by Ned Boulting
‘I remember that one of them looked too well dressed, he was too well turned out. He came to the back fence, and he called my name out, “Graham!” He’d come to say goodbye. That’s all I remember of him.’
‘Were you very close to your mother?’ I ask.
‘Not really. No.’ He thinks about it for a moment. ‘I can’t say we were close. She never talked to me. She never said anything. Sometimes she would be crying all the time, and I’d ask her what the matter was. She’d never answer.’
Like many women of her generation, she had reason enough; not only had she lost her husband, she had also lost her father in the First World War when she was just six. In fact, her dad had died in a German prisoner-of-war camp a month after Armistice Day. All this, Graham only knows because of research he has undertaken since her death. Nothing of the sort was ever discussed during her lifetime.
All throughout his quietly fraught childhood, a pervasive silence characterised his everyday life. His mother, a machine operator at the BSA Motorworks plant, worked every shift she could to put bread on the table for her growing family of five, but showed no inclination to indulge the demons of the past. Ignorance was this family’s default position, although the difference between Graham and his older siblings, and their subsequent behaviour towards him (he is only just dealing with very damaging, long-suppressed memories), suggest that they knew all too well that the ‘runt of the litter’ was only a half-brother.
‘That’s why I like living here, you know. When I am in England, the memories come back.’ The geographical distance works. ‘It depresses me when I am in England. As soon as I get back to Belgium, everything just clears up, really.’
The family occupied what was known as a ‘back house’, which gave onto the back alley, rather than the road. Smaller and cheaper, it had only two bedrooms. Graham would sleep in the same bed as his mother, and the rest somehow made do in the other room.
Serious illness was a fact of life. In his first three years, he spent prolonged periods in hospital with repeated bouts of pneumonia and a near-fatal episode of meningitis. ‘They had to pump penicillin into my spinal cord between each vertebra. I think I’ve had to fight since day one just to stay alive.’
Sometimes, Graham describes himself as autistic. I do not think that this has ever been actually diagnosed, but it is telling that he has hit upon this word as he looks to make sense of his past. Certainly, by the time he reached boyhood, he had completely turned in on himself. And that’s when he first stepped on a bike.
‘I was eight years old. One of the kids on the street had a bike. I’d never been on one before, but they pushed me off, and I just rode away, you know.’
That was it. He saved, and ended up buying a rusty old wreck of a bike, stuck in the hardest of its three gears, for nine pence from his cousin. He never looked back.
‘It was my magic carpet.’ The first ride he ever did was the ten miles there and ten miles back to Earlswood lakes, just outside Solihull.
He immediately got a reputation among the kids he rode with for going further and faster than any of them had attempted. They would complain that they couldn’t keep up.
‘That was the story of my life: nobody would go with me.’
When he turned ten, he, along with all the other kids at school who rode bikes, hatched a plan. They would ride a hundred miles. By looking at a map, they realised that Gloucester was exactly fifty miles away: there and back then, all along the same road.
But no one went with him. ‘Come Sunday morning, I turned up. But no one else did. So I set off for Gloucester on my own.’ He got the shock of his life when he hit the Malvern Hills, which had not been marked on the map. Over the top of the hills, he got ‘terrible abdominal pains’, which ended in a bout of very bloody diarrhoea – but still he soldiered on. ‘I’d have rather died, than walk.’
He reached Gloucester, where he found a big roundabout in the middle of town, went round it, and started to head back.
Listening to him recount the adventure, I am astonished to learn that he had not packed a thing to eat or drink. ‘Not even a sandwich Graham?’
‘I never took anything to eat. There never was anything to eat. Five kids and no money? When we got up in the morning, the cupboards were bare, you know. Some days we never had anything to eat at all. That was no issue.’
About twenty miles from home he collapsed, and lay by the side of the road. Occasionally, people would come over to him and offer help. ‘Leave me alone!’ was all they got for their concern.
After four hours, he remounted his bike, and finally made it home. The next Sunday he went out and did it again.
I look at the retired rider sitting opposite me as he nears his seventieth birthday, and try to imagine the ten-year-old boy pushing himself into ruin. I wonder if I am to believe it all. The tales of post-war poverty are so familiar-sounding, so conforming to the archetypes of the era, that they are almost too perfect.
Yet, this is no self-dramatist.
Could his mother really have allowed him off on such an adventure so hideously ill prepared? I realise that she almost certainly knew nothing of his solitary rides. He would leave at three o’clock in the morning, before it was light. He’d be home in the evening, but wouldn’t tell a soul what he’d done.
He ventured further afield. Aeroplane spotting had become a passion. As he explains, ‘The only way I could see aircraft was to go to the airfields on my bike.’
I think of my own childhood, some of which was spent in the spectator lounges of Luton and Birmingham airports, listening to the indecipherable chatter from the control tower on my tiny transistor radio. My dad would sit opposite me, reading his paper patiently, as I noted down the registration number of each jet that taxied past and took off.
Then I thought of those twelve British plane spotters who were sentenced to three years in prison by the Greek authorities for indulging their passion near the Kalamata air force base. The Greek judiciary simple couldn’t accommodate the notion that people might want to watch planes taking off and landing as a hobby. This is a very home-grown, very boyish madness.
It came as no surprise to me that, sooner or later, Graham’s particular upbringing would lead him to a hobby like plane spotting, at which the British still excel. But the difference between his ‘passion’, and my ‘interest’, was vast.
At the age of twelve, he set off for Heathrow on his little rusty bike, a journey of almost exactly one hundred miles.
‘How did you plan to get back?’ I ask him.
‘I never thought about that. I never thought about it.’ There’s a flicker of a smile as he remembers this now. Or perhaps he’s remembering the Lockheed Constellation, or the Bristol Britannia.
‘When I’d quenched my thirst looking at the aircraft, I realised it was too late to get home, so I crawled into a ditch under a bush at the back of the BOAC hangars at Heathrow. I slept in that ditch. The next day, I watched the aircraft again and rode home.’
This became a habit.
One Easter, he rode to Heathrow and then on into London to find a Youth Hostel. There were only three in those days, and they were all fully booked. Not knowing what to do, he happened upon Euston Station, where a train for Birmingham was about to leave. He jumped on, paying for the ticket with the money he’d saved up for the Youth Hostel.
‘I rode from Birmingham New Street station. I got home quite knackered at about teatime. Somehow, my mother knew what I’d been planning. She said, “I thought you were going to go to London?” I said, “I’ve been!”’
At a conservative estimate, the twelve-year-old Graham Webb had probably ridden one hundred and fifty miles, stuck in top gear, on a rusty bike, all on his own, without anything to eat.
Throughout his childhood, as he recalls, his family expressed not the slightest bit of interest in his cycling.
His mother, Lilly, had remarried. But not happily. Her new husband was an elderly neighbour called Albert Whitton. Graham suspe
cts that she did this to free up their own house so that his sister’s young family had somewhere to live.
But Graham joined the new household on sufferance only.
‘You can bring that kid with you,’ Whitton had told Lilly, ‘but you’ll have to go out to work for him. I’m not keeping him.’
‘He was a terrible bloke. He’d pin mother up against a wall with a big carving knife against her throat. I couldn’t say anything. I thought he’d go after me with the knife.’
At fourteen, he left school and started work on an assembly line building imitation log fires. Everyone else in the factory was a woman. Perhaps his isolation grew more pronounced. Certainly his disappearing acts grew more ambitious. He saved up money, and he took two weeks’ holiday, intending to ride round the entire coast of Wales, pedalling all day until it got too dark, and then pitching his tent wherever he stopped.
All the while, he knew nothing of the sport of cycling. ‘I didn’t even know it existed.’
‘So if someone had talked to you about the Tour de France . . .?’
‘I wouldn’t have known what they were talking about, no.’
The only competitive cycling he’d ever seen had been dirt-track racing in a bombsite in Birmingham. ‘Road racing, time-trialling, track racing? I didn’t know they existed.’
A chance meeting with a member of the Solihull Cycling Club changed all that. He suggested Graham went to a club meeting at Knowle Village Hall.
‘There must have been a couple of hundred people milling around, just chatting. I sat there, not talking to anyone, wondering what it was all about. People thought I was thick.’ By now he was seventeen.
He was asked if he was going to do the ‘Club 25’. He had no idea what the ‘Club 25’ was. But they took his two shillings and his signature. He was entered.
‘I got the start sheet. I was number 22. It was a time trial, but I didn’t know what a time trial was. I thought everyone started together in a race. We were given a changing room, which was like someone’s garden shed. All these blokes were getting into racing gear. I’d just got some cut-off jeans and a T-shirt and a pair of pumps.
‘I got a bit fed up with sitting in this garden shed, so I went to have a look at the start, and there were blokes being pushed off.’
Eventually, despite him missing his start time, they let him start. But still he didn’t understand the race.
‘I thought, ‘Christ! I’ve got to catch all the blokes in front of me, to win this race!’’
He caught his ‘minute man’, and eased up so that the rider could get on his wheel, and they might work together.
‘But he started shouting, “Bugger off! Bugger off!” I thought, that’s nice, you know! I’m offering to help him, and he’s telling me to bugger off. So I did.’
At the finish line, he was still none the wiser. He knew he’d not caught everyone, but couldn’t figure out what was supposed to happen next.
‘I thought, bugger this, it’s still early. I’ll just go out for a ride on my bike. It’s got to be much more enjoyable than what these blokes are doing.’
Needless to say, he set the fastest time that day. They told him the following week when he returned to the village hall. He remembers the embarrassment. ‘I went blood red. I hated any sort of spotlight.’
From that moment on, his presence on the local scene was established. The cycling community became aware of this taciturn kid with the cut-off jeans and the tennis shoes, an entire tool kit strapped to his seat post by a spare tyre. Bit by bit, he shed his naïvety, and inevitably, the prospect of a career in cycling presented itself.
In 1963, at the age of nineteen, in his own words, ‘I was an aeroplane, I was a jet. I could do nothing wrong.’
Having ridden with great success as a junior, he now started to take out bigger and bigger races. He rode the Beacon mountain time trial, taking seven minutes out of the established star, Hugh Porter, who accused him of riding a two-up time trial with another rider to get the better of him. ‘He was unforgiving, you know. Very, very nasty.’ (Porter, now a hugely venerated television commentator, remembers the race well, and stands by his accusation to this day.)
On the final climb of that race, and as a portent of things that lay in wait many decades down the line, his heart stopped beating, then started again of its own accord. But for a while, ‘I was dead’, he recalls. ‘There’s a pain barrier. And you can go through it. And then you get wings, you fly!’
In the 1960s a lack of understanding from the general public, and a lack of tolerance from the authorities, meant that roads were seldom closed to traffic for a ‘mass start’ road race. This resulted in a prevailing culture of time-trialling: races that could, by their nature, co-exist with the traffic on open roads.
Webb became prodigiously good at them. He rose to the top. At Brentwood, he rode the fastest 25-mile time trial of the year, a significant feather in his cap. But he remembers that day for a very different reason. When he returned home in the evening, he walked in to the house to find his stepfather, Albert, dead on the couch. Albert had succumbed to the effects of chronic alcoholism and bronchitis. He’d ‘coughed himself to death’, in Graham’s no-nonsense words.
Despite his bitterness towards Albert, this discovery had a profound effect on Graham. He attributes a life-long battle with depression to this moment. But he cannot explain why.
In 1964 and ’65 he raced on, but his heart wasn’t in it. He tried his hand at the insurance business. He married his girlfriend Karen. He was drifting away from cycling.
Then, in 1966, an old friend came to stay, after being thrown out of his own family home. The Webbs put him up. He used to cycle to his factory job early every morning. Since Graham’s job in insurance didn’t start till ten, he used to tag along for the ride. That rekindled his enthusiasm. He got fit and started racing again.
Under the guidance of the 1948 Olympic bronze medallist Tommy Godwin, he broke a significant British record, completing the furthest distance round a track in one hour. He bettered Les West’s Hour Record by 414 yards. It was a major achievement.
‘It was so easy. That night, I said, “I wonder if I can make a career out of cycling.”’
That then was the moment when the penny dropped. That was the moment in which Graham Webb embarked on the journey that led him to his homely bungalow in Wachtebeke, and voluntary exile. He knew that the road to success lay overseas. The money and the races just weren’t there in Britain. ‘It was hopeless in England trying to make a career of cycling.’
So, he worked all winter without training, then rode the Good Friday Meeting at Herne Hill (‘I cleaned up there’) and the Butts Meeting in Coventry on Easter Monday (‘I cleaned up there, too’) and then on the Tuesday, he and Karen ‘found ourselves standing in Amsterdam Central Station with two suitcases, not knowing where we were going to sleep that night’.
‘Did it work out for you?’ I ask.
‘Perfectly.’ And just this once, a smile sweeps across his features, unknitting his brow.
We break, while Graham makes a coffee for me. It’s decaf, for which he apologises.
That year, 1967, the Amateur World Road Race Championships were in Heelen; fifteen hilly laps, two hundred kilometres in total. The field had been whittled down to an elite bunch of a dozen or so, and on the final lap, he just rode away from them. No one could touch him; as he crossed the line, he was still pulling away, and he won by a good hundred yards; the first Briton to win that medal in forty-five years.
He pulled on the Rainbow Jersey, and stood awkwardly on the podium (‘a necessary evil’), shyly scanning the sea of faces in the crowd. Suddenly he spotted someone he knew.
‘Who came pushing through the crowd towards the podium? My mum.’
She’d never before seen him race. But here she was, as far as Graham knew, on foreign soil for the first time in her life, watching her son being crowned World Champion. The British cycling fans who’d also made the trip lifted her onto
the podium.
‘Did you two talk to each other at all? Do you remember what she said to you?’
‘Nothing was said.’
‘Nothing was said?’
‘No.’
There was an abnormally long pause. I tried to discern what he might be thinking about this. He stared fixedly back at me.
‘And then what happened?’
‘I imagine she just continued her trip home. Because she was the queen of the trip. Her son was a World Champion.’
The very next day, he turned professional with Mercier. It should have been the start of a glorious career. But that’s not the way it worked out.
That winter, accompanied by Karen, he went off to a training camp in Sardinia. He was scheduled to ride the early season races in the South of France. But a general strike in Sardinia shut the place down, and kept him effectively imprisoned on the island. He missed all the races the team had wanted to enter him in.
Eventually, at the end of February, they got off the island. But in Turin, everything was stolen from the back of his car, including, significantly, his racing shoes, whose plates had been assembled just right for his pedal stroke.
That had a bad effect on his form. ‘I had a lot of trouble. My bike had a bent pedal, too.’ It all led to a debilitative knee injury.
Carrying this pain, he was nonetheless entered by the team for Paris–Nice. He had to abandon on Stage 2. The team stopped paying him and, despite returning to fitness and resuming his racing, eventually he was summarily dismissed. There was little to stop them doing what they wanted with riders in those days.
And that, put simply, was that for his professional career. Gone before it had even got underway. Money problems piled up. His marriage to Karen fell apart. Together with their son Jean-Paul she returned to England in 1968.
Beset with debt, and labouring in a furniture factory, Graham remarried eventually, this time to a Flemish lady called Marie-Rose Verspecht. Together, almost in the tradition of retired English footballers, they opened a pub called De Neeuw Derby, in a village just north of Ghent.
