by Tim Moore
Speeds soon topped 50kmh, with a world hour record of 38.17km set at Herne Hill velodrome: no mean feat when you consider that well over a century later, despite giant technical strides and regular ultra-punishing attempts by almost every champion of note, the hour record still stands in the 40s. Wheels grew ever larger – some penny-farthing riders sat 9 feet above the ground – and frames ever lighter. One high-end manufacturer sold a track machine that weighed in at under 6kg – an achievement you’d struggle to better in today’s era of titanium, carbon fibre and non-idiotic rim diameters.
Wobbly, featherlight enormity, increasing speeds and the persistent absence of brakes incited a steady growth in ghastly accidents: routine and regularly fatal over-the-handlebar meetings of road and skull earned the casual nickname ‘headers’. One published history of the bicycle includes the curiously precise but manifestly appalling claim that any penny-farthing collision with a pedestrian at over 12mph carried a 100 per cent mortality rate, and that during the machine’s peak, over three thousand people died in this fashion every year.
That obsession with haste and the high-tech means of increasing it also made penny-farthings ruinously dear: a market-leading Starley cost more than an average worker’s annual salary. Michaux’s boneshaker – simple, practical, cheap – had promised a bikes-for-all revolution. The exorbitant and suicidally imbecilic penny-farthing pitched this dream straight over its handlebars.
Launched in 1885, the Rover Safety Cycle was a game-changer for a game that badly needed changing. Safety bicycles were so called by virtue of their equal, modestly sized wheels, which lowered the centre of gravity and allowed riders to place their feet on the ground at rest, thereby greatly reducing the probability and severity of a ‘header’. The Rover broke little ground itself: the first safety cycle had gone on sale ten years before. And it wasn’t even cheap: manufactured in Coventry by J. K. Starley, nephew of the penny-farthing king, the first Rover retailed for £20 15 shillings, which for the purposes of pointless comparison could have bought you five hand-tailored suits and 310 gallons of pale ale.
JK’s creation was, in essence, no more than a considered aggregation of all the best bits from its many unsuccessful ‘safety’ predecessors. A diamond-shaped frame, handlebars connected to a front wheel supported by forks, pedals below the saddle powering the rear wheel via a chain and gears: it was to prove a stunningly durable design. You could put a silhouetted Rover on a no-cycling sign anywhere in the world today, and no one would give it a second look. Some achievement, especially when you consider that 1885 also saw the launch of the first successful petrol-powered motor car: the three-wheeled, handle-steered Benz Patent-Motorwagen, which bears as much resemblance to the vehicles of today as a tramp does to a banjo.
Starley’s guiding principle was a machine in which ‘the rider could exert the greatest force upon the pedals with the least amount of fatigue’. In comparison to walking, a Rover required 80 per cent less human energy while increasing speed four-fold. Courtesy of this astonishing and unimprovable efficiency, Starley’s Rover Safety Cycle has survived almost intact through the bewildering developments of the last century and a quarter, surely the most profound overhaul the human race will ever experience in such a timeframe.
Paired with John Dunlop’s new inflatable pneumatic tyre, Starley’s bike was a smooth and easy ride. You didn’t need to be daring, youthful or male to get your leg over a Rover: women could now pedal around in comfort without the twin risks of imminent fatal head injury and showing everyone their pants. And for the first time they could set off into town, or even miles and miles out of it, minus a chaperone: Susan B. Anthony, America’s Emmeline Pankhurst, wrote that ‘the bicycle has done more for the emancipation of women than anything else in the world’.
Booming sales brought down prices, and by the turn of the century, Starley and his many imitators were shifting a million Safety bicycles a year in Europe alone. When Edouard Michelin introduced a detachable tyre that could be easily repaired or replaced at the roadside, a social revolution was born. The boundaries of commuting were hugely extended, and leisure was transformed. Countryside picnics, day trips to the city or seaside, touring holidays: all were now in universal reach. And though the Safety wasn’t as fast as a penny-farthing – not yet – it was certainly better adapted to the emergent craze for tremendously long transnational bicycle races. I would therefore like to conclude this brief history with an expression of deep personal gratitude to J. K. Starley, for the invention that did away with the penny-farthing, and thus prevented me having to ride one for over 3,000km in the company of Europe’s worst drivers, and dying in the process.
*
As depicted in Paolo Facchinetti’s 1914 photos, Alfonso Calzolari looks even less like a champion athlete than the stork-like Fausto Coppi. A clean-shaven, diminutive fellow with thick, slicked-back hair and a squarish, slightly too large face, in the saddle he seems frail and shell shocked, old before his time: caked in road-filth, malnourished and weathered by the vicious elements. But bathed, fed and besuited for the post-victory celebrations, Calzolari looks cocksure, squat and tough, like one of those ‘you got it, Boss’ Mafia sidekicks. A five-foot man with watermelon bollocks.
The son of a carpenter, Alfonso Calzolari was born in 1887 in Vergato, 40km south of Bologna. The family moved to the city soon after, where the teenage Alfonso found work in a bed factory. He bought a rickety second-hand bike with his first savings and, encouraged by his father, rode every day after work to do a few laps of the Montagnola cycling track near Bologna station. Alfonso was keen and showed impressive resilience in his first amateur events, though no one but his parents would describe his competitive progress as more than steady. He didn’t win a race until he was twenty-two – a local club event – and only attracted the first stirrings of attention after finishing eighth in the national amateur championships the following year.
Drawing upon the indefatigability that would stand him in such good stead in 1914, Alfonso persevered despite his ongoing lack of success in the saddle. He was still working full time at the bed factory, and being unable to afford trains, spent the weekends riding his old clunker to races all over northern Italy, coming tenth and riding home. After bagging a few podium places in early 1912, he was finally awarded a ‘junior professional’ contract. Though not a very good one: after his L’Italiana team entered him in that year’s Giro d’Italia, he had to beg the bed factory for time off. He was back at work within a week, having only lasted four stages.
Calzolari didn’t chuck in his job until 1913, when at the advanced age of twenty-six he was finally awarded a proper contract with a proper team. Stucchi, one of the pre-eminent bike manufacturers of the time, expected results from their pro riders, but Alfonso was only able to give them one that year: a win in the regional Tour of Emilia. A broken collarbone made a mess of the season, and he started the Giro before it had properly healed, failing to complete the first stage.
The next year began with a run of solidly unremarkable results: a tenth, a seventh, a fourth. For a rider of twenty-seven, this was the kind of form that looked like the beginning of the end of a pro career. As the 1914 Giro approached, Alfonso Calzolari was hardly prominent in any discussion of pre-race favourites: in the unkind assessment of one Italian cycling historian, ‘nobody needed an abacus to count the victories of that little man from Vergato’. The 1914 Giro, he said, ‘elected its king from among the lowly actors of cycling’.
Paolo Facchinetti based his book on a meeting with Alfonso Calzolari back in April 1972. It was the old champion’s eighty-fifth birthday, and Paolo had requested a commemorative interview. The man he met at the reception area of an old-people’s home near Genoa was even tinier than he’d expected, with a full head of silver hair and a restless manner. Alfonso’s greeting incorporated casual mention of his recent visit to Bologna, where he’d spent a day riding between various press engagements. ‘On my road bike, of course.’ In the evening, he’d signed on to e
nter an amateur race organised by one of his old home-town cycling clubs, before being talked out of it by the officials. ‘I just wanted to see if I could hold their wheels: if I still had it.’ As Paolo would conclude, this was ‘Fonso’ Calzolari all over: ‘a fellow with unstoppable get-up-and-go, who spent his life exploring his own limits’. A small man with a big heart, and other such patronising clichés.
The two talked all afternoon. Paolo was intrigued to hear Fonso’s memories of 1914 littered with French road-slang, the lingua franca in pro cycling’s early days even for a rider who never left Italy. Riders were ‘routiers’; ‘suiveurs’ the following caravan of officials and journalists. Calzolari also referred to his bicycle solely as ‘la macchina’ (literally the machine, but these days the default colloquialism for a car) and called tyres ‘palmersa’ – the name of the American company that had just patented and introduced the first rubberised cord fabric. To Paolo’s immense excitement, the old man then brought out his scrapbook, filled with yellowing photos and cuttings and his own handwritten reminiscences of that terrible, glorious 1914 Giro.
The journalist was astonished by what he read and heard. ‘A fable, an adventure of true pioneers, when a stage was not a race but a journey of hundreds of kilometres, a journey that began at midnight and ended at dusk.’ For three hours Calzolari held forth on the filthy weather and dirty tricks, the relentless mechanical and human carnage, the miraculous escapes with the hand of God upon him, the pain piled upon pain. ‘It was a massacre that only eight of us survived,’ he said when he was done, ‘and somehow, in spite of everything, I beat them all.’ Then he shook Paolo’s hand, gave him the scrapbook for safekeeping, and walked away from what seems to have been his final interview.
Listen to the sporting reminiscences of a pole-vaulter or a National Hunt jockey and though you will certainly be impressed by their exploits, you probably won’t wish to emulate them. But riding a bike down the road without falling over is a humdrum core skill that everyone possesses, unless there’s something badly wrong with them. ‘The bicycle is democratic,’ wrote one of pre-war Italy’s many self-styled cyclo-philosophers. ‘You just get on, start pedalling and enter an ecstatic dimension.’ Easy, tiger! That’s him off my tandem list. But hearing about Paolo’s encounter with Alfonso Calzolari, I knew exactly what he meant. The 1914 Giro had been dreadful beyond imagination, almost humanly impossible, yet its eventual victor was no more than a plucky journeyman, bagging his place in history by doing something we all do, but doing it harder.
The final photo in Paolo’s book showed Alfonso at ninety, waving from a stage in his Sunday best. I looked at it and felt a lump in my throat the size of an avocado. His was a generation that knew what to do when the going got tough. As a member of mine, I went shopping.
CHAPTER 4
Wooden bar grips, 22mm interior
Double bidon handlebar holder, 2x metal bidons
B/B: bearing cups? Locking ring??
Stem bearings/cups (?)
Toe-clips
Butterfly axle nuts
Chain tugs
Cotter pins – knackered one too fat, other one too long, need 9mm/9.5/10??
Crochet-backed gloves
Twat hat
Twat goggles
A SINGULAR BLEND of wisdom and cluelessness, this was the shopping list I took to the Anjou Vélo Vintage festival. Even before my champion’s-choice road racer was outed as a rustic potterer, I’d been looking forward to this event; now the enhanced urgency for properly authentic components and remedial period accessories had elevated the AVV cyclo-jumble ‘brocante’ into a last-chance mission-saver. I’d even experienced a related dream, one of those typically male Aladdin’s Cave jobs, in which naïve, profit-averse stallholders slouched behind trestle tables strewn with boxed new-old-stock kit and antique memorabilia. The absurd highlight was a framed display case containing an ancient but pristine Stucchi jersey, as worn by Alfonso Calzolari in the 1914 Giro. This item’s €13 price sticker made it very hard not to shriek myself awake.
Roger Rivière had sold the AVV to me, and in the interests of company and informed input, I’d sold it to Jim and Matthew. At the end of June, the latter drove us down to the Loire in a car that seemed more than big enough for the task in hand, but in the event wasn’t.
Based in the winsome old riverside town of Saumur, the festival announced itself as a magnet for those with an interest in old bicycles and pillbox-hatted ’Allo ’Allo! extras in seamed stockings. Except for a temporary softening of the frontal lobes brought on by over-exposure to trad jazz, the three of us enjoyed our weekend there tremendously.
To calm myself before the orgy of grubby burrowing in the open-air brocante zone, I spent the morning of that fateful Saturday browsing the festival’s display of fabled vintage machinery. This was introduced, almost insultingly I felt, by the very La Française-Diamant on which Maurice Garin had won the 1903 Tour de France. Running my eyes over its hateful blackness, I throttled back a Max-eating growl, which at length evolved into a puff of relief. A single fixed gear, and no brakes whatsoever! All hail eleven years of technical development: the 1914 Peugeot nearby sported familiar caliper brakes, and a switcheroo flip-flop hub that gave the rider access to at least two gears, even if changing between them meant stopping to take the back wheel off and turning it around. Perhaps more crucially, one was a freewheel, which would have allowed him to descend mountains without taking both feet off the crazily spinning pedals (the unnerving Garin method) or having his legs puréed by the rotational frenzy.
I left Matthew and Jim talking to some penny-farthing owners in deerstalker hats and tweed knickerbockers – Jim had acquired fluency while riding as a semi-professional in France for a few years – and set off to do a first pass of the brocante tables. Two hours later I came out the other end €74 lighter and with a third of my shopping list crossed off. By far the dearest purchase was a wire-frame twin bidon holder to be mounted on the front handlebars in the daft but period-correct manner: a brittle and shriekingly cack-handed assemblage of welded coat hangers that I sadly accepted was the only one I’d ever find. Some other vendor had a set of original tin bidons, but they didn’t fit in the rack, would probably have given me botulism and were priced at €250 the pair.
I was halfway through another pass, haggling over some tan-suede string-backed gloves, when Jim tapped me on the shoulder. ‘A few lovely old bikes being flogged here,’ he said, reminding me of a plan to extend his shop’s retro range to include actual vintage machines. I’d noticed a few stalls selling complete old bicycles, but transfixed with the micro-management of my kit and components I hadn’t paid them much attention. But how very flattered I was when Jim – bike-shop-owning, semi-professional Jim – now asked if I’d run the rule over a few that he had his eye on. I thought back to an autoroute discussion the three of us had shared about old bottom-bracket designs – really, you should have been there – during which it became apparent that I was no longer a completely stupid idiot.
‘The one you really want to avoid is a Thompson,’ I heard myself say, informed by the many comparative discussions I’d waded through online over previous weeks.
‘A what?’ Neither of them had ever heard of it.
Jim was especially interested in porteurs – old grocer-boy bikes with baskets over the front wheel – and together we assessed a few, rubbing chins and sucking our teeth doubtfully in the traditional manner. One was on a stall nominally overseen by a pair of stubbled, bleary and very French men, both preoccupied with running their oily fingers through their unabundant slicked-back hair and refreshing themselves from the crate of beer under their table. We’d just dismissed this duo’s overly knackered porteur when Jim nodded at a bike hidden away at the back of their pitch. ‘Go and check that out,’ he advised.
I did so. It was self-evidently ancient: filthy, liberally pocked with rust and unburdened with brakes. The tyreless wooden wheels were horribly warped and delaminated, and half their spokes h
ad rusted clean through. But it was a racer, and of appropriate vintage. The head-tube was pitched less rakishly than a Garin-era machine, but more so than the 1920s bikes in the AVV display zone. The chrome drop bars were finished off with copper-trimmed wooden grips. Most conspicuously, the distressed Brooks racing saddle was supported by one of those funny V-shaped seat posts that the less ignorant, more dull new me was aware had fallen from favour after the First World War.
Jim called out to the stallholders, cocking a thumb at the bike. ‘Quelle année?’ The nearest one yawned massively, massaged his scalp, drained his Kronenbourg and at length rose. En route to us he disappeared into a fearsomely dishevelled van and emerged with a crumpled bit of paper. In place of an answer, he vaguely uncrumpled this and handed it to Jim. I looked over his shoulder: it was a photocopy of a monochrome page from an old bike catalogue. Page 207, to be precise, headed ‘HIRONDELLE 1914’ and largely filled with a meticulous line drawing of a bicycle, labelled ‘No 7 COURSE SUR ROUTE’. The sweep of the handlebars, the profile of the forks . . . the briefest geometrical comparison suggested the bike in the catalogue was the bike before us. Some judicious rubbing with my newly acquired glove lifted enough dirt to confirm it: there were the backgammon-board darts – green on black in full-colour reality – that embellished the drawing’s down and top tubes; there, most definitively, was the head-tube brass nameplate. ‘Manufacture Française d’armes et cycles,’ read Jim, ‘Saint-Etienne.’ I rubbed a bit harder to reveal the swooping bird that filled the space between these words. ‘That’s a swallow,’ said Jim. ‘Une hirondelle.’
