Something else about Simpson struck Shaw. ‘Even when he was a junior, he would push himself over the edge. From a young lad, he either won, or blew up, or he crashed. You would never see him without bandages. There was always a bandage on his elbow or whatever.’ The rest of Simpson’s career would follow a similar pattern.
As juniors, Shaw and Simpson would ride races in the Derbyshire hills which were open to all categories, from 16-year-olds to the top amateurs of the time. Simpson did not respect reputations, and would sprint up the road ahead of the bunch time after time. His aim was always to win, when for his contemporaries merely finishing with the best over-18s would have been an achievement. ‘He was so aggressive, right from the word go,’ says Shaw. ‘He would take them all on, some of the best guys in the country.’ However, the slender junior would often overestimate his strength. He would be out front with a clear lead, looking a likely winner, but would suddenly find he had nothing left and his legs had turned to jelly. Another fellow cyclist, Pete Ryalls, remembers a race in the Peak District, the Burbage road race, in which Simpson led from the start until the final climb, where Ryalls and the others passed him walking, exhausted, and close to tears.
Simpson was already prepared to drive himself beyond the bounds that are usual for most people. Peter Parkin worked alongside him at Jenkins after secondary school. ‘He came in one Monday morning, he’d been riding a race on Sunday. It was the middle of the summer, and he’d taken his top off. He rolled it up and showed us: the sunburn was like raw meat. He couldn’t bear anyone to touch it. I’ve never seen anyone burnt so badly.’ Parkin says that Simpson could get into such a state of exhaustion that his body gave out. ‘He would race all weekend, then would ride to work on his bike, work a full day, and train in the evenings. It wore him out. He had a problem; eventually it dawned on him and he got a job in Harworth. One day he just collapsed at work and was taken home in a car.’
Like many others, Shaw links Simpson’s death firmly to the obsessive courage he saw in his teenage contemporary. ‘He knew there was an opportunity and he was going to take it. In his early days he was not the best climber, but he was a fearful descender – he would drop off and catch the rest on the descents. He probably just tried to stay with the climbers for too long. I can imagine when he got to the Ventoux, he got carried away with the emotion.’
Shaw was not the only person the young Simpson wrote to. As a teenager Simpson had no inhibitions about seeking help from, among others, the runner Gordon Pirie, the boxer Terry Downs and the great French cyclist-turned-manager Francis Pelissier. He had a thirst for any information which might help him progress on his bike. He wrote to Pelissier on November 22, 1954, nine days before his 17th birthday, after Simplex, the cycle components company, invited letters to the great Frenchman. Cyclists from all over Britain wrote, and the journalist Jock Wadley had the task of dealing with the letters. He rediscovered Simpson’s a few years later and printed it in his magazine, Sporting Cyclist. It shows that young Tom is precise about his time trial placings – ‘11th, 8th, 15th, 7th’ – and cannot resist mentioning that he is the fastest 16-year-old over 25 miles in England that year.
Simpson is looking for simple information – he wants to know if it is advisable to combine road racing, track and time trials, and the maximum distance he should race. He is also more sceptical than the average 16-year-old about what he is being told. ‘I have been told that if I race often I will burn myself out, and will be no good when I get older. Do you think this is true?’
Another letter put Simpson in touch with his first trainer, the naturalised Austrian George Berger. Simpson’s choice reflects the clarity of his vision: Berger had learned all he knew in France, which made him one of the few points of contact in England with the European cycling world Simpson wanted to enter.
Berger travelled from his home in London to Harworth and found an ungainly youth with boundless potential. He changed Simpson’s position so that he was sitting correctly on his bike, and advised him to take up pursuiting on the track – an intense, short-distance discipline which is where Simpson’s great hero Fausto Coppi had begun. Berger’s plan was that, as the young rider turned from junior to senior, Simpson would develop the pedalling speed which would enable him to win road races later in his career. He was to be proved correct.
In his first year at the discipline, 1956, Simpson began to earn notoriety in Britain by defeating the reigning world champion Norman Sheil in the semi-final of the British championship. Still aged only 18, he followed that with a bronze medal in the four-man team pursuit at the Melbourne Olympics the same year. ‘Five days in a plane is really trying,’ he wrote to George and Marlene, on a postcard of a Constellation airliner.
Simpson had his setbacks on the track. A brace of punctures in the final cost him the national title in 1956. A disastrous crash put him out of the 1958 world championship. His sheer youth showed on the way to his bronze in Melbourne: he went through a crisis of confidence beforehand, and was unable to keep up during a vital semi-final. His attempt on the world amateur hour distance record on the Oerlikon velodrome in Zurich in November 1958 was overambitious. ‘Thank you for the invitation to your house,’ he wrote to George Shaw, ‘but I will be away. I am going on the 28th Nov to attack the record on the 29th, I am 21 [years old] on the 30th. The present record stands at 45km587m, or 28.335mls, so I am going to have to motor it to make it.’ He did not ‘motor’ quite fast enough, missing out by 300 yards.
The defeat which hurt him most, though, was a narrow loss to Sheil of the gold medal in the 1958 Empire Games in Cardiff. ‘Even when he was a pro, he always said to me that that was the one race he regretted not winning,’ says Sheil. But the blistering turn of speed which track racing gave Simpson was to be invaluable on the road. He was never able to sprint with the very best but his pedalling style retained the suppleness of a track racer, which gave him the ability to finish rapidly. Superior speed in a two-man sprint won Simpson three of his biggest victories: Milan–San Remo, the Tour of Flanders, and the world title. Berger’s advice kept paying dividends long after Simpson had left Britain behind.
Simpson’s spell in track racing had another long-term effect on his career. It was while racing on the now defunct track at Fallowfield in Manchester that he found a second mentor, Cyril Cartwright, who had won the silver medal in the individual world pursuit championship in 1949. If Berger had pointed Simpson in the right general direction, it was Cartwright who did much to show him how to proceed, by instilling in the youngster the principles of nutrition which he had taken years to formulate. Cartwright believed that you are what you eat. This was perfectly understandable: he had recovered from rheumatic fever to win his medal with the help of a diet based on fresh vegetables, vegetable juices, nuts and lightly cooked meat. His ideas were to stay with Simpson, who was obsessed with diet throughout his career.
When Cartwright offered to train Simpson in the spring of 1956, the young man showed a remarkably clear-headed approach. In spite of Cartwright’s record, the 18-year-old was not bowled over and did not commit himself. Instead he went away and found out more about his prospective coach before giving his answer: a wholehearted ‘yes’.
Simpson returned from a two-week stay at Cartwright’s house in Manchester in the spring of 1956. With typically brutal honesty, he told his mother Alice, ‘You’re not feeding us right,’ as she recalled it. ‘I used to make him a plate of salad. I had a job to feed him.’ So much so that she went out to work in order to earn the extra money it took to buy the fresh fruit and vegetables. In the interview with Ray Pascoe, Alice reels off the list – bananas, apples, grapes, sultanas, pears – and reveals how preoccupied she was with paying for it: ‘When he was eating it I said, “Do you know how much that plate of salad cost me, boy? Seven and threepence.” He would say, “I’ve made you a lot of work, mother.”’ Harry Simpson would eat his meat and two veg and tell his younger brother that he did not know what he was missing.
L
ike many younger sons, Simpson seems to have been the apple of his mother’s eye. It is said that his premature death hastened hers. In Pascoe’s interview, she cannot resist the temptation to underline the extraordinary nature of the back-up she gave her son, relating how another of his little cycling circle, Bobby Womack, came into the Simpsons’ house and saw the salad. ‘He said, “Who’s that for?” “It’s for Tom.” “That would serve us a week in our house.”’ Alice adds that Bobby almost got to be a better cyclist than Tom, but ‘he liked going dancing and didn’t keep up with the training’. You can almost see the maternal breast swelling with pride.
Even at that age, Simpson had a clear idea of where he wanted to go and had the dedication which was going to get him there. His mother would tell him, ‘You lead the life of a monk,’ and he would reply: ‘I’m not doing it for nothing.’ In the interview, his mother repeats, like a mantra, this phrase: ‘He put his heart and soul into it.’
He would come into the house on Festival Avenue after training in the evening, and the television would be on. After his bath he would come into the room in his dressing gown and would ask when the programme would finish. On hearing that, for example, it would be over at 9.30, nine times out of ten he would say ‘I need nine hours’ bed’ and would be on his way upstairs.
The anecdote closely resembles a tale told by the Belgian family who looked after another English-speaking great, Sean Kelly of Ireland, in the early 1980s. Herman and Elise Nijs could not work out why Kelly went to his room at nine o’clock every evening – was he writing letters home, reading a book? One evening they peeped through the bedroom door, and Kelly was lying there sound asleep.
George Shaw’s plastic folders of letters in that ornate handwriting show that Simpson was no ascetic, however. I spent most of my two hours with Shaw laughing. During 13 years of correspondence, Simpson comes over as raunchy, vulnerable, funny, deadly serious, naive and worldly-wise. His mind jumps rapidly and busily from subject to subject. People and topics are jostling for space. He goes well beyond the immediate focus of the next race, the last race, the next training ride.
Simpson, and his wife Helen, continued writing to Shaw and his wife: Shaw has kept the entire correspondence. Set out in order by date, the letters and postcards chart Simpson’s rise. Notes arranging training rides as a teenager give way to letters from Brittany as Simpson makes the breakthrough in Europe. There are letters from the Tour de France and postcards from holidays on the beaches of Corsica and the ski slopes of the Alps.
There are glimpses of the detail behind major events in Simpson’s career: a postcard from the Melbourne Olympics, the news of his professional contract, his first training camp with a pro team, his first Tour de France and the broken leg that ruined his season as world champion. But mentions of major turning points in his career are overwhelmed by requests for news from home, inquiries about the Shaws’ welfare, and commentary on the letters he has received. Simpson never brags about his own achievements, and he never seems to dwell on his failures.
Strikingly, there is not a single excuse in the correspondence, never a ‘might have been’ or an ‘if only’. There is barely a word of complaint in any of the letters or postcards, other than an admission or two of homesickness, and the mention of a puncture here and a crash there. These are traits which go far towards making a champion athlete. Little things stand out as well: immersion in French enters Simpson’s subconscious after a year in the country, when he spells ‘modern’ in the French style, with the final ‘e’. There is his ordinariness: like every other British bike rider I have known, Simpson refers to the magazine Cycling and Mopeds – now Cycling Weekly – as The Cycling, reflecting the magazine’s status as an institution within the British sport.
The letters show him uncut, unedited for public consumption, but they confirm that, in private as in public, he is far more than a man who can merely ride fast on a bike. Simpson is as uninhibited on paper as he was in his racing style. These are an extrovert’s letters, conversational in style, packed with sly asides, in-jokes and self-deprecation. Read them at speed, and you can imagine what it might have been like to talk to the man, why his contemporaries all agree that there was rarely a dull moment when he was about.
Running through the letters is an intriguing in-joke. Tom has a soft spot for Shaw’s wife Marlene. ‘He used to tell me that he would have married her himself if I hadn’t got there first,’ says Shaw. ‘If I come to [the race at] Wentworth it will be to see Marlene not you,’ Simpson writes rather brutally on March 21, 1957. Two years later, he writes from Brittany: ‘So all the best to you George and to you Marlene (my heart throbs when I say the name), all my love, well nearly . . .’
After George and Marlene marry in 1958, most of the letters are addressed ‘Dear Both’. Simpson would sign off to both of them and would send Marlene a special inverted pyramid of X’s at the foot of the letters. ‘All the best, yours Tom; love Marlene, half yours, Tom,’ ends a letter in 1960. Sometimes, he imagines Marlene’s reaction to his raunchier comments with bracketed asides – ‘Thinks Marlene: “the dirty dog”.’ Nor is he above sending a smutty seaside postcard from training camp with the Rapha-Geminiani team in the south of France in early 1960: the buxom silhouette of a lady in a beach hut with a queue of gawking men. He teases George and Marlene about what they got up to on honeymoon – ‘I bet you did a lot of walking, ha ha.’ Soon after their marriage, he warns her that ‘married life can do terrible things to a woman’.
Among his fellow bike riders, Simpson had a reputation as a man with an eye for the ladies. ‘They just used to throw themselves at him. It was like that with all the big stars,’ says Alan Ramsbottom. Simpson’s letters bear this out. In its crudity, a comment on June 20, 1960, is worthy of Loaded magazine – ‘Well mate if you see that Barbara again, just tell her I found one that did, one that doesn’t is no good is it?’
Clearly, Simpson did not always live the life of a monk, whatever his mother might have thought. Besides Barbara, who lived near Harworth, other girlfriends’ names appear in the letters: Fay, who worked with Shaw, and Bobby, a bridesmaid at George and Marlene’s wedding. Fay apparently went with Simpson to a track race in Manchester just before he left for Brittany, and he wrote to Shaw from there: ‘She may go to more [track races] and if I do well here I may get contracts to ride in England and ?’ The question mark makes his intentions clear.
As well as spending weekends on their bikes in the summer, Tom and George partied in the winter, following the rhythm of cycling club life at the time. ‘In those days, everyone raced from March to October, then they stopped,’ explains Shaw. ‘Come October it was what was called the social season, when there were loads of parties all over the place, then on January 1 everyone got serious again.’ Simpson clearly liked to let off steam, something which was not in the least incompatible with living the life of a dedicated athlete for the bulk of the year. On September 1, 1960, a few months before he was married, he wrote to Shaw: ‘Well mate, the season is nearly finished, start getting that social season prepared. Any dolls up your way for when I can get away from mine? See, I’m starting already to rake back my wicked ways.’
Before his first training camp as a professional, at Narbonne Plage in the south of France, he seems to have overdone it: ‘I don’t think I will come to any more partys [sic], I am still tired, I never seem to get enough sleep,’ he groans in a smutty seaside postcard written in early February 1960.
Even at his peak, and when married, Simpson did not completely calm down. Two British amateur cyclists were once settling down to sleep in a hotel room in Spain when they heard a clicking of high heels and a loud screaming from the corridor. They opened the door and saw a half-naked woman, a member of a coach party from Lancashire. ‘Quick, quick, hide me,’ she said. ‘That Tom Simpson is chasing me.’ This was two nights before Simpson won the world road race championship in San Sebastian.
Simpson saw no alternative but to go to Europe to further his cycl
ing career: at the top of the tree in Britain it was possible to glean a living, but little more. Pursuiting would never bring in a great deal of cash, and it had been merely a means to a greater end: success in road racing. Like all the other British pursuiters, Simpson had successfully mixed his track racing with races on the road, but had stayed away from the longer, hillier events which would have blunted his speed. He had also won time trial after time trial, and had taken the BLRC’s national hill climb championship. Yet all this meant nothing if he could not get a contract with a professional team in Europe. Winning the world pursuit title might have earned him a place, but he had missed out in 1957 and 1958 owing to crashes at the wrong time. His attempt to gain attention by challenging the amateur hour record in November 1958 was unsuccessful, and cost him dear. ‘Just a line to wish you a Merry Xmas, I don’t think I’ll have any money by then,’ he wrote to George.
After an abortive attempt to make a living on the track in Ghent, he returned to Harworth early in 1959 with half a crown in his pocket. At 21, he now had to begin his cycling career again – Olympic Games, Empire Games and national title medals notwithstanding. There was one step open to him: move to Europe and earn his contact by winning enough races to get noticed. His move to Brittany in April 1959 was not quite the last-chance saloon, but it was next door to it. ‘Shit or bust,’ he told a fellow cyclist.
The opportunity came through the Murphy brothers, friends of a friend. They were French, but of Irish descent and ran a butcher’s shop in the Breton fishing port of Saint Brieuc. Simpson caught the bus from Harworth to Doncaster and the train south in April 1959 with £100 (enough to live off for a few months), a suitcase, a haversack and two Carlton racing bikes. His mother remembered his words as he went: ‘I don’t want to be sitting here in 20 years’ time, wondering what would have happened if I hadn’t gone to France.’ As in his racing, his inclination was to take the risk.
Put Me Back on My Bike_In Search of Tom Simpson Page 6