On the Road Bike

by Ned Boulting

  The British Isles, in cycling terms, had become the Galapagos Islands. Its indigenous species were evolving into something unique and endangered, oblivious to, or obdurately resisting, influences from overseas.

  It took a war to change all that, and a visionary called Percy Stallard. Arrogant, intransigent, irascible and stubborn, Stallard saw it as a divine crusade to bring the light of road racing to these gloomy, fog-bound islands. Having spent time overseas before the war, and ridden at a high level in Continental racing, he was determined to establish a similar scene back home. After all, according to Hewson, wherever he went overseas, cycling folk would always ask him the same question: ‘You’re the only blooming country in Europe that doesn’t have road racing. What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with you?’

  In 1942, as the nation’s police service and Home Office were preoccupied with the war effort, he gathered together a band of like-minded comrades. The first meeting of the British League of Racing Cyclists was held at the foot of the Long Mynd Hill in Church Stretton.

  ‘That’s just round the corner, isn’t it, Tony? I think I drove past it coming here.’ It was that road I’d spotted on my way to his house. Inadvertently, or perhaps by Hewson’s design, I had been sent on a journey right through the cradle of the sport in Great Britain.

  ‘That’s right, you can see it from the main road,’ he carries on, warming to his theme.

  Shortly after that meeting at Church Stretton, came the pivotal moment: ‘Llangollen to Wolverhampton, in 1942. That was the very first road race in this country. By the end of the war, road racing was established. There were those in the Home Office who resisted it still, but it was too late. They couldn’t ban it. It wasn’t British to go around banning things.’

  Civil war within the curiously pugnacious and intolerant cycling community duly broke out and continued largely unchecked for twenty years and beyond when the various factions were brought under one roof, and what we now understand to be British Cycling was established. The time triallists, still fearing a public and police-led backlash to the perceived anarchy of the road racers (or ‘the superfluous excrescence’, as they were once described in Cycling magazine), were forced finally to accommodate their bitter foes, when the Road Traffic Act of 1960 enshrined the legality of the mass start bicycle race. It was time to move on.

  Tony Hewson had brought me up to speed, at least on his version of events.

  I am left with a feeling, given all the allusions to in-fighting, feuding, resignations, ultimatums and petty agendas, that should I consult any of the riders whose careers span back as far as Tony’s does, that I will get as many different versions of the truth as there are men and women to do the telling. But for now, at this table in the very middle of Britain, a few miles from Church Stretton, this one appears cogent, plausible and exciting.

  And all the time Percy Stallard’s figure looms large in the conversation.

  ‘He was our Churchill. He fought the war for us. He was prickly and arrogant. He fell out with almost everyone. He kept resigning and rejoining. He was the right man to fight the war, but the wrong man for the peace. He was a very, very difficult guy.’

  As Tony Hewson tells me this, there is a tightening of the neck muscles, a clouding of the expression, and a slight reddening of his features. Even after all these years, a man who he never met, and who had simply been a talented and dogmatic sports administrator, can inspire passionate loyalty, and command such unexpectedly strong feelings. And then, as Tony finally takes a pause to drink slowly from his tea, which must surely now be cold, I understand why.

  ‘That’s where the heart of cycling resides. Road racing matters. It carries the whole culture of cycling with it. And it’s shaped me.’

  His racing years, dogged by accident and illness, were an education in the most literal sense. To Hewson, raised as a Catholic, and imbued with post-war grammar school virtues, his years in France, trying to make it as a pro, were a liberation, both physically and spiritually. He took a typewriter with him, visited the local library in the village that they finally settled down in, and started to fall in love with the written word. When he wasn’t out on his bike, he was tapping away on the keys.

  ‘Everything I wrote was sub-Hemingway. I had all my heroes dying very dramatically in the arms of their lovers. It was absolute tosh. But at the time, I knew no better. It was the plots and the stories and the drama of Hemingway.’

  I doubt very much that it was tosh. The 1959 Tour ended for him on Stage 7 when, already the last rider in the General Classification, he was told to wait for a teammate. He later abandoned, climbed into the broom wagon and dropped out of the race. It is a capitulation that is perfectly recounted in Hewson’s memoirs In Pursuit of Stardom.

  Next morning I watch the Tour departing for Bordeaux. It’s like that bad dream where the train you want to catch leaves you on the platform, paralysed, its tail-lights disappearing. What do I feel? Stultified, superfluous, like a lump of dough trimmed off a pie and tossed aside.

  When, in his late twenties, the realities of earning a living finally forced him to retire from racing and take up a profession, he tried at first to get into acting, completing a three-year course at Bretton Hall, an institution that would later become famous for producing some of the most radical influences on the contemporary British Theatre in the late twentieth century. From there, he went on to complete an English degree at Leeds University. Already a free-thinker, an ‘outsider’ in his own words, he became radicalised.

  ‘Britain was changing at a hell of a rate. It had been a very stuffy, sort of black-and-white country to be in. You had all the rebel movements at the time. I was a bit of a lefty. Some of the people I knew were Trots.’

  Tony roars with laughter at this recollection. And by ‘roars’ with laughter, I mean just that. I almost jump in my chair as he bellows his amusement across the table at me. ‘They used to go around at night painting the walls with Fuck The System!’

  He attended political debates. Though he had much to say on many issues, he was normally too shy to speak. Indeed, he once found himself sounding off to a bemused stranger in the urinals of a public meeting room.

  ‘I went to have a pee, and said to this bloke that I thought the public schools had been an absolute disaster for the country. He said, “I wish you’d stood up and said that outside.” And I looked across at him. It was Jack Straw.’

  And then, surprisingly, in reference to the former Labour Home Secretary, he quotes from D.H. Lawrence’s The Snake. ‘I lost my chance with one of the Lords of Life.’ Again, the Hewson laugh, but a chuckle this time, not a bellow. It seems a strange way to describe Jack Straw.

  Then I put it to him that this, being the mid-sixties, must have also meant long hair.

  Indeed so. For a while he taught English at a school in Yorkshire, at which he had made himself unpopular by refusing to make the children pray at assembly (‘Oh the hypocrisy!’). So, when he asked the head teacher for a reference so that he could apply for a new job elsewhere, he got what his long hair and generally subversive attitude deserved.

  ‘He gave me a bloody awful reference,’ Tony recalls. An exhaustive list of his shortcomings and general flaws ended in the damning conclusion: ‘This is a man who wears a beard.’

  He got the job, though. And for the next twenty years he taught English and drama in a comprehensive school outside Maidstone in Kent.

  ‘It was a grave mistake to go into teaching. Teachers’ pay was piss poor. And it was such a grind. I thought, I came out of the working class, so I should give something back to the working class.’

  He shakes his head with real sadness. Then he slips inadvertently into an impression of Donald Sinden. ‘Ohhh! It was a great, great mistake!’

  He hated it, retired at fifty-five, and then, together with Kate, ran an antique furniture business, which suited him much better. And now here they both are in Shropshire.

  Two days after I visited Tony Hewson, and in a curious
subversion of everything he stood for in cycling terms, he rode a competitive time trial: the Johnny Helms Memorial 2up TT – the Grand Prix des Gentlemen.

  I could not imagine a more fittingly named race for him to enter in his eightieth year. The Grand Prix des Gentlemen bit speaks for itself, fusing as it does the bipolar nature of Tony Hewson’s anglo-continentalism.

  But the fact that the race was named after Johnny Helms was somehow just as perfect.

  Helms, up until his death in 2009, had contributed cartoons for Cycling magazine. Like his predecessor Frank Patterson, who produced wonderfully affectionate sketches of cycling through rural England, Helms’s work constituted a body of drawings solely dedicated to cycling, a colossal visual library for the devotee. Quite correctly, given the artist’s longevity, dedication and sheer volume of output, they inspire great nostalgia and affection in the cycling community.

  But they are singularly unfunny, spectacularly so.

  They are simple, almost childlike drawings, often featuring dogs, and with jokes which are so straightforward that they are regularly barely more than slightly mundane observations. Look for the layers of meaning all you like, they aren’t there. I am certain that this is a shortcoming in me, and not vice versa. Perhaps the Helms cartoons represent a world to which I, with my Johnny-come-lately ways, will forever be prevented access. But, to me, his cartoons stand as a totem for the unchanging, modest ambition of British cycling over many, many years.

  Either way, I enjoyed the fact that Tony Hewson would be turning out to honour his name. Both men had ridden the waves of British cycling, through their lowest ebbs to this unexpected tidal surge of success. Both men had interpreted, wholly differently, their respective worlds and left a record for posterity.

  Now that Hewson’s health has finally prevented him from fell running or marathons, he has rediscovered the joy of riding a bike. His carbon-fibre Trek, the one that nightly gets stolen from his dream-like grasp outside that ghostly chip shop, lives in the garage alongside the skinny steel frame of the bike on which he rode the Tour de France. And although he ‘bitterly regrets’ buying the Trek, because it is ‘ugly, ugly, ugly’, this is no nostalgist. He has a keen eye firmly fixed on the present. All July he was glued to the television coverage of the Tour de France.

  ‘I can still read a cycle race, you know. I can read what’s going on, why some guys are working and other guys are not working. That smell. The sound of the wheels whirring in your ears. A clinking-clanking of the chains hitting the chain stays.

  ‘Just wonderful’, he concludes.

  But what’s become of the political firebrand, of the old Trot, of the non-conformist? What does he think of the new wave of cyclist pounding up and down the roads on their absurdly expensive bikes? What does he think about the democratisation of cycling in reverse? Doesn’t the class warrior in him object to the rape of a working man’s sport? And what about Sky, for heaven’s sake?

  I have goaded him enough. I sit back, and let him answer.

  ‘Oh, I think that’s wonderful. Wonderful. Wonderful. Wonderful.’

  He pours some more tea.

  ‘I’m such a hypocrite. I sent my daughter to Chetham’s, because of her talent for the piano. We ended up sending our own daughter to a private school! If I’d stuck to my principles, we’d have said no, no, no, no.’

  He takes a long, thoughtful sip. ‘But we change, you know. As life goes on, it teaches us to change.’

  For Hewson, the adventure in British cycling has spanned his lifetime. What began in 1942, when he was just nine years old, has not yet reached its endgame.

  ‘What has happened is the best thing that could ever have happened to cycling in this country. It’s what we used to dream of in the 1950s. Percy Stallard. It was his dream that one day there’d be a winner of the Tour de France from these shores. We’ve had to wait seventy years for that.’

  Last September, when the 2012 Tour of Britain started a stage in Welshpool just a few miles up the road, Tony Hewson was asked along as a guest of honour. He had taken the leader’s jersey in the Welsh stage of the Tour of Britain in 1955. And here he now was, invited back to the race and after a fifty-seven-year absence, to greet the riders as they signed on.

  He was greatly looking forward to meeting Bradley Wiggins.

  ‘I was hoping against hope that I’d bump into him. But the message came through that he wasn’t going to ride.’ Wiggins had succumbed to a stomach bug, it seemed, and abandoned overnight. Tony Hewson, who had driven down to the start in the hope of shaking him by the hand, and meeting the man who finished what he, among others, had begun, was left high and dry.

  ‘So again, I lost my chance with one of the Lords Of Life.’ And this time there is no chuckle.

  It was only now, leaving the Golden Placket after a promise to return and a heartfelt handshake, that I realise how my understanding of what it is to be a British cyclist has been framed and formed by those who have, one way or another, done it differently. Perhaps I had skirted the real issue, shied away from the truth that, for many, the club run, the time trial, the lay-by and annual dinner among friends was enough, more than enough. For many, it began and ended here.

  But not for everyone.

  I had, instinctively, been drawn to men like Tony Hewson, like Maurice Burton, like Graham Webb, like Mick Bennett, men who had spoken to me about yearning for elsewhere, for something else. Ian Meek, too. And David Millar. The act of escape, of getting away, implied a destination elsewhere, a trip into the other. The bikes ridden by these men, and by all of us who share the same desires, have a will of their own. They could steer themselves.

  Maybe Rapha were onto something after all.

  I drove back down to London, listening all the way to the whistling of the wind blowing across the tiny gaps that my roof rack had ripped open. My bike sat dismantled and wounded in the boot. I was keen to get it mended, and get it out on the road. After all, that’s what a bike is for.

  FORETHOUGHT

  BELGIUM. THE BLANK canvas, the barren landscape. Belgium, just over the water. Belgium, the insurmountable obstacle, flattened to the sky, threatened by the sea.

  I travelled there for work. The start of the 2012 Tour de France was in Liège. It was to be the tenth Tour that I would cover for ITV, if you include the first few during which I floundered about like a salmon in a bear pit.

  A decade then, all in all, spent moving through the gears of the great race; from Armstrong’s dope-fuelled jihad, through the more-or-less chaotic aftershock of those tainted years and into a vaguely brighter, probably cleaner, certainly more human future.

  But some immutable things, through these turbulent years had remained constant: our difference and our deference; our otherness. We, charged with the duty of bringing the race back home to Britain, were never under any illusion as to our minor place in the grand scheme of things. Despite Mark Cavendish’s serial heroics in his very particular skill, despite Bradley Wiggins’s exceptional ride in 2009, when he somehow finished fourth (third if you discount Lance Armstrong), we never really troubled the scorers. We lived off scraps, scavenging at the margins of a race that belonged to someone else, somewhere else.

  Even when Team Sky appeared to trumpet their preposterous ambitions across the water at a laughingly sceptical Continent, things fell predictably, Britishly, flat. Wiggins flopped in 2010 and crashed in 2011. And that had been that. Plus ça change, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

  Until, that is, the summer of 2012 came along, when Britain grabbed France by the throat, turned it upside down and emptied its pockets.

  Liège. The eve of the Tour.

  The doors open, and into the glare walk Mark Cavendish, Bradley Wiggins, Chris Froome and the six other members of Team Sky. The sight that greets them exceeds their expectations. All of them are experienced media campaigners, all of them have been the subject of press conferences, but the scale of interest here, the number of camera crews, reporters and
photographers, is unlike anything they’ve seen before. Suddenly, and in the case of Bradley Wiggins specifically, they realise the reality of the burden they will have to bear round France for the next three weeks. They are the favourites to win the Tour de France. Wiggins is the favourite. This is the scrutiny their effort will invite, day after day.

  ‘Jesus Christ.’ Wiggins’s appears to be temporarily wrong-footed, but is still, refreshingly, unable to refrain from swearing in public. That much, too, is expected of him.

  Nothing much emerges from the press conference. There is a tiredness in the responses to simplistic questions that is entirely understandable. How else can you answer, ‘Do you feel confident that you can win the Tour de France?’ other than with the obvious, cautionary, ‘I feel confident in my own ability, but we’ll have to see how the race unfolds.’

  Wiggins understands he is being bland, but can do nothing about it. We are in the neutralised zone, the roll-out to the race itself. There is no evidence one way or another yet. Only hope and nerves.

  Outside, once the ludicrous formalities of the pre-race press conference are finally put to one side, there is a brief semi-regal walkabout from Bradley Wiggins. He slouches across the car park, saving energy with every lazy stride, towards where a cluster of important people has gathered by the team bus.

  On his way over there, he is stopped by a member of the public, with whom he poses for a picture. That done, he politely declines to shake the outstretched hand, for fear of picking up last-minute infections. By the time he reaches the cluster of VIPs, he has mysteriously abandoned such principles of hygiene, and warmly shakes the hands of Fausto Pinarello, who owns the eponymous bike brand. So it seems that not all bacteria are equal.

  As we drive away from their hotel, and back to ours over the Dutch border in Maastricht, I ask Chris Boardman what he makes of Wiggins’s frame of mind, which is not always easy to read, but which can have a huge impact on his performance.

  ‘I’d have said he’s just very happy,’ is Chris’s assessment of the man he mentored through the early years of his career. ‘Why wouldn’t he be? He’s ridden the year to perfection, and he knows he can win the Tour de France. That’s not a bad place to be.’