 22 1897.
Something puzzled me about this testimonial from the people of Wrentham. It recorded an event of little interest, but there was a distant familiarity in its wording. Suddenly, memory took me to the sooty buildings of central Birmingham. In Balsall Heath there had been an Alfred Street, a Wrentham Street, a Gooch Street and a Shirlock Street. My map showed a Benacre Hall next to Wrentham. That must have been the baronet’s home. And there had been a Benacre Street in Balsall Heath.
Empty, melancholy lanes skirt the grounds of Benacre Hall. You can’t see the house from these roads, only parkland, woods and a home farm. My communist upbringing gave me a feeling of political anger about the Benacre estate. Years ago, I had been given much childhood instruction on СКАЧАТЬ