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

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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