by Robert Penn
The whole process of making a saddle takes three days. Each job requires a high level of hand—eye co-ordination, manual dexterity and concentration. ‘Experience and a good eye are important,’ Steven said. ‘You’d have a good chance of losing a hand if you had a go at any of these jobs.’ I did look to see if anyone was short a finger or two, but no. Even Sonia, who was punching rivets through leather to mount it on the metal cantle plates, with only experience and a good eye to guide her, had the full complement.
‘On the rivet’ is an old cycling expression. It dates from the era when all saddles were made of leather and secured to the frame with metal rivets. It describes a rider scrunched tight and low on his bike, hands clamped to the drops and backside perched precariously on the nose of the saddle, trying to lever maximum power into the machine with every pedal stroke, going at it for all he’s worth. ‘On the gel’ somehow doesn’t convey the same intensity.
The models with large brass rivets are hammered and chamfered by hand — jobs no machine can do — to finish them off. Chamfering is a medieval carpentry term for fluting the edge of something. At Brooks, Eric shaves the edge of the leather away with a razor-sharp tool in a continuous motion. A momentary loss of concentration causing a slip of the tool and that saddle is heading for the bin. The ‘Team Professional’ model is chamfered. When pro cyclists rode Brooks saddles, they used to complain that the edge of the saddle rubbed their thighs. Today, the process is more for decoration but it illustrates better than anything else the care and the precision of the handwork that goes into every saddle. It reveals why Brooks has become a byword for good craftsmanship.
‘We make over forty models. Each one requires different workmanship. And if you’re chamfering or even riveting, you have to get a feel for each batch of leather as they’re all different,’ Steven said. We walked back across the factory to the end of the production line where the saddles were being inspected one last time, polished and boxed.
‘Now,’ he said. ‘You’ve seen the manufacturing process from start to finish. I presume it’s a B 17 you want to buy. What colour?’
‘Actually, I’m going for a Team Professional instead. I’ve fallen for the hand-hammered copper rivets and the chamfering. I’d like a black one with a chrome frame.’ The Team Professional was introduced in 1963. At 46 years old, it’s the whippersnapper in the Brooks range. Based on the B 17, it is constructed from a single piece of leather shaped over a steel frame of two rails and the curved cantle plate. The tensioning bolt is fixed underneath the nose and the leather is secured with copper rivets front and rear. ‘Team Professional’ is branded on both sides and a ‘Brooks’ plate is fixed to the rear. It is simple and beautiful, a blend of strength and grace. I could see the warm approval in Steven’s eyes.
‘Good choice,’ he said. ‘It should serve you well for many years to come. And I hope you’ll bring it back in twenty-five years for an overhaul. Some of us will no doubt still be working here then.’
Not in Vain the Distance Beckons
A road, a mile of kingdom, I am king
Of banks and stones and every blooming thing.
(Patrick Kavanagh, ‘Inniskeen Road: July Evening’)
The seasons changed twice between my first visit to Brian Rourke and my return to see the bike being painted and assembled. In that time, I’d considered a hundred colours. Some had been summoned to mind deliberately. Others had dropped in uninvited during my journey to collect the components. The first colour to stick was yellow — a rich Van Gogh yellow, a Mediterranean hue that cycling made its own when the leader of the Tour de France first pulled on le maillot jaune in 1919. The colour was chosen to reflect the pages of L’Auto, the newspaper that backed the event. Next, I wanted a black bike — it would look suave and ageless, I thought. Then a friend said black carried a psychological burden and would make the bike look heavy. I dabbled with Bianchi-blue or ‘celeste’, made iconic by Fausto Coppi and said to be the colour of the Queen of Italy’s eyes. I toyed with British racing green, until I read it represented greed.
My wife is an artist. She has great taste in colour. When I asked her what she thought of Cappuccino-brown — the colour of self-sacrifice — she said: ‘Darling, is choosing a colour for your bike harder than choosing a name for your children?’ That wasn’t helpful. The Malteser-orange of Eddy Merckx’s bikes, seal-grey, pearlescent grey, raspberry, azure, crimson, sapphire, sea-green and myrtle — I mulled over them all until my dreams were filled with flickering colour swatches. I printed dozens of photos of hand-painted bikes and stuck them to the walls of my office. Still, I couldn’t choose.
The decision was complicated by having to find a second colour for the contrasting panels on the down tube and the seat tube. I rang Jason Rourke. He would be painting the frame: ‘I need guidance,’ I said. ‘What colours can I have?’
‘Any colour you can think of, Rob. Any colour you fancy. Basically, any colour at all.’
‘Nope, you can’t have that colour,’ Jason said, putting a paint-pot down, turning to face me, resting his hips against the workbench, crossing his ankles and folding his arms. We were in his paintshop.
‘What do you mean, “No”?’ I said.
‘Just no. That’s it. No.’
‘You can’t say that. I’m the customer. And you said I can have any colour.’
‘Rob, one day you will thank me for this. It may even be today. But there’s no way I’m going to paint your bike purple. It’s not 1973. We’re not going off to see a Slade concert tonight. I promise you, if you had that bike purple, you’d be back here in six months begging me to re-spray it. No.’
Purple had come to me late in the journey. I had an imperial purple in mind: Tyrian purple — the dye first produced by the ancient Phoenicians, the colour of clotted blood.
‘You’re not Ziggy Stardust,’ Jason said. ‘You’re just Rob Penn. How about Flamboyant Red? That’s popular.’
Along with choosing the tubing material, the right geometry, the perfectly sized frame to suit the rider’s needs and the components to match it, choosing the colour scheme goes to the heart of why you would want a bespoke bicycle. Not only should the bike feel and handle like it was made for you, it should look like your bike too. Red — one of the periodic favourites of the mass manufacturers — would not do.
‘I’ve just painted a bike I made for Muhammad Ali in Flamboyant Red over silver, with pearl white panels. If it’s good enough for Muhammad Ali, it’s good enough for you,’ Jason said.
‘No.’
‘Gunmetal grey? That’s been in demand in the last few years, with blue or red panels.’ Jason continued rummaging among the fifty or so tins of paint on the shelves in front of us. He popped the lids with a screwdriver and pushed the tins along the bench towards me.
‘Pink?’
‘No.’
‘Ferrari blue?’
‘Umm . . .’
Pop . . . pop . . . pop. There were three tins of different metallic blues in front of me.
‘That one’s a Harley-Davidson blue. Quite electric. A bit like sapphire but richer . . . Now this one’s a nice colour — a metallic blue with a clear top coat so you can build up the top coat to make it as dark as you want.’
‘I like this blue,’ I said, pulling one tin to the side. ‘What would that go with, for the contrasting panels? Blue and orange?’
Jason’s lips tightened. Blue and orange are my favourite colours. In all my efforts to find a unique colour scheme, I’d overlooked them.
‘Can we see an orange?’ I said.
‘Nnnn — all right. We’re never gonna agree on this, are we?’
While I flicked through booklets of colour swatches, Jason rooted through another hundred or more tins of paint in the cupboard.
‘Californian Gold? Olympic Gold? Candy-apple Red? Here we go, here’s an electric orange,’ he said, passing a tin over his head. ‘That’s what Jeremy Clarkson calls ASBO orange. Here’s another . . . and another. Let’s have
a look at these.’
With all the tins of orange and blue in front of me, I finally had a target in sight. For an hour, I deliberated, shuffling the tins around, placing each orange with each blue and trying to imagine them together on a frame. It was difficult. Jason had left me to it. The silence was only broken by the repeated thump of my clenched fist meeting the palm of my other hand. Just when I wondered if I might be getting high on the fumes of the paint, the perfect blue and orange combination hit me.
‘OK, I’ve got it,’ I shouted downstairs. Jason came doubling up the steps.
‘Quick,’ he said. ‘Let’s get on with it before you change your mind.’
Jason was into his white romper suit and halfway to looking like a Droog before I could say ‘Clockwork Orange’. The frame had already been prepped with white paint. The seat and chain stays were wrapped in paper and sealed — they would remain unpainted, giving the frame a classic, Italian look. This was one thing we had agreed on. With the frame hanging from a meat hook, he set to work. The first coat of orange went on the seat tube and the down tube. It looked awful. I whimpered.
‘The colour changes with each coat. In fact, you can’t really judge until the painting is finished and the bike’s been built up. So don’t worry . . . yet.’
Another coat went on. The ‘oven’, a heated panel at the back of the paint shop, ensured each coat was dry in minutes. After the third coat of orange, Jason masked off the panels with tape and paper, and filled the spray canister with blue.
Many frame-builders send their frames out to be painted. I can understand why. It is a specialized job — perhaps as difficult to master as the welding itself. The masking needs deft handwork; knowing when paint is taking and how it changes colour as coats build up requires experience, and getting every coat even is a skill. The paintwork is also the criterion by which many potential customers will judge a hand-built bicycle: few will inspect the tube welds and even fewer will know what they’re looking for. Everyone, however, can spot a botched paint job.
Jason worked carefully, making elegant sweeps with the spray gun to ensure the entire frame received each coat smoothly. Between coats three and four, he pulled out a drawer of transfers or ‘decals’. I needed to choose them for the down tube and the seat tube: ‘ROURKE’ in silver over the orange panels, with multi-coloured World Championship bands to edge the panels; the elegant Brian Rourke logo on the head tube and a smaller ‘BR’ badge on the rear of the seat post — ‘so, when you drop somebody, Rob, they know you’re riding a Rourki,’ Jason said. The final transfer, on the top tube, would be my name: ‘Rob Penn’, in a simple font, in silver.
‘Is it dark enough? Tell me if the blue is dark enough for you. I can easily make it darker if you want, but I think it’s building up nicely now,’ Jason said, finishing another coat. The power to make a decision had left me. It was dark outside now. I was almost mute with anxiety about whether the blue and orange would go together. Jason put one more coat of blue on. When it was dry, he worked away the tape with a scalpel, and carefully peeled back the paper from the panels.
Blue and orange. It looked fucking fabulous.
If seeing the frame being painted was agony, watching the bike being assembled in Brian Rourke’s shop was uninterrupted pleasure. Matt Roberts, the chief mechanic, worked with the precision and dexterity of a watchmaker. First, inner tubes and the tyres were attached to the wheels, taking care to ensure the writing on the tyre aligned with the valve hole. Next, with the bare frame mounted on a workstand, the head tube was prepared. The bearing cups of the headset were pressed in and the steering system — forks, stem and handlebar — came together.
I had brought all the components to the shop in a large cardboard box. Each time Matt bent down and pulled something out, a memory came dashing back — Gravy’s vast hands, Antonio Colombo’s suit, the twinkle in Steven Green’s eye. It was like an evocative lucky dip, a box of happy remembrances.
The bottom bracket, chainset and cassette were next. Matt plucked tools from the arsenal on the wall behind him, often reaching for them without looking. The front and rear derailleurs were bolted on, then the chain. Manufactured to standard size, Matt shortened it to the correct length for my bike with a chain tool, by eye. Then he drove the connecting rivet into place: the drivetrain was complete.
The wheels were mounted. Jason came out of his office to check the rear tyre clearance on the frame: ‘Bang on,’ he said. ‘Phew.’
Periodically, Brian walked by. When Matt got briefly stuck — trying to thread the cables from the new 11-speed Campagnolo levers through the interior of the Cinelli handlebar — the younger mechanics circled round us, half-smirking. With judicious use of a file, a little oil on the cable and some elbow grease, he worked the cables through and the vultures dispersed. Matt then cut the pieces of black cable housing, taking care to ensure the section for the rear brake had the writing centred and reading the right way.
The seat post was cut to length and the Brooks saddle attached: ‘Work of art, this one,’ Matt said as he clicked the gears up and down, again and again, making micro adjustments, to ensure they were perfectly in sync: ‘You must be dead chuffed.’
Actually, I felt rather glum. My journey to put this bike together was at an end. It had been fascinating and great fun. I’d come to realize that the talk about the bicycle being at the dawn of a new golden age was not hyperbole. All the manufacturers I’d spoken to reported growth in the last few years. The balance between craftsmanship and technology is shifting once more, in pursuit of quality. If people want well-made bicycles that are going to last, this shows that the machine is being valued again in a way that it hasn’t been for half a century. In Portland, Fairfax, and even in London, I’d witnessed the growth of communities around the bicycle. Bicycles are fashionable — that may not last, but it’s indicative of how health concerns, transport issues, the environment and the price of oil are nudging the bicycle back to the centre of public consciousness. In Britain, the establishment are riding bicycles for the first time since the 1890s: to have the Mayor of London, frontbench politicians, national newspaper editors, famous broadcasters such as Jon Snow and Jeremy Paxman and a host of leading businessmen, from the Asda chief executive to fashion guru Paul Smith, not only riding but advocating bicycles would have been unthinkable only twenty years ago.
Bespoke frame-builders are re-adapting the bicycle once again, particularly for urban transportation, with an eye on the future. The world’s first cycling magazine, Le Vélocipède Illustré, concluded in an editorial in 1869: ‘the steel horse fills a gap in modern life, it is an answer not only to its needs, but also to its aspirations . . . It’s quite certainly here to stay.’ The same could be written today. Twenty years from now, many cities in the developed world will have successfully re-integrated the bicycle into the transportation infrastructure. H. G. Wells wrote: ‘When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race.’ He would have been full of hope today.
I told Matt I was feeling sad that my journey was over. He looked askance at me. Then he looked at the bike. Then he looked back at me. He was right. There was a silver lining: a millimetre-perfect incarnation of one of mankind’s greatest inventions. My dream bike. It was ready.
Brian raised the bike out of the workstand. ‘Now then,’ he said, ‘jump on here and we’ll have a last look at you. Clip in, relax, grab hold of the brakes there . . . bring this pedal arm down, dink yer knee back. OK, I’ll nick it down a wee bit if you jump off. And I’ll take the saddle back a tad.’
With the saddle adjusted, I climbed back on the bike, supporting myself with an elbow on the workbench. Jason and Matt stood to one side, looking over the bike with pursed lips, nodding slowly: a seal of approval.
Brian’s eyes and hands moved energetically around the bike. He stepped back: ‘Yer looking good, kid,’ he said. ‘That’s absolutely the mint.’
In my mind, the first ride was like a TV car advert. I was on an
empty coastal road — Big Sur in California, perhaps, or high above the Adriatic Sea — barrelling downhill through tight, perfectly cambered corners. Bike, road and rider were one. The sea sparkled. The sun shone. All was Zen.
In reality, I stepped out of my back door in the Black Mountains to confront a world with no sky. A Welsh poet would have said the rain was falling softly, like a blessing. Actually, it was just raining. I should have let the rain pass but I couldn’t wait. The bike, ready to do battle with all the winds yet unborn, couldn’t wait either. You make a covenant with a bike like this — to ride it, and to look after it for as long as it bears you away to a refuge far from the present.
Can a machine have feelings? I recently re-read the diary I had kept while cycling round the world. It confirmed what I suspected then — Mannanan, my bike, never let me down. It never once broke down when I was crossing a desert or a remote mountain range, when I was sick or melancholy or scared of the people I was among. The bike never failed when I was in jeopardy. As soon as we reached a safe haven, and I relaxed, components fell off. In return for this deferral of failure in straitened times, I completely stripped, cleaned and rebuilt the bike every three to six months. I understood how it worked. We were equal partners in a fulfilling journey.
I swung a leg over the bike. Click . . . click . . . into the pedals and we rolled down the lane. Here was the calming familiarity — my window on the world: faster than walking, slower than a train, higher than a car, lower than a plane. The bike felt tight, as you would expect a new, quality bicycle to feel — hard saddle, gears in perfect sync, taut chain and responsive brakes. It felt beautifully balanced, and somehow alive with the hands of the people who had made it.
