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2009-06-02T23:14:00.001-07:00

A Wheel Within A Wheel, Frances E Willard (1895)

2009-03-18T13:44:00.001-07:00

Fleming H Revel 1 55707 449 7 Paberback 75pp republished by Applewood Books

How a 53-year-old American suffragette learned to ride a bicycle against her own and societies’ expectations on the eve of the twentieth century

The idea today that learning to ride a bicycle is an improbable challenge – even for those in advanced middle aged – is hard to appreciate. In this modest tome, however, Williard explains, in near pedal-by-pedal detail – how she accomplished the task, over three months, practicing for quarter of an hour a day.

She clearly intended the book to serve as an inspiration to other women to follow her wheels: for their health; for the adventure cycling brings; and, for the joy of mastering a difficult process. At this distance, however, much more is evident from her words.

Women’s clothing was clearly an issue – she described the impracticality of crinoline, hoops and restrictive corsets; as well as describing her own cycling uniform, ‘a simple, modest suit, to which no person of common sense could take exception’.

There was prejudice, too. Many men, according to Willard, clearly thought that acquiring the skill of cycling was beyond the mental and physical wit of a woman. Her satisfaction as dispelling such ideas – particularly given her age – is considerable.

This is not a shrill polemic that finds men responsible for all the world’s woes, however. More than anything, it is a paean in praise of pedalpushing. Consider the inherent democracy of cycling, for example: ‘Happily there is now another locomotive contrivance which is no flatterer, and which peasant and prince must master if they do this at all, by the democratic route of honest hard work’. Or, the bicycles’ role in promoting a good state of mind: ‘When the wheel of the mind went well, then the rubber wheel hummed merrily’.

Grainy, black-and-white pictures of Willard bestriding ‘Gladys’, her bicycle provide an added dimension to her tale.

The prose style is from an age when writers were expected to serve readers up with a decently filling dish, no matter how stodgy that made the narrative. But the unfamiliar flavours and textures of this treatise are worth chewing over, if only for a fleeting flavour of the unprecedented liberation that bicycles brought in their infancy.

PS Mar 09

A Wheel Within A Wheel, Frances E Willard (1895)

2009-03-18T13:44:00.000-07:00

Fleming H Revel 1 55707 449 7 Paberback 75pp republished by Applewood Books

How a 53-year-old American suffragette learned to ride a bicycle against her own and societies’ expectations on the eve of the twentieth century

The idea today that learning to ride a bicycle is an improbable challenge – even for those in advanced middle aged – is hard to appreciate. In this modest tome, however, Williard explains, in near pedal-by-pedal detail – how she accomplished the task, over three months, practicing for quarter of an hour a day.

She clearly intended the book to serve as an inspiration to other women to follow her wheels: for their health; for the adventure cycling brings; and, for the joy of mastering a difficult process. At this distance, however, much more is evident from her words.

Women’s clothing was clearly an issue – she described the impracticality of crinoline, hoops and restrictive corsets; as well as describing her own cycling uniform, ‘a simple, modest suit, to which no person of common sense could take exception’.

There was prejudice, too. Many men, according to Willard, clearly thought that acquiring the skill of cycling was beyond the mental and physical wit of a woman. Her satisfaction as dispelling such ideas – particularly given her age – is considerable.

This is not a shrill polemic that finds men responsible for all the world’s woes, however. More than anything, it is a paean in praise of pedalpushing. Consider the inherent democracy of cycling, for example: ‘Happily there is now another locomotive contrivance which is no flatterer, and which peasant and prince must master if they do this at all, by the democratic route of honest hard work’. Or, the bicycles’ role in promoting a good state of mind: ‘When the wheel of the mind went well, then the rubber wheel hummed merrily’.

Grainy, black-and-white pictures of Willard bestriding ‘Gladys’, her bicycle provide an added dimension to her tale.

The prose style is from an age when writers were expected to serve readers up with a decently filling dish, no matter how stodgy that made the narrative. But the unfamiliar flavours and textures of this treatise are worth chewing over, if only for a fleeting flavour of the unprecedented liberation that bicycles brought in their infancy.

PS Mar 09

Its Not About The Tapas, Polly Evans (2003)

2009-03-11T07:22:00.000-07:00

Bantam Books 0 553 81556 3 Paperback 301pp £6.99

An enjoyable account of a solo bicycle journey made around parts of Spain made (probably) in 2002. It would serve as a good primer to Spain but also have something for those who know the country well

Burned out and brassed off in Hong Kong, Evans decides to cycle around Spain. It is a familiar, if not downright unpromising pretext. But Evans is a good writer with a genuine knowledge of and love for Spain. Examining the map at the start of the book, it is clear that her tour did not really take in much of Spain at all – she rides from San Sebastian to Barcelona, tours a little in Andalucía and Extremadura, and crosses to Madrid.

However, her grasp of Spain is sufficient for this to provide a framework on which to paint a convincing picture of the country in the early years of the twenty first century. She deals confidently, if light-heartedly with both historical context and the recent dash for modernity. Here she is introducing an explanation of Spain’s monarchy.

‘When Louis XIV of France said: “There are no more Pyrenees”, he was clearly misinformed. He had blatantly not bundled his freshly powdered wig under a cycling helmet, stuffed his spare velvet knickerbockers in to a very tiny pannier and tried cycling from Versailles down to Spain.”
Dealing with everything from Iberian food, to the fashion sense of elderly Spainish women, she maintains a similarly well-informed, but jocular tone.

Her excursion into Extremadura also marks out this book. This huge area is thinly populated, little know and infrequently visited by outsiders. For those reasons it is far more like ‘old’ Spain that any of those areas served by low-cost airlines. Evans enthusiasm for the area is reason enough for more people to venture north of Jerez.

PS Mar 09

Put Me Back On My Bike – In Search Of Tom Simpson, William Fotheringham (2002)

2009-03-11T00:44:00.000-07:00

Yellow Jersey Press 978 0224 08018 7 Paperback 254pp £8.99

An account of the life of the British star of 1960s cycling that raises the bar for cycling biography
It is curious to reflect now on what an enigma Tom Simpson was during the 35 years after his demise as he raced up Ventoux in the 1967 Tour de France. Fotheringham opens with a screening of Ray Pascoe’s film Something To Aim At. For most of us, this was the only source of biographical information about the man widely described as ‘Britain’s greatest cyclist’.

By the late 1990s, when Fotheringham started work on this book, the precise details of Simpson’s demise had entered space of part knowledge, part rumour. Even his fans would assert that ‘it was drugs that killed him’, but it was rare to meet anyone who could recite the details with any kind of accuracy. The surprise is that it took as long as it did for someone of Fothingham’s talent to apply themselves to this subject. But then in the past decade, British cycling has been unusually blessed with high quality writers applying themselves to a whole range of bicycle-related subject matter. Of them, Fotheringham is among the best.

The book traces Simpson from the Nottinghamshire mining village, where he grew up to the top of the European cycle racing scene, drawing on dozens of interviews with friends, family members and professional colleagues. Along the way, he paints evocative pictures of everything from the amateur cycling scene in northern England in the mid-1950s to the experience of moving to and living in Europe.

There is much in this book from which Simpson’s humour and humanity shines out. He was clearly a gifted athlete and an engaging personality. It is in his account of the sometime world champion’s demise, however, that Fotheringham excels himself. His analysis is forensic and his evidence far too weighty for his conclusion to be in doubt – a massive dose of amphetamines caused Simpson’s body to fatally overheat. Indeed, the shock of the revised edition of 2007 is the revelation that Simpson experience a drug-induced collapse during the Vuelta earlier in 1967, that saw him zig sagging across the road in what was pretty much a rehearsal for the more famous incident.

That this book so successfully nails the drug issue is reason enough to commend it, but it is, nonetheless, a hugely enjoyable read. At the end, however, it is impossible to argue with Fotheringham’s conclusion:

“Simpson should be remembered as an impulsive, intelligent, articulate and supremely charismatic man who had a single blind spot: his need to win at any cost. He was not a bad man, nor a foolish one, nor was he unprofessional in his approach to his sport, but he chose to join others in cheating and got caught in the most dramatic way imaginable.”

PS Mar 09

The Hour, Michael Hutchinson (2006)

2009-03-09T03:15:00.000-07:00

Yellow Jersey 9780224075190 paperback 278pp £11.99

An engaging account of Hutchinson’s preparation for, and attempt on, the hour record, taking in much of the history and mythology of the record along the way

Bookshop shelves groan under the weight of accounts of contrived ‘quests’. It is an effective, if well-worn format. Picking this up casually one might assume that it was another such outing. It takes precious few pages to dispel such misapprehensions.

Hutchinson still is a top flight British tester (technically he is from Northern Ireland, but he has been based in England during the entirety of his cycling career). His decision to attack Chris Boardman’s ‘athletes’ hour’ record was far from the goofy pie-in-the sky ambition that he occasionally implies. Nonetheless, his account of how he went about trying to put his name in the record books is a rich, well-researched and revelatory page turner.

Interspersing in his account of his own efforts, Hutch tells a lot of cycling’s less-well-known tales: the NCU/BLRC split, Francesco Moser’s many, many attempts at hour titles (and Mick Jagger’s witnessing of at least one of them), and Roger Riviere’s drug fuelled trip around the track.
The book – and indeed, his attempt on the record – work because of the curious place that ‘the hour’ occupies in the cycling firmament. For long periods of its history, the record has been ignored. Both the Mercyx and the Moser records of 1972 and 1984 endured for close on a decade, or longer. At other times there has been frenetic activity in pursuit of the prize – most notably the Oscar Egg/Marcel Berthet rivalry in the 1910s and the many successful challenges to the record during the mid 1990s.

Since the establishment of the ‘athlete’s hour’ in 2000, however, cycling’s blue ribbon has been all but forgotten. So, its a real record, that has been contested by many of cycling’s biggest names, but it is not quite outside the bounds of possibility that a hapless unknown, as Hutch paints himself, could be seriously in contention.

His narrative is aided significantly by the extraordinary behaviour of the UCI towards those interested in trying to add their names to the record books. Making up rules on the hoof is patently unfair, and did much to hamper our have-a-go hero – but they provide the story with a comedy subtext that it would otherwise lack.

Those who don’t read the British cycling press might not know how this story concludes, so I won’t spoil the ending. If I have one complaint, however, it is that there is not rather more Nick Hornbyesque self-discovery – particularly at the end of the book. Did the endeavour change him? Is his girlfriend still at his side? Is he now applying himself to some more mundane challenge? Having wheeled along beside him from the byways of Antrim to the Manchester velodrome, I would have enjoyed a little more narrative resolution.

PS Mar 09

Roule Britannia, William Fotheringham (2005)

2009-02-25T12:34:00.000-08:00

Yellow Jersey Press 0 224 074253 290pp Octo £15.99

A highly readable history of British participation in the Tour de France 1955 – 2004

It is a curious thing being a British cycling fan. Bicycle sport can’t be claimed as an underground interest any longer – Channel Four used to attract audiences of 5 million in the hey day of their tour coverage, and London could scarcely have made a greater spectacle of hosting the Tour’s depart in 2007. But, because there are sports that are so, so much bigger - sports that are woven thick through the national culture - there is still something of the outsider about us bikies.

Only our perception of our marginal place in the country’s grand scheme can have made heroes out of the nation’s rosta of professional bicycle racers. Taken together and subjected to objective scrutiny, they do not amount to a hill of beans. In the entire history of the tour, as a nation, we have not produced a single top three finish, have only one won a jersey of any kind (Robert Millar’s 1984 Mountain’s prize), and have won fewer stages than countries with one tenth of our population.

And yet, I for one, have hung on the performance of every British tour rider, at least since Barry Hoban. I have willed Robert Millar out of the pack; saluted Sean Yates sturdy performance of duty; thrilled to Chris Boardman’s electrifying prologues, and; spent five hours in a baking sun just to watch Max Sciandri pluck defeat from the jaws of victory. It has been a meagre diet of victories. But, perhaps as studies of the health those brought up on WW2 rations have shown, thin pickings can be the most nutritionally beneficial.

William Fotheringham’s account of this history is masterful and frequently touching. Even where riders have been the subject of quality biographies – say like Millar - he finds new angles. He may not touch Jeff Connor’s account of the ANC/Halfords 1987 debacle for laughs – but he provides enough make a good case for seeking out Wide Eyed and Legless. And in the case of David Millar, the rider with whom Fotheringham’s book closes, he has done the best job of explaining his troubled persona that I have yet read.

Roule Britannia is actually at its most affecting when Fotheringham touches on his own cycling back story. It is used to provide only the most occasional linking fibre to the narrative, but I would happily have read a whole lot more.

Of course this is a story that has now moved on. In the 2008 Tour Mark Cavendish served up four stage victories – as much to digest in one race as British fans had to contend with in the preceding decade. And, Team GB’s cycling Golds at the Beijing Olympics provided a further eight course feast of success. So much triumphal fois gras after a century of gruel may prove a challenge to our constitutions. But, hey, who can blame someone who has walked through the desert for gorging themselves now that they have reached the waterhole?

PS February 09

Mountain Bike Maintenance, Rob Van Der Plas (2007)

2009-02-20T12:11:00.000-08:00

Cycle Publishing/Van Der Plas Publications 1 892495 53 8 Octo 176pp $16.95/£10.95

Lavishly illustrated in colour, this is a very competently written and assembled guide to fixing most things on most bikes, as well as such mountain-bike specific jobs, such as servicing your suspension

There is a tension at the heart of cycle culture. On the one hand, part of the appeal of cycling is that it stands apart from late-period capitalism. Bicycles span more than a century – scarcely changed as a piece of technology. One can be had for peanuts, and riding it costs not a groat. So, by doing so you enter a real, wind-in-your-hair world, that stands apart from the oil-guzzling simulacra of majority culture.

On the other hand, without effectively making and selling things, there would be no bicycles. Cycling requires the on-going invigoration provided by new techniques in production, sales and marketing . Modern groupsets, for example, are fantastically better than their 1970s counterparts – but keeping up with Campagnolo and Shimano’s planned obsolescence and Chinese-menu marketing methods is endlessly frustrating.

This book is a product of that tension. It is a simple, effective guide to cycle maintenance that should allow all but the mechanically dyslexic to keep their cycles on the road. By doing so, those wielding spanners and hex wrenches will be taking their own little stand against the ‘buy it, don’t use it, chuck-it-away’ current that flows the modern world.

But one can’t help but wish that a single book should serve for all bicycle maintenance needs. Of the 18 chapters in this book, only three (disk brakes, front suspension and rear suspension) are mountain-bike specific. True, for someone who simply wants to maintain their mountain bike, they will purchase no needless chapters on brake-lever-control gears, for example. Such guidance doesn’t take up much of more general guides, however.

Van Der Plas is a titan of cycle maintenance publishing, and clearly need to make a living to keep his company afloat. And any business school will tell you that they more products you can create from the same stock of intellectual capital, the more you will sell.

Part of me admires him for rebottling his ideas with such verve. Part of me wishes that it was possible for someone of his standing to commit all his best ideas to a single volume and sit back happy in knowledge that such a publication was in the spirit of cycling.

Pedalspinner Feb 09

Into The Remote Places, Ian Hibell (1984)

2009-02-13T09:27:00.001-08:00

Robson Books 0 86051 253 X Octo 204pp £8.95

An episodic account of cycle journeys made in the early 1970s across the Darien gap, south through Africa (including the Sahara) and west-east across South America from Lima to Recife in Brazil

Hibell is accorded a high plinth indeed among adventurous cycle tourists. He is cited approvingly by everyone from Josie Dew to Bernard Magnaloux and copies of this book are now reputed to change hands for hundreds of pounds. It is a deserved reputation. Into The Remote Places recounts adventures of spectacular audacity – most notably crossing the Darien Gap and the Sahara.

Since his untimely death, obiturists have adopted a kind of short hand to describe his most extraordinary moments: ‘rescued from certain death in the desert by Tuareg tribesmen, chased by spear wielding Turkana in northern Kenya and savaged by soldier ants in South America’. Taken alone, the Boys Own adventures would make this book worth reading. But its really special quality is Hibell’s self-effacing, humble attitude to himself. He paints himself as a very ordinary man, doing extraordinary things, without his modesty ever seeming false. Possibly it is this that makes it easy to project yourself into his cycle shoes – even if you are never actually going to pedal further than the shops.

He paints some vivid pictures of the scenes that he has encountered too. Here he is when he found himself amid a herd of elephants:

“Now there were currents of elephants; streams that flowed this way that that. I was a rowing boat in the midst of a regatta, a wheelchair patient negotiating the M1 on a bank holiday weekend. I sought and found the protection of another tree and pressing myself up against its rough bark, closed my eyes.”

Or, having a hard time of it in the Sahara:

“Three days. 147 kilometres. The afternoons were interminable. Dullness overpowered me. I might have been walking on the moon; for all I knew the day’s journey took ten years. Only at the ransom of my other faculties could I put one foot out before the other. And even then I would count, very slowly to one hundred. By that time my
dizziness would have disappeared and I would get to my feet and stagger on.”

There are also interesting reflections from an age now long passed. His sympathies for general set up in Rhodesia, as it then was, are illuminating given his liberal instincts and his long immersion in the rest of Africa.

The book is not without its curiosities. Hibell makes his final journey with ‘Jean’, a young woman he met at a lecture he was giving in the UK between his journeys in Africa and Peru. Love blossoms between them, but when ‘Jean’ returns to Britain early, Hibell starts to pine. And before he has reached, the Atlantic she has written to him to let him know that she was pregnant. Hibell is delighted and happily starts to fantasise about family life, marriage and a simple cottage with a door framed by rambling roses.

This does give the end of his narrative a very strong, human conclusion. But it also sits rather oddly in a travel book of this kind. Indeed, in the age of the internet it is almost impossible not to seek out further instalments. This turns up any number of gems – not least Hibell’s appearance of Blue Peter.

It also becomes clear, however, that the relationship did not thrive and the author was soon in search of yet more remote places.

It is a bittersweet revelation. The human desire for a happy ending is unfulfilled; but, hero Hibell, the unassuming global circumnavigator, emerges intact from the clutches of domesticity.

PS February 09

Sex, Lies And Handlebar Tape, Paul Howard (2008)

2009-02-11T06:33:00.000-08:00

Mainstream 9781845963019 Quarto 317pp £17.99

A biography of Jacques Anquetil, the dominant racing cyclist of the late 50s and early 60s, including his highly unconventional post-career family life

Forty years after Anquetil hung up his wheels, he continues to be a fascinating character. The first of the five-time Tour de France winners, he is one of the most famous examples of a sportsman who won races but not hearts. Despite his glittering palmares, the French public always preferred his great rival, Raymond Poulidor – the eternal second, as he was know.

More recently, Anquetil has returned to the headlines after the curious twists and turns of his relationships came to light. In 2004, his grand daughter, Sophie, wrote Pour l’Amour De Jacques (Editions Grasset) in which she explained all. Anquetil had an affair with, and subsequently married, his doctor’s wife, Jeanine. Together they brought up her two children – until, Anquetil started an affair with his wife’s then 18 year old daughter, who he also impregnated. They lived as a ménage a trios, with daughter/grand daughter Sophie, for 12 years, until the retired cyclist took up with his stepson’s wife.

The inspiration for this book was clearly this latter aspect of the star’s life. To get to that, however, you must work your way through a long and illustrious competitive career.

Howard has done a creditable job of this, citing numerous team mates, childhood friends and journalists who knew Anquetil while his star was in the ascendant. There is an enduring fascination in such a sporting phenomenon. On some important issues, Howard is wanting, however. Anquetil openly admitted taking performance-enhancing drugs, for example. Several recent books – such as William Fotheringham’s biography of Tom Simpson - have taken an almost forensic approach to this issue. Howard mentions it, but does not nail it satisfactorily.

Nor is there enough, beyond the basics of a rider biography, to make this book seem worth the effort. More of a flavour of France at that time, and the place that cycle racing enjoyed within it, would have better justified publication – but there is precious little of that kind of detail between its covers.

There is the sex – the subject of 20 pages at the end of the book. It is a pretty stomach-churning tale, but Howard can’t really make up his mind whether his subject is a reprobate or a hero whose ‘superior powers’ placed him above conventional morality. Perhaps he simply didn’t want to offend those of his family and fans who continue to be forgiving of this side of the ‘Viking of Quancampoix’. I found myself mentally bracketing Anquetil with the Fred Wests and the Josef Fritzls of this world.

PS February 09

Travels With Rosinante, Bernard Magnouloux (1988)

2009-02-05T03:49:00.000-08:00

Grafton Books 0 586 20828 3 paperback 252pp £5.99

A compelling account of a five-year, minimal-budget, round-the-world cycle journey starting in 1980. The author took in: Europe; the length of Africa, travelling south; the length of south America, travelling north; the USA travelling east though the southern states and then crossing to California; China to Nepal and some major excursions in India and Pakistan

To judge from his picture on the book’s cover, Magnoloux is the sort of person who might cause your heart to drop if he joined you in a railway carriage. He is using sacks for panniers, has a filthy suitcase strapped to his rack and is dressed as though from a charity shop he visited several thousand kilometres ago. But suspend your prejudices, for he has a compelling tale to tell and a considerable gift for expression – particularly given that his first language is French.

He cycled about 48,000 miles (76,988 kilometers), lived on an average of £2 per day and did most of the trip on a bicycle for which he paid just £15. Given the scope of his experiences, this is actually a very slender book, each of the 30 chapters recounting his highlights in some of the 45 countries through which he journeyed.

What plans he had, he appears to have made from maps copied down by chance at frontier posts and in airports. He lived among the people whose countries he visited – sometimes working as a labourer to raise funds, elsewhere, giving lectures on his journey. In some respects his experiences might seem like the boilerplate expectations of such a passage – robbed at gun point, fleeced at borders, shown enormous kindness by some of the poorest people, and the opposite from a few of the richest. But he tells his tales with a compassionate authenticity that gives them all - even his few amorous encounters – the stimulating grit of quality reportage.

It would be interesting to know more about Magnoloux himself. He describes himself variously as a stonemason (at which he is clearly skilled) and an author. Throughout the book he demonstrates his ability with languages. He is able to immerse himself sufficiently to pick up some native words nearly everywhere he visits, and he provides snapshots of dialogue and their translations in half a dozen tongues. And, as no translator is mentioned, one has to assume he wrote this book in English. What he has done since then, I have been unable to discover – but would be fascinated to know, if anyone can shed some light.

He also provides only a hint at what propelled him pedalling on this lonely, frequently hungry, quest. In Tibet he found himself contemplating the motivations of the pilgrims to Lhasa.

“I wondered if, under the surface, there is such a difference between the Tibetan pilgrim who prostrates himself every three steps for 2,000 miles on his way to Lhasa and the European cyclist pushing his pedals every couple of yards for 4,000 miles around the world.

“Is religious piety the real motivation for the Tibetan? Isn’t it more general – a kind of social pressure, or the force of tradition? And isn’t it exactly the same for the European?

“To go around the world has become, for young Westerners, the social and cultural equivalent of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for medieval Christians, to Mecca for present-day Muslims and to Lhasa for Tibetans. This thirst for travel, it seems to me, is a new form of initiation, a new set of atheistic rituals...”

The resultof his initiation is a fascinating picture of the world during the time of Magnoulox’ adventuring. It would also be a useful primer for anyone contemplating a similar venture. His broad brush impressions might well help with general route planning – Muslim countries are friendly, Africa is friendly, south America unfriendly, the US friendly, but full of cars; and in India, the village crowds who mob a western cyclist make progress near impossible.

The appendices, which aim to give more practical advice to would-be travelers, clearly cannot be depended upon given that the book was published 20 years ago – but in many of the less developed countries they are probably still as useful as ever.

For those of us less adventurous, his book provides a transport far beyond the railway carriage.

PS February 09

Bicycling Illustrated Bicycle Maintenance, Todd Downs (2005)

2009-02-03T03:59:00.000-08:00

Rodale 1 4050 8788 9 Quarto 320pp £17.99

A comprehensive repair manual that is rich in step-by-step photos and exploded diagrams aimed at the most serious end of the consumer market

This venerable publishing institution has been in production – in various guises – for more than 20 years. Nonetheless, this edition is up-to-date in its coverage and modern in its presentation. From brake-lever gear controls, to sealed bearing headsets and servicing SPD pedals, it has everything that a modern bicycle owner could need. It goes well beyond routine servicing and maintenance jobs, and includes such puzzlers as removing and replacing cottered cranks and disassembling a cassette. It does not include wheel building or realigning frames – in other words it covers everything that a home mechanic might contemplate undertaking with only a book for instruction.

If I have one criticism it is that the book is a bit wordy and dense. A manual of this kind does not promise to be a laugh a minute, but there does seem to be an awful lot of text for the amount of information that it actually imparts.

It also throws up a question. Just how do you gain the experience that you need to start really taking bicycles apart?

Bicycling’s guide tries hard to cover all the bases. Gear systems from Campagnolo and Shimano, components old and new. But everyone knows that as soon as the printing presses roll, new components will appear whose servicing the book does not describe. And yet, millions of home mechanics will capably dismantle and revitalise such components without recourse to any kind of manual. Most of them will probably have started off in adolescence with a book such as this one. It is the repeated pulling apart of mechanisms and then reversing that process from which they have really acquired the skills to make bikes work, however, as well as the occasional steer from someone more experienced than themselves.

To put it another way, Illustrated Bicycle Maintenance is arguably the most comprehensive cycle maintenance manual available in bookshops today – but it won’t make a bicycle mechanic of you until your copy has oily marks on at least half the pages.

PS January 09

Cycling In The French Alps, Paul Henderson (2005)

2009-01-29T06:57:00.000-08:00

Cicerone 1 85284 445 0 Paperback 217pp £14

A detailed guide to eight, multi-day cycle tours in the Alps including numerous colour photographs, route itineraries and ride profiles

Had this book been written by a life-long cyclist, then chances are its impressions of the Alps would have been framed by the routes and riders of the great tours. But it was not. Cicerone are an ambitious publisher with a good many cycling titles in their catalogue – but whose starting point is mountaineering.

In many respects this is refreshing. Far more awesome than the spectacle of, say, the Tour de France, are the mountains themselves and it is good to focus on them without the second hand perspective of the feats of Bahamontes or Pantani.

The ‘eight classic cycle tours’ through which Henderson guides us are each multi-day excursions. He envisages in his Tour of the Ain, for example, spending six days, covering between 46 and 77 kilometers a day. Daily height gain varies from 500 to 1197 meters per day.

This would certainly be a fabulous way to spend a week – although for many cyclists the schedule is perhaps a little unambitious. You don’t have to be a Category 1 racer to be able to comfortably contemplate double the daily distance and a height gain of 2000 meters over that period. Still, there is no reason why one should not cover Henderson’s routes in half the number of days.

For each route, the book provides detailed directions, showing each turn that you should take over the course of the route. Such information is critical in the mountains, as the roads are generally few and wrong turns can prove disastrous. These pages would be easy to copy and keep in your back pocket – or simpler still, programe into your GPS.

There is also a lot of good general information and some spectacular illustration. I would certainly consult this if I were planning a summer trip to the Alps. I would find it hard not to cross reference it with a guide to the climbs of the Tour before completely settling my plans

PS January 09

Simple Bicycle Repair, Rob Van Der Plas (2004)

2009-01-29T06:53:00.000-08:00

Cycle Publishing 1 892495 43 0 Paperback 96pp £5.95 $9.95

A pocket-sized, colour-illustrated guide to all basic aspects of cycle maintenance that could usefully be kept in most tool boxes

Another handy publication from the Van Der Plas publishing empire. The small size of this volume is actually an advantages as it makes it easier to keep to hand where you actually work on your bike, or keep it in your pannier if you are touring, just in case you a struck by a breakdown that is beyond your experience.

There is both line and photographic illustration on every page – but there is less than in the larger volumes. Nonetheless, most jobs should be easy to follow and complete with the author’s guidance. My only beef with all such books is that they, understandably, illustrate them using brand-new bicycles, in spotless workshops. My experience is that the bike that breaks down is both filthy and pretty worn, by the time I start to pull it apart in my messy yard. Still, perhaps that is the argument for following Steve Snowling’s advice on bicycle cleaning.

PS January 09

Bicycles – read and learn, Lola Schaefer (2003)

2009-01-29T06:42:00.000-08:00

Raintree 1 844 21383 8 Quarto 24pp £4.99

A colourful paperback aimed at young readers, probably in the first years of primary school
A nice, simple book from a series based on means of transport (the others are busses, cars and trains). Each spread has a couple of pictures and four easy sentences explaining about different kinds of bicycle – from BMX, to track bikes and mountain bikes.

It would a fun book to give to and read with a child that you were hoping to interest in cycling. Ideally, it might be used to tee up the arrival of that child’s first bicycle.

PS Jan 09

The Wind In My Wheels, Josie Dew (1992)

2009-01-27T08:02:00.000-08:00

Warner 0 7515 0249 9 paperback 368pp £6.99

An account of journeys made in the late 1980s including most of Europe, the UK, Ireland, North Africa, Canada, India and Romania

This was Dew’s first book (she has written seven at the time of 2009). An enthusiastic cyclist since her childhood in the south of England, she started touring more ambitiously in her mid teens. The cover promises that, at the time of this publication, she has covered ‘four continents, 36 countries and 80,000 miles’, and her accounts of most of them are contained in this book. Whereas her subsequent books are based on journeys that appear to have been devised to deliver books, this is the summation of her travels up to this point.

She makes little of her courage or her eccentricity – although both are there in charming spade fulls. Precious few young women dedicate themselves to adventuring by bicycle, and yet Dew makes it sound like the most normal, natural thing imaginable. Not only that, but she fashioned her working life around her desire for regular long cycle adventures – she runs a catering service, towing ingredients around London on a trailer behind her bike.

Her approach is impressionistic and humorous. There is occasional cultural contextualisation – Granada is the ‘city that Lorca loved’, but he was shot close by early in Spain’s civil war, she explains. But for the most part, she is more interested in shopkeepers, bed and breakfast proprietors and encounters with passers by, than culture, architecture or topography. Much space is also devoted to the challenges of cycling in countries where a lone female on a bicycle is a rare visitor.

Here she is, for example, toward the end of a lengthy passage on the difficulties she had with a routine bodily function in Morocco.

“I sprang full-bladdered from my cycle to retire safely behind a rock, which promptly came to life. It turned out to be a big and startled Arab who had been peacefully snoozing among the genuine rocks in the landscape”. Thereafter Dew developed a technique whereby a cycling cape doubled as a portaloo.

At times her prose is pedestrian – her nose was ‘red as Rudolph’s’, Poland was ‘poverty stricken’ and Finland was ‘flat’. But the quick fire jump from country to country keeps the pages turning.
At this distance, the one thing missing from the books is some more precise dates (which may have been sorted out in more recent editions, or might perhaps in editions to come). For example, her travels in Ireland are nearly always troubled by fears of the IRA – an interesting indicator of how the Provisionals got into the British psyche during their 30 years of active campaigning. Dew crosses into Hungary ‘after the collapse of the Cold War’. But if we know precisely when this was, her observations would have greater value today.

Nonetheless, the journal bowls along pleasurably over an enormous number of miles – and provides a very reassuring proof that whatever is the addictive magic of cycling, both sexes are susceptible.

PS January 09

News from Tartary – a journey from Peking to Kashmir, Peter Fleming (1936)

2009-01-27T05:35:00.000-08:00

Jonathan Cape Quarto 384pp

An account of a famous 3,500 trek through China and into India

This is clearly not a book about cycling. However, Fleming’s journey, and the means by which he accomplished it have a good deal in common with some of the ‘epic trip’ cycling books, and for that reason I have included it here.

Fleming made the 3,500 mile exploration in 1935. At that time neither was there a road or railway that covered this route. There had also been civil wars and violent skirmishing between local chieftains, Soviet Russia and nationalist China. It was an Odyssey so outlandish and dangerous that it is hard to conceive of its modern equivalent. Even so, in his introduction Fleming dryly notes that: “The trouble with journeys nowadays is that they are easy to make but difficult to justify” (an epithet that has more resonance with each passing day).

His ostensible reason for making the trip is that few outside the region – save for those seeking to make inroads in the area, such as Moscow – had any reliable idea of what was going on there. Fleming was acting as special correspondent for The Times (of London). So, two thirds of the way through his account, he pauses to offer his assessment of what was the political situation at that time. Broadly speaking, the Russians were seeking to expand their area of influence, for no real reason than a feeling that it was their destiny.

He made the journey in the company of Elia Maillart, (known as Kini) but was otherwise unsupported and was out of touch with any part of his own world from March to August that year. The journey involved travel by horse, camel, rough lorry, and for many, many miles, foot. They hired guides and joined traders’ caravans, and endured countless attempts by local bigwigs halt them as a result of their having ‘incorrect documentation’.

Much of their food – or at least the protein – Fleming shot with a ‘rook rifle’, whose usefulness prompted a lengthy correspondence on The Times’ letter pages. And every now and then their progress was enlivened by surprise encounters with people of the same class and background as themselves.

At his best, Fleming was a dazzling writer – but there is little in the way of writerly show in this book. It was written after the conclusion of their journey, but the tone is very matter of fact. In part this seems to be because the journey itself was so outrageous in its ambition, and so extraordinary in the terrain that it covered, that literary embellishment seemed unnecessary.

At times this can make its 180,000 words slightly heavy going. By the end of the book, however, the down-beat style probably a fair reflection of the experience of walking, making camp, eating what little food they could forage and sleeping, day after day.

Nevertheless, the extraordinary nature of Fleming and Kini’s achievement provide enough to keep you reading. And by the book’s conclusion you are left in no doubt that their feat was remarkable and one that is worth sharing with them at first hand. Indeed, it is clear from some of his exploits why Fleming’s brother Ian would draw on his elder sibling’s attributes when he was crafting the character of James Bond.

PS January 09

Cycle Repair Step By Step, Rob Van Der Plas (1993)

2009-01-25T09:37:00.000-08:00

Springfield 1 85688 027 3 Quarto 127pp

A comprehensive and well-explained guide to cycle repair, with extensive colour illustration

Having something repaired, much less repairing something yourself has become a subversive in recent years. The modern way is to throw away manufactured goods rather than entertain any idea that they might be coaxed back from mechanical breakdown.

You might think that the reason for this is that we now so goo d at making things that repair is no longer necessary. It is certainly true of cars that most marques of car can now be expected to deliver nearly double the trouble-free miles than the vehicles offered by the same companies thirty years ago.

Perhaps the same is true of bicycles – but I doubt it. Indeed, I would lay a hefty wager that the average distance that any bicycle sold today will travel will be a third of that which might have been achieved by a similar model sold in the mid-1970s. Nonetheless, the torrent of new products that manufacturers bring to market is dizzying – intentionally so, I suspect. Every year, Shimano and Camapgnolo issue new versions of their vast range of groupsets, for example – thereby rendering all that went before as ‘not the latest’.

All of which makes the repair of bicycles increasingly difficult. Once, servicing one derailleur gear system was much the same as working on an another. Now they grow more complex by the year. Once there were only one or two different patterns of frame mounted brakes. Today there are half a dozen.

Nonetheless, maintenance and repair of your bicycle is still within the grasp of anyone willing to try. And anyone who is game would do well to have Van Der Plas to Hand. The goatee-bearded engineer is a publishing phenomenon. He has sliced and diced cycle repair into a whole shelf-full of books, of varying specialism, but of generally clear, easy-to-use quality.

Road bikes are the main focus of this book, but he does detour to such esoteric areas as coaster brakes, hub gears and side-pull brakes. I might be a bit wary of taking apart a Sturmey Archer five speed hub with only his words to guide me – it is a challenging job to which he devotes just half a page. But if you aim is to get your gears to index again as they did when you left the bike shop, Van Der Plas is your man.

He even has the occasional tip for the experienced cycle engineer. I did not know that the control cables used on bicycle gears and brakes were known as ‘Bowden’ cables, despite 30 years of cutting my fingers on their ends. I do now.

For anyone venturing very far beyond their home on two wheels, some basic competence in bicycle upkeep is a wise precaution. But there is a deeper value in becoming proficient in the repair and adjustment of your bicycle. You may sometimes choose to have someone else repair your mount, or even to replace it once its lustre is gone. But by becoming proficient in cycle repair you are increasing your control of the world around you – an act that brings benefits both practical and spiritual.

PS January 2009

The Great Bicycle Expedition, William C Anderson (1973)

2009-01-22T01:00:00.000-08:00

Crown 0 517 505975 Quarto 208pp $5.95

The light-hearted account of a journey made by a new-to-cycling couple in their fifties and their young adult children from Copenhagen to Calais in the summer of 1972

In the early 1970s cycling had a renaissance in the United States. The ‘oil crisis’ of October 1973 is frequently cited as the motive force for this rediscovery of self propulsion by Americans – but Anderson’s testimony suggests that there was something in the air long before OPEC intervened.

He was a career airforce officer turned professional writer who enjoyed success with a series of amusing, easy-to-read accounts of his family’s adventures. By 1972 they had traversed their own continent with a caravan, built for themselves and moved into an eco-home and explored the Mississippi on a houseboat – each of which had been turned into a book.

As Anderson tells it, he was take aback by his wife’s agreeable reaction to his proposal for fresh adventure. More surprising still – but rather less explained – was the acquiescence of his college-age son and daughter. None had ridden a bike since childhood, the author explains – a good four decades distant, in the case of half of the party. In the Danish capital they buy new touring bicycles, and then hit a predictably steep learning curve.

It is all told in an enjoyable enough way. Dialogue drives much of his account, and at times his vignettes read like a script for the Cunningham family of Happy Days fame to proceed a-wheel from Scandinavia.

Here is Anderson trying to get his leg over for the other kind of ride.

“You are in great shape,” I said to her (variously, the wife, the distaff, Big Red or my soulmate), plucking a dandelion and handing it to her. “If you were in any better shape I couldn’t stand it. In fact,” I waggled my brows at her. “What say you and take your great shape over to yon haystack? Play a little kissy-face?”

She looked at me out of the corner of her eye and gave me the dandelion back. “Honestly! If you don’t think of the darnedest thing at the darnedest times.”

“Correction. I think about it all the time. I just mention it at the darnedest times.”

“Just address yourself to your map, hotlips.”

The author’s main endeavour is in squeezing humour from their situation – at which he is good, even if it is very warm and gentle, by modern standards. There is not much by way of observational reporting, although where there is, he catches the tone well. His write-up of the in-your-face sale of hard-core pornography that was so noticeable in Sweden in the mid-1970s, for example, is consistent with my memories of the country a few years later. And the Swedish maitre d’ who parries Anderson’s surprise that his country had an army with the retort “We have a very neutral army” also rang true.

Anderson also records the names and prices of hotels and restaurants, which are of historical rather than practical interest at this remove. He does, however, provide some insight into how poor Americans felt abroad in the years after their currency came off the gold standard in 1971. Anderson carries “Europe On $5 A Day” with him, but concludes by saying that even with cheap hotels and modest restaurants, the per-person cost of trip has been more like double that. He doesn’t mind however, and records that it was ‘one of the most memorable experiences of my life’.

In fact, it is a recommendation of the inexpensive delights of cycle touring in times of economic turbulence, that has unexpected resonance today. Perhaps we should be reflecting anew on the role that the bicycle might play in transporting us from today’s credit crisis.

PS January 09

Classic American Bicycles, Jay Pridmore (1999)

2009-01-15T01:46:00.000-08:00

MBI Publishing 1 58068 001 1 Quarto 96pp £9.99

A quick spin through the history of US cycle manufacture, lavishly illustrated in colour

At first glance this appears to be as much a picture book as anything else. On nearly every page is a sumptuous photograph of a bicycle – the most interesting being those from the 1930s balloon tyre craze to the post war ‘muscle bikes’ like the Schwinn ‘Krate’ series of bicycles. Interweaving the illustrations, however is a short narrative that contains much to interest those of us steeped in British, or European cycling.

The rhythm of US cycle development is unique – and has much to tell us about the development of manufactured goods in advanced capitalism. During the first cycling boom of the 1880s, Colonel Alexander Pope of Hartford Connecticut manufactured the countries’ first bicycles – high ordinaries, as penny farthings were known. But even then, Pope demonstrated some of the attributes that would define US manufacturing. He was an early enthusiast for mechanized mass production – boasting to a magazine in 1882, of ‘158 machines that perform automatic labor’. He invested heavily in publicity, founding the magazine Bicycling World and sponsoring Englishman Thomas Stevens on a round-the-world journey by bike. And Pope was an enthusiast for patents and litigation – he tried to claim ownership of nearly every aspect of the steeds he created.

It was one of Pope’s protégés, Charles Pratt, who started to pay attention to cycling clubs. These he organized under the umbrella of the League of American Wheelman, which by the mid 1890s has over 100,000 members. Little wonder then that Pratt, in his book The American Bicycler, was able to claim that ‘the bicycle is the most democratic of all vehicles’.
Technological development, however, was all coming from the other side of the Atlantic – the diamond frame of the safety bicycle and the pneumatic tyres, most notably.

Then came the first world war. From this point the bicycle industry’s greatest spin out venture – the Wright brothers aeroplanes – really took off. But bicycles in the US fell from fashion, as the internal combustion engine appeared to sweep all before it.

In Europe during the 1930s the bicycle was still a logistical necessity for millions of people. In the US, however, it was the development of a wholly new take on the two wheeled transport that revived the sector. Rather than focus on their function, Frank Schwinn concentrated on creating bikes that would capture childrens’ imaginations. Suddenly bikes had fat tyres, chrome mudguards, headlights, and all the other trappings of the automotive age.

He created a sensation, and found many imitators. Indeed, the planned obsolescence of products that were given a new spin each year, powered the bicycle industry for decades to come. And the next big phase of US cycle development – muscle bikes – was really just more of the same. In 1963 a Schwinn employee noticed that children were customizing small wheeled frames with banana seats and ape-hanger handle bars. With a couple of tweaks back in the Chicago factory, the Krate series was born.

The story of the 1970s lightweight boom, BMXs and mountain bikes is touched on at the end of the book, but its real focus is the period up to 1980. If there is one message to draw from the book it is that the drivers of success in the cycle trade, or indeed any other, are as complex as they are varied. A quality product can easily be trumped by a well-developed dealer network, or an innovative means to re-imagine how bikes are sold.

PS January 2009

Crap Cycle Lanes, Warrington Cycle Campaign (2007)

2009-01-04T00:54:00.000-08:00

Eye Books 1 903 070 589 113pp £4.99

A stocking-filler book cataloguing the failings of UK cycle-lane construction

Designed for consumption in the house’s smallest room, this book was spun out of a web site’s gallery of shame. The source material was plentiful. Here are cycle lanes so short that a unicyclist would struggle to set off, before leaving the dedicated road space; routes that are rendered impassable by street furniture and, junctions so hazardous that the motivations of the respective local authorities are open to question.

It is a well-deserved and effective send up, even if the accompanying text follows a rather curious formula. Reading the book, it is impossible not to muse on how such facilities can have been created? Cycle lane construction is not cheap, and most of these facilities were designed and installed by highly qualified and well-meaning staff. Perhaps the problem is that while there exists some will to establish cycle lanes, there are neither the funds, determination nor specific skill base to make them anything other than a sticking-plaster remedy. This book demonstrates that, this being the case, in many cases, it is a sticking plaster that we would be better without.

Is that something about which cyclists can do anything? Perhaps one step would be to start celebrating really good cycle lane creation – particularly where challenging problems in dense urban environments have been effectively solved. If we did, it might do a bit to shake our reputation as ingrates, who demand the world and then mock those unwise enough to pay us any heed.

PS January 2009

Bicycle Mechanics In Workshop And Competition, Steve Snowling (1993)

2008-12-29T01:18:00.000-08:00

Springfield Books 1 85688 037 0 160pp £11.95

An accessible manual of cycle preparation and maintenance aimed at serious road racers and those who seek to be professional race mechanics

Snowling’s book first appeared in 1986 and has been through several editions since then (some subsequent to the issue I read). That there has been demand for so many revisions is as cheery as it is mysterious. Snowling announces that ‘I am the only full-time race mechanic from the UK and I am probably the only one there has ever been’. That might suggest a rather limited market for this tome, but, clearly, that has not been the publishers’ experience.

It is a good thing too, because this book has both a charm and a scope that goes significantly beyond the usual fare. The appeal comes from the determinedly personal nature of the text. Not only is the book illustrated by dozens of black-and-white photos of Snowling in action – with his race-day tools, adjusting a cone nut and preparing a tubular rim, but much of the detail is drawn from his own life.

After a racing career as an amateur, and a brief spell as a cycle-cross pro, Snowling found himself at Tony Doyle’s side as he conquered Europe’s velodromes. Later came appointments with several national squads and the 7-Eleven Team, among other professional outfits.

Included in the topics he deals with, that you will not find elsewhere, are such simple things as bicycle cleaning . He suggests a systematic, and very sensible system. He also advises on significantly more complex projects, such as how to check whether a frame is true, and the use of frame-truing bars in the event that it is not.

There are some oddments. He devotes a good deal of space to the lost art of fitting toe straps, before announcing near the end of the book that clipped pedals are ‘a thing of the past’. A chapter detailing his own professional story is interesting, but rather curiously placed in the book. Nonetheless, for those for those seriously interested in working on racing bikes, he has guidance to offer that I have not seen elsewhere.

PS Dec 08

Richard’s 21st Century Bicycle Book, Richard Ballantine (2000)

2008-12-23T00:51:00.001-08:00

Macmillan 0 330 37717 5 376pp £16.99

A comprehensive introduction to all things cycling argued with a excitingly intense moral power

Reopening Richard’s Bicycle Book a quarter of a century after I first bought a copy is to step inside the tent of a charismatic, revivalist preacher. From page one, Ballantine’s argument booms from the page. Bicycles are best. They are the most efficient, economical, health promoting, environmentally sound transport of delight ever invented.

He broaches no doubt, never measures his positions nor nuances his arguments. His text bristles with a pulsating certainty.

I might not proslesyse in quite the manner of Ballantine, nor have his talent for enthusiastic bombast. My cycling world view, however, has remained remarkably similar to his since, in a bookhop in Bradford, I mistook a 1983 edition of the book for a simple manual on cycle maintenance.

The book has had an extraordinary publishing history. It first appeared in 1972 and has gone through several significant revisions since then. In 1987 it was retitled ‘Richard’s New Bicycle Book’, and then in 2000 came the title above. Comparing editions, it is clear that the rewrites were pretty comprehensive. The chapter listings, for example, change completely between editions, and evidence of cut and paste is hard to find. The voice, though, is constant.

The one concession to the conventional world is in the cover. Ballantine himself appears on the cover of the 1983 edition. Heavily bearded and wearing a Christmas jumper, he is adjusting a bicycle brake on the front cover. A woman and child join him on a tricycle tandem on the back cover. They could be in search of an Amish community in need of reinvigoration.

An attractive young lady pedalling a recumbent bike adorns more recent editions. Its a commercially savvy repackaging, but it does little to prepare readers for the uniqueness of the text.

The content mirrors Ballantines own interests and prejudices. He is very strong on unusual bicycles, cycling history and human powered vehicles. Competitive cycling is dispensed with in ten pages. In earlier editions nearly half the book was devoted to cycle maintenance. Today that section takes up little more than 20 pages.

His hatred of dogs, in particular, is legendary – indeed the section of the book they occupy has grown with each edition. Arm yourself with pepper spray, or prepare yourself to ram a bicycle pump down ‘Towser’s’ throat, is his advice for dealing with the canine menace.

Just occasionally his extremism becomes comical – kickstands aren’t really the devil’s work, as he insists. And the large format of the latest version does look a bit sparsely illustrated. For the most part, though, Ballantine is sound in his advice and engaging in his intensity.

I bought the book in anticipation of a cycle journey from Bradford to Vienna, thinking that a manual on cycle care should form part of my luggage. Indeed, the counterfoils from the traveller’s cheques I took on that journey are still taped in the back of my copy. Happily Ballantine’s guidance on matters mechanical was unnecessary. The rest of his text did much to enliven our evenings, however.

Tim Dawson December 2008

Complete Bike Book, Chris Sidwells (2003)

2008-12-23T00:50:00.001-08:00

Dorling Kindersley 0 7513 6445 2 249pp £16.99

A colourful introduction to all things cycling – probably aimed at younger teenagers

DK’s style might be formulaic, but it is a formula that clearly works. And the big colour pictures, interspersed with gobbits of text rubric is one that lends itself well to an introduction to a pastime to rich in visual opportunities.

Chapters follow a predictable course – different types of cycling, different types of bikes, ways to improve you cycling, promoting you health and fitness on a bike, starting competitive cycling and a basic guide to maintenance.

There are no great surprises in the content, nor is this the places for left-field cycling options. But across the range of subjects, the book has a winning élan. Page after page looks like fun, and all are rich in well-considered detail.

Give this to a teenager at the right stage of their interest and they will pore over its pages for hours on end. My only caution would be to ensure that you buy the most up-to-date edition that you can find. Bike technology, and fashion, moves fast. It would be a shame to lose someone’s interest in two-wheeled fun by expecting them to obsess about last year’s model.

PS December 2008

The Racing Bike Book (3rd edition 2007)

2008-12-23T00:49:00.002-08:00

Haynes Publishing, 978 1 84425 341 8 168pp £17.99

A general introduction to all things connected with racing bikes, aimed at novices and lavishly illustrated with colour photographs

It is hard not to view Haynes publishing as an anachronism. For sure, in the ‘60s and ‘70s every man who bought an older car soon sought out the appropriate Haynes manual. The exploded diagrams and black-and-white, step-by-step photos showing you how to change the carburettor or check the shock absorbers were part of the wallpaper of the age. It was Photo Love for the boys with oil under their nails.

In the era of motors that require specialist computers to complete a simple service and most marques comfortably clocking up 100,000 miles and more with little difficulty, the iconic Haynes manual must surely be going the way of Jackie and Smash Hits?

The company is still largely managed by people whose surname is Haynes, despite it being a plc. No doubt recognising the changes in the motor market, the company decided to diversify. They have applied soubriquet ‘Haynes Manual’ to all manner improbable topics: Sex, Parenting, Teenagers and even Cancer. How disturbing would it be to see that on your oncologist’s shelf?

Opening the Racing Bike variant, it is immediately clear that it is not a Haynes manual in the conventional sense of the term. There is not a line diagram nor a grainy workshop photo to be found.

It is a perfectly serviceable book that introduces road racing, to potential participants and spectators. Authored by writers, most of whom will be familiar to readers of Cycling Plus, it is sound in content and fairly comprehensive in its scope.

It does, however, look a bit dated (perhaps a new publication is imminent) and it makes nothing of the scope for mirth and wit that the Haynes tag might present. Indeed, there is little to make this the first choice for such a general book, save for its exclusive focus on road racing. Possibly anyone who is already certain that this, in particular, is their interest, will already know that ‘The Tour de France is the greatest bike race on earth’, or that ‘groupset is the collective name for the gearing, braking and bearing components on a bike’.

PS December 2008

The Bicycle Book, various contributors (2006)

2008-12-23T00:49:00.001-08:00

Weidenfield and Nicolson 1 841882 633 2 144pp £12.99

A general introduction to cycling for leisure and transport, illustrated with colour photographs in a magazine style and aimed at adult readers

I am guessing that most sales of this book are made to gift purchasers. Your husband, wife, teenager or whatever, has shown a sudden interest in cycling and this volume solves the present problem come Christmas time. If I am right, lets hope that this is not the third cycle-related tome that they unwrap on the big day.

It takes readers through much of what they will need to know to buy a bike that meets their needs, to start making journeys, and have the know-how to undertake basic repairs. The chapters on carrying children by bicycle and transporting bikes on the back of cars are possibly the clearest signal that the target audience probably grew out of BMX riding some time ago.

The spread of photos, and the design of the book make it an attractive thing a which to look. And the content is all good, sound stuff, expressed with the professional lightness of touch that the authors bring from their magazine background.

There is little here, however, to get the blood pumping. It would have been easy to add panels on some of the wilder aspects of bike culture that might have really stimulated the imagination of an interested innocent. If you want a book for which the recipient will really thank you, consider alternatives.

PS December 2008

Cycle Maintainance, Richard Hallett (2002)

2008-12-23T00:48:00.000-08:00

Hamlyn 0 600 60676 7 112pp £9.99

A nicely illustrated and easy to follow entry-level manual on bicycle maintenance

Producing a manual of this kind is a balancing act. What level of knowledge to assume? How esoteric a level of equipment is it necessary to cover. How much detail to go in to? On all of these Hallett seems to have got it about right.

He covers modern road and mountain bikes in sufficient detail to make most jobs reasonably straightforward. And the spread of topics is impressive. Hub gears and brakes feature, as well as disk brakes and full suspension.

Of course, it won’t stop you facing apparently intractable problems on a bikes that are past the first flushes, have not been well-maintained and do not quite correspond to the photos in this book. But then, noting will. There is, however, here, enough to get you going on cycle mechanics from the basic to the pretty complex.

The photography and its reproduction is a really strong feature of this book. It looks attractive, uses masses of colour and allows you to see components in sufficient clarity and detail to get a clear understanding of what it is on which you will be working.

PS December 2008

Cycling To Work, A Beginners Guide, Rory McMullan (2007)

2008-12-23T00:46:00.002-08:00

Green Books 978 1 900322 12 6 96pp £4.95

A useful primer for those who have not cycled to work before

A regular cyclist might well wonder why such a book were needed. Surely the great thing about a bike is that, for short journeys at least, you simply jump on, and off you go?

All true – save that one should perhaps consider how one might feel about making such a journey having not touched a bike for 20 years, say. Indeed, one senses that this publication might well be intended for employers, to buy in bulk and distribute among staff who they were trying to help make different travel-to-work decisions.

As such, its advice is generally sound. It makes the case for cycling on the grounds of health, wealth, environmental concern and coolness. It provides sufficient information to make an intelligent choice of bike, and makes clear that while, for example, specialist clothing has its place, it is certainly not essential to two-wheeled travel.

The book is attractively laid out and illustrated and is peppered with useful real-life case studies – particularly of employers such as Pfizer and Glasosmithkline, that have invested heavily in cycle promotion.

Perhaps cyclists should buy up copies of this book and distribute them about workplaces in the style of Gideon bibles. Most would who picked up the volume would put it to one side pretty quickly. But even a tiny trickle of converts would make the investment worthwhile.

PS December 2008

How Is A Bicycle Made? Angela Royston (2007)

2008-12-23T00:46:00.001-08:00

Heinermann 0 431 05054 6 32pp £6.50

Aimed at 5-6 year old children, this book tells a simplified story of how raw materials become a bicycle that is retailed

Initiatives to encourage children back on to bicycles come and go, but few educationalists seem to grasp the possibilities of the bicycle as an integrated teaching aid. By exploring the science and maths of a bicycle there is much scope to demystify a complex manufactured product. Such a process might also start encourage the idea that with a spanner and an hex key it is possible to adjust, modify and repair your mount. Bicycles remain a popular Christmas present – but as anyone who has taught children cycle proficiency will tell you – a shocking number of these gifts will languish unused in garages before making their final journey in the back of a car to the municipal tip.

Royston’s book is a series of captioned photographs, each focussing on a stage of production. In most cases it will be used for guided reading, and as a prompt for wider discussion. As such it would make an ideal companion to gift to a bicycle itself. Not only can the wheels provide a thrilling entrée into the world of fast, self-managed travel, but also offer an introduction to design, manufacture and marketing.

PS December 2008

Bicycles And Tricycles Of The Year 1886, Harry Hewitt Griffin – facsimile introduced by Noel Marsham

2008-12-14T12:57:00.000-08:00

Olicana Books 200pp

A late Victorian bicycle buyers guide providing descriptions and illustrations of nearly 200 wheeled machines, including penny farthings, faciles, tricycles and quadricycles, republished as a facsimile

How dull are modern equivalents of this publication if you are in search of variety and invention? Even enthusiasts for Velo Vision’s diet of paradigm-changing bicycle designs don’t have such a rich selection upon which to feast.

This was the age before the world had settled upon the brilliant simplicity of the safety cycle. Here are described an astonishing set of variations of the high ordinary, through cycles propelled by cranks and levers and at least 90 tricycle variants. Most of these huge contraptions had one or more giant wheels, some with a diameter of as much as 60 inches, few smaller than 36 inches. The ‘Manchester Express Tandem Quadricycle Roadster’ is described as having a length of 89 inches and being 38 inches wide (2.2 meters long, just shy of a meter wide).

This was the ninth edition of this guide and clearly, by this time, penny farthings had passed their high-water mark. Safety bicycles had been built, but their design was in its infancy. Indeed, more ‘dwarf’ ordinaries that use some kind of drive set are listed here. There are machines from around 20 manufacturers and clearly their work represents the fruits of an extraordinary surge of invention.

Marshman, who oversaw the republication of this catalogue, incidentally, was a doctor in general practice in Otley, West Yorkshire – and is described elsewhere as a ‘stalwart of the Veteran Car Club’.

Prices for two wheeled bicycles are listed in advertisements at a shade under £20. Larger machines rise in price to £40. It is interesting to reflect on how much of a commitment this represented for readers of the original of this guide.

A skilled worker in the 1880s earned around £62 per year – so a penny farthing would have cost around four months wages. In Britain today a worker in a similar position would earn about £10,000 over the same period. Put the values into http://www.measuringworth.com/ and the result is about the same. That is about the cost of a new, small family car: no small purchase for someone on average earnings, but within reach of a determined would-be cyclist.

On the other hand, even with the dramatic inflation that has occurred at the top of the bicycle market in recent years, it would take a truly determined shopper to drop £10,000 in a bike shop and emerge with a single machine. In fact, 5% of the average cost of a bike in 1886 will buy you a really good new bike today. Whether you consider that progress will depend on how much you enjoy sharing the road with the multitudes who can buy a clapped out cars for much the same money.

PS December 2008

A Canterbury Pilgrimage, Joseph and Elizabeth Robins Pennell (1885)

2008-12-14T12:45:00.000-08:00

Seeley and Company 79pp 1 shilling

An illustrated account of a ride on an early tandem tricycle journey made by an American couple whose cycling travelogues did much to make wheeled touring respectable in Victorian Britain

In August 1884 the Pennell’s recreated the journey made famous by Chaucer’s pilgrims on what, I suspect, was a Humber Club Cycle Quadricycle Roadster. These extraordinary conveyances from the penny-farthing era are now completely unknown. Clearly, however, at the time of their manufacture, they made possible travel of a kind that had hitherto required a horse and trap.

This was the first volume penned by the Pennells – over the following decade they would traverse Europe and produce written and sketched accounts of their adventures. He drew, she wrote. That said, in this edition, there are two quite separate styles of illustration. One is naturalistic, the other a cartoonish take on Chauceresque emblams.

The Kentish jaunt is the basis for a charming, gentle account of the garden of England. They seek out the pilgrim’s milestones – the Tabard Inn, Boughton Hill and, of course, the shrine at their journey’s end.

They can have had no idea how completely the county would change in the century that followed. To read them now is to visit an almost unknown world. Deptford and Blackheath are villages separated by countryside. In places, the roadsides are thronged with tramps. And, the Thames is crowded with barges and commercial sailing ships.

There were clearly enough cyclists on this route for their wheels not to cause shrieks of amazement, although several people reacted with concern at the sight of Joseph trying to catch their likeness in his sketch pad.

The book is of the size and style of a school exercise book with a stitched seam. According to Irving Leonard, writing in Bicycling in 1967, this, and the Pennell’s other publications, sold in large numbers from railway bookstands. And their import to cycling history, was the role that they playing in making cycle touring respectable.

Unused to wheeled travellers without horses, some sections of Victorian society viewed bicyclists with alarm. The Pennell’s, by taking their travel cues from such respectable guides as Chaucer, and later John Bunyan, showed that were a conveyance suitable for gentle folk. And by painting such an attractive picture of their tours, they did their bit to fuel the ensuing cycling boom. Today, this account of a cross-county pilgrimage delivers readers an evocative transport in time.

Incidentally, Kessinger publishing are currently republishing this book, and much of the rest of the Pennell's work. Given that you can still pick up originalls for less than £20 (and sometimes less than £5), it might be worth holding out for an original.

PS December 2008

The Ride issue one, ed Philip Diprose (2008)

2008-12-11T07:53:00.000-08:00

Own It! Publishing 146pp £8.50

An entertaining anthology of short pieces of writing and collections of photographs or other graphic images from all kinds of cyclists

Whether The Ride is a magazine or a book is an open question. Its card cover and perfect binding give it the feel of a book, the fact that it announces that it is ‘the first issue’ and its design suggest more of a magazine. Its pretext is to bring together writing by people who love all types of cycling: road racers. BMXers, commuters, campaigners and collectors. There are 50 chapters in all, each by a different author, including interviews with Greg Lemond, Victoria Pendleton, Sir Paul Smith (written up as first person pieces).

Poetical renaissances about childhood family cycle rides are juxtaposed with edgy photo essays on BMX gangs on the Lower East Side and reflections on circumnavigating Islay. Quality photographs and illustrations intersperse the pieces throughout.

For the most part The Ride is a joy – and for a range of reasons. Cyclists should share their joy of riding, whatever wheels they prefer. And as nearly all the contributors to The Ride were unfamiliar to me, it suggests that a whole new cohort of writers have decided to put pen to paper. One or two of these pieces are a bit thin, but given the quantity on offer, that is hardly surprising.

According to The Ride’s website, issue one has now sold out. Lets hope that is successor is not too far from the stands. Incidentally, the most dependable place to find The Ride is at Condor Cycles in London.

PS December 08

17 Dec 08 The editor tells me that issue two is 80% complete

The Death Of Marco Pantani, Matt Rendell (2006)

2008-12-11T02:13:00.001-08:00

Phoenix 978 0 7538 2203 6 324pp £7.99

A biography of the meteoric star of 1990s cycling that is readable and thought-provoking; if ultimately depressing.

At the prologue of the 1998 Tour de France I had an unexpected encounter with Marco Pantani. After the last rider started the stage, everyone – myself among them - who had crowded around the start ramp started to walk in the direction of the end of the course. Momentarily separated from my friends, I realised that I was walking beside Pantani, who was wheeling his bike back towards his team bus.

Although he had won the Giro a month earlier, and was famed for his impulsive, thrilling riding in the mountains, he moved through the Dublin crowd without an entourage or commotion. Pushed together more by the surrounding mêlée than anything else, we must have walked side-by-side for 100 meters. I nodded and smiled at him, he appeared to reciprocate.

Sixteen days later Pantani rode audaciously to win the stage that ended 1650 meters above sea level at Les Deux Alpes. Doing so he sealed victory in the Tour and completed one of the most amazing seasons enjoyed by any professional cyclist. It made him one of Europe’s biggest sporting celebrities of the late 1990s.

At the time, the juxtaposition of my accidental brush with Pantani, and his subsequent stellar performance seemed to encapsulate the appeal of cycle racing. Intimate, albeit fleeting, access to the action and its stars is easy and uncomplicated in a way far removed from, say, professional football. And the televised action provides sporting narratives of almost unparalleled drama.

Sadly Matt Rendell’s meticulous researched and brilliantly written book systematically strips away any illusions one might have maintained about top-level cycle racing. He has pieced together the details of the mountain climber’s life, from his childhood on the Italian Riviera to his crazed death after a cocaine binge.

Pantani was involved in a great deal of legal cases because of his doping. As a result, the level of information on which Rendell has been able to draw is spectacular. Half a dozen measures of the state of his blood at nearly every stage of his career paint a picture of an athlete who used doping products throughout, and possibly even before, his professional career. Such data might make for a dull read, but the story fairly trips along to its tragic conclusion – even if the constant focus on blood gave me a few queasy moments.

Rendell concludes that Pantani was ‘cycling’s greatest cheat’. But he casts illumination on more than simply a single, flawed, individual. Pantani was a gift to his sponsors and to Italian broadcasters and the millions who enjoyed his reckless, erratic style of riding. All of us bare some responsibility for what has happened to cycle sport. Nearly five years after Pantani’s demise it seems far from certain that we will find ways to row the sport back from the abyss into which the little man from Romagna disappeared.

PS December 2008

A Century Of Cycling, William Fotheringham (2003)

2008-12-05T06:13:00.000-08:00

A coffee-table-sized book containing a good history of the major races in professional road cycling.

Photo-rich tomes of this size frequently deliver little in elucidation. Indeed, this has the appearance of precisely that kind of volume that one is presented with as a gift by a non-cycling family member who has ‘spotted it in a bookshop’.

Happily, however, Fotheringham is a high-quality journalist (he writes for The Guardian) who has covered the world of cycle racing for more than a decade. As a result there is something in this book for all but the most obsessive cycle racing enthusiast. The book is divided into nine chapters with one each on the major tours, and the rest on the classic one-day races, such as Paris-Roubaix and Liege-Bastogne-Liege.

Each chapter covers the history of the race, the most notable contests and is illustrated with a map of a recent course. Throughout the text there are single page profiles of 37 of the greatest cyclists, from Coppi to Lance Armstrong. The book ends with a useful list of all the winners of all the races covered in the book.

My edition is now five years out of date, and may well have come from some kind of discounter. Nonetheless, it is a great companion to the cycling year – one to be got out on the morning of each race to contextualise and deepen your viewing pleasure.

PS Dec 08

Full Tilt – Ireland To India With a Bicycle, Dervla Murphy (1965)

2008-12-01T14:42:00.000-08:00

The Reprint Society 238pp

An account of a cycle journey made in the first half of 1963 covering precisely the journey described in the title, by an Irish woman in her early 30s. Most of the book concentrates on the portion of her ride that took her through Afghanistan and Pakistan where she made some truly remarkable rides, including cycling the length of the Khyber Pass and a hair-raising journey through the Babusar Pass.

How fabulous it must have been to have been so brave, determined and carefree as was Murphy to make such an epic journey. At nearly every stage of her progress wise heads tried to persuade her of the foolishness of her ambitions. And time and again she ignored them. Quite possibly much of what she did was rash – but it is justified by the testimony that she was able to bear.

The early stages of her journey pass in something of a blur – so much so that readers might be persuaded that the book is not for them. She actually sets off from Dunkirk and in less than a page has reached the Yugoslav border – despite cycling through one of the worst winters Europe has ever recorded. Indeed, the only matters of incident before the Persian border are those that involve her automatic pistol.

Within a few days she had used it to shoot dead a Croatian wolf as it made to attack her, shot it over the head of an amorous Kurd whose advances she thought would not be slowed by mere exhortation and narrowly resisted plugging a Turkish policeman, whose amour was doused with a knee to the nether regions instead. The pistol makes no further appearance – possibly because she admits to having packed just four rounds of ammunition.

It is well worth hanging in till Tehran, because that is where her narrative takes off.
For the most part, the book is culled from letters she sent home to friends as she rode. Entries frequently end with fatigue forcing her to sign off. She is enviably lucky with the people she meets along the way, who offer her extraordinary kindness – senior army officers, a Pakistani Prince and endless diplomats put her up and help her along their way.

The section of this book that make it really worth reading are those that cover her wanderings across Afghanistan and Pakistan. By this time she has become ‘Afghanatical’, and her sympathies are clearly with the people among whom she lives. She writes, almost obsessively about the food she eats, for example. Here she is in Galapur on 6 June: “The food situation here is very grim – an acute scarcity of flour and no tea, sugar or sale left after the winter. Most people are living on goats’ milk, eggs and mulberries – not my favourite when served simultaneously, but this evening I was too starved to fuss.”

Murphy's greatest quality is that while sharing the living conditions of those among whom she lives, and acutely recounting some of the minutiae of life in the region, she is never so arrogant as to lose sight of her essentially alien quality in relation to those around her.

Indeed, despite the privations, she worries increasingly about ‘modernisation’ in this part of the world. In Kabul she writes: “I feel have been privileged to see Man at his best – still in possession of the sort of liberty and dignity that we (in the west) have exchanged for ‘progress’.” She even worries about the western enthusiasm for easily moving around the world: “Progress has deprived (the western travelling public) of the incentive to live fully”.

Despite this, Full Tilt was to be the first of a great many travel books from this author - some by bicycle, others on foot. Indeed, her latest offering The Island That Dared (at the time of writing she has just turned 77), about a recent journey in Cuba, was published earlier this year. There is an interview with her about that book here.

PS December 2008

Designing and Building Your Own Frameset, Richard P Talbot (1979)

2008-11-30T03:36:00.000-08:00

The Manet Guild 0 9602418 1 7 161 pp

A thorough technical guide to building a steel bicycle frame, including the design, cutting, brazing and finishing of the frame. There are many step-by-step photographs and tables of technical information.

At the time this book appeared, little had changed in the fabrication of bicycle frames for a good 50 years. Reynolds tubing was the preferred raw material; different schools of cycling favoured different variations on the tube angles; and, braze-on fittings were added to suit the use to which a frame would be put.

The book gives every impression of being comprehensive and easy-to-follow, with a strong section on design, as well as guidance on how a technically proficient person, with access to the right tools, can create a bicycle frame that is the equal of that offered by a specialist builder. Fashions in frame design have moved on a good deal in the 30 years since this book was written – but the types of frame on whose construction Talbot advises are every bit as good now as they have ever been.

This I can assert for sure, because I am still riding a bike built a quarter of a century ago by following the advice of this volume.

My brother, Adam Dawson, bought the book in the mid-1980s, when in his late teens. Having already befriended Johnny Mapplebeck and Geoff Whitaker the owners of Bradford’s Pennine Cycles, he persuaded them to let him use their frame-building workshop to undertake the work.

Its design is, to say the least, idiosyncratic. My brother was a very enthusiastic cycle tourist. He rode a good 150 miles a week to work and back and did double that most weekends, mainly with other cyclists from Bradford. Although he had commissioned a touring bicycle from Pennine some years earlier, the more immersed he became in cycle culture, the more he developed his own ideas about what would make the ideal touring cycle.

First off, it is build for a fixed wheel, with rear-facing drop outs. Fixies at this time were the preserve of hardened road racers who used them for winter training. In a hilly city like Bradford they made for a punishing ride indeed – but their lightness, simplicity, and possibly their eccentricity appealed to Adam.

It also has a built in rack. This was designed to support a custom-made saddle bag, created by my other brother Ben, who manufactured tents and bags for a living. The design of the saddle bag was such that it could be used either as a saddle bag, or as a rucksack and sat perfectly on the mini-rack.

A committed user of Sturmey Archer Dynohubs, Adam also specced the bike for the lighting system that he had in mind. To the front fork, he brazed a light bracket, and along the length of the frame, he created a series of nicked out loops to carry the wires necessitated by a dynamo - up the front fork and to the rear of the bike.

He added a unique set of pre-threaded water-bottle nuts. Two were in the conventional position to carry a water bottle carrier. A further two were in the inside angle of the top tube and the down tube. These were to attach a strap that made the bike more comfortable to carry over the shoulder – a significant feature of the rough-stuff riding that Adam enjoyed.

Finally he brazed on a raised impression of his initials – realised as a swirling logo. Beneath the enamel it has the role of the frame’s crest. Pennine were kind enough to add their badging to the frame – although it has little in common with the fine racing bikes on which their reputation is based. It also bears its own name – Adamant.

Adam completed thousands of miles on the bike – the length and breadth of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, many times over. And, unusually for a bike built before the invention of ‘mountain bikes’, it also went up some pretty considerable mountains, most notably in the Cairngorms.

Its most noteworthy journey came when Adam and a friend rode from Bradford to London (approximately 200 miles) in a single day. The photograph of him with the bike was taken by the local newspaper a few days after the ride (I have yet to add this to the site). Shortly after they got to London, Adam climbed back on his bike. “Where are you going now”, asked his friend, who had a train ticket for his return journey.. “Home”, replied Adam. And without further ado, he was off – scarcely stopping until he was back in West Yorkshire.

The bike came into my possession after Adam’s unexpected, and substantially unexplained death shortly after his 40th birthday. By that time he was an infrequent cyclist and Adamant fulfilled the role of a trusty, but little-cared-for hack. Happily, however, Pennine Cycles took the frame under their wing, and brushed it up pretty well. It is still set up as a ‘fixed’, and provide a light responsive ride. I go out on it a couple of times a week as an honour to my brother’s memory.

Is this a recommendation for the book? I think so. Of course, I would much sooner have my brother still with us, than have his bike. But with this bike he tried to give shape to his dreams and then fashioned something with his own hands. That I can use to this day is an enormously potent act of remembrance. If a few more of us followed Talbot’s advice and tried to distil our ideas about bicycles into brazed steel tubing, we would surely develop a deeper, more profound relationship with our mounts and their underlying materials. Cycling is its own reward – but that is no reason not to try and make it more rewarding.

Tim Dawson 29 November 2008

Adam Dawson, a couple of days after his return from the Bradford-London-Bradford ride.

Adamant today

The Ultimate Scottish Cycling Book, Paul Lamarra (2003)

2008-11-23T10:49:00.000-08:00

Mainstream 1 84018 617 8 207pp £14.99

An area-by-area guide to cycle touring in Scotland, based on a tour made in 2002, including extensive ‘how to’ information.

So many guides to cycle touring in the UK have been written that the job of squeezing some new juice from the format is a challenge. Of course, roads change and attractions come and go. (Only 20 years ago, I cycled the length of the A74 and the A9, something that would be neither fun, legal nor necessary today). Nonetheless, finding something new to say, or a new way to say requires considerable initiative.

And that is just what Lamarra has brought to this book. There may be precedents for the format he has adopted, but I am not aware of them.

Nine chapters each concentrate on different areas of Scotland. It is a pretty good spread – from the Western Isles to Galloway and the Borders. Inevitably, he does not cover everything. But he does go where many guides have avoided – rural Aberdeenshire, for example, which provides some of the best cycling country in the UK.

Each section recounts a carefully planned tour or several days made, I am guessing, in 2002. Lamarra is particularly good on capturing the flavour of places – he has the excitement of Oban to a tee, likewise the transition of wild Perthshire into the tourist attractions of Pitlochry. There are also some great route tips – anyone could miss the private, but easily accessible, roads built for hydro-scheme workers that allow one to get into the head of Glen Lyon, without cycling its length, for example.

His accounts are peppered with his own wry observations. He recounts the experience of the weather on the day that he made the rides and the difficulty or otherwise he had in finding accommodation, as well as entertaining historical asides. Each chapter then ends with a diagrammatic route map, map references, directions, accommodation and food stop suggestions and other important transport information such as ferry timetables. This information is particularly strong and he has clearly gone to some lengths to put himself in the position of a travelling on wholly unfamiliar territory.

As Lamarra suggests in his introduction, this is not a volume for the saddle bag. Rather, it is a primer to be enjoyed over the winter, while planning one’s own tours in Scotland. There is much of this routes that you may wish to copy turn by turn. But the real value of his book is in firing the imagination, and giving you the wherewithal to plan. Despite having read dozens of cycling books about Scotland and ridden quite extensively in many of the areas he covers, by the end of the book, I was back with my maps, dreaming of a fresh Caledonian campaign.

If I have a beef, it would be with the title. Such a grand promise is never going to be deliverable. However, books are published to be sold, and doubtless Mainstream were keen on something that they hoped would jump off the self. “An account of nine cycle tours in North Britain, with accompanying notes for wheelmen hoping to emulate the author’s progress”, might well have been the title had it been published in the 1880s. More accurate it might have been – but it would hardly be the stuff to tempt the armchair cyclists of today.

PS November 2008

Fifty Years of Road Racing – The History of the North Road Cycling Club, S H Moxham (1935)

2008-09-24T03:30:00.000-07:00

Diemer and Reynolds 178pp

This solid little tome takes the story of one of England’s most venerable cycling clubs from its inception in 1885 to its Golden Jubilee. And its very physical manifestation gives some indication of how seriously the Club took this anniversary. It has a beautiful mid-blue, grained hardback cover and the text is printed on handsome, grained paper with more than a dozen photographic plates.

Little wonder. The date of publication must surely be close to the high point of voluntary clubs in Britain. Cycling, walking, hostelling, running, model railways and every other pastime you can think of spawned seriously marshalled organisations in every town, village and city. Many, like the Scouts, for example, were Edwardian inventions. But the North Road Club, like a good many other cycling clubs, traces its origins into the glory days of Victoria’s reign.

The book is organised in a year-by-year narrative, which could make for dry picking. But the author – it is credited to Moxham (president of the club from 1933) ‘and others’ – provides a fascinating picture of the early days of amateur racing in this country.

At the outset, the very shape of cycle racing has yet to emerge. Time trials are run on ordinaries (penny farthings), faciles (a hybrid that looks like a penny farthing – albeit without the really dramatic difference in wheel size), tricycles and safety bicycles. Manufacturers promoted events for competitors riding only their own machines. And place-to-place records were in their infancy. In 1882, for example, H R Reynolds recorded the first recorded London to York attempt – managing the journey in 21 hours and 43 minutes.

There are plenty more delicious details. “This season (1890) witnessed the first appearance of the pneumatic tyre in the Club’s races and the commencement of the gradual elimination of the sold tyre…The contrast in appearance between the narrow solid tyres then in common use and the 2in. pneumatic was so extraordinary that the man in the street received the latter with jeers and ridicule”.

The club played a critical role in the development of time trailing – organising, among other things – the first 24 hour event. Indeed, it championed longer time trails. For many years, it would consider no distance of less that 50 miles being worth the effort of organising an event.

As the narrative gets closer to the time of publication, the detail does get thinner. Once or twice the author mentions that there is little point in dwelling too much of detail from only a few years ago. This is a shame, as the age of cycling that is now only just within living memory seems every bit as interesting as the late Victorian golden days.

Happily, the club continues to thrive – albeit now centred on Hertfordshire, rather than north London. It is enormously heartening to learn that a second volume of history was produced in 1985 to mark the club’s centenary. At the time of writing, however, there are half a dozen copies of the 1935 book available on abebooks.co.uk – but not a single copy of the account of the club’s second half century. That in itself probably tells you something of the changing size, status and enthusiasm for official histories that occured in the ensuing period.

PS September 2008

Daisy, Daisy Christian Miller (1980)

2008-09-24T01:17:00.000-07:00

Routledge & Kegan Paul 0 7100 0709 4 180pp £5.99

Miller is the mother of grown up children who sets off to cross the United States on a Bickerton. The date is never specified, but at a guess it is 1978 or 1979.

Her account is amiable enough. She carries a tent, accepts lifts where they are offered and gets into enough scrapes to make this an entertaining read. By the close of the account she has journeyed from Yorktown, Virginnia to Portland, Oregon, via Kansas, Denver, Salt Lake City and the Rockys. More than anything it paints a picture of the USA beyond the major costal cities – much of it small town, agricultural and frequently with very little money.

Perhaps the most intriguing things about the book is that it was published at all. For sure, Miller is a more than competent writer. But today, it is rare for someone to undertake an epic adventure on a whim, and then write it up. Books that bare any comparison to this one published today tend to be by time-served professional writers, who start with a clear plan to generate sufficient material for a book.

To the extent that this does not appear to be a contrivance, and that a major publishing house chose to take it on, it is refreshing. Whether it captures enough of the time and place that it charts to merit a continuing readership is a more open question.

PS Sep 08

The Sweat of the Gods, Benjo Maso (2005) trans Michiel Horn

2008-09-18T06:46:00.000-07:00

Mousehold Press 1 875 739 37 4 165pp £9.95

What is it that makes an athletic hero? The rules of any sport would appear to suggest that winning alone should be sufficient. It takes little historical perspective, however, to see that the consistent, effortless victories are rarely rewarded with much affection by the spectating public, save for nationalistic fervour. Just ask Lance Armstrong or Miguel Indurain

The trick to being a hero, of course, is to win heroically – in the teeth of impossible odds, against a bitter opponent, with an unexpected flash of brilliance.

All sports are, of course, human contrivances, with a particular end in mind – with professional spectator sports, thrilling the viewing public. In this book, Dutch sociologies, Benjo Masso attempts to unpick the forces and fancies that have shaped modern road races, and in particular, the Tour de France.

What rich pickings there are! Masso traces the Tour, though its early genesis, as a spectacle designed to sell newspapers, to the drug scandals of today. And it is the early years that are particularly interesting. Henri Desgrange, editor of a French sports newspaper and founder of the Tour, endlessly tweaked the format of the race to maximise benefit for his paper – and to fend off the influence of other interested commercial parties, such as the bicycle manufactures.

So, at various times: teams were outlawed, then later introduced as national squads, before being replaced by trade teams. Riders were required to ride identical bicycles, carry enough spares to equip them from start to finish and ride on courses deliberately strewn with tacks (to demonstrate how quickly Michelin tyres could be repaired).

The pressures on the race vary over time. In the early years, Desgrange watched his circulation rise and fall depending on how interesting was the race. Sure-fire start-to-finish winners were a disaster. For much of the time, the journalists had little real knowledge of how the race progressed, so for the most part, made up the heroics. Indeed, some of the best loved characters of the race are entirely the result of such ingenuity.

In 1934, for example, team members were, for the first time, allowed to give each other components when the need arose. So it was that rookie rider, and formidable climber, Rene Vietto found himself at the foot of the Pyrenees. His team mate, race leader Antonin Magne, broke his front wheel in a descent. Vietto offered his own wheel, only to find that it did not fit his leader’s bicycle – who instead accepted one from another rider.

However, the tale, retold by Tour director Jacques Goddet in the column he wrote for L’Auto, accompanied by a doctored picture of a wheel-less Vietto, sobbing after having sacrificed his own chances, made a hero of the first-year rider. Indeed, ‘King Rene’ was hailed as the Tour’s moral winner in Paris, and earned a decent living on his resulting reputation for the rest of his career.

At times Sweat of the Gods reads like a kind of Peloton Babylon, so relentlessly does it unearth the sports seamier side. And certainly in translation, there are no references, leaving the reader with little opportunity to double check any of the authors claims.

Nevertheless, this is a tremendous read for anyone with a serious-minded interest in professional cycle sport – so long as you don’t harbour too many illusions about la Grand Boucle’s Athenian ideals.

MOUSEHOLD Press, a small, Norwich based imprint publishes an impressive range of off-beat cycling books.

PS Sep 08

Flying Scotsman, Graeme Obree (2003)

2008-09-17T22:03:00.000-07:00

Birlinn 1 84158 283 2 246pp £9.99

Obree’s story is well-known – much of it is told on another article on this site. He was a maverick time trailist from Ayrshire, who built his own bike using some discarded components, and went on to take the world hour record and twice win the world pursuit championship.

There is certainly some interest in the detail of how this happened – his lonely childhood, failed business ventures and inability to settle down to a college course. The genesis and execution of the bicycles that he made, and the development of his unique ski-tuck and superman riding positions too merit a close look.

What really makes this book fascinating, however, is the picture Obree conjures up of his mental health problems – severe depression that have caused him to make several attempts at suicide. Flying Scotsman reads as though he hid under his duvet for days, pounding out, with searing honesty, what it is to live with such a condition and then thrust the manuscript into the hands of its publishers before there was any chance of alteration of embellishment. For anyone trying to understand such problems – whether they find the cycling aspect of his treatise interesting or not – this makes it an extraordinary, and, at times, revelatory, read.

He is desperately poor on the ‘Daily Mail’ aspects of his story. His wife has clearly been a massively nurturing and steadying influence since they got together. Yet quite how they did get together does not make the pages of this autobiography. But then accounts of boy meets girl are ten-a-penny. The distilled experiences of a suicidal depressive are rather rarer.

Heroes, Villains and Veoldromes, Chris Hoy and the Track Cycling Revolution, Richard Moore (2008)

2008-08-28T23:47:00.000-07:00

HarperSport 13 978 0 00 726531-2 Quarto 310pp £15.99

A well-written and enjoyable biog of Sir Chris taking in the evolution of the entire track cycling phenomenon that came out of the east of Scotland in the 1990s

Just how do you explain Britain’s emergence is as the pre-eminent force in world track cycling? It is an important question, now that Hoy has brought back three gold medals from the Beijing Olympics?

And who better to answer the question than Richard Moore – and ex team mate of Hoy’s, and now a writer who has already shown his talents as a biographer?

This book came out on the eve of the Beijing games, so takes the story up to the British team’s crushing performance at the world track championships in Manchester 2008. So complete was their demolition of the opposition, that Moore confidently concludes with a promise that there will be much, much more from Hoy. How right he proved to be. You can expect an updated version of this book with a new final chapter any day now, I would guess.

Moore is a diligent journalist who is successful at rooting out the early twists and turns in Hoy’s life: his attitude to BMX racing; the emergence of a dedicated track cycling team in Edinburgh (City of Edinburgh Race Team) in the early 1980s; and, his relationship with his trainers. This is a book that is rich in interviews – with Peter Keen, Chris Boardman, David Brailsford as well as fellow competitors from the UK and beyond.

Moore certainly appears to come close to nailing what makes Hoy special – a fantastic raw talent, married to an obsessive zeal for training. In one of the most interesting passages, a despondent Hoy seeks out Chris Boardman for advice. The Wirral rider’s suggestion is that Hoy needs to devise a training programme that really excites him, rather than one that he simply feels that he has to follow. Given that the Scottish rider apparently always trains on Christmas day – because none of his competitors will be doing so – this was just the kind of advice to help him turn the corner.

Along the way there are plenty of colourful diversions – particularly Hoy’s unsuccessful attempt at the kilometre record, at altitude in Bolivia, and a fascinating chapter on Japanese kerin racing.

Does Moore answer the central question, however? Obliquely, yes – but readers are left to fish for conclusions.

The disappearance of East Germany in 1990 removed from the scene the long dominant presence in track cycling. Like other Warsaw pact countries, the GDR: invested very heavily in facilities (Moore paints a vivid picture of the vast Cottbus complex of training facilities and velodromes); developed talent from a very young age; allowed mature athletes to effectively be professionals by employing them as soldiers; and, utilise a systematic doping programme.

Since then, track cycling has been relatively open. Most success has gone to those countries with the best infrastructure, generally the traditional European cycling nations, or Australia. (The Australian Institute of Sport was founded in 1981 to prevent further national embarrassment after the Montreal Games where the Aussies won no golds.)

The arrival of the Manchester velodrome in 1994 is clearly the springboard from which much of this success took flight. Just as important, however has been the investment in track cycling that the National Lottery has allowed. In 1996, British cycling received just £22,750 in state funding. This had grown to £2.5m in 1999, and now stands at about £4m per annum.

Britain’s home grown back room team is clearly exceptional – Brailsford, Keen and Boardman in particular. But they have also recruited specialist coaches and others from abroad, most notably Australia.

Also largely absent from Moore’s book are any real villains. Yes, the UCI dropped the kilo from the Olympics, but quite why never becomes clear, nor who, exactly are the shadowy forces behind the move. In the context of Hoy’s success in other disciplines, it also appears that they did the Edinburgh rider a huge favour.

Nevertheless, this is a hugely enjoyable book – particularly to those who, like me, have been watching Hoy since his early days at Meadowbank in the mid 1990s. Given his success, it will doubtless sell to a far, far wider audience than would otherwise have been the case. In doing so it will play its part in bringing this most spectacular sport to a much wider audience.

PS August 2008

Breakaway, Samual Abt (1985)

2008-08-28T00:20:00.000-07:00

Random House, 0-394-54679-2 178pp $16.95

This is the story of the 1984 Tour, told in the in the style with which Abt’s many fans will be familiar. He is the consummate reporter – providing a vivid account of the racing, and peppering his account with dozens of incidental tales.

This was the year when Laurent Fignon was dominant, beating Hinault be a whacking 10 minutes, 32 seconds. It is also the edition of Robert Millar’s forth place and King of the Mountains crown. You can certainly find DVDs that will allow you to relive that great race – but they can’t match Abt for providing a joyful reimersion in that era.

PS August 2008

101 Mountain-bike routes in Scotland Harry Henniker (1998)

2008-08-28T00:18:00.000-07:00

Mainstream Publishing 1 85158 936 8 223pp £14.99

There are any number of guides to various kinds of cycling in locations various. Henniker’s stand out for a number of reasons. His knowledge is that of a life-long enthusiast who runs Bike Bus – a service providing transport for cyclists. He packs all of Scotland into a single volume. And, his routes are straightforward to follow.

Given the size of Scotland, covering it all in only 200 or so pages is no mean feat, but he manages it. There are routes described from Dunnet Head to Maidenkirk – or very nearly. There are also immensely varied – including both modest circular routes and some of the more ambitious journeys that are possible in Scotland.

Henniker’s kind of rides are the tracks and trails that were once the preserve of the Rough Suff Fellowship. Glentress does get a mention, but his main interest is not really the high octane thrills and spills of downhilling.

Each chapter is accompanied by rudimentary maps, and is described. In all probability, you would need a set of OS maps to actually take to the hills and follow most of these routes. Indeed, one wonders how long it will be before volumes such as Henniker’s are offered with CDs containing sat nav files that riders can download to their own handlebar guiding devices.

The author maintains that Scotland is the best country in the world for mountain biking. That remains a matter of contention – but he certainly provides more than enough evidence for someone to make a comprehensive evaluation of the quality of Caledonia’s potential for aficionados of the knobbly tyre.

PS august 2008

Building Bicycle Wheels, Robert Wright (1977)

2008-08-28T00:17:00.000-07:00

Macmillan 0-02-028260-5 46pp £3.95

This slender volume does exactly what it promises on the cover – provides enough information to allow you to build you own wheels.

Like so many, complicated technical processes, this was one that I fancied mastering. Indeed, I imagined that, once I had acquired the knack, I would build any number of clever variations on the simple bicycle wheel.

Wright’s instructions are clear and easy to follow. And he goes a good way towards explaining how wheels work, and the possible variations on the regular patterns. Notwithstanding the ease with which the author presents the instructions, though, the spokes that I tried to deploy were infuriating.

I did eventually manage to knit them together, and tighten them into reasonably true wheels. The end results even managed a decade’s service on my daily rides. That was more than 20 years ago, however. But in fairness, I don’t think my failure to repeat the exercise can be laid at Wright’s door.

PS August 2008

The Yellow Jersey, Ralph Hurne (1973)

2008-08-28T00:15:00.000-07:00

Breakaway Books 1-55821-452-6 285pp $14.95

This novel comes with the recommendation on its cover that it is “The greatest cycling novel ever written”, courtesy of Bicycling magazine. It is, of course, impossible to know how accurately that sentence reflects the magazine’s review of this book, nor of how qualified was the originator of the phrase.

At the time of writing, however, I can think of only a dozen or so ‘cycling novels’ in the English language. Even assuming that I have missed a great many others, can there be more than 50 ‘cycling novels’? If this is the case, being the best in such a small field, is not quite the recommendation that it first appears.

Most cycling novels – and this is no exception – take professional racing as their backdrop. Hurne’s story is of Terry Davenport, a washed up, end-of-career pro, who is down on his luck competitively and unhappy in his personal life.

It is an engaging tale, with plenty of edge-of-the-seat thrills to keep the pages turning. And, as Hurne clearly has a considerable knowledge of, and a love for, professional racing, there is plenty of insider insight to impart.

What it does not do, however, is to transcend its backdrop – in the way, for example, that The Rider does. For a cyclist with a long-haul flight to pass away, it is thoroughly enjoyable diversion. Its is not, however, the volume to persuade anyone else that cycling has produced a rich literature.

PS August 2008

Rough Ride, Paul Kimmage (1990)

2008-08-28T00:11:00.000-07:00

Yellow Jersey Press 0224 051 458 £8 261pp

There are bookshelves and bookshelves of biographies and autobiographies of enormously successful sports people. The testimonies of those who came close to the top of the game, but did not quite make the highest echelons of their sports, however, are few and far between.

When someone with the journalistic skills of Irishman Paul Kimmage does so, therefore, he does those with a serious interest in what it is to compete, a genuine service.

Kimmage was a professional cyclist, riding for a major European team, in the late 1980s. It was a golden age for Irish cycling – Sean Kelly and Stephen Roche were at the pinnacle of their powers, and they were by no means the only compatriots in the peleton. Nonetheless, Kimmage came up the hard way. After a successful amateur career in Ireland, he joined ACCB in Paris as so many had before him. From there he clawed his way to a professional contract – and then rode with enough success to stay in Europe for four seasons.

It is a painful picture that he paints – insufficient money to eat and a lonely life in miserable, shared flats. Even when success comes, life seems to be so hard that he rightly questions why on earth he is carrying on.

Part of his reason for writing the book is to expose the drugs culture in the sport – and to do this, he made himself a persona no grata with many of his former colleagues. In truth, the drug taking that he exposes is small, small beer compared with what has come to light since then. Indeed, given that there is no reason to suppose that Kimmage trimmed his facts, his testimony is arguably evidence that drugs were far less rife that one might have imagined in the 1980s.

During the monstrous Bordeaux-Paris, he is offered ‘something’. On a few other occasions he took some kind of amphetamine ‘charge’ before a small town crit. He was also put under pressure to ‘charge up’ on days in stage races when his team had a lot of work to do to protect their leader.

Lifting the lid on this level of abuse, and the conviction that runs through this book that such drug use is wrong, make Rough Ride valuable. More interesting, though, is the light that Kimmage shines on the lifestyle of the journeyman professional sportsman. His experience is probably similar to the majority of the peleton – not to mention the leagues of young men who labour in the lower reaches of the football divisions, or try to break in to the big time boxing ring.

PS August 2008

Round Ireland in Low Gear, Eric Newby (1987)

2008-08-28T00:08:00.000-07:00

Collins 0 00 217639/4 308pp £12.95

Newby is a titan of travel writing. A Short Walk In The Hindu Kush and The Big Red Train Ride, among many others, are rightly considered classics of the genre. He was in his late 60s, however, when he and his wife Wanda took to these island’s rainiest land mass on heavily laden mountain bikes.

The Newbys are returners to cycling – having both clocked up a few clicks during the second world war, but few since. Perhaps because of this, their bicycles only play a small part in the narrative. Of course, there are terrible headwinds, unnerving hills and, more than anything, rain (hardly surprising given that they start their tour in December). But Newby is far more interested in, and interesting on, the countryside though which he is passing, rather than his means of transport – and the book is much the better for that.

For years, British visitors to Ireland have found aspects of life preserved there had apparently been consigned to GB’s history books long ago. Perhaps the 1980s was the last point at which this was true. That is certainly Newby’s finding, in the pubs, boarding houses and shops that he visits. Here he is in a pub in Waterford.

“We found it (food and drink) in T and H Doolan’s old snug and dark pub which contained no one but a very old man wearing a huge uniform overcoat who was drinking tea and a very grown-up young woman who was into the Irish Paddy and hot water, which seemed like a good idea in the circumstances. The old man told us to bang on the bar to summon attention, something that I am always loath to do in case the publican is on the bottle and comes rushing out to hit me over the head with it.”

There is nothing nostalgic about Newby’s book, however. He documents what he sees meticulously and is brilliant at setting it in historical and cultural context. Indeed, it is at doing this that he is almost without peer. Certainly anyone seeking to write a cycling travelogue of this kind would do well to start here.

His skill and care make this a fascinating document of Ireland just before everything changed – before the tide of migration turned, before money flushed though every corner of the country, before the substantial settlement of the ‘constitutional question’. It is an engaging, infuriating, beguiling place – now hard to find. But at least you can reach for Newby and pay it a fond visit from your armchair.

PS August

French Revolutions, Tim Moore (2001)

2008-08-28T00:06:00.000-07:00

Yellow Jersey Press 0-224-06095-3 277 pp £12

A humerous account of the authors attempt to cycle the route of the Tour despite his lack of experience on a bicycle

This is a good – if obvious – idea for a travel book. Follow the route of the Tour de France, in this case the tour of 2000, at a touring speed. As a non-cyclist, this gives Moore a framework around which to hang a travelogue, meditation on cycle racing and a chance to marvel at those who complete the route at a rather less leisurely pace than the author achieves.

Moore is undoubtedly an amusing writer. Here he is teeing up his assault on Ventoux.

“The trouble with cycling up mountains is that – panniers or, as today, no panniers – after about four minutes, as soon as that first metallic-tasting, lactic gasp rasps inward at the back of your throat, any thoughts of appreciating your surroundings, contemplating the Continental way of life, or otherwise entertaining an appropriate holiday mentality have been booted out of your brain by an all-encompassing him-or-you struggle to the death with the force of gravity.”

Were someone who knew nothing about cycling looking for a light-hearted introduction to the Tour, this book would serve well.

To anyone who starts the book with a deeper knowledge of cycling and cycle sport than Moore, however, it is impossible to shake a feeling of irritation with him. He is an able writer, for sure, although the efforts of his wise-cracking show. He has read up on the great race, and can rehash many of its curious tales with some élan. But at the end of the day, he has little that is actually new to add. You can’t help feeling that he alighted upon the idea of a Tour-based book as a commercial opportunity, rather than anything fired by passion. As a result, he steadily creates a feeling that, at heart, he is mocking cyclists and cycling for the amusement of others.

PS August 2008

Bad To The Bone, James Waddington (1998)

2008-08-28T00:00:00.000-07:00

Dedalus 1 873982 68 2 194pp

During the late 1990s, two stories recurred in the mainstream media coverage of professional cycling in the UK. One described how five-times Tour de France winner Miguel Indurain was in some way a physiological superman. With each year that he started favourite to win the race, there would be more discussion of his unnaturally capacious lungs, or his giant heart’s ability to pump blood faster than those of mere mortals.

The other story – and I am not suggesting that these things were related – was the rise of EPO as the peleton’s drug of choice. Evidence of the effect of this was easy to see – the average speed of la grande boucle rose year after year. And 1996 winner Bjarne Riis was widely known as ‘Mr 60%’ because of his ability to maintain an illegally high haemocrit level. There were also deaths. EPO caused the blood of those who took it to turn to the consistency of jam, causing some to have heart attacks as they slept.

These are the issues that Waddington takes as the themes of this novel. We demand of athletes ever more gladiatorial displays of endeavour, but throw up our hands in horror when they are revealed to be ‘drug cheats’. These are fantastic moral conundrums for a fiction to consider, and Waddington very largely does them justice.

His tale is of a five-times Tour winner, Akil Saenz, his wife Perlita, and a messianic ‘sports physician’ Mikkel Fleishman. It starts with an account of cycle racing which will be recognisable to aficionados, but becomes increasingly disturbed.

Waddington knows his cycle racing and has things to say to even the most trainspottery of enthusiasts. He also has an important point to make about professional sports in general – but to get to that, you should read the book. The end in not as neat as the rest of the book, which undermines its overall quality – but the journey to that point is sufficient to make this an enjoyable and stimulating read.

PS August 2008

The Bicycle, Pryor Dodge (1996)

2008-08-27T23:58:00.000-07:00

Flammarion, 2-08013-650-X 225 pp £20

A lavishly illustrated history of bicycles

This is a truly sumptuous book, based on the author’s extraordinary collection of bicycles and cycle-related ephemera. There are hundreds of pictures – from the early velocipedes and Draisnes, to the promotional material to period shots of them in use. Every page is illustrated, mostly in colour and entire double page spreads are devoted to almost pornographic depictions of, among other things, pedals from the 1860s.

Accompanying the photographers are a scholarly account of cycling from earliest times, including the social developments that accompanied the first cycling boom, cycling organisations and the industrial backstory to the Victorian and Edwardian bike craze.

Dodge’s collection is fabulous, and this, luscious book does it proud. If I have one beef it is that it makes a claim to bring things up to the present day, with a brief mention of mountain bikes, human powered vehicles and other recent innovations. In truth, the period up to about 1920 is lavishly covered. Thereafter, the coverage is so slight as to have been better left out. Hopefully, some collector of cycle-related matter will do a job on the second half of the twentieth century will produce a volume that is the equal of this.

PS August 08

Ride And Be Damned, Chas Messenger (1998)

2008-08-27T23:55:00.000-07:00

Pedal Publishing £24.95 0 9534096 0 0 151pp

Writing at the age of 84, Messenger tells the tumultuous tale of the British League of Racing Cyclists. These were the hardy band of roadmen who, by grit, guile and grim determination brought mass-start road racing to Britain in the years immediately after the second world war.

The author’s perspective is essentially that of a protagonist – he served for many years as an office holder with the BLRC and was subsequently involved in everything from organising the Milk Race, to working with Britain’s Olympic team.

At this distance, the rift that divided British cycling in the late 1940s and 1950s is difficult to comprehend. The sport’s governing body at that time was the conservative British Cycling Union. As cycling boomed in the 1880s, the Police started to prosecute competitive cyclists for ‘furious cycling’. The governing body wanted to ensure that bicycling remained respectable and, in 1888 that had adopted a resolution stating that: “(We) desire to discourage road racing and calls upon clubs to assist it by refusing to hold races upon the road”.

It was this decision – and the maintenance of that position for more than half a century - that prevented mass start road races from becoming the huge spectator sport in the British isles that it is in most of continental Europe. Racers on these shores had to satisfy themselves with secretively organised time trials, and track cycling.

At the end of the 1930s, however, Percy Stallard, a Wolverhampton cyclist, was one of a growing band who wanted the chance to race as they did on the other side of the Channel. His enthusiasm, and that of those who gathered around him, led to a new organisation – the League of Racing Cyclists, and a furious break with the British Cycling Union. Both sides entrenched, cycling clubs split, and there was much bad blood. As a result, however, big, road races were introduced to the UK, even if they were too late to become the mainstays of the sporting calendar that the European races became.

The joy of this book its two-fold. It is a story that is, otherwise, without a historian, and Messenger does his subject great service by setting down these tales for posterity. It is also fabulously illustrated, with flyers, programmes and photographs. There is scarcely a page without some kind of graphic – and seeing the originals really evoke the age from which they came.

The downside is that Messenger makes a somewhat confused historian. Often he seems uncertain whether he is setting down a dispassionate record, writing a polemic in favour of his own views, or writing a personal memoir. In the end, for anyone interested in the development of British cycling, it is a forgivable fault.

PS August 08

Trial By Tandem, Alan McCulloch (1951)

2008-07-24T09:16:00.001-07:00

George Allen & Unwin 236pp

The author and his wife, Ellen are killing time between jobs. At this point, in late 1940s, he is old enough (probably about 40), to have progressed from life working in a bank, to that of a professional art critic. Indeed, later in life, he and his wife become some of the most eminent figures in art curation in their native Australia.

In Paris for a conference, the couple buy a tandem on a whim and set off on an Odyssey through France and Italy. This is a book about cycling only in the sense that the tandem exists and a generally unwelcome gooseberry in their relationship. Indeed, McCulloch insists that despite her time pedalling behind him, his wife never properly learns to ride a bicycle. Certainly, the experience of cycling and travelling on a two wheels take up very little of the story.

Their journey, and his writing style, are gentle - although the prose is shot through with perceptive observation and taut writing. "A curious feature of bicycle travel is that, although you are whistling along, utterly unprotected, through the atmosphere as it were, you have a strong sense of privacy, the feeling of being unobserved. Consequently one soon develops a lack of self consciousness about clothes, and quickly sheds all items superfluous to the job in hand". Thus, McCulloch introduces his being barred from entrance to the casino at Monte Carlo because he resembled a tramp.

They stay at rowdy youth hostels, enjoy the hospitality of a Vicomte, search for signs that Van Gogh is remembered in Arles and eventually return the tandem to the dealer from whom they procured it in Paris. The book has a witty observation about all of them - even his wife being with child by the end of their travels.

Throughout, McCulloch brings the sensibilities of an artist to his account, and the book is illustrated with pen and ink drawings that he did en route. It is a charming book, and a record of post-war Europe that seems a million miles from France and Italy today. There are moments when he appears to be spinning out his tales, to fill the pages and there is not much in the way of narrative drive to keep the pages turning. But the book has considerable charm and provides a more than pleasant means to pass away and afternoon.

PS July 2008

Ellen, by this point is with child

From the pen of J B Wadley, ed Adrian Bell (2002)

2008-07-24T06:45:00.000-07:00

Mousehold Press 1 874739 22 6 £12.95 206pp

A collection of articles about competitive cycling by one of Britain's most celebrated cycle journalists

Jock Wadley was a towering presence in British cycle journalism in the middle years of the twentieth century. True, you might say, with few practitioners in this particular corner of reporting during that period, even one of short stature might appear as a giant. But Wadley's qualities as an observer and recorder of bicycle sport would have shone out, whatever the competition.

Born in 1914, Wadley reported on the domestic and continental scene from 1933, pretty nearly until he died in 1981, writing for Cycling and The Bicycle, as well as editing Coureur and International Cycle Sport. That this publication was issued over 20 years after his demise shows the regard in which he was held by his readers.

The pieces here cover topics as diverse as the intense competition to take the 'Bath and Back' record (from London - of course); Frederico Bahamontes assault on the 1959 Tour and a Randonneur in the Alps. His tone is almost conversational - he frequently explains the difficulties of following a race from a press car. "When the journalist is equipped with a helicopter he might be able to cover all four races at once" he laments at one stage - speaking of an age before most commentators watched the race on the box.

Here he is on Shay Elliot's progress in 1958's edition of Ghent-Wevelgem: "What I dared to hope was the Elliot was still strong enough not only to win the Messines prime, but to get away on his own to keep clear of the other chasers all the way to Wevelgem. But although he was still strong, one man was stronger. He was Noel Fore, and Fore Flung himself into a powerful sprint on a modest hill".

He is partisan, but when the English-speaking riders do not triumph, he is quick to applaud the winners.

Often the style is more that of a letter to a friend than what we would today recognise as journalism. But what a correspondent to have! These dispatches from the past are so full of colour, incident and detail that they transcend their style.

PS 24 July

Cycling Is Such Fun, Ragged Staff (late 1940s)

2008-07-03T05:32:00.000-07:00

Skeffington & Sons no price shown 131pp

A series of fictional sketches and tales featuring a 'clubman' and his family traversing the countryside in the forties and fifties

Ragged Staff is the pen name of Rex Coley, a journalist on Cycling (which became Cycling Weekly) in the 1940s and 1950s. The pieces collected here are, I believe, ones that had already appeared in The Comic, and they offer an glimpse into a world that now seems impossible remote.

Each article is an entertainment - a short tale or scene from the life of a keen cyclist, who is never happier than when traversing the country on two wheels. There are endless social mishaps, with boarding house land ladies who have a low opinion of cyclists; hotel porters who insist on carrying saddle bags like the baggage of grandees; and station masters who don't approve of means of transport that do not require the purchase of tickets.

Much of the time Ragged is accompanied by his wife, Ann, his foil and frequent debunker. On occasion, the son, and even the pet dog join them awheel.

Coley was an accomplished writer. These are simple little tales with no pretensions to literature, but Coley makes them a pleasure to read. Each is alive with incident and dialogue. In the hands of a lesser wordsmith, an account of an ill-conceived cycle ride from south east London to Nuneaton simply to return a milk bottle would be stogy fare. Coley's deftness of touch and feel for the absurd make it a pleasure.

It is a period piece in every sense of the word. The roads are empty, the clothing woolen and the enjoyment of simple pleasures after the privations of war is palpable. Not everything rose-tinted, however. Even if there are still vicar's wives alive who would badger passing cycle tourists into 'blacking up'; to play Sambo in their husband's dramatic productions ('you merely have to act in an ignorant and absurd manner', she advises), it is unlikely that they would be celebrated as they are here.

Nonetheless, this is book is a considerable pleasure - even for those of us for whom this era seems impossibly distant.

PS July 08

Incidentally, I would be fascinated if anyone has any further information about Coley. There are other books of his Ragged Staff pieces, I know, but any other information would be great.

Grame Obree profile, Tim Dawson

2008-07-01T09:03:00.000-07:00

First published Scotsman 28 February 1998

Graeme Obree circles Manchester’s velodrome with the easy precision of a watch movement. Around and around the huge, empty bowl of pine boards he spins - a vision of mechanical efficiency in his metallic skinsuit - his speed apparently diminished by the vastness of the track. So regular and effortless is the motion that he might easily be a clock’s second hand awaiting installation of its slower partners.

Riding his first trials for a fresh attempt on the world hour record in Manchester this week might have made the going look easy. But all is not as it seems.

‘Cycling at that intensity for an hour is like being on a rack, and winding the screw to tighten it up yourself,’ he says. ‘There are people who can tolerate agony, but very few who can inflict it on themselves over a sustained period.’

Warming to the theme, he says that pulling your own teeth out would be easy by comparison. ‘After about twenty minutes the pain becomes intense and there is no respite. It seems like another three or four hours before you stop. To keep going, I tell myself that the each lap is the last, and visualise my wife and family in tears because I have failed.’

How the forthcoming feature film of the Ayrshire cyclist’s rollercoaster career will deal with the terrible suffering to which he is willing to subject his body remains to be seen. As does its potrayal of the fiery independence that has exasperated so many of the people who have tried to help him along the way.

His single-minded unwillingness to be anything other than his own man is legendary. According to one of cycling’s professional officials, the sport’s ruling bodies would love to help him. ‘All we ask is that he occasionally puts in a competitive performance to demonstrate that he is still riding at international level. But he won’t co-operate and insists on doing everything in private. He would only have to give a little and by doing so, a very substantial pot of money would become available to him, but he makes it impossible for us.’

Graeme Obree first started pedalling around Scotland’s roads as a teenager. He made numerous friends at schoolboy cycle races and on hosteling weekends, but many considered him to be wild. Even, slightly weird. He seemed to be on the edge; willing to sanction in himself physical, mental and mechanical extremes that few others would contemplate. And he has a stubbornness about getting what he wants which, while it is the bedrock of his success, has also lost him plenty of friends along the way.

The signs of his eccentricity are legion. Even now, at 32, he still has plans to conquer the world on ‘Old Faithful’ the original bike he built from scrap parts and fitted with the bearings of an old washing machine. The only professional cycling team to have signed him, sacked him within days. And in the last few months he has turned down lottery funding available to him as an elite athlete, preferring his independence even if it means poverty.

In person, he is engaging, enthusiastic and likeable. He talks ten to the dozen on any subject, and is naturally friendly. But the intensity of his inner belief in his ability to push his body would be considered madness were it not for what he has achieved - and says he can achieve again.

In May or June of this year, Obree will once more try to ride further in one hour than any cyclist has before. He can’t promise to beat the record again - the current holder Chris Boardman has taken it into the ‘twilight zone’ of human capabilities, the Scot concedes. But, says Obree, the conditions for his two successful bids for the record were far from perfect.

‘I am stronger now than I ever have been,’ he says. ‘I can produce more power and I am now taking more account of nutrition, which will give me a few more meters. I won’t be able ride in a position quite so aerodynamic as Chris used because of new rule changes, but I am sure that I can at least get up to his distance.’

Even sympathetic commentators consider his chances slim. But Obree has succeeded against all expectations so many times before that no one will completely discount what he says.

To put his put his accomplishments to date in context, a brief detour into European cycling is necessary. On the continent, cycling is a major professional sport. It is as extensively televised as football and, attracts the cream of athletic talent who if successful can earn millions of pounds each season. Wealthy teams invest lavishly in the minutely monitored training of their stables: some have even built substantial research institutions dedicated to perfecting their riders’ bodies and equipment.

When Graeme Obree achieved international fame, all he knew of this world had been gleaned from television and magazines. Aged 27, he was a highly-rated British amateur. This put him in a group of 20 or 30 people who would thrash it out each weekend for meagre prize money. He and his competitors were as far from international success as Sunday-league footballers are from sudden elevation to the Permiership.

Unemployed after his bike shop had folded, Obree was all for giving up. The training time necessary to compete as a cyclist made it difficult to provide for his young family. But he still had a towering ambition - or perhaps more a crazy dream.

‘Francesco Moser’s hour record in 1984 had always inspired me,’ says Obree. ‘I liked the purity and daringness of one man going out alone with no hiding place against the clock. It seemed like cycling’s glittering prize and Moser’s aerodynamic style and radical bike brought an Italian glamour and panache to his ride. And he broke a record widely considered to be unbeatable.’

It is a record that cyclists have been contesting since 1876 when FD Doods managed to cover 25.508 kilometres in an hour on a track in Cambridge. In subsequent years, many world-class champions have added their names to those who have pushed the record further. Fausto Coppi - arguably the most gifted rider of this century - covered 45.848 kilometres in 1942; five times Tour winner Jacques Anquetil managed 47.493 kilometres in 1967 and the Belgian Eddy Merckx, who notched up more professional cycling wins than any rider before or since, stunned the world in 1972 with a ride of 49.432 kilometres.

Like most others who have tried for the hour record, Merckx completed his successful assault with a vow never to try again - such was the mental and physical stress of the effort.

Obree came to the specialist discipline of track cycling relativly late. Once he did, however, he decided that it was here that he could make his mark.

For all the jokes about his home-made bike, and his training methods, it is impossible to discount the achievement of his first successful hour record bid in 1993. True, the bike did contain some components that came from unorthodox sources. But what he devised in the workshop behind his home in Irvine has been more successful than bikes and positions developed at a cost of hundreds of thousands of pounds in America and Italy.

Both Obree’s successful assaults on the record were made in his own self-devised chest-on-handlebars ‘ski-tuck’ position. By keeping his back flat, he improved his aerodynamics. And by eliminating the bike’s top tube and narrowing the distance between the pedals he was able to imitate the action of a runner, drawing his legs across his body, rather than simply up and down, therby developing greater power.

In the context of world cycling, Obree’s experimentation seems curious. Even among those professional riders with a technical interest in their equipment, none have begun to match his brilliant inventiveness. But then Obree is the product of the peculiar, semi-detached world of British time trialling.

When the modern bicycle emerged, in the 1880s - before cars or planes - it was a sensation whose competitive potential was quickly recognised. The tours of France and Italy started in the early years of this century, as did the other great ‘mass start’ races from city to city that are still the mainstay of professional racing. Similar developments here stalled, however, because, from the 1890s onwards, cyclists caught racing on British roads were prosecuted under a law that prohibits ‘furious cycling’.

Rather than give up, British cyclists turned to clandestinely organised time trials. These were extraordinary events. Secret route guides were mailed to participants along with their start time. At five minute intervals, each competitor would arrive at a deserted lamp post or drain cover. Dressed as inconspicuously as possible, they would belt round the course while a hidden timekeeper recorded their effort. Only when the results sheet arrived in the next day’s post, would competitors know their time and placing.

Not until 1960 was road racing brought within the law and, although much has changed in the sport since then, time trailing continues to be the backbone of British competitive road cycling. The country is criss-crossed with courses that retain coded names and are measured from lamp posts and road signs. And the very nature of these events breeds an obsessive, almost trainspottery, interest in tweaking bikes and employing obscure bits of kit.

That someone from this background could take the hour record shocked the world of cycle racing. Not only was Obree’s bike an oddity, but he eschewed traditional training methods and professed to consume a diet of conflakes and marmalade sandwiches ahead of major events.

As a result, his success rekindled greater interest in the hour record than there had been for years. First Chris Boardman bettered the Scot by 600 meters. Obree extended his record again to 52.713 kilometres in April of 1994, and then the big boys moved in. Miguel Indurain - five times Tour de France winner - put his name in the record books, only to be displaced a few weeks later by the rider ranked world number one, Tony Rominger.

Meanwhile Obree’s extraordinary career continued. He won the world track pursuit title, but was prevented from defending it because his ‘ski tuck’ was banned by cycling’s ruling body. A professional French team offered him a contract, but he was dismissed within the first week when he failed to turn up for training.

Most assumed that his fifteen minutes of fame were over. But, undaunted, he arrived at the 1995 world championships with another new and equally revolutionary cycling style - ‘the superman’. Not only did he storm to victory, but within months, many top professionals had copied the position. Since then, however, a virus wrecked his chance of Olympic glory in Atlanta and shortly afterwards he ‘retired’ because he lacked the money to continue.

Among those who copied ‘the Superman’ was Chris Boardman. After struggling to finish the 1996 Tour de France, the Englishman, who now ranks in the world’s top 20, hit the most blistering form of his career. Before a packed crowd in Manchester he covered 56.375 kilometres - an average speed of more than 35 miles per hour. To beat this mark, Obree must ride more than four kilometres further in the hour than he ever has before.

In pursuit of this he has made some concessions to convention. For the first time since he was a junior, he is working with a professional trainer. He has submitted to a regime similar to those used by other world-class cyclists and is using standard devices like a heart-rate monitor that, until recently, he disdained in place of his own ‘feel factor’.

He even planned to ride a professionally made bike, until another change in the regulations forced him back on Old Faithful. Fortunately, he says, this is still the fastest bike he has ever ridden.

But has Obree has joined the mainstream of cycling? By no means. There will be more novel technical additions and adaptations to his bike. He won’t let anyone see this at the moment - or even enter his workshop - but, among other things, it is possible that he will be using a chain lubricating device adapted from a motorbike.

There will be no public trails until late March. At these, he must demonstrate, for his own purposes, and to impress potential backers of his seriousness, that he can at least mount a credible challenge. Doing this requires him to output between 450 and 470 watts for 20 minutes - as hard as most fit cyclists can manage for two minutes. If he can do this then believes, his training programme will bring him to a peak and by early summer he will be able to sustain the effort for an hour.

But if this happens, it will be nothing to do with gifts from nature, he says. ‘I am insulted when people complement my natural ability. Its not natural - I made myself like this. Most people assume that they have reached their natural limit when really they have reached the level at which they are satisfied. I am never satisfied and play mind games to keep pushing myself to the next level and the next again. The only thing that really makes a difference is what is in your head.’

Nevertheless, Obree says that he will only get close to the record if everything goes exactly as planned. If it does though, he believes he can do it, which at least until now seems to have been enough. And if he is right, his world will once again open up. As holder of the record, he will command decent appearance fees at track meetings around Europe. He has already been pre-selected for Scotland’s Commonwealth Games squad later this year and is even dreaming of the Sydney Olympics in 2000.

What failure would mean is impossible to say. For the moment it is an eventuallity he refuses to contemplate - another mind game. All he can focus on is a mental image. The circling stops and Obree climbs off his bike: a new world record under his belt.

ENDS

Cycling Across Spain, Tim Dawson

2008-07-01T07:24:00.000-07:00

First published Cycling Plus c. October 1998

I am squatting on the hard shoulder of the motorway between Toledo and Madrid trying to mend a puncture. The pounding hailstones will cut open my face any second, I am sure, unless one of the full carriageway of speeding lorries hits me first. My head spins with fatigue, after 60 miles into the wind, I am soaked to the skin and, a powerful gust has just toppled my upturned bike down the steep ditch beside the road.

As I gaze down to see my saddlebag lying beside the partially rotted corpse of a German Shepherd dog it is impossible not to wonder, why I am doing this?

The answer is that I wanted instant adventure. I am in my mid 30s, married and do a demanding professional job, so time is limited. Backpacking around the world, crewing a yacht in the Caribbean or hiking in the Himalayas are not feasible. Cycling alone and unsupported across the Spain - from Gibraltar to Bilbao - seemed heroic and just about possible.

Ten days would be enough, I had calculated. Ninety miles a day seemed within the bounds of my capabilities. A few weeks with a pre-recorded cassette provided me with half a dozen words Spanish. But without prior bookings, sag wagons, tour leaders, useful guidebooks or knowledge of the Spanish interior, it felt like a genuine adventure.

And if it was going to be an adventure it was possible that things would go wrong. There would be roads that were not ideal for cycling, punctures and bad weather. Not that this made fishing my bike out of the diesel enriched mud beside the motorway any more fun. But I had achieved one objective.

All that I could think about was my journey. How much further would I have to go before I would find a hotel? Would my strength hold up for the second week of cycling? And would I be able to dry my few clothes before I had to set out tomorrow? After five days riding, the anxieties and pressures of my daily life back home were completely forgotten.

And most the experiences that displaced my work-day worries were ecstatically joyful. The sight of Toledo and Segovia from their best road vantages are high octane experiences when you have made the journey to them alone on two wheels. Spain's roadside blooms - in spring at least - are the most dazzling flower show. And the climb up to the monastery of Escorail easily repaid ten years of dreaming.

The idea of crossing Iberia came from Laurie Lee. Bored of London in the 1930s, he spent two years wandering south from northern Spain to Andalucia. His prose conveys a feeling of poetic wonder and exploration.

And such a journey gives you an incredible - if no doubt unreal - sense of knowing a country and its people. The extent to which the language changes from province to province, for example, is rendered uncomfortably real. My attempts to order sandwiches were perfectly understood in Andalucia, but met with incomprehension as I rode into Old Castile.

The varying approaches to Holy Week celebrations reveal the enormously differing attitudes to religion and display. In Seville, over a million people crowded its labyrinthine medieval streets to watch marching penitents carry elaborately carved floats depicting Christ and the Madonna. Several processions each day for a week encountered equal enthusiasm, I learned.

The same ceremony in Cuidad Real - an ancient city so completely rebuilt it could be a new town - was shambolic. A desultory crowd trailed behind a gaudy modern float without obvious interest or passion. And in Madrid the procession appeared to excite no one but the tourists. Once it had passed though the city's central square providing momentary excitement for the video-camera-touting classes, it marched on uncheered.

My decision to start in Gibraltar was arbitrary, and a few hours looking around seemed sufficient. The view from my hotel, The Rock, was stupendous however. The Bay of Algecerias is massive - I could see over 40 merchant ships as well as the coasts of Spain and Africa. Best of all though, as I sipped my sherry, was the sea, which, if everything went to plan I would not see again until the end of my ride.

I had planned my first day cycling to be among the hardest, and the 212 kilometres from the coast to Seville lived up to expectations. The road climbs though gentle, rocky hills which, during spring at least, are indecently green. Meandering between small lakes, the scenery could have been Alpine. It was not the hills that did for me, though, but the wind. My twisting and turning route set me alternately with and against it. The latter was a real struggle and after seven hours in the saddle powered only by breakfast and a couple of energy bars, I had the worst hunger knock I have ever experienced.

Fortunately I was able to stumble into a roadside bar where enormous Spanish lunches were still being served. To the amused encouragement of half a dozen old men I stuffed my face and allowed my body sugar to work its magic. The next 70 kilometres felt like they were fuelled by adrenaline alone, but without the food, I could scarcely have walked 70 steps.

Reaching Seville felt an epic triumph, but the welcome I received exceeded all expectations. As I neared the city centre I hit huge waves of people dressed up to the nines, taking part if the first perambulation of Holy Week. By the time I reached the cathedral, the streets were too packed to progress at all. Eventually I reconciled myself to retracing my steps to join the ring road en route to the friends with whom I was staying.

The stiff jabs of pain from my legs the next morning were not to disappear until long after I returned to Britain. But sore though they were off the bike, I was never troubled on the road. Nor did my muscle's fatigue affect my ability to pedal - perhaps this is what professional cyclists feel like during the three week tours?

Happily the road from Seville to Cordoba is quiet and, as it follows the course of a river, flat. It was here though that I first encountered the curious Spanish practice with unwanted dogs. Many owners appear take their animals onto a quite stretch of road and slit their throats. I saw the corpses of endless individual dogs an one pair of very fresh Alsations. Those who feel unable to bring their pets lives to a swift end simply leave their unwanted animals to the mercy of speeding traffic - which if you are on two wheels rather then four can be terrifying.

It was also in Cordoba that I realised how difficult it would be finding accommodation during the country's main national holiday. From the grandest hotels to the simplest pensions there was not a room in town. I was forced to cover a few more miles before finding a motel with vacancies.

In the days to come, it was the search for hotels that gave me most cause for concern. Beds in the tourist centres were mostly full. Far more worrying, however, were the long empty roads where there could be 30 miles between villages, not all of which boasted hostelries.

On one day I was fortunate enough to come across a fabulous hunting lodge from which wood smoke puffed in a steep gorge between mountains. The next day I rode on and on, searching villages with ever greater desperation looking for a place to sleep. Long after I wanted to give up, a simple barn of a building, with the word 'camas' (beds) painted on its gable wall, hoved into view. Never have I been happier to break bread with itinerant farm labourers.

My journey into Madrid was also a long, forlorn search for somewhere to sleep. I had planned to miss the capital entirely. In Toledo, one of the big effects of Spanish tourism, there was no chance of a bed. I set off on the motorway feeling sure that there would be a travel lodge on its outskirts. The skies opened and the road rolled on without a sign of anywhere to stay or even a promising looking town to which I could have turned.

The upshot was an unexpected 70 kilometre drag and an unscheduled night on the town. After five days without hearing anyone speaking English, it was as reassuring to hear my native tongue, as it was to be taken for a Spaniard in one of Spain's endless Irish bars.

Until now I had been lucky with roads - no real disasters and only one stretch of motorway. From the Royal monesty of Escorail just north of Madrid - to Segovia, however, proved to be the most sever physical test I have ever endured.

The map showed two possible routes - a flat main road and an obviously hilly minor road. I had this 75 kilometre stage planned as a rest day, and decided that bit of climbing would be fun. From the sunny spring of the plain, however, the road went up and up. Soon there were patches of snow, but I was generating plenty of heat. It rose further until everything was covered in half a meter of white carpet. Cars carrying skis were now passing me en route to the ski station of Navacerrada.

Here two and three meter icicles hung from the gables, snowboarders ran around in day-glo quilted jackets and my spit froze on contact with the ground. I had stopped only twice on the ascent of 2000 meters and was feeling like a polka dot king.

Until I started to descend. By the third hair pin I was wearing every piece of clothing I had with me and still had to stop every kilometre to choke back the tears of pain and try to warm my extremities. By Segovia I felt freeze dried.

Before my departure I had joked that once I reached Spain's centre, the rest of my journey would be down hill. And although not strictly true, the five days after Segovia turned out to be far the easier. My legs were stronger, the wind more accommodating and the towns and villages of La Mancha flew by.

Nevertheless, by Vitoria - the Basque country's second city - I was beginning to tire of my routine. Every day I looked for a hotel, unpacked, handwashed my kit, found somewhere to eat, had a quick look around and then collapsed into a long deep sleep. After nine days, I wanted to stay in one place and to wear ordinary clothes.

Happily, the high of eventually reaching Bilbao kept me going a little longer. Rain poured during my last day on my bike, and the industrial detritus that surrounds the Basque capital is as widespread as it is depressing. But I scarcely noticed.

The appeal of crossing a country is the feeling of achievement. I had come from the shimmering heat of Gibraltar depending on my wits and self propelled. Soaked again from the rain I rode to the shore of the Bay of Biscay, ten kilometres from Bilbao. There I waded in fully clothed and dizzy with joy.

ENDS

Cycling in cities, Tim Dawson

2008-07-01T07:13:00.000-07:00

first published in Cycling Plus cDecember 1996

Cycle touring has an image problem. So set is our view of what bikes are good for, that we are missing out on their most exciting possibilities.

Since the first hearty wheelers emerged into the countryside from Britain's industrial towns and cities more than a century ago, they and their successors have been the pass-time's living embodiment. So much so, that it is impossible to say 'cycle touring' without thinking of hairy-legged, cord-shorted, beardy-weirdies who only stop peddling up hill and down dale to quaff flagons of foaming real ale.

But why is this a problem?

Its simple. The saddle of a bike is a great place from which to see the countryside. It is probably the best way to see the countryside, but it is not the only way. Even a die-hard velocipede would be hard-pressed to deny the pleasures of viewing our open spaces on foot. And, loath though they might be to admit it, there are parts of rural Britain best seen at speed.

The Settle-Carlisle and West Highland Lines both bring a magic to the mountains unsurpassed by other means of transport. And it would be churlish to deny the pleasures of crossing Shap on the M6.

Cities, however - the great engines of human development - are quite a different story.

A bike is the only satisfactory way to explore, and discover a metropolis. By bike you can criss-cross a city, meandering where it interests you, flying though where it does not: seeing its sights, as well as uncovering its underside.

Let me give you a taster.

I spent a fortnight this summer seeing Barcelona by bike. One of Europe's most exciting cities, it has been an important port since Roman times. And each subsequent generation has left its marks on the cityscape.

Early one morning I rode out into the city's southern suburbs beyond Montjuic, the hill that towers over the city. By chance, between two buildings, I caught sight of a huge complex of modern buildings on the side of the hill that faces away from the city.

I thought by this time that I knew Barcelona - I had visited before, I had read all the books. So, as I picked out a route, I raked my mind trying to recall any mention of this city on the hill.

I took it to be a new university, perhaps modelled on Warwick or Bath. From my vantage point on a suburban road, I could see dozen of small regular windows in the sides of the blocks. Student residences, perhaps, or a large administrative centre?

With some difficulty I steered a course though industrial areas and run down housing schemes until I started climbing towards the concrete campus above. Only as I overtook a long black car did I realise my mistake.

Montjuic cemetery is immense. The Spanish place their dead, embalmed in coffins, into custom built blocks. Each body merits a slot into which the coffin is pushed like a peg and then plugged with a grave stone and glassed over. Wreaths, now dried in the hot sun decorated the windows from which I had seen students waving.

The huge white concrete blocks at Montjuic were built in the 1950s. Rising over 30 feet, each is ten courses of coffins high, 30 wide. On the side of the hill, arranged in avenues, streets and parades there are more than 100 blocks, some almost enveloped in a dense, moist, foliage. A handful of old women, wrapped in thick black head scalves and cloaks, climbed precariously high step ladders to commune with their loved ones. And as the morning's heat rose, the air grew heavy with the sweet smell of decaying flowers.

Had I been travelling by any other means I would have never discovered this astonishing place, nor a hundred others in the many other cities I have explored by bike over the years.

Consider first the facts. For the last 200 years cities have been the theatres in which all important human drama has taken place. In them are built the great monuments of our civilisation - churches, factories, offices and houses. And around those, the detritus of past centuries is wove in an elaborate tapestry. The number of us who choose to live in cities increases each year and, in their confines the important events of human existence are enacted a million times each day.

So why are bicycles, that most enduring invention of the modern age, the only way to discover them?

The physical scale of cities makes them inaccessible by foot. One can traipse around an assortment of tourist attractions but to really see any but the smallest cities, walking is just too slow. Spot something that looks interesting at the end of a street, and the pedestrian faces a dilemma. Is it worth the walk just to have a look? It does not take many blind alleys to dull your curisoity

With two-wheeled transport, you can afford to take a chance. The scale of cities is perfectly suited to the bicycle. In a few hours you can cover the main streets and roads of cities like Norwich and Bristol. The mighty connurbations of Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow are within the scope of the modestly fit. And even London, although perhaps best taken in parts, is better seen by bike than by any other means of transport.

By bike you can get pleasantly lost, safe in the knowledge that it will not be unduly taxing to retrace you path. Set off in one direction, double back, dodge down a narrow passage and if it comes to nothing you can be back where you started without losing your breath.

Cars by cotrast are too fast. Driving takes such concentration. Unlike the great outdoors, in the city the sights fly by. A gap between buildings visible for only a few seconds might give unique view or open up a completely new vista. But travel by car and you've missed it. Even if, from the corner of your eye, something catches your attention its usually impossible to stop.

Traffic planning makes car travel in cities a nightmare. Unfamiliar with the roads, no sooner have you set off in one direction than a one-way sign forces you in another. By bike the world is open around you, you can stop, get off, slip down a pavement, or chat with a passer-by.

But bikes can be fast when you need them to be. On foot in New York, I was more interested to see the neighbourhoods I knew from films than the Midtown shops. But as I wandered from the main streets in Harlem, I was repeatedly accosted by more and more threatening young men. By the time I dived back into the subway I was soaking with sweat and shaking with fear.

By contrast, when the residents of a housing estate outside Seville, charmingly named Six Thousand Habitations, appeared unwelcoming, I simply dropped onto my bottom cog and made hastily away. On another occasion, a guard dog took chase in the wilderness of Liverpool's waterfront. Fearing a mauling, I summoned up such a burst of speed that I would have left even Cipollini in the jaws of the hound.

The coutryside is not even that assecible to cycle tourists. Most of us live in cities. Travel by air, rail or road typically starts and ends in cities. But try escaping them by bike. Ribbon development beside roads makes a ride out of even our smaller connurbations a long slog past an endless dreary parade of shops and houses.

And see how much of the countryside you can take in if you set off on a day's circular trip from the centre of Paris or London. Even if you start by train in the south-east of England, it is impossible to escape the car. The roads in Kent, Hertforshire and Buckinghamshire are every bit as car-clogged as the city centre. The only difference is that in the country cars travel faster.

Recent projections of the increase in car travel our rural areas suggest that in the next two decades this can only get worse.

It is an illusion to think that one can escape the rush of every day life in the country - better by far to accept this, and enjoy yourself in the city centre. You'll find far fewer cars in the City of London on a Sunday morning than you will anywhere in the Home Counties.

Which ever city you choose, you will see more of it by bike. Only on two wheels can you quickly understand how a city fits together and get a sense of how its inhabitants lead their daily lives.

But why with so much to see, is cycle touring in cities not more popular? Our bookshops are groaning with tomes detailing rural rides. If you can't find any about seeing cities this way, perhaps it is because of the image problem.

For so long as cyclists head for the hills, they will miss their bike's greatest potential. It is time to reclaim cycle touring from the saddlebag and cape brigade and discover the frontier on our own doorsteps.

STREETWISE CYCLING

Most of us can start city centre touring outside our own front doors, but getting the most out of it requires a little planning.

1 Arterial routes are invariably clogged with cars and, although they are inescapable for some journeys, they are never going to be much fun. Locally produced cycle route maps show designated cycle paths which usually trace routes though quiet streets that are inaccessible to traffic. Even in a city you know, making a familiar journey by a different route can be quite a surprise. If you wonder what London's docklands were like before the developers arrived, for example, take a ride out to the Royal Docks, where it is easy to believe gangland disputes are still resolved.

If you can't get hold of a cycle map, try a street plan. Look for the lines of blocked off roads, designed to stop rat runs. A nightmare for motorists - a warren of quiet, undiscovered roads for cycle touring.

2 Waterways are also the source of endless reclaimable routes though cities. In both Birmingham and Leeds tow paths will take you into canal basins that have, until recently lain undiscovered. Beside the lesser river banks and tow paths in Glasgow and London you canl still see sides of both cities with which few of their natives are familiar. Tow paths can be overgrown and do sometimes end without warning, however, so be prepared to double back, or haul your bike over a fence or two.

3 The lines of old railways provide another set of routes accessible only by bike. Edinburgh closed down a network of suburban railways in the 1950s leaving behind a maze of bridges, junctions and branch lines. They allow access to almost anywhere in the city, but lie unseen from the roads and pavement. Some of these have now been properly converted into cycle paths. But elsewhere you will find the lines of old railways marked on maps. They are occasionally impassable, but more often than not provide unique routes for cyclists.

CITY TOURING TIPS

Any bike will do, but a mountain bike with slick tyres is best - city streets are full of craters. If you are riding a polished titanium frame equipped with this year's groupset borrow a trick from the couriers: cover your frame with insulating tape to disguise it from would-be thieves.

Wear flat soled shoes. You are bound to want to get off fairly frequently - to buy a coffee, get a better view or look around a building.

Avoid too much lycra unless you are supremely self confident. A Banesto team strip is an invitation for those you pass by to call out unfavourable comparisons with Miguel as peadle past.

Attach your map to your handlebars with either on a bar bag or a clip. In an unfamiliar city you will often need to check that you taken the right turn.

Always carry a lock and the necessities of puncture repair - a long unnecessary walk is just as dispiriting in the city as it is in the middle of nowhere.

ENDS

One More Kilometer And We Are In The Showers, Tim Hilton (2004)

2008-07-01T06:13:00.000-07:00

HarperCollins 0 00 257194 3 £16.99 396 pp

A collection of memories, autobiography and lists by a talented writer who provides a treat for anyone who has been touched by cycling culture

Hilton - an art critic and journalist by trade - has assembled a glorious rattle bag of a book of memoires. He opens with his introduction to cycling as an escape from the communist household in which he grew up in the 1940s. So dedicated to the cause were his parents that they named Hilton, their only child, Timoshenko, after the Soviet war hero.

Little wonder then that 'All Spare Parts' bicycle that he found at the bottom of his grandparents' garage provided a welcome relief from party meetings devoted to the desirability of scientific socialism.

This is a book of vignettes and digressions in bike culture. He ranges widely, from the rivalry between Coppi and Bartali, to the history of the socialist Clarion cycling clubs and way that cyclists choose their occupations. An unusually large number of artists, musicians and writers are cyclists, he claims. Many postal workers are cyclists too - it provides long afternoons for training. Also - he claims - cyclists are won't to seek employment a decent training run distant from their homes.

Hilton is also keen on lists - classic steel frame builders of industrial England, the hills of The Tour of Flanders and successful women racing cyclists of the 1950s, to mention just three.

Even to those who have read dozens of books about cycling, Hilton has something fresh to reveal. He is a writer of such easy, professional competence that he is always a pleasure to read. Indeed, to anyone who has stumbled into cycling and is trying to make sense of why clubs style themselves 'VC' or why British cyclists are obsessed with time trialling, this is a great starting point.

PS July 2008

The Escape Artist, Matt Seaton (2002)

2008-06-12T09:03:00.000-07:00

Forth Estate 1 84115 103 3 £14.99 186pp

Autobiography on two wheels including genuine tragedy and highly perceptive observations

Matt Seaton is possibly the most talented writer chronically cycling today. Widely known for being The Guardian (and Fleet Street's) first cycling columnist, he has a long track record as an intelligent interpreter of modern sporting culture. Indeed, he first came to public notice when he won an essay competition in the late 1980s run by the magazine Marxism Today. In that, he dissected the relationship between gym use and the prevailing Thatcherite spirit.

Detractors might dismiss Escape Artist for being Nick Hornby on two wheels. And, it is true that the male-self-discovery-through-obsessive-activity story has been applied to pretty much every imaginable leisure pursuit. In respect of the genre, this point is valid, but it is a format that Seaton raises to a new level. This is part because of his talent and intelligence, part because the period of his life that he chronicles contains a narrative that is truly heart wrenching. By the end of the book, Seaton's 33 year old wife, the mother of his 18 month old IVF-conceived twins, has died from breast cancer.

Even without that, his lyrical description of his transition from boyhood with his second-hand Raleigh Jubilee, to being a creditable amateur racer, and then finding that he had to devote more time to his family, makes this book an enduring pleasure. His observations are illuminating on dozens of tiny matters of cycling interest: the tactile qualities of tubular tyres; the social dynamics of the club run and; cycle apparel before and after Lycra.

Here he is on a question that has tested all of us who have ever put razor to leg: "For cyclists, the real question of shaving, the one which no one dares to ask, is where to stop. In changing rooms at race controls you would see all sorts of ad hoc solutions to this conundrum. Some would shave to just above the point which their lycra shorts would reach. This was fine as far as it went, but in the changing rooms it looked ridiculous because it created the distinct visual impression that they were wearing a pair of hair shorts. On a particularly hirsute cyclist if could look like a pair of opaque tights cut off above the knee.".

Perhaps most important of all, however, Seaton unpicks the way that, for him at least, his bicycle was so much more than a means of physically travelling from A to B. His two wheeled odyssey is as much about his human growth as his muscular development and for that reason is essential reading for all who seek to explore their own transports of delight.

PS July 2008

In Search of Robert Millar, Richard Moore (2007)

2008-05-23T05:34:00.000-07:00

HarperSport 978 0 00 723501 360pp £15.99

A readable and stimulating biography of Britain's most sucessful stage race rider

Robert Millar is arguably the greatest stage race cyclist that Britain has every produced – and by virtue of his post-career behaviour, no small enigma. Given the current enthusiasm for cycling-related books, it seems surprising that a biography of Millar took so long to appear. The only thing keeping would be hagiographists back, presumably, was the near certainty that Millar would not co-operate. Moore, however, offers a great deal more that the standard sports-biog. First he was a cyclist himself – good enough to represent Scotland at the Commonwealth Games. Second, he knew Millar slightly; albeit as a bit-part player in a Scottish cycling team that Millar managed. It is the quality of Moore's research and writing, however, that really mark out this book.

He movingly evokes Millar’s ascent up cycling’s greasy pole from a working-class neighbourhood in Glasgow. And, he lifts a bit of the lid on the weirdness of being a professional cyclist in the mid-1980s. Twenty years on, it is easy to forget just what a phenomenon Millar was, or how he achieved his success almost entirely alone. To read this book is to rediscover the joy of seeing Millar shoot out from a group on one of the great French climbs. It is also good to learn that he had friends and admirers in the peleton - even if most of his professional colleagues remained wary of him.

Moore even goes some way to get to the bottom of the persistent stories that Millar has now had a sex change. However jaded you feel with cycling biographies, this one still has something to give.

The Man Who Loved Bicycles, Daniel Behrman (1973)

2008-05-22T07:37:00.000-07:00

Harper's Magazine Press 0-060120350-5 130pp $6.95

A series of essays an recolections about life and the culture of cycling as a form of transport by a perceptive US writer, living in France in the early 1970s

"The bicycle is a vehicle for revolution. It can destroy the tyranny of the automobile as effectively as the printing press brought down despots of flesh and blood. The revolution will be spontaneous, the sum total of individual revolts like my own. It may have already begun." So writes Behrman, an American scientific writer "existing in Paris and living in Brittany" in the early 1970s. The book contains far more than pro-cycling invective, however. It is a catalogue of intelligent reflections and ruminations on France in that period. He is a fine writer with moral fibre and an eclectic ear for scientific snippets. The treatise is laced with personal stories and remissness.

Reading the book today, however, (I read it in around 2004) the book does throw up some questions. Where did these pieces of writing come from - they read as though they might have been magazine articles, and who was Behrman?

That the book itself does not answer them however, does not make it any less enjoyable a read.

Major Taylor, Andrew Ritchie (1988)

2008-05-22T07:24:00.000-07:00

John Hopkins University Press 1988
0-8018-5303-6 303 pp $15.95

An important readable biography of one of the most historically important stars of late nineteenth century US cycling

Major Taylor was one of the first black athletes to become world champion in any sport. Between 1898 and the early 1900s he was one of the biggest names in track cycling – at that time a massive spectator sport. Few names from that age are recognisable today, but Taylor’s, if any, deserves to be celebrated. He overcame massive obstacles – not least the huge institutional and unofficial bars to non-whites competing at the top level. As a result, he became an international superstar. Ritchie has done a fabulous job in both teasing his story from the fragments of evidence that remain, and bringing to life the golden age of track cycling as a spectator sport. Economic and racial history are intertwined with with sporting triumph and fascinating crumbs from cycling's past. It is peripheral to the tale, but the story of 'Mile-a-minute Murphy' has long stuck in my mind. He constructed a timber track between railway lines, so that he could draught behind a railway train and pedal his bike at the remarkable speed of 60mph.

Breakaway, Samuel Abt (1985)

2008-05-22T07:16:00.000-07:00

Random House 0-394-54679-2 178pp $16.95

Sameul Abt is a long-time follower of the Tour de France and the continential racing scene, mostly in his capacity as deputy editor of the International Herald Tribune. His books are year-long pieces of reportage that tell the tale of the great French race through dozens of individual narratives – of mechanics, riders, managers, sponsors and reporters. This book takes as its subject the 1984 tour – the year that Laurent Fignon got one over on Bernard Hinault. It was also Robert Millar’s best ever tour – he came forth in the general classification and won the King of the Mountains. Abt is a brilliant journalist, with a fine ear for a story and an ability to pluck out telling details. There are really no books to touch his for evoking the glamour, oddity and daily grind of a great cycling tour. Indeed, the value of his books increases as time goes by, as they allow the reader to reimmerse themselves – or immerse themselves, in may cases, in a bygone age.

The Rider, by Tim Krabbe (1978)

2008-05-06T05:31:00.000-07:00

(trans Sam Garrett)
pub: Bloomsbury (2002) 0 7475 5941 4 148 pages cover price £6.99

A exploration of the experience of racing a bicycle written as an account of a fictional race

The Rider is the best book on the experience of cycle racing ever written. Indeed, by any margin, it is a great book; and an exemplar to any who would set out to imortalise the guts of an experience in such a way that a reader might momentarily inhabit the soul of the protagonist.

First published in Dutch, the book is a fictionalised account of the Tour de Mont Aigoual. It draws heavily on Krabbe’s own career as an amateur cycle racer and is at its best describing the effort required to compete at this level. There is plenty of insight into the preparations that he makes for a race and the curious tactical melange that is mass-start racing.

The race narrative – set out kilometre by kilometre – draws readers along like a peleton with the wind on its back. It is interspersed with an account of the rider’s sporting career, and a more general discourse on professional cycle racing. For a reader unfamiliar with cycle racing, this provides useful context. Anyone immersed in the sport might find it distracting.

Nonetheless, it is not surprising that since its English translation, the book, and its author, has become as lauded among British cyclists as it is on the continent. Indeed, some have even gone so far as to produce cycle jerseys in the colours of the fictional teams against whom Krabbe’s rider races. There can’t be many books whose fans feel so passionately about them that they create tribute t-shirts.