One More Kilometre and We’re in the Showers. Tim Hilton

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СКАЧАТЬ a new organisation, the Midland League of Racing Cyclists. Further leagues were formed in the north and in London, later amalgamating to form the BLRC. In November the NCU, now joined by the RTTC, issued the following warning: ‘As from today’s date, any person or club associating itself with the British League of Racing Cyclists or any of its constituent parts will be suspended.’

      The committee of the NCU simply did not understand the wishes of its membership. The same went for the RTTC. Neither body attempted diplomacy, and therefore could not stem the flow of defections. By 1943 about 450 people had joined the League in defiance of the NCU’s threat of suspension and in scorn of the editorials in Cycling, in which they were regularly condemned. If their own club had taken the NCU side they resigned, often to form new clubs. The BLRC gained further and further strength. Eighteen months after ‘Stallard’s race’ it had five regional sections and thirty affiliated clubs.

      The sudden rise of the BLRC has something in common with the speedy formation of the Clarion clubs in the 1890s. A spirit was everywhere, but dormant. All that was needed for revolution was a catalyst or pioneer, whether in the form of Blatchford’s newspaper or in the person of the obstinate Percy Stallard.

      A difference between the Clarion movement and the rise of the BLRC is that the first led to fellowship, the second to division. After the summer of 1942 there was schism in club after club. Old friends were no longer friends. People who had never met regarded each other as enemies. Sons of cyclists were told by their fathers to avoid certain other cyclists. A height of the wrangling was reached when servicemen came home after 1945. Let us imagine two cases. A young man returns from fighting and is not inclined to obey the edicts of old non-combatants in the NCU. So he becomes a Leaguer. Another war veteran returns to civilian life and finds that his beloved club has been torn to pieces by Leaguers. So he resents them, especially since they – like the NCU committees – had also not been combatants. He joins another club or loses interest altogether.

      

      From 1945 to 1946 the League wished to send its members to race on the continent and – yes please! – to accept any invitation to enter a British team in European stage races. The problem for racing cyclists, who were neither linguists nor diplomats, was to get on to terms with the world’s governing body, the Union cycliste internationale. The UCI recognised the NCU as cycling’s governing body in Great Britain. How then was the BLRC to proceed?

      Help came from the Belgian-born sister of Alec Taylor (2nd, Tour of Britain 1951, National Amateur Champion 1947). Miss Taylor went to Brussels at her own expense, for the League had no funds, to put the BLRC case. More assistance was given by Victor Berlemont, the landlord of the York Minster in Dean Street, Soho, always known as ‘the French pub’. This small bohemian bar had been the unofficial headquarters of the Free French during the war. Berlemont had an interest in cycle sport and was the UCI’s London consul. Victor’s son Gaston (who as a young man can be seen in Willi Ronis’s famous photograph of the pub, part of his record of the life of French people in England) inherited the York Minster after his father’s death in 1951.

      Victor advised the BLRC. Gaston, like his father, did a bit of commissaire work for road racing until late in his life. The Berlemont family have all gone now, but there is an annual Victor Berlemont Memorial Road Race, organised by the Surrey League. The French pub still has a connection with our sport, a place of rendezvous for racing cyclists as well as bohemians. Photographs of old champions are on the walls, where they always have been. That handsome woman in the middle of the display is Lilian Dredge.

      If we lived in Belgium we would know dozens of bars of this sort. But we are British. In the 1950s, when you could buy Miroir-Sprint from the foreign-language newsagent Solosy, Leaguers from the London area would go to Soho on Saturday mornings. They would sit in the French pub in winter, and in summer they would ride to race on the circuit that goes round the perimeter of Finsbury Park. Its surface was bumpy, there was no proper hill, kids and prams and footballs were all over the road, people took illegitimate laps out, since there were no real commissaires – but it was urban bike racing of a kind never seen before, nor scarcely since.

      Looking back on Gaston Berlemont, I feel that he ran his Soho bar in much the same way that a commissaire controls the riders in a continental bike race. Even the maddest of us had respect for him. Gaston could stop fights in a few seconds, and was never angry. If you were barred from the French he would reinstate you the next day. When in need he would lend you money. And always there was the same calm, the twinkle in the eye, the same ample stomach and enormous gallic moustache.

      There were many famous people in the French pub. Gaston gave them no more deference tham he would accord to any art student. He was like a commissaire in the Tour de France who listens to the domestiques as well as the champions. In person and demeanour Gaston resembled the greatest of modern commissaires, Jean-Marie LeBlanc, who has directed the Tour de France since 1994 after previous careers as a professional cyclist and a journalist. Gaston, like LeBlanc, was a linguist of sorts. He could make his decisions clear to anyone from any country, usually in simple French. An essential skill in Soho, and also in the man who supervises the affairs of the peloton.

      The League needed a patron in the Berlemont mould. There was no single person who could unite so many difficult racing cyclists. Members of the BLRC fought with each other as well as with the NCU. They even managed to suspend Percy Stallard, the man to whom the League’s very existence was owed. In some areas there were totalitarian demands that records of errant members be excluded from the minutes and account books. But minutes were not often kept and finances were always in disarray. Meetings were inefficiently chaired and the arguments went on for twelve hours or more.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ