ON THE ROAD
It’s 50 years since Tom Simpson died on Mont Ventoux at the Tour de France. We wanted to mark the anniversary and our man Trevor Ward got excited at the prospect of riding the Giant of Provence. We, however, had a less glamorous location in mind...
There are many places I could have gone to mark the 50th anniversary of pro rider, Tom Simpson’s death. The slopes of Mont Ventoux would have been an obvious choice. The monument marking the spot where he died during the 1967 Tour de France continues to inspire cyclists to make the gruelling, 20km climb from Bedoin.
During my own pilgrimage to it several years ago, I joined a queue of Belgians and Italians waiting to leave their votive offerings of caps, bidons and flowers. All appeared to be in their mid-twenties, yet Simpson’s was a name that resonated as powerfully with them as Sagan’s, Wiggins’ or Cancellara’s.
Mont Ventoux is a big part of the Simpson story, but it’s only the last few pages. Other chapters and places made him the man he was.
There is the Brittany town of St Brieuc, where he got his first break with a continental team and met his future wife, Helen; his adopted home town of Ghent in Belgium; San Sebastian, where he became the first Brit to win the World Road Champs in 1965; or the scenes of his victories in three monuments – Flanders, MilanSanremo and Lombardy.
So many exotic locations to choose from. Yet I have somehow ended up in the bar of a Nottinghamshire working men’s club, click-clacking in my cleats through a gauntlet of mildly intoxicated Sunday morning footballers towards a display cabinet that bears a trove of glittering artefacts under the simple dedication, “Mr. Tom”.
This is the Harworth and Bircotes Sports and Social Club, situated in a former mining town on the edge of rolling countryside where the Tom Simpson story really began.
Outside is a replica of the monument that adorns Mont Ventoux. It’s here that I’ve arranged to meet up with members of Harworth and District CC for their Sunday morning club run and a celebration of their most famous son.
TheSimpsoncommute
The first part of our route takes us down the Great North Road. This would have been Simpson’s regular 10-mile commute from his home in Festival Avenue, Harworth, to his job as a trainee draughtsman at the Jenkins’ engineering works in Retford. Just before turning into the town’s market square, we pass Bridgegate Cycles, where I’d had an interesting encounter shortly after getting off the train the previous day.
I’d only popped in to buy an inner tube, but soon found myself bowled over by a human hurricane in the form of owner Dom Battersby.
“This used to be LG Wyse, North Road Cycle Shop, which Tom used to come to for spare bulbs for his lights when he worked in the town,” he told me, producing a framed photograph showing the shop from the previous century. Soon he was leading me into his backyard to show me the whiteflowering magnolia tree that towered over assorted tables, chairs and bike parts. He told me the person I needed to speak to about Simpson was Len Jones, who used to ride with him.
“He was in here the other day, but he doesn’t half talk and my mechanic wasn’t getting any work done so
Half a century on from Tom Simpson’s death near the summit of Mont Ventoux we head to Nottinghamshire, where his story began…
we had to kick him out,” said Dom. In between continuing his life story – he’d had stints working at bike shops in London and the Lake District before taking over his current premises in 2008 – he gave me Len’s card, which announced he was a qualified masseur and reiki practitioner. Dom let me use his phone to call there and then – “He’ll probably want to rebalance your chakras. But don’t tell him where you are!” It turned out 77-year-old Len was a former member of Harworth CC, and would be happy to meet me at their cafe stop the next day.
As I left, Dom was returning a bike – a steel Edison frame replete with down-tube shifters – to the local butcher. In lieu of a fee, he’d negotiated a quantity of sausages.
Four-Stone Coppi
In his autobiography, Cycling Is My Life (Yellow Jersey Press), Simpson recalls his time as a junior with Harworth CC with mixed feelings.
“As a trier, I got plenty of encouragement and the members made me feel popular but on the club runs they gave me no quarter,” he wrote. “The only prize I got was the nickname ‘Four-Stone Coppi’.”
Fortunately, today’s club run is at a more sedate pace, and I’m able to enjoy the undulating landscape and postcard-perfect villages. The twisting lanes are quiet and empty – apart from one minor delay as we give a wide berth to a group of horse riders – and I lose count of the number of handsome churches and tempting village pubs.
After establishing himself as a successful pro, Simpson would regularly return to Harworth and join his former club on its Christmas run. He would have ridden these roads and passed through these villages, including nearby Edwinstowe where another local hero, Robin Hood, is said to have married Maid Marian.
As we swoop down into the leafy village of Askham, I find myself alongside John Owens, who still remembers one of the most significant events in his home town’s history – Tom Simpson’s funeral.
For all the apparent ‘flatness’ of this part of the world, the succession of ups and downs is taking its toll
“I was 10 at the time, but I remember all the factories and businesses had closed and everyone was walking down the main road towards the church,” he says. “Me and some mates followed them on our bikes. We knew who Tom was because our parents talked about him, but we didn’t have a clue who anyone else there was.” (A young Eddy Merckx, Simpson’s Peugeot-BP teammate, was the only European pro rider among the 5000 mourners).
Full of beans
Mont Ventoux seems a million miles away as we arrive at the top of the Mapleback climb – altitude 79m –
offering views all the way to Lincoln. Yet for all the apparent ‘flatness’ of this part of the world, the relentless succession of ups and downs is taking its toll, and we are all ready for our plates of beans on toast and mugs of tea when we arrive at the cafe stop.
Len Jones is waiting for me. He still rides two or three times a week and only stopped racing in 2012. Since then he’s qualified as a masseur and produces a testimonial from a Harworth CC member who credits Len’s methods with knocking 52 seconds off his PB for a 10-mile time trial. His eyes twinkle beneath a frayed baseball cap as he tries to sell me the merits of reiki, but I divert him onto the subject of Simpson.
He was aged 10 to Simpson’s 13 when they both joined Harworth CC, and still remembers the first TT they competed in over five miles. “My time was 15 minutes, 3 seconds, and Tom’s was 17 minutes something. I was younger and had beaten him. He didn’t like it at all,” he laughs.
The pair caused a stir at the club’s AGM a few years later, when bunch racing on roads was still banned by the National Cycling Union.
“Tom was 16, and when it came to ‘Any Other Business’, he proposed that the club should join the British League of Racing Cyclists,” recalls Jones. “And 13-year-old me stood up and seconded him! I thought we were both going to get a good hiding. The rest of the members just left us standing there on our own. I said to Tom, ‘I don’t think it’s going to be accepted because they haven’t even had a vote!’”
Shortly afterwards, Simpson would leave Harworth CC after older members started to resent his cockiness. “Now I know it wasn’t the winning they resented, but my bragging about it, but all the same I couldn’t stand it,” he wrote in Cycling Is My Life. He decided he needed to test himself at a bigger club, writing: “So although I was unhappy when I left Harworth, I have never really forgotten how much I owe them.”
Continental drift
Len eventually followed Simpson to
France, but returned home after two years – “I wouldn’t take drugs like everyone else” – and didn’t ride his bike again for the next 13 years.
“I won’t knock Tom,” he tells me. “He was only doing what he had to do to be on a level playing field. I had the same choice, but chose not to.”
As a sad postscript, Len tells me he never attended his former friend’s funeral. “I think I was on holiday,” he says, his eyes momentarily hidden beneath the peak of his cap.
Until now, I’d been reluctant to raise the topic of Simpson’s doping with the fiercely proud members of his original club, but as we clip in for the start of the ride home, I feel emboldened by Len’s words.
So I ask Matt Rodgers, one of the club’s younger members and a regular racer, for his thoughts. He’s unequivocal in his reply: “That’s just how it was back then, just like you weren’t allowed to take drinks from team cars.”
It seems a reasonable opinion, though apparently not one shared by the organisers of this year’s Tour, who have chosen to ignore the anniversary of Simpson’s death by not including Ventoux on the route. “Don’t worry,” says Matt, “a group of us are taking a couple of banners with us and will be doing the ride up Ventoux on the anniversary. We haven’t forgotten him.”
Cabinet of curiosities
Meanwhile, we have arrived at the foot of our own ‘Ventoux’, the climb up from Tuxford’s Museum of the Horse to its working windmill – almost a kilometre with a maximum gradient of six per cent. The views down the other side extend to Sheffield and beyond. After that, it’s a fast run back to Harworth and the sports and social club.
None of my co-riders seem keen to accompany me inside to Mr Tom’s display cabinet, though they tell me that Bradley Wiggins paid his respects recently as if to reassure me that the regulars won’t bite. While entering a bar full of raucous Sunday lunchtime drinkers watching the football on Sky might be a daunting prospect at the best of times, the tension is ratcheted even higher by the fact I’m wearing Lycra shorts, cleats and a helmet that resembles a bright blue colander.
As the fluorescent light above the cabinet flickers into life, I feel like an archaeologist discovering the contents of a long-forgotten tomb. Four jerseys – Great Britain, St Raphael, Peugeot-BP and the rainbow stripes – are on display, along with one of his bikes, several caps, trophies and musettes, and newspapers and photographs.
To complete my Simpson pilgrimage, I have to ride the couple of miles from the social club to Festival Avenue, where he lived (there’s no plaque or other indication that the former semi-detached council house was once his home), and then to the cemetery where he’s buried.
There, I spend several minutes scanning the tightly packed headstones for his name. When I locate it, sandwiched between the graves of Frank Joyce and Albert Edward Brownley, it is a modest, black headstone that includes the inscription: “His body ached, his legs grew tired but still he would not give in.”
It’s an eerie echo of a sentence he wrote on the final page of his autobiography, published in 1966, which I brought with me today: “Most of all, I would like to win the Tour de France, but I cannot afford to have any bad luck, such as in past attempts. If I fail, it will not have been for the want of trying!”