by Ned Boulting
Where else but Herne Hill would have been so fitted to the moment, to the man? The location, and the man, were perfectly aligned.
A date in my calendar had been fixed for months. It was the Inter-Schools Championship Day at Herne Hill. An enthusiastic, extremely well spoken, young teacher from nearby Dulwich College (a palace of Victorian brick and expensively honed values) had asked me, and Tommy Godwin, to attend. I liked the idea of schoolkids using the track. I was reminded of stories I’d heard from a number of London riders, who’d told me how their first experience of cycling had come when their schools had taken them down to ride at Herne Hill. Most of South London’s secondary schools would have sent kids to the track. It had been a treasured local resource, before it slipped into anonymity and decline, only recently to be re-animated a little.
It was a perfect early summer’s day. I rode down to the track, this time on my own. Again, I locked my bike to the railings and made my way towards the stands.
It wasn’t quite the meeting I had thought it would be. Handed a programme, I glanced down the list of competing schools. Far from being drawn from the velodrome’s natural constituency of comprehensives, they were all private schools and from as far afield as Bedford. That was where I had been educated, where my dad had been a teacher; my old school had sent a team down to London! I caught on a breeze the particular strains of self-confident boys’ voices that had once been so familiar to me. My childhood seemed a very foreign place.
There, sitting in the stands, was Tommy Godwin. He was unmistakable.
A small collection of men and women clustered disciple-like on the rows beneath him, so they sat at his knee level, their heads inclined towards him and angled slightly to catch his every word. Tommy sat in their midst, occasionally gesticulating. He looked twenty years younger than he actually was, his hair smashingly parted and fulsomely silver, his glasses framing eyes of steely blue. He wore a blazer, a club tie, a pair of English brogues and some mathematically pressed slacks. He was holding court. Even from a distance, as I approached, and took my seat to listen, I could tell he was on a roll.
‘I was a good all rounder. I could rough it up. I could sprint. I could ride pursuits, team pursuits, kilometres, time trials . . .’ Suddenly he was interrupted.
‘Go on, Tommy!’ a passer-by yelled at him, clenching his fists and smiling.
‘Oi! I’m talking about you!’ Tommy fired back, with a dash of a Brummie accent like a drop of Worcestershire sauce. The passer-by laughed back, clapped loudly, and walked on. Tommy beamed delightedly. And then, seamlessly, he carried on with the point he was making, the point to which he often returns, the touchstone of his ethos.
‘You must have respect for people. You must behave yourselves. You gotta have ambition and determination. You’ve got to be prepared to make sacrifices. Listen to your elder people who’ve got the experience, because you might think you know it all, but the people who’ve been through the sport can tell you where you’re making the mistakes, and you must listen and you must get the work ethic into your mind. You will only get out of life what you put into it.’ He does not draw breath.
On he goes. ‘The work ethic is absolutely the essential thing in any walk of life. If your kid’s going to be a musician or a doctor, they’ve still got to work hard in everything they do. You’ve got to be dedicated and be prepared to make sacrifices.
‘And I do live this life. I live it absolutely to the minute.’
He rapped his fingers on the wooden box, and resettled his glasses on his nose.
‘Amen!’ we all wanted to shout, cultishly. At that moment, we, his disciples, would have gladly packed our bags and followed Tommy to wherever he wanted to lead us: to a lakeside in the Caucasus, a mountain top in Kenya, a hide-out in Wyoming. Or, perhaps more realistically, to Herne Hill, where we had come as pilgrims. We would sit up straight. We were the Godwinites.
‘Look at those two, buggering around, now.’ Tommy suddenly broke the spell, and drew our collective attention to two schoolboys whose sprint had just started. They were playing at being Chris Hoy and Grégory Baugé, standing virtually motionless on their pedals, the one in front of the other, looking each other in the eye.
This thrilled Tommy. ‘Isn’t that bloody marvellous. Oh! Priceless. They’ve been watching too much of that on the telly. Go on lads!’ he hollered at them, and sat back chuckling to watch the race unfold.
No two riders are the same, just as no two Tommy Godwins are the same.
Though outwardly the epitome of the English gentleman, he had actually been born in Bridgeport, Connecticut. His father Charles, originally from Birmingham, had sought a better life in New England (Old England had simply delivered a murderous regime of breaking pig-iron for smelting; a job he’d started at the age of thirteen).
In America in the 1920s, things were hard, but wholesome. Schooling was in fact pretty good, and young Tommy grew up sledding, skiing, boxing and even golfing. Charles was seized by the notion that his oldest son should be a sportsman. Stumbling back drunk from a party one night he woke up his son and made him promise he’d compete in the Olympics one day. Young Tommy agreed to the request, presumably so he could roll over and go to sleep again.
In truth, inseparable though they were, Tommy and his dad were very different characters. Charles was a bit of a rogue. He hung out with the odd gangster. He set up a moonshine operation during the years of prohibition, roping his kids into the illegal distilling trade and getting them to deliver the whisky to his Italian friends in exchange for their equally illicit wine.
Certainly he was no angel. Yet, in everything that Tommy recalls, his approval is sought. Through him, and throughout his life, Tommy looked for affirmation.
‘My father was a very disciplined man. He laid down a strict code of listening to him. Do what he says. “Don’t do as I do, do as I say.” He was a drinker, a smoker and a gambler. But I had to be the gentleman. I had to behave myself, respect people, show my appreciation to other people. “Civility is cheap,” he said.’
But the Depression put paid to their American dream. It was time to return. Tommy recalls in his autobiography, It Wasn’t That Easy, the moment at which his dad knew it was over.
‘During 1932 my father, rightly or wrongly, made a decision after seeing some children searching for food in a garbage can while on his way to work one morning. His decision was, that, as a patriotic Englishman who refused to swear an oath against the King to obtain American citizenship, he would return to England, the place of his birth, and infant nurture.’
On the track, a bell rings to indicate the final lap of a sprint. One boy is a hundred metres ahead of his rival, who comes panting past us in the home straight, quite hopelessly beaten. We all watch on. Tommy shouts a few words of encouragement at the kid who’s been vanquished, and then mutters a much more honest assessment of the boy’s potential under his breath. ‘He’s not got much, that lad. Sad to say.’
Herne Hill is still playing out these little dramas. For Tommy Godwin, they are viscerally real. As he remembers racing, the words trip and tumble, overlap and catch up with one another. He can’t get them out fast enough. The emotion is far, far ahead of its expression. Every now and again, and very suddenly, he will start to cry, recovering with a smile just as quickly. Such a torrent of memory and regret is exhausting to witness. It must be much harder still to be feeling it.
‘Oh dear. I’m living it too much . . . Yes . . . I’m living it too much. I’m going through it all again. My life. Oh dear. Oh dear.’
After all, we are right where the ley lines intersect, right at the scene of his greatest moment. It happened at Herne Hill.
In 1948 he picked up an Olympic bronze medal in the Team Pursuit and another on his own in the 1,000m time trial, the ‘Kilo’.
That race went off at 9.30 at night in horrendous, blustery conditions. Dusk had fallen prematurely. There was no lighting at the track, only the yellowish spill from lamps in the pavilion and other off
icial buildings showed the way. He reckons he lost over a second on the home straight when the wind got up and pushed him backwards. This is what track riders call a ‘Hard Straight’. But he got that medal he had dreamt of.
Winning the Team Pursuit bronze was also a considerable achievement for the decidedly ramshackle British team. They were, according to Godwin, just ‘buggering about’. From start to finish, they were riding with hope and desire, guts and pluck. Science didn’t enter into it.
‘It was all strictly amateur. You rode for watches and clocks and things like that. You worked forty-eight hours a week on whatever job – I was working on concrete floors, climbing ladders, working in polishing shops, working with all the dust around me, or the next day in a breaking shop with all the fumes. It was all no good for bike riding.’
He breaks off to applaud another winner, coasting around on his lap of honour. ‘He’s done well, him. Looks all right on a bike, too. Good lad.’
Then, in a flash, without skipping a beat, he’s spun back the clock again.
‘There was no real training. There was no understanding between ourselves. There was no anything, you know.’
But they were up against seriously well-prepared French and Italian specialists. That lack of preparation, that lack of seriousness was poison to the meticulous-minded Godwin. After retiring four years later, he went into coaching. He was determined to try and change British cyclists’ dilettante attitudes towards training. But it didn’t stop there. Long before Brailsford’s marginal gains, Godwin was leaving no stone unturned.
‘The most comfortable chair? A straight-back dining chair. You slip the small of your back in it. You sit upright, and you never feel tired. And when you eat, you must chew for a count of twelve and you must get your food down to a pulp. Thirty-six times. I chew my food very well, before I put it into my system so my system doesn’t have to work that hard to digest it.’
I put it to Tommy that he has aged considerably better than the old pavilion behind us. He glances over his shoulder at it, crumbled, flaking, and unloved, and then he launches into a passionate sermon. He invokes the rhythm and the vernacular of a charismatic preacher, measuring his words with increasing conviction and unshakable faith, and it starts very simply.
‘Even of a morning, a glass of hot water first thing. One glass of hot water to clean the system out.’ He looks at me acutely. I can see that he doubts the healthiness of my regime, and I feel a little uncomfortable. But now, he’s warming to his subject.
‘Bran flakes and muesli. A bowl of fresh fruit at the start of every week, with apples, oranges, kiwi fruit, grapes and a cut banana. Then I have three rounds of wholemeal bread, two with either pâté or cheese or a boiled egg. And one with honey on.’
He goes up a gear, as we head towards the lunch and then the evening meal.
‘Even now, as a ninety-one-year-old man I still cook sea bass, salmon. If I do a meat meal like pork, I do apple sauce, sage and onion stuffing. I do spinach, carrots and potatoes. I do three vegetables for a main meal.’
Diet, and its consequences, became a feature of his coaching career. ‘One rider had an iron deficiency. We put him on a diet of Japanese dried fish and Guinness.’
He was, in many ways, ahead of his time. He coached the British National team at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, and he set up a training camp in the sunshine and mountains of Mallorca for the British squad; an island base still used by British Cycling’s Olympians and by Team Sky and Bradley Wiggins himself. He started the first track course at Lilleshall, where he did a deal with local greengrocers to ensure the kids had a proper diet.
‘I had friends in the fruit market that used to provide an apple, an orange, a banana every morning. I got the Milk Marketing Board to buy us a pint of milk a day. I got Horlicks to supply us. They wanted chips and egg butties and all this sort of thing. I said you’re having what I’m telling you.’
He enjoyed successes as a coach, too. He trained Hugh Porter to repeated national titles. He trained Graham Webb to the British Hour record. He trained Mick Bennett, who also went on to win two bronze medals at the Olympics.
Listening to him recall his innovations, and even allowing for a margin of exaggeration, I am struck by his attention to detail. It seems to me that his work fitted the template that has made the current generation of British coaches the envy of the world.
And yet, thinking back, I do not recall his presence at that British Cycling gala dinner that first sparked my interest. I ask him if he was there. He tells me he had not been invited. I have touched a nerve.
‘And you know, I’ve never once been invited along to Manchester, under the present scheme. With all the work I’ve put in. I’ve never been asked to see a training session. I feel very bitter almost with British Cycling. They’ve never had the decency to say, Tommy would you like to come and spend a few days?’
I find myself wondering if there is a reason for this. I can see, mixed into the chivalry and the charisma, a wilfulness in Tommy Godwin. But whatever the reason, it is uncomfortable, neglectful even, that the sport that gave him his purpose, and to which he dedicated so much of his life, now has so little room for him. Instead he sits here, on a plastic seat, talking to me about it all instead, talking to a virtual stranger.
‘You would have loved the science of it all now, wouldn’t you?’ I put to him.
‘Oh, I would have loved it.’ He looks up and away, across the track. It seems like he’s imagining an alternative version of the past.
‘So, in a way, do you think you were born into the wrong generation?’
I have barely got my question out, when he interrupts loudly, and almost angrily.
‘Yes. Yes. Exactly. That’s exactly how . . . you’re the first person to ever realise that. You’ve greatly complimented me by saying that. And I thank you.’
And, with that, he bursts into tears. Which wasn’t what I had intended.
During the course of that long afternoon, and before Tommy and I are finally called upon to walk down to the middle of the track and make our speeches, we are regularly interrupted. People want to see the medals.
Every time he is asked, Tommy Godwin delights in opening the little wooden box to reveal them, dark brown and serious, nestling in the kind of green baize normally found on snooker tables. They are fine medals, but they are shaped by their age; unelaborated, gloomily tarnished, smallish. If you saw them in the window of a charity shop, propped up against a Shoot! annual, a teapot and a defunct ZX Spectrum, you would think nothing much of them. Like the man, so the medals. Unassuming.
‘I’m very strict with the control of my life. I’ve never had any envies or jealousies for anyone. I live a very modest life.’
We shake hands. I think about him all the way home.
Not long later, as the London Olympic Games approach, I hear that he has become very ill. His daughter, Kay (and this time it is his daughter), emails me.
Sadly, Dad is not at all well at the moment – he has been diagnosed with cancer, so that has come as a great shock to us all given that he has been so remarkable in the lead up to the Olympics. We hope he will attend the opening ceremony tomorrow and an evening of track cycling next week and then we can take life a little more gently.
I tune in for the opening ceremony. Sure enough, right towards the end, just as the torches are being passed to the children to light the flame, I catch a glimpse of Tommy, beaming. The director has framed the shot on Steve Redgrave and Kelly Holmes, but there, just in the edge of the picture, is Tommy Godwin. A few days later, he was trackside to see Great Britain take home the gold medal in his discipline, the Team Pursuit.
He was in his rightful place. Right in the thick of things. He’d made it.
Tommy Godwin passed away on 3 November 2012, two days short of his ninety-second birthday.
These two Tommies represent, in some ways, opposite extremes. The fact that neither man appears in British Cycling’s Hall of Fame is surely a remarkable omission, g
iven what they both achieved in their separate ways. The one, humble to the point of denial, dedicated to the lonely pursuit of records on frozen roads, day after day. The other, quicksilver, forthright, almost a bit natty, his heart shaped by the contours and the speed of the track and the application of science.
The two men never met, as far as anyone can tell. I wonder how they would have got on. Perhaps they might have had little in common. They might have had scant regard for each other’s achievements. They might have rubbed each other up the wrong way, Tommy 1 could easily have found Tommy 2’s volubility and propensity for emotion, a problem. Tommy 2 might have been dismissive of Tommy 1. Or they might have been soulmates. Who knows.
For now I prefer to close my eyes to the unpredictable and fractious reality of human relationships, choosing instead to read their stories as you might a favourite childhood adventure.
Their stories have both been published. Unsurpassed tells the story of the World Endurance Record holder, and It Wasn’t That Easy recounts the life of the Olympic medallist.
The subtitles are subtly different:
The Tommy Godwin Story, and The Story of Tommy Godwin.
CHAPTER 13
THE LONGWICK TEN
I WAS STANDING in the corridor of a well-appointed West London basement flat, staring at a picture of a naked man pleasuring a lady. I was surprised at how easy it was, in the course of researching a book about cycling, to end up leafing through a copy of The Joy of Sex with a management consultant.
Avril Millar was telling me about a book she wanted to write called The Joy of Work. It would be, she enthused, a user-friendly manual that would help people to re-engage with their work, an antidote to growing alienation, a balm for the schism she saw in people’s lives between the family and the workplace. She was surprisingly passionate about it.
So that’s how it came to pass that she and I were looking through those iconic pencil drawings from the original naughty 1970s manual, wondering what the copyright restrictions might be on using the same beardy man to illustrate The Joy of Work.
