by Robert Penn
In The Great Bicycle Expedition, the author William Anderson met a 70-year-old former six-day racer, who recalled: ‘Six days of chafing your inner thighs on a pie-shaped piece of leather. You’d be amazed at the things bike riders have used to reduce the friction. I personally have tried axle grease, Vaseline, coconut oil, you name it. Fellow I knew even tried a preliminary heat with his shorts stuffed with Jell-o . . . Ah, those were the days.’
Sixes in America faded in popularity during the Great Depression. Automobile-mania and televised sport had killed them off completely by the 1940s. By the time Horst Schütz was creating his undulating saddles in the 1980s, the vestiges of the six-day racing calendar were back in Europe. Today, the races are nothing like the extreme endurance events loved by the Victorians. Nevertheless, in Amsterdam, Berlin, Bremen and Stuttgart, and at the legendary ‘Six-Days of Ghent’, pro cyclists do still put their rears where it hurts, and put their saddles to the ultimate test.
I’ve tried many saddles. None have been what I’d call comfortable in the same way as a pair of old slippers. I’ve noticed, though, that I do become inured to the pain of different saddles at different speeds. This suggests some saddles are better, or at least suit me better, than others. It does not suggest, as one of the characters asserts in Three Men on the Bummel by Jerome K. Jerome, ‘that the right saddle is to be found’. Jerome is rightly sceptical:
I said: ‘You give up that idea; this is an imperfect world of joy and sorrow mingled. There may be a better land where bicycle saddles are made out of rainbow, stuffed with cloud; in this world the simplest thing is to get used to something hard. There was the saddle you bought in Birmingham; it was divided in the middle and looked like a pair of kidneys.’
[Harris] said: ‘You mean that one constructed on anatomical principles?’
‘Very likely,’ I replied. ‘The box you bought it in had a picture on the cover, representing a sitting skeleton . . . I only know that I tried it myself, and that to a man who wore flesh it was agony. Every time you went over a stone or a rut it nipped you; it was like riding on an irritable lobster.’
Three Men on the Bummel, about a cycling tour through the Black Forest, was first published in 1900. Jerome was a gimlet-eyed social observer and witness to the unseemly rush to make a fortune from bicycles during the 1890s. Once pedals, a chain drive, brakes and pneumatic tyres had been added to the diamond-shaped frame, the inventors’ attentions turned, finally, to making the saddle comfortable.
John Kemp Starley famously sat down hard on a heap of wet sand, pointed to the imprint of his buttocks and exclaimed to his employees, ‘Make that!’ ‘New’ saddles were advertised almost continuously in the 1890s. The ads often proclaimed ‘ground-breaking’ medical evidence showing just how detrimental the ‘old’ style of saddle was. Chaps like Harris couldn’t help themselves as Jerome noted: ‘Can you think of any saddle ever advertised that you have not tried?’
One earlier, novel attempt to remove the threat of male impotence caused by cycling on cobblestone roads came from the Boston Athletic Club. A group of ‘bike jockeys’, as cyclists were known in America during the 1870s, sought an undergarment that supported and protected the groin while in the saddle, without attracting accusations of corrupting public morals. At their bidding, Charles Bennett of the Chicago sporting goods company Sharp & Smith invented the ‘Bike Jockey Strap’, or jockstrap.
Saddles for women were a particular concern to the conservative elements of Victorian society. That bike riding might be sexually stimulating to women was a real worry. Of course, the threat of tens of thousands of permanently aroused nymphomaniacs cruising around the countryside on bicycles never materialized. The saddle manufacturers had a field day even so. In 1895, the first ‘Hygienic’ saddle was produced. Marketed as ‘anatomically perfect’, the saddle was divided in two, so the rider’s weight rested on his or her ischial tuberosities solely. It is probably the very design that Jerome K. Jerome likened to ‘riding on an irritable lobster’.
Anatomical saddles are still patented and manufactured today. In fact, each generation since the Victorians has produced someone who thinks he’s cracked the problem with some freakish adaptation of the saddle. And, like Harris, we keep on buying them. I’ve seen ‘wonder saddles’ shaped like old-style tractor seats (two cheek scoops and no pommel), or like the snout of a great anteater, a new moon, the seat of a shooting stick, a circle of black pudding, a manta ray, oversized tuning forks set in an oven glove, and the upper section of a potty. In my opinion, they’re all made by quacks. The websites selling them invariably claim to redefine comfort, and headline with the familiar question: ‘Impotence: are you at risk?’
The more enlightened version of a woman-specific saddle has a groove cut out along the centre, and a slightly shortened nose. Manufacturers started producing these ‘cutaway’ saddles a century ago and they remain popular. It’s a simple modification to the standard saddle design with sound anatomical and medical reasoning behind it: taking a chunk out of the middle of a saddle reduces pressure on some highly sensitive parts of the body.
The most uncomfortable saddle I’ve ever ridden was the largest. It was on my first real bike, a Raleigh Tomahawk. It was black and spongy, with a backrest. It taught me the first rule of the bicycle saddle at an early age: less is more. I learnt rule two when, aged 12, I got my first drop handlebar bike: the width of the saddle depends on the position of the upper body on the bicycle. When you’re crouched over the bike with your hands in the ‘Ds’ of the handlebars and your spine curved, a narrow saddle is more functional. Sitting upright on a commuter bike, a wider saddle is preferable.
On my first mountain bike adventure to China and Pakistan, I bought a saddle cover in the bazaar in the city of Urumqi. It consisted of two inches of foam covered in purple velvet. Braids and sequins adorned the sides. It looked like a stray shoulder pad from a jacket Huggy Bear might have worn, working undercover at a pimp convention. It had no place on a mountain bike. Halfway along the Karakoram Highway between Kashgar and Gilgit, I was walking like John Wayne. Rule three: never adorn a saddle with anything. Excessive sponginess or layers of extra padding may initially seem more comfortable, but they make for more lateral movement, inefficient pedalling and, ultimately, suffering. I got away with it relatively lightly that time. My friend Bill bought the same saddle cover in green velvet. Deep in the Hindu Kush, he got haemorrhoids.
Different saddles adorn my current fleet of bikes. On my old Schwinn mountain bike, I have a Selle San Marco ‘Rolls’. San Marco has been making saddles in northern Italy since 1935. The Rolls model is something of a classic. The saddle is made of high-density foam and covered with leather. It’s really a saddle for a high-performance racing bike — Bernard Hinault and Greg LeMond both won Tours de France in the 1980s on Rolls — but it looks grand on my old warhorse. However, if I don’t ride this bike for a few months, the Rolls feels like a piece of granite. My newer mountain bike has a proprietary saddle: it’s slim and comfortable but it’s covered in vinyl and looks cheap. Both my racing bikes have saddles made by Selle Italia — in the business since 1897, one of the venerated marques of Italian bicycle componentry and manufacturer of the first genuinely minimalist saddle, in the 1980s. The old aluminium racer has a ‘cutaway’ saddle that is fraying and curling at the edges. The newer carbon bike has an über-sleek, black convex saddle with a chunk missing out of the rear — the result of a high-speed encounter with Joe Tarmac. On my aged commuter bike, there is a nondescript, large foam saddle. I can’t remember where it came from. It’s easily the least comfortable.
Save for the latter, these saddles are all high quality and slightly different. Yet it seems that no matter which bike I jump on, some days my backside hurts and some days it doesn’t.
There is one saddle I haven’t mentioned: the saddle on which I rode round the world. I remember the conversation with the assistant in the workshop where the frame was to be built. After the fitting process, we were going throu
gh the checklist of components that would be assembled on my bike. The assistant knew well what I needed but he was polite enough to humour me. He initiated a short debate about the best rims, spokes, racks, handlebars, brakes and so on, before leading me to his pre-formed conclusion. When it came to the saddle, though, there was no such courtesy. Without looking up from the page, he wrote down ‘B 17’.
‘What’s a B 17?’ I asked. ‘It sounds like a cocktail.’ He pointed to the saddle on the bike behind me.
‘That’s what my Granddad rode on,’ I said.
‘Precisely.’
Brooks make B 17 saddles. John Boultbee Brooks founded the company in Birmingham in 1866, to make horse harnesses and other leather goods. Twelve years later, so the story goes, the horse Brooks rode to work went off to the great steeplechase in the sky. Unable to afford a new horse, Brooks borrowed a bicycle to commute. Like many gentlemen of his age, he presumably found this iron horse something of a revelation, not least because he didn’t have to feed it a bucket of oats each day. He certainly found the wooden saddle a revelation: it was so uncomfortable Brooks swore he’d do something about it.
In October 1882, he applied for his first saddle patent. It read: ‘My invention has for its object the construction of saddles for Bicycles and Tricycles so that they shall be more comfortable and easy especially when in continual use.’ The company has been devoted to relieving the problems of cyclists’ posteriors ever since. Mr Brooks, on behalf of bike riders the world over, and through the ages, I salute you, you beautiful man.
Brooks introduced the B 17 in 1896. It’s been in continuous production ever since. I suspect this makes it the oldest extant component model in the history of the bicycle. Such longevity is the result of several things: a new B 17 is an object of beauty; the succinct name is memorable in many languages; the simple design has hardly changed; and traditional manufacturing techniques have been passed down from generation to generation of craftsmen who all honour the company’s heritage. Above all, though, the saddles are comfortable and they are built to last.
During the twentieth century Brooks diversified into saddlebags, toolbags, panniers, bicycle-mounted cigar trays (what gentleman would ride without one?) and even furniture. The company changed hands a couple of times — it was briefly part of Raleigh — but Brooks never stopped making B 17s to the most exacting standards. For almost fifty years, until the 1970s, the B 17 was the saddle of choice for the majority of professional racers including those from France, Italy and the Netherlands, who were presumably under pressure to ride on saddles made in their home countries. The vast majority of serious cyclists followed the pros’ lead.
Moulded plastic, vinyl, titanium, Kevlar, spray adhesives and gel (a type of durable, non-absorbent foam) were introduced to saddles from the mid-1970s onwards. It was a fundamental change. Saddles became lighter and cheaper to make. Leather faded from fashion. When my round-the-world bike was being built in 1995, the B 17 was serving only a niche market — long-distance tourers. Of these, there were two types: young men and women setting off to cross continents, and the dying breed of British cyclists setting off to a youth hostel with a neatly folded map and a thermos of soup. In 1995, Brooks saddles were not the height of cool (though they are again now: sales have trebled in seven years since 2002).
The frame-builder’s assistant inked ‘B 17’ on to my order form without a moment’s hesitation, as the manager of the Brazilian football team at the 1970 World Cup Finals would have inked in ‘Pelé’ at number 10. That saddle lasted me for 25,000 miles. I’m not saying it didn’t cause any pain — pain is inevitable, remember — but I didn’t suffer.
By the time I got back to the UK, I’d all but pounded the poor saddle to death with my buttocks. The leather had slipped away from the rivets at the rear, and torn at the side. The rails — the steel under-carriage that connects the saddle to the seat post — had a small crack. But my B 17 saw me home.
Spending so much time on one saddle does carry a risk, if you believe Sergeant Pluck in Flann O’Brien’s bizarre, satirical tale of a tender but unrequited love affair between a man and a bicycle, The Third Policeman. Pluck’s ‘Atomic Theory’ says prolonged contact with a bicycle saddle can result in ‘molecular exchange’:
The gross and net result of it is that people who spend most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycles as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who are nearly half people and half bicycle.
The Brooks factory is down a side street in Smethwick, near the Birmingham Canal Navigations. Smethwick was a rural hamlet before the industrial revolution turned it into a nineteenth-century boomtown and global centre of metalworking expertise. Today, Brooks is the only bicycle-related manufacturing business left, not just in Smethwick but in the whole of the greater Birmingham area. They make saddles and a small range of leather bicycle accessories.
The Brooks factory has been on the same site in Downing Street since 1950, when the company made cables, handlebars, brakes and, briefly, complete bicycles. It requires a great leap of imagination to picture Birmingham then. Known as the ‘City of a thousand trades’, nearly every non-domestic building would have been a factory or workshop making nails, guns, tools, cutlery, bedsteads, castings, toys, locks and bicycle parts. The city’s growth and prosperity depended upon metalworking industries, and at the heart of this was the bicycle.
With Coventry to the south-east and Nottingham to the north-east, Birmingham made up a triangle that contained the largest concentration of bicycle and bicycle component manufacturers on the planet. It was home to Hercules, the world’s largest bicycle manufacturer in the 1930s, plus hundreds of businesses that made everything from bearings to steel tubes. My Dad grew up between Birmingham and Coventry. One of his earliest memories is watching the night sky flame orange as the bicycle factories and car plants in Coventry burned, during the Blitz. When I told him I was writing a book about the bike, he was delighted. His generation of Midlanders still have a sense of ownership of the bicycle.
Steven Green, the office manager or ‘gaffer’ to his thirty employees, met me at the factory door. ‘Welcome to Brooks,’ he said loudly over the noise of the ‘press shop’. Blanking, bending and riveting machines were hammering, shaping, coiling and cutting steel. The sound-track of the factory — once the sound-track of the whole City — can hardly have changed in a century, I suggested.
‘That’s right,’ Steven said with a twinkling eye. ‘Some of the employees have been here almost as long too. Meet Bob.’
Bob, an avuncular figure with kind eyes and worn hands, was operating a blanking machine making coil springs for the suspension in Brooks’ legendary range of heavy-duty saddles. He smiled broadly. ‘Aye, I’ve been working here for fifty years. It’s just with a gaffer like him it feels longer. Now, the only thing here even older than me is this here machine. It’s from the 1940s. Fortunately we can still get spare parts for it. I wish I could say the same for me.’
Next I met Keith. He’d worked at Brooks for forty years. Then Stephen — over thirty years; Alan — nineteen years; and Beverley — ‘not telling’.
‘We’re really like a family, a second family,’ Steven said, straightening his tie again. Clearly he took pride in this. ‘Everyone gets on with everyone else. We have a good social life. There’s a lot of training involved. And there’s so much pride taken in what we do that people want to stay. Customers bring in saddles that are thirty or forty years old, for an overhaul. That’s very nice.’
Putting a hand on my shoulder as we walked across the press shop to the leather-working room, Bob said, ‘Think of a Brooks saddle like a pair of leather shoes. They may be uncomfortable when you first put them on. They’ll pinch a bit here and nip a bit there. But after a while they fit beautifully and they’ll be the most comfortable shoes you ha
ve for twenty years. I always say bike riders use plastic saddles; cyclists use leather.’
New Brooks saddles are notoriously hard compared to modern gel-padded saddles. Like Bob’s leather shoes or a baseball glove, they need ‘breaking in’. Aficionados clash on how best to do this. Some hurry the process by applying lanoline leather dressing. Brooks suggest their own ‘Proofide’ ointment. In the end, to break in a Brooks saddle, you have to ride it.
After 1,000 miles there will be shallow indentations where your sit bones are and the leather will have moulded to fit your backside. My B 17 took a little longer. The first leg of my round-the-world journey was from New York to San Francisco. I recall thinking the saddle was finally comfortable somewhere in South Dakota. Thereafter, I had no problems. If you take the trouble to keep the leather taut using the tensioning bolt (a defining feature of Brooks saddles), the saddle will only continue getting more comfortable.
You have then a product that improves with use. This is an anomaly. We live in a dystopian age when almost everything we buy begins to deteriorate the moment it comes out of the box. Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse as the French say — everything changes, everything breaks, everything wears out. Obsolescence is ubiquitous. We’ve come to accept it as the norm. Buy it, use it, bury it in the ground. A Brooks saddle, with its legendary lifespan, could be one of the first products of a utopian economy: the sort of economy dissident intellectuals were dreaming up in the 1970s, wherein goods are expensive, built to last and repairable. Ideally the people who made them would be well paid and share in the wealth.
It was difficult to see Steven and Bob as the advance guard of the greatest economical (and ecological) transition the world has known since the beginning of the industrial revolution. And to be perfectly honest, when I suggested it to them, they didn’t know what I was talking about.
The leather for the saddles comes from British and Irish cattle, via a tannery in Belgium. It has to be 5.5—6 mm thick, ‘for proper support, and to last. Only the section of the hide from the shoulder blade to the butt is thick enough,’ Steven explained, handing me a black sheet of it. I watched the leather being cut into saddle shapes, like pastry cases. Any blemished sections were discarded. It was then soaked in tepid water and pressed on to a brass saddle mould, before being dried and shaped again. Beverley smoothed the edges of the leather on a huge belt sander. The trademark was branded on with a heating element. The company badge was fixed to the rear and the leather was hung on a rack with hundreds of other part-prepared saddles and run on a trolley to the assembly stations.