Put Me Back on My Bike_In Search of Tom Simpson

by William Fotheringham

  So quotable was Simpson that, after his death, one magazine devoted an entire panel to his witticisms from the 1967 Tour under the title ‘Tom’s Bons Mots’. On a teammate abandoning, probably reflecting his inner thoughts: ‘That’s a gentleman for you, he quit so there are fewer of us to share the prize money.’ On the contrasting abilities of the British team, ‘It’s so absurd I love it.’

  In this posthumous tribute to ‘Simpson’s humour’, the picture in the panel of his bons mots is truly worth 1,000 words. Simpson is holding a huge block of ice on a fork and Barry Hoban has one corner in his mouth; Simpson is licking the other end, his tongue fully extended, his gurning grin a small, and vulgar, masterpiece in itself.

  The ways in which Simpson managed to appeal to spectators and promoters were infinitely varied, and usually mischievous. At the Sportpaleis track in Ghent, he was riding a ‘devil-take-the-hindmost’, a race where the last cyclist in the pack is eliminated until the two fastest meet. In the end, Simpson was up against Giuseppe Beghetto, the reigning world sprint champion. Simpson had no chance of winning so, as Beghetto sped past him, he took one hand off the bars, leant over – travelling at 40 mph – and pretended to take a tow on the Italian’s saddle. On another occasion in Ghent, he was part of a panel selecting ‘Miss Sportpaleis’ – and he persuaded the others to choose ‘the roughest girl there’, according to one witness.

  Even on the morning of his death, Simpson was fooling around with Hoban in a rowing boat at the stage start in Marseille’s Old Port, dipping his toe in the water for the photographers. This was before the most important stage of the Tour, on which his career depended. Today, prior to such a day, the Tourmen would be cocooned in air-conditioned buses. The notion of playing up to the crowd and the media would be the last thing on their minds.

  For any public figure, the key to popularity is genuine emotional engagement. Simpson’s death was a major event because he struck chords right across a wide range of audiences. He offered the complete package: success to attract the aspirational, the Dunkirk spirit for admirers of glorious failure, a humble background for those who liked the homespun, an aristocratic touch for the snobs, off-the-wall humour for fans of the peculiar, wider aims of his sport for the serious-minded.

  For the French, Simpson could either play the stiff-backed English major, or the precise opposite: the Englishman ‘who was not phlegmatic’, as one journalist put it. ‘He is ambitious like a Frenchman, selfish like a Spaniard, industrious like a German, talkative like an Italian and versatile like a Fleming,’ wrote the professional cyclist turned journalist Jean Bobet. And there was a final, crucial element in the equation of stardom: a hint of self-mockery in Simpson which meant that he never looked as if he was trying too hard or taking it all too seriously.

  In Cycling, Alan Gayfer compared him to the Formula One driver Mike Hawthorne, ‘another laughing cavalier cut off in his prime’, while two of the tributes in the magazine drew a parallel with Sir Donald Campbell, both ‘killed while fulfilling their aspiration to put Britain at the top’. For Jacques Goddet, he was: ‘A champion in his own style, a lover of the peculiar, ambitious to the point of imprudence and collapse.’ For Chris Brasher, an Olympic gold medallist and still one of the country’s leading sports writers, Simpson was more: one of the greatest figures in British sport in the 20th century.

  All he lacked was the survival instinct.

  Côte de Dourdan, May 26, 1963

  The five small motorbikes putter up the dead straight hill out of the village in the Chevreuse valley, through the crowds lined three-deep. Old men in berets, Brylcreemed fathers, mothers and children in frilly Sunday dresses have turned out to watch cycling’s longest race, the Bordeaux–Paris ‘Derby of the Road’.

  The ‘dernys’ are motorised bikes driven by fat men in dark glasses, cycling jerseys and shorts, who pedal slowly to help the engines; behind each one is a cyclist. They are wearing identical kit to the ‘derny’ drivers, but the similarity ends there: the cyclists are slender, athletic, their pacemakers corpulent and varicose-veined.

  The cyclists left Bordeaux 14 hours ago, at two in the morning. They rode through the night in a silent, orderly crocodile with their police outriders and support cars, saw the sun rise at Angoulême and began racing near Poitiers, where the ‘derny’ drivers were waiting. The ‘Derby’, 348 miles long, 180 of those miles behind the ‘dernys’, is a throwback to cycle racing in the 1890s, when racers were paced by tandem cycles over inhuman distances; Dourdan, an hour and a half from Paris, is usually decisive, where the distance finally makes itself felt.

  Tactics are dictated by the pacer; Tom Simpson’s guide, Fernand Wambst, is a calculating man, chosen by the Peugeot team to master Simpson’s impetuous instincts. He wants to make their move here. His gut wobbling under the black and white Peugeot jersey, he guides Simpson to the front of the little group and accelerates, with Simpson sprinting behind, eyes fixed on the back tyre of the ‘derny’.

  Only one man attempts to hold their pace: Edouard Delberghe, in the striped jersey of the Pelforth Beer team, and he is soon 100 metres behind Simpson. He races the final 42 miles to the Parc des Princes stadium with ‘the ease of an English gentleman going to his daily bridge session’, as one writer puts it. After a spring of frustrating near misses, his career is back on track.

  1 Sadly, Nino Defilippis died in July 2010.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ‘A Kind of Expatriate Dick Whittington’

  Geoffrey Nicholson, 1967

  BIG, ROUND TEARS roll slowly down the cheeks of the mountainous old man in a backstreet bar in Ghent. Albert Beurick is sitting at a table in the Kafe de Koninck talking, as he so often has, of his friendship with Tom Simpson, as he did at the film show back in January at the Riverside Theatre in Hammersmith. He sweats heavily, and occasionally wipes away the tears he has shed for over 30 years. This could be any bar in Belgium, with its red-brick walls, its ebullient off-duty army recruits in green fatigues, the old men sitting over unhealthily dark beers. It’s afternoon, so the pinball machines are quiet and the 1980s hits on the stereo correspondingly loud. This is Beurick’s café, but there is nothing here of the little world of 35 years ago centred around the quixotic Simpson and Beurick, his factotal Sancho Panza.

  Beurick was at the finish when Simpson won his world championship in Spain in 1965, ‘crying his eyes out in joy’, wrote David Saunders in Cycling in the Sixties: ‘I could hear him shouting “champion du monde” over the din, his well-filled stomach thrusting aside police, troops, and even metal barriers.’ No sooner had Simpson crossed the line than Beurick fought his way through the dictator Franco’s Guardia Civil to be with his idol, to pick him up, while still on his bike, and lift him in the air. But there’s no sign of this 35-year-old passion in the Kafe de Koninck, where the only link with English sport is the ubiquitous Manchester United ‘Red Devils’ scarf pinned on the wall. The café could be a shrine to Simpson, but isn’t. Beurick, I sense, is trying to move on. The tears, however, and his outbursts at the film show a few months before, imply that he cannot.

  Asked to define the Flemish passion for cycling, one Belgian simply answered: ‘It is a neurosis.’ He pointed to the sky as if implying that, in the Dutch-speaking part of the country, the love of things two-wheeled comes from above: it is an implacable, innate fact of life rather than an acquired habit. The Flemish ‘supporters’, as they call themselves, are the most obsessive and driven of them all. For the Flemish supporters, going to races and screaming encouragement is a peripheral part of the business. What matters above all is the reflected glory of involvement, however marginal, in the sport. It may be waving a flag on a crossroads at a village race, dressing up in the same team strip as a superstar or domestique, or wearing a cap with a local cycling club name, but it is still about getting involved.

  Only the Flemish seem to push fandom towards stalking. For the last 13 years, on every single stage of the Tour de France that I have driven – perhaps 200 – I
have seen the same Belgian camper van pulled up on verges from Nice to Nantes, driven by a 75-year-old named Lucien Blio from a village in Flanders. It has always had the same flag on the back window, bearing an intricate, incomprehensible pun about the Lions of Flanders. Blio began following the Tour in 1974, and is as much part of the race’s furniture as Lance Armstrong. It is admirable, but not normal and Beurick’s devotion to Simpson has to be seen in this light. Some who lived in Ghent at the time say that Simpson exploited Beurick’s support, that he ordered him around as you might a servant. Beurick would never see it that way. In his friendship with Simpson, Beurick achieved the ultimate dream for any Flemish fan: the champion came and lived with him.

  Beurick was a wrestling fan when he bumped into the British amateur cycling squad at a track in Paris in 1958. He offered his services as an unpaid team helper.1 Simpson was one of the team; the two kept in touch. Simpson would stay with Beurick when racing in Belgium. It was Beurick who helped him find a place to stay for nothing when the English cyclist and his young family arrived in Ghent in October 1961, and Beurick who piled Simpson’s furniture into a van and helped him move from Paris.

  Soon, the city became the centre of a little expatriate British cycling colony. After Simpson, two other English professionals, Alan Ramsbottom and Vin Denson, moved from their base in eastern France. Denson and his wife Vi eventually opened a bar in the suburb of Gentbrugge. Barry Hoban came from his home just over the border in northern France. Keith Butler and Bob Addy were amongst others who came over from England too.

  For a professional cyclist, the attraction was obvious: Ghent was a central location from which to travel to races in every part of Europe. If his team did not call on a rider’s services, there were races aplenty, the ‘kermesses’ in the Flemish villages. ‘You could race every day: there were prizes down to 30th and you could make a living just by coming 10th,’ recalled Ramsbottom. Ghent had another enticing side to it: the tax bills were lower than in France.

  Initially, the Simpsons lived in a small cottage. A year later they moved to Saint Amandsberg, a self-contained Ghent suburb across the railway line from the city proper, where they speak Dutch with a slightly different accent. Then they moved to Mariakerke, and settled at No. 87, Hugo Kouter Street for four years.

  Mariakerke is quiet and affluent, with plenty of space between the large, neat villas and a big brick church. It’s the kind of place where professional people live, and was an area favoured by Ghent’s expatriate community. The move from St Amandsberg must have been an important step up the social ladder for a man who began life in a back-to-back Durham mining village. Early in 1966 the Simpsons began building a high-gabled house of dun-coloured bricks, 22 Vijverstraat. The house is still there. Tom was away racing when it was finished in 1967, and slept there for only a few nights before leaving for the Tour.

  A quarter of a century after Simpson’s death, Ray Pascoe happened to be passing while filming Something to Aim At. The lady who owned the house, as proud as a peacock of the building’s association with the man who built it, invited him in. Simpson’s name was there on the original plans she showed him; the kitchen was the one he had ordered from Italy from the Salvarani company. They were the sponsor whose team he was set to join in 1968.

  After Paris, settling down in Flanders was easy for the Simpson couple, according to Helen: ‘It was a good life. In Paris we were unknown because it is a big city, in Ghent you were somebody.’ Living in the centre of Paris meant training was hard for Tom; the 111 stairs to the apartment in Clichy and the lack of a garden were not ideal for Helen, especially when she became pregnant.

  Ghent took its adopted son to its heart: Simpson’s victory in the 1965 world championship prompted a series of civic receptions. Most of the population turned out to watch him and Helen parade along a circuitous route in a horse-drawn carriage with the mayor.

  Flanders is as steeped in cycling as the Welsh valleys are in rugby. Virtually every small village has its ‘kermesse’ and a local professional or former pro running a café or a bike shop. The history runs deep: iconic heroes such as Rik Van Looy and the great races, topped by the Ronde, the Tour of Flanders. Once word spread through the small, intimate world of British cycling – helped by Simpson’s ghosted articles in Cycling magazine – that there was an English-speaking bridgehead in Ghent, one amateur cyclist after another would come over to indulge their passion. They raced the crowded calendar, rubbed shoulders with the British elite, took in the atmosphere, and visited the exotic bike shops. They would stay at Beurick’s place, a café called Den Engel – the Angel – in the quiet middle-class Ghent suburb of Saint Amandsberg, or at another famous cyclists’ boarding house, Mrs Deene’s. Ray Pascoe was among them. He dates his passion for Simpson to a meeting with him in Den Engel, where he was taken to see the great man by Beurick. Simpson was seated in a chair, waiting to answer questions put to him by a group of amateur acolytes – but Pascoe clammed up and barely knew what to say.

  Another to make the trip was Arthur Metcalfe, who was to be Simpson’s teammate in the 1967 Tour de France. He put on his best suit for the occasion but got on the wrong train and ended up in Antwerp. He got the train back to Ghent, walked across a railway marshalling yard in the pouring rain with his bike and bag, and eventually arrived bedraggled and wet at Den Engel. He slept the night in a room with no heating. The following day he rode a race where the other cyclists went so fast he thought he’d been told the wrong distance, because there was no way he reckoned they could keep that pace up for 90 miles.

  There were Australians as well, who lived in even rougher style than the Britons. The English-speakers would train together, hang around each other’s houses, and share the travelling. ‘I was taking the Australians to one race, and I ran over a big rabbit,’ recalls Alan Ramsbottom. ‘The Aussies jumped out of the car, cut its throat, skinned it, and they all came round the day after for rabbit pie cooked by my wife.’ Sometimes, the British and Australians from Ghent would make up a little informal team in the kermesses, helping each other and splitting the prize money.

  Back in the 1960s, Belgium was 24 hours travelling time from most parts of England, the same as Australia is now. For most of the British cyclists, coming to Ghent was the first time they had been abroad. Having someone like Beurick on the ground to look after you was vital. In this respect, the word ‘supporter’ meant more than a mere fan.

  Men such as Albert and their families formed a little network of fixers and fetchers for the expatriate Britons and Australians – and today foreign cyclists living in the area are still warmly looked after. Ramsbottom’s daughter was born in Ghent, and the supporters’ club paid for his wife’s private hospital treatment. When he broke his arm, fortunately the club had arranged the insurance. Like Helen Hoban, he has fond memories of Flanders: ‘Cyclists can do no wrong there.’

  Beurick put me in his Renault Espace, and we drove around the city, stopping off to visit a grandchild or three on the way. Den Engel is still there on Dendermonsesteen-weg in St Amandsberg, a small, one-storey building set slightly back from the busy thoroughfare, with rooms built into the loft space – once a dormitory which could take 20 British cyclists. In European towns, a particular café always acts as a vital hub for any sport; Den Engel was the heart of the British cycling community in Ghent. This was where Beurick organized the Simpson supporters’ club, with between 400 and 500 members, paying 100 Belgian francs (15 shillings) per year; here was where the fans met in the evenings to drink, and where the cyclists congregated in the mornings for their training rides. The Tom Simpson Grand Prix, run by Beurick, started and finished outside, and was won in its first year, 1964, by one Frans Brandts, with the world champion Benoni Beheyt in fifth place.

  The 1965 BBC documentary ‘The World of Tom Simpson’ includes a long sequence shot in the café. A thinner and younger Albert pulls beers in a top with a British Cycling Federation badge. A sign over the door states that this is National Cycling Union-app
roved accommodation. Black and white photographs of the great Flemish cyclists line the walls as if to remind us that this is Belgium, not England. The cameraman didn’t travel round the back, to Beurick’s father’s knackers yard, where cyclists would see an old horse arrive in the morning, and then see bits of it on their plates in the evening.

  The cameraman pans from a billiard table in one corner to another with a long dinner table. A large group of thin, neatly dressed young cyclists in Buddy Holly glasses are eating bread and jam and drinking tea from a vast pot wielded by Beurick’s mother. It is as if an English school canteen has materialized from nowhere in a bar in Belgium; Simpson is playing schoolmaster with a beer in his hand and a proprietorial air about him. Vin Denson sums up the way Simpson saw all this: ‘He used to like people milling around, doing things for him.’ The English king is in his court.

  Beurick and Simpson were soon providing board and lodging for cyclists, on a grand scale, in the Velotel Tom Simpson, a large brick building five miles outside Ghent, with a massive banner outside made of a patchwork of at least 20 national flags. It offered bed, breakfast and two meals for 25 shillings a day, or 18s for those who stayed the whole year.

  This was not the only business venture the pair started up to cater for the aspiring racing men from over the Channel. For a short while, from March 1962, they ran two-week ‘cycling schools’ for young amateurs from Britain. They used their contacts to provide a mix of training rides, racing and lectures on diet, preparation and race tactics. The instructors included the former world champion Georges Ronsse, Belgian team manager at the Tour de France; the racing included an outing in the amateur Tour of Flanders. The school did not make a great deal of money, but it was an enterprising piece of lateral thinking, and it was 30 years ahead of its time. Now, many former professionals in the English-speaking world trade on their names to run training camps and cycling holidays; it was almost unknown in the 1960s, and it remains rare for any cyclist to attempt diversification of this kind while still racing. In Simpson’s case, it was probably more than mere money-making and self-promotion.