CYCLING MEMORIES

 OF THE

 1940’s and 50’s

 

John Elliott

Wellington Veterans Cycling Club, New Zealand

(Formerly Sherwood Cycling Club, 1946 – 1965)

 

CYCLING MEMORIES OF THE 1940’s and 50’s

 

I joined the Sherwood Cycling Club, in Nottingham, just before I left school at the age of 14, after the end of World War II.  The Sherwood Cycling Club was then, mainly a Time Trialling, and touring club.  In Britain at this time, there was quite a bit of controversy about Massed Start Road Races, and the BLRC, (British League of Racing Cyclists), was the main body then for organising such events.

 

I was less than 12 years old, when my father bought me my first bicycle it was a Hercules upright cycle.  Later I graduated to a Raleigh Sports, which I paid for myself, which even in those days was considered to be a heavy machine; it had a 3 speed Sturmey Archer Gear mechanism in the rear wheel.  Then, in 1947, I bought a hand built “Paragon” Road Racing frame from Andy Bone, he had a cycle shop in Arkwright St., near the Midland Railway Station, he and the shop have long since gone.  The frame was hand built to my own specifications.  I bought all the ancillary gear as individual parts, and assembled the bicycle myself.  It was insured for £150 which was considered to be a lot of money in the 1940’s.  I have since restored this frame together with another “Paragon” frame, which I bought off my brother Roy.  Both frames are almost identical.  This second frame originally had the Olympic Rings in the Decals on the seat tube, as it was built in 1948 when the Olympic Games were held in London during that year.  Unfortunately, the Decals could not be saved, or replaced, when I had both the frames re-sprayed in 1998.

 

I have never considered myself to be a racing cyclist; I had the stamina but never the speed.  I was more interested in doing long distance touring, especially in the Derbyshire Dales, and then later, doing cycle tours in Europe, when things were a bit better after the war years.  I did ride 3 events just to see how fast I could go.  As near as I can remember; I did a 10 mile TT in 26 min, a 25 mile TT in 1:12:00, and the Annual Nottingham to Skegness event run for Sherwood Club Members only.  This event started from the outskirts of Nottingham, on the A52, on Radcliffe Road just up from the Trent Bridge Cricket Ground, and finished on the outskirts of Skegness, a distance then of 80 miles.  I rode it in 3:19:00, but there was a slight tail wind during that event, also I had stopped for someone who had crashed in Boston, I think it may have been Frank Beale.  We hired a coach to carry the marshal's and timekeepers, etc., and also to bring the riders back home after the event.  I was the Club Captain for about 4 years organising the Sunday club runs, I also helped in the running of club events, marshalling, timekeeping, and at feeding stations, etc.

 

Nobody in the club had a car then, so this meant that we had to ride our bikes to all local events, no matter how near or far they were, and in all types of weather, I was really fit in those days.  On one such occasion we were to set up a two-way drink station, at Long Bennington, on the main A1 road, between Grantham and Newark.  This was for an Open 100 mile Time Trial, which started at 6am in the morning.

 

We had to have the drink station set up by about 7am.  But things went wrong somewhere along the line; we were supposed to set off at 5am from our meeting point on the edge of town.  Instead we were about one hour late getting started.  There were about 10 or more of us in the group, including at least 2 females, and we had to carry several of those awful green canvas water buckets with ½" rope handles, also quite a few aluminum water bottles.

 

So instead of a nice comfortable ride, we finished up having to work bit-and-bit to try and make up for lost time.  Just as we hit the main A1 road, a rider came into view, so one of the lads took his own water bottle and handed it up to the rider.  Fortunately, he was the first competitor, and we hurriedly went to the local farmhouse to fill up the water buckets, in time for the next rider.  No such things as “Powerade or Gatorade” in those days; just plain unadulterated water.  Later in the event we were handing up water to riders coming in both directions.

 

We held our 10-mile TT’s at Lowdham.  At most of the 10 mile Time Trials I assisted Bert Morris as timekeeper. Even though it was only a club event, we generally had a good turn out, and often had members from other local cycling clubs entering too, using the event as part of their training.  So we had to have 2 timekeepers because the first riders were finishing before the last riders had gone off.  We used the old type chromium watches with a big knob at the top.

 

Most riders used a fixed wheel for this event, as there was no need for gears, and I believe they still do even now.  Some riders carried a spare pair of wheels on brackets attached to each side of the front axle, and strapped the top of each wheel to their handlebars.  Other riders rode fixed wheel out to the event on a medium gear, and just changed the rear wheel around to use the smaller fixed sprocket for the higher gear to ride in the event itself.

 

We had one member, I think it was Lofty Sykes, in the club, who was well over 6ft in height, solidly built, a very powerful rider, and as strong as an Ox.  He was quite a character, but a bit slow on the up-take.  He was unable to speak properly, because of a defect in his upper palette, but we were still able to understand what he said.

 

At one of these events he was industriously changing his wheels, and pumping them up with an ordinary hand pump.  He had this strange ritual, whereby, he would start pumping up one tyre, then the tyre on the other wheel, and then back to the first one, and so on!  This particular night, one of the other lads, mentioned to him that if he wasn’t careful, he would burst his tyre, as he had already got an air pressure of more than 110 lbs.  But no, he still carried on pumping.  The next minute there was this almighty bang, and bits of rubber shot up about 10 or 15ft into the air, and started floating slowly back to earth.  He had literally blown the tube and outer casing of the tubular tyre to pieces.  Then he came out with the classic remark: “I fink I punk-tured”, which sounded all the more funnier because of his speech defect.  Everybody cracked up with laughter.  I think a few of the competitors did poor times that night, because they could not ride properly for laughing, every time they thought about this tubular tyre blowing up.

 

Some of the older members should be able to remember the old step through Mopeds.  Prior to these mopeds coming on the market however, there were 3 other devices that were designed specifically for use in an ordinary bicycle.  The idea being to assist the rider to get from A to B a bit quicker without too much effort.  People used them a lot to get to work and back.  The best of these machines, actually had the motor attached within the rear wheel, in such a way that you could still pedal the bike home if anything went wrong.  The other two earlier devices, came out just after the war.  Both used a 2" diameter milled roller, being driven by a 2-stroke engine, and running on top of the tyre.  Both devices were very hard on tyre wear.  The larger of the two was used on the front wheel, and was similar to a Villiers 2 stroke lawn mower engine.  The other model was quite small, and drove the rear wheel, and was attached to the bicycle frame below the saddle, with a very flat looking petrol tank sitting on top of the engine.  They were the least reliable of all the three devices.

 

About 8 of us were returning home one night, along the Burton Joyce Road, after a 10 mile TT.  We had only gone about a couple of miles, when this middle-aged gentleman slowly overtook us, with one of these rear wheel motor assisted bikes.  He had a bit of a smirk on his face as he went by; well; this was like hanging out a red rag to a bull.  As he went by, the lads at the front of our group immediately latched on to his rear wheel, naturally we all followed suit.  It was a minute or two before our middle-aged gentleman realized that we were still there, hanging onto his back wheel.  He did not appear to be very pleased at all about this situation, so he upped his speed a bit.  I was the only one riding with gears, all the rest of the lads were riding fixed medium gears, but even I did not need to change up a gear.  Each time after a couple of minutes or so, the middle-aged gentleman was getting more annoyed, and kept increasing his speed.

This went on for about 5 or 10 minutes.  We were not really interfering with our motorised gentleman ‘friend’, he had no real need to keep increasing his speed, we were just enjoying our ride home, albeit a little bit quicker than usual.  Then without any warning whatsoever, there was this almighty explosion!  The rider immediately on the gentleman’s rear wheel almost fell off his bike with shock, and we all scattered, very nearly creating a pile-up, and rapidly shot past our very shocked and surprised motorised ‘friend’.  He cursed us black and blue, as we left him. The rider, who had been closest to the explosion, explained to the rest of us that the engine had just literally disintegrated.  We then looked back, and the middle-aged gentleman was having to pedal his bike the rest of his way home, so we considered he was OK.  So we continued on our journey home too, discussing and laughing at what had just happened.

 

Three local cycling clubs each ran a reliability and endurance trial each year, I don’t know if they still do.  The Broad Oak Club usually ran one.  They were usually team events of about 6 or 8 riders.  These were entered by most of the other cycling clubs in the Nottingham district, usually during the late winter and spring.  The distance we had to cover varied with each event, but generally they covered a distance of 120/150 miles, mostly around the Derbyshire moors.  I cannot remember if any awards were given to any of the winners, because most riders used the events more like training runs, and we covered the distance in about 8 hours or less.

 

Not so on one occasion; we took more than 10 hours!  Everything went OK until just after our brief lunch stop.  Nothing went right from then on.  It started off with Ray Austin getting a puncture, and the rules stated that all the riders had to stick together, and to help each other out whenever anything went wrong.  We had everything go wrong throughout the rest of that day, broken chain, broken spokes, crashes, etc.  You name it we got it, even my brother Roy tried to do a wall of death act going down the Snake Pass and crashed!  By the time we got back to the finish, we were more than 2 hours overdue.  Everyone had gone home, including the wives of 2 of our riders, Eunice and Sybil.

 

We learned later that the 2 girls had only just left before we finally arrived at the finish.  To get home, John and Ron went via Breck Hill Road, which as most of you know is a very steep climb, almost a mile long.  Just as they rounded a bend at the bottom, and started to climb the hill, they caught sight of the 2 girls near the top, walking up the last 100 yards, which is the steepest part of the climb.  They tried to catch up with the 2 girls, but they just did not have the energy left to catch them. As they approached the foot of the steepest part of the hill, the girls had by this time disappeared over the top. By the time they reached the summit the girls had gone out of sight, and got home before them, even though it was mostly downhill for the rest of the way.

 

I remember that hill very clearly.  Because the very first time I had to use it several years earlier, I was a 12 year old butchers errand boy.  I used a very heavy carrier frame type of bike, with a small wheel at the front, as used by Granville in the TV programme “Open All Hours”.  I delivered meat to customers around Nottingham 2 nights a week and on Saturdays, in all weathers.  I dreaded that hill every time I had to deliver meat to one customer about halfway down Breck Hill Rd.  The very first time I used the hill I approached it from the top on level ground.  I stopped and looked down this hill in horror.  I just could not believe how steep it was; and with all the weight I had in the carrier on the front of the bike; I felt sure I would go over the top of the handlebars, the moment I applied the brakes.  Needless to say, I got off the bike and walked down!  They say that Baldwin St. in Dunedin, New Zealand, is the steepest street in the world, but I reckon Breck Hill Road is as steep if not steeper!  It took me several journeys to that one customer on Breck Hill Rd., before I finally plucked up enough courage to go down it on the carrier bike.

On a 15-day cycle tour in Norway, I rode with a group on a CTC organised tour, we had some really shocking weather.  It rained for 12 out of the 15 days, in fact on one day we actually ran into a snow blizzard near the Hardanger Fiord.  It was supposed to be mid summer, it was more like mid winter.  We had originally planned to do 5 cross-country rides, but only finished up doing one.  We had to carry the bikes part of the way, no such thing then as a mountain bike.

 

This meant that where we could not go across country, we had to do some extra miles by road to get to our destination.  We had planned the tour for just such an eventuality, but we did not expect the weather to be quite so bad.  Needless to say we did not take very many photographs.  On one day we had to use a ferry, going from one fiord to another.  Would you believe, about half-way through the journey, we had to change ferries in the middle of a fiord, not at a quayside!  The two boats were tied to each other while passengers in both directions changed from one ferry to the other.  That is the first, and only time, I have ever had to do that, I was not very impressed about the situation either, as those fiords are very, very deep.

 

From 1954 to 1956, I did 2 years National Service in the R.A.F. as an Airframe Mechanic/Rigger.  I was stationed at Wahn (Varn) near Cologne, in Germany, for 18 months, with R.A.F. 87 Squadron; flying Meteor twin engined jet fighters.  Fortunately, I was able to take my bike with me onto the R.A.F. Station.  We were allowed extra time off, if you were interested in any kind of sport.  So a few of us made up a cycling club on the station.  This enabled us to go out most weekends with-out a pass, and we took this opportunity to tour the local countryside.  We only needed a pass if we were going to stay out overnight.  There were three R.A.F. Squadrons, and a Belgian Squadron stationed at Wahn.  R.A.F. 87 Squadron was a night flying squadron, so this made it possible for me to go out touring in mid-week.

 

One weekend we obtained passes so that we could stay out overnight.  We wanted to go and see the Mohne and Eder Dams, which were bombed during the war, by R.A.F. 617 Squadron, flying modified Lancaster Bombers.  The scenery around the two dams is quite pleasant, nothing really spectacular, but the Eder Dam is in a very steep sided valley.  It was really quite an achievement, for the R.A.F. bomber pilots to get their aircraft down to a height of 60ft, to drop their bouncing bombs, onto the water, they then bounced towards the dam wall, before sinking below the surface, and exploding.  We stayed overnight at a place called Kassel, at a youth hostel there.

 

Unfortunately, some locals found out that we were from the R.A.F., and made our night’s stay a bit uncomfortable, we just had to ignore them as we were well and truly outnumbered.  Kassel is only 35 miles downstream from the Eder Dam, and suffered from the flooding caused by the bursting of the dam in 1943.  We got our own back by getting up at about 5am in the morning, making a fair amount of noise in the process, and a rapid departure, before breakfast.  Overall we enjoyed our cycling tour of the dams that weekend.

 

On one of my first holidays on the European continent, Alan Dowlman and I toured S.W. France, N.E. Spain and Andorra, in and around the Pyrenees.  We left London Central Airport, now known as Heathrow, for Orly Airport in Paris.  When we disembarked and collected our bags and bikes, to my horror the rear wheel on my bike was almost completely folded in half, fortunately the gears were not damaged.  We had no show of trying to straighten it up while it was in the frame, so we took the wheel out, and stood on either side of the rim and bounced it back into shape, and to our surprise it almost trued itself up.  When we put the wheel back in the frame however, it would not spin between the brake pads, so we had to do some truing up.  Nearly half the spokes were slack and the rest dead tight, but we eventually managed to get it almost perfectly trued up.

 

After about an hour or more of struggling with the wheel, we were eventually turned out onto the street, because would you believe, they wanted to close the airport for the night!  There were no passenger night flights much in those days.  A short time later we were eventually able to ride our bikes into Paris, to catch an overnight train to Toulouse.

 

Over the next 14 days, we traveled almost 1000 miles, over the Pyrenees and back again on that wheel, and carrying a fortnight’s gear in a large saddlebag on the back.  During that time almost a dozen spokes broke, we were both carrying spare spokes, so we had plenty between us.  When we finally returned home, I took the wheel in to be repaired.  Andy Bone, who had built it, asked me what was wrong with it.  I replied that he would soon find out when he changed the rim.

 

When I went to collect the wheel a few days later, he asked me what on earth I had been doing with it.  So I asked what did he mean, (knowing full well what would have happened), and he said that when he cut the spokes out, the rim had almost turned into the shape of a figure 8.  I told him the story then, and that it was a credit to his wheel building, that the wheel had stayed together for the whole 15-day tour.  Incidentally, I am still using that same rear wheel today!

 

There were two other incidents on that tour, that I remember quite well, one was humorous, and the other almost fatal.  The humorous one occurred when Alan and I got a wee bit lost.  We came across a ford, which we could not possibly cross on the bikes, so we knew we had taken a wrong turn.  Knowing that Alan could speak French, I blithely asked him to go and ask the way, after all I thought, Spanish could not be that much different!!  He politely told me to get knotted, but he still went anyway, and asked someone the way, and we finally got back on course again without too much difficulty.

 

The near fatal episode occurred on the Mediterranean coast, on the stretch of road, from Blanes, northeastwards along the Costa Brava.  This road winds in and out of the many bays, and there are 365 bends in it, one for each day of the year, so we were told.  The road climbed up each time it came to a headland, and then dropped back down again into each bay.  Just as we were descending from the top of one of these headlands, on the seaward side of the road.  I ran into some gravel, and slid into one of the many 6ft long parapets which line the edges of the road, above the cliffs.  My right foot pedal was just about skimming along the top of a parapet, fighting for control, and before I thought I was about to go over the edge, Alan grabbed my left shoulder and somehow managed to pull me back.  Talk about a close shave, I thought my number was up well and truly.  We both managed to stay on our bikes, but we stopped anyway, just to get our breaths back, it was about a 250ft drop to the sea below.

 

John Elliott, Wellington Veterans Cycling Club, New Zealand.  (Sherwood C.C. 1946-1965)