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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 of dogs. So are cyclists. Postmen like coarse fishing. That enthusiasm is shared by cyclists. The postman’s functional walk corresponds to the cyclist’s daily routine of training over familiar roads. Postmen usually know that they are in their job for life. Cyclists also sign up for all time. There is not much of a hierarchical structure within the postal service: you don’t expect to rise within the GPO. Cyclists also avoid hierarchies. Postmen are often the sons of postmen. Cycling is essentially a sport in which sons are taught by their fathers.

      We will hear more about postmen. Now I turn to a social group that is particularly difficult to explain, even to describe. Many racing cyclists are or have been artists. By the term ‘artist’ I mean someone who once went to a college of art. This is the only sensible way to differentiate between an amateur artist – who might be anyone and might be personally rich – and a professional artist, whose profession often brings no financial reward. Cycling artists begin at art school. And, to this day, one can walk round the studios of many an art college to find the iconic photograph of Fausto Coppi pinned up in a student’s personal enclave, surrounded by other tokens, favourite images and gallery postcards – forty years after Fausto’s death.

      Why are so many art students and artists committed to cycling? As with other groups, it comes down to their background. The great majority of art students come from the same social band that produces racing cyclists. And, as I have described, that band is the skilled working class. To these people, art meant work. In Birmingham and other places, notably Sheffield, boys might go to art school at the age of twelve. They were not encouraged to be creative: they learnt how to draw designs for manufacture. This helps to explain the numerous cyclists nowadays who are graphic designers. A mystery remains. How do we account for the cyclists who practise the fine rather than the applied arts? That is, the painters and sculptors?

      

      I imagine a boy – an adolescent, hardly yet a young man – with the bright eyes of youth and eagerness for life, who likes looking at things and gets on well with his friends; and yet is not sociable all the time, for there is some loneliness in his character, perhaps born of a frustration he cannot comprehend. He quite often roams after school and in lessons he does not do well, because of a reading difficulty. His parents and teachers know that he is gifted. They do not understand dyslexia. So all parties agree that Adam, as we may call him, shows precocious talent in drawing and might find his right place in the local art school.

      Art school would be fine, Adam thinks. No more maths, no more book-learning. There is a painting in the municipal gallery he has always gone to look at when he gets off the tram in Navigation Street. And so Adam goes to college, where he finds that he can make friends with older people. One of his tutors in the printmaking department is a cyclist. It happens that Adam enjoys riding a bike, sometimes taking expeditions into the country. And he has seen the brilliant machines belonging to racing cyclists who live quite near his home. One way or another Adam finds the money to buy a racing bike. A man in the specialist shop advises him and gives him the address of the secretary of the local club. Adam joins club runs. He goes out training. Soon he rides his first time trial. At last he is fulfilled: another cyclist who went to art school.

      For some of us, to be an art student and a young racing cyclist represented the height of happiness, a height within reach. My vision of Adam is not a fantasy. I grew up with boys of his sort and met more of them when teaching in art schools. That was in the 1970s and early 1980s, when art education was still a pleasure for all concerned. Students kept finding things within themselves, which is a reason why they were so highly motivated. There were still a number of problems for the cycling art students. Growing cyclists need to coordinate body and mind. They learn about themselves by training. And then, often, their efforts on the bike take the edge off their creativity in the studio. I am not talking about tiredness but about the deep contentment one experiences after a good 50-mile training ride. That particular glow is unhelpful for a young artist needing to live on his nerves.

      

      Our young Adam, like so many people with their first bikes, may have got his real education in the world when he joined his cycling club. To learn about the club would take him a couple of years. To learn about all the other cycling clubs – as we should – is the task СКАЧАТЬ