On the Road Bike

by Ned Boulting

  Taylor was immensely capable, extremely articulate (his autobiography is a model of dignified prose) and largely forgotten, even by a soppy American public hungry for legitimate heroes. Where Jesse Owens will be remembered for ever, Major Taylor has mostly vanished from history, just as his money melted away in the 1930s. And like Owens, he too found his most accepting public was not necessarily at home, where the discrimination was overt, but overseas, where it was couched in the beguiling language of paycheques and plaudits; in Europe, he found adulation, albeit at arm’s length.

  One hundred years later, in the pleasantly chaotic office at the back of his bike shop, Maurice Burton drops in his name, no more than that. It’s in the context of illustrating a point he’s making about the lost glamour of the Continental track scene. And what a scene it was.

  In 1904, Taylor rode a triumphant tour of Europe, challenging the best that the Continent had to offer on the track. He raced fifty-seven times, more often than not against fields including national champions. He beat forty of them.

  Such domination. Such an appetite for success.

  Exactly seventy years on, in 1974, in Maurice’s debut season on the European circuit there was a rider like that, too. His name was Eddy Merckx. Maurice and Merckx did not meet on the roads of the Belgian Classics, nor in the mountains of the Grand Tours. They did battle on the boards of Europe’s great velodromes. ‘Six-Day’ meetings, festivals of gladiatorial track cycling had never been more popular.

  Although the format had originally been a Victorian British invention, it had been the Americans who had glamorised and formulated the template for Six-Day racing. After the Second World War, it migrated back to Europe. Earls Court, in London, regularly staged Six-Day events, but it was Germany and Belgium that took the races to their hearts. Ghent, in particular, led the way. That’s where Maurice crossed Eddy Merckx.

  ‘My first year was Eddy’s last year.’ We are talking on Maurice’s home soil now. These are the events and the stellar names that illuminate his career.

  ‘It was my first Six-Day. I was keen to do well, I was hungry. We went for everything. We had a car race [a race with a new car as a prize was always a feature of the meet]. It was a Madison Devil, in which teams of two riders alternate laps. Each time the race passes the finish line, the last-placed team is disqualified, and so on, until there is a winning duo, and “the devil take the hindmost”.

  ‘It came down to two teams,’ Maurice continues. ‘Merckx and Patrick Sercu, and Paul Medhurst and me.’

  In front of a partisan Belgian crowd, largely inebriated and infatuated with their great champion, there could only be one result. The Cannibal, Eddy Merckx would have to win. That’s how things played out in the highly choreographed world of Six-Day meetings; the story always had a happy ending. But, almost by mistake, and quite against the spirit of the event, Burton and Medhurst won the race. It was a major breach of good manners.

  ‘We shouldn’t have done it. But we won by half a lap.’

  But the great champion had one more chance to save face. ‘Later in the evening, in another elimination race, there was just me and Merckx left. So I think he decided he’d better have a little quiet word with me, you know. He came alongside and said, “You let me win this one, yeah?” I said, “OK.” It was the man that I’d seen a few years before on the World of Sport and my dad had told me that I had to eat steak.’

  He grins. ‘I let him have it, Ned. But I made it look good.’

  Just then Jason, one of the Maurice’s mechanics, pops his head round the door, with a question about a bike build for a customer. And then the phone rings.

  ‘You’ll excuse me, Ned.’

  Before Belgium called and the glamour of the Six-Day circuit gripped him, back at Herne Hill in the early 1970s, a teenage Maurice Burton began to tear through the categories. He had a name, a reputation. ‘Slow-Mo’ was a formidable opponent, with great tactical nous and a turn of speed that few of his peers could match.

  It would be fair to say he fell off a lot. In fact, he was known for it. But if he stayed on, he often won. And he delighted in winning. Actually, not much else mattered.

  ‘You imagine when you ride against somebody, and when you beat them, you see them throw their bike on the floor. How do you think that made me feel?’ The grin is back. But this time, it’s unambiguous. Winning, he recalls, had been a visceral pleasure.

  ‘Were you quite a hard bastard?’ I ask him.

  There is a long pause. ‘I think I probably am quite a hard bastard.’

  He switches my past tense for his present tense. Perhaps he has to be. He certainly had to be. London’s mostly white cycling scene didn’t exactly embrace its latest recruit.

  Maurice had a close friend from the same South London secondary school near Lewisham. Joe Clovis was from St Lucia. They got to know each other after that first visit to the velodrome and under the protective wing of the coach Maurice had met on his first day at the track. They adored Bill Dodds, the avuncular figure they both credit with looking after their interests. They were, along with another guy called Jim Robertson, pretty much the only black riders competing at Herne Hill at the time.

  Jim Robertson still races there. Now well into his sixties, he has not missed a Good Friday meeting since 1970. He is well known, feted even, for doing the same trick each time: attacking early on in the showpiece ‘scratch’ race, the simplest event of the day, in which the first rider across the line wins. Robertson has always ridden on his own off the front for as long as his legs will allow. These days that means maybe only for a lap. Then he drops like a stone through the field. Joe and Maurice had a fairly low opinion of this kind of showboating back when they were young men, and thought that it smacked of tokenism, the acceptable face of black participation. Their contention was that Jim was not perceived as a threat, and was not taken seriously, according to Joe, whereas they were there to win.

  Among that group of young riders, there was sporadic violence. From time to time, it would all boil over. On one occasion Joe and Jim came to blows, with Maurice trying to separate them. ‘How did that look to everyone at the track?’ Maurice remembers with wry amusement. ‘The only three black cyclists trying to knock each other out?’

  But, much more seriously, the occasional covert beating was administered, I am told. The context was never defined, but the suspicion was that there were times when it had to do with skin colour.

  ‘Kamikaze’ Joe Clovis who, by his own admission, didn’t quite have Maurice’s talent (‘I only once beat him and he absolutely hated it’), still lives in Catford. He gave up riding a long time ago, and has only recently taken one of his sons down to the track. ‘He wants to be a doctor. I can’t stand in his way.’ It’s a curious reversal of the way things were. He goes on, ‘Besides, I wouldn’t want him to have to go through what we went through. And I’m not sure how much has changed.’

  It must have been, amidst the fun and games, an alienating experience. He remembers Maurice and him getting a lift back from racing at Leicester with the father of another white friend. As they left the M1 at Brent Cross, they were discussing the best route across London to get to Catford.

  Maurice told the dad, ‘If you go through Brixton, that’ll take you straight to Forest Hill, and then you’re nearly there.’

  Then his friend’s dad said, ‘Why would I go through that coon country?’

  Joe Clovis can remember the insult as if it were yesterday. ‘Maurice and I sat in the back of the car, totally silent. We were shocked. What was the response? We were in the man’s car!’

  There was another occasion when Maurice went out for a sixty-mile ride with two fellow members of the same club. They rode two abreast in front of him, leaving him to ride the whole way on their wheels and in silence. Not a word was spoken to him. He is certain, with hindsight, why they never spoke to him.

  The occasional overt act of racism was one problem, but what both riders felt almost more keenly was the systematic pre
judice of officialdom.

  Track cyclists would have to glue on their tubular tyres, known as tubs, making sure that they wouldn’t roll off the rim during the race. This happened quite often, and invariably caused injury. So, as a safety measure, riders would have to present their tubs for inspection by officials before being allowed to race. The officials would try to roll them off with their hands to see if they were firmly stuck down.

  Joe Clovis had noticed that his tyres were being rejected more regularly than anyone else’s. He grew suspicious, and mentioned his concerns to a white rider.

  ‘One day I told my friend Paul that I thought my wheels weren’t going to pass because I was black. It was the first time I ever raised the issue.’

  Paul reacted with consternation. But Joe was adamant and, to prove his point, he borrowed his friend’s wheels, which had just been passed fit for the race. He took the very same ones for re-inspection. And in his hands, apparently, they were no longer good.

  ‘They just rolled the tyres right off. Both of them.’

  Perhaps their riding styles didn’t help much. Both Burton and Clovis were strong sprinters, and would sit in, seldom going to the front. It didn’t endear them to the crowd, nor did the other riders like it much. But it got the job done. And the more he won, the more Maurice began to feel that they’d all rather he just disappeared for good. They nearly got what they wanted.

  ‘I was training at Herne Hill. A couple of guys were just riding in front of me, sprinting, and one of their tyres came off. He crashed, and I crashed into him. I went over both of them, and I ended up with one of my teeth in the track at Herne Hill. The tooth was actually in the track. The whole tooth.’

  He ended up in hospital, where his parents came to visit him. ‘My face was hardly recognisable.

  ‘I heard that after that accident some of the people at the track thought that that was the last of me, that they wouldn’t see me any more. And that’s what they were hoping. That I’d just go away.’

  On another occasion he won a race at Crystal Palace by half a wheel, and was immediately congratulated by the rider he beat. But the judges saw it differently.

  ‘They said that he won the race. I got second place, and he won the race.’

  As he recounts this story, there is a long pause in Maurice’s office, not for the first time. He’s frowning and smiling at the same time. And when he looks up I am not sure whether he’s angry or amused.

  ‘But I won the race. When he heard the judge’s decision the other rider said, OK, maybe I made a mistake. But he didn’t make a mistake. I won the race.’

  And in 1974, he won a national title, the twenty-kilometre race at Leicester. As he stood on the podium, the crowd booed. In photographs from the time, he is smiling back at them.

  ‘If you look at my face on there, I had a little grin. It didn’t worry me. It didn’t upset me. It didn’t make me angry. It didn’t piss me off. It pissed them off. But it didn’t piss me off.’

  Joe Clovis watched on in the stands as his friend took the win. Back at home in Catford, Maurice’s dad was watching the wrestling on World of Sport. The phone rang. It was Clovis. ‘Switch over to the BBC, Mr Burton. Your son’s on Grandstand.’

  ‘Up till today, I still don’t know if he actually switched channels and saw me winning the national title. I just don’t know.’ Maurice and his dad don’t talk about those days too often.

  He turned up the following year to defend his title, crashed in the home straight and was disqualified to boot. In his eyes, this was the final petty act, although it’s hard, at this distance, to back up his claim that he was being singled out for special treatment. But that was the perception, and he’d had enough. As far as Maurice Burton was concerned, his future lay elsewhere.

  ‘They didn’t boo me over there. They didn’t boo me in Belgium. No, it was the opposite. Sometimes I don’t realise how much they appreciated me over there.’

  Not everyone around at the time backs up Maurice’s claims of racism. There are those, even now, who are tempted to brush it off as chippiness or as an excuse for his own shortcomings. One rider told me that ‘it wasn’t because he was black that he wasn’t selected for the Olympics, nor that he wasn’t good enough. It was because he was ugly!’

  It’s meant as fun, and Maurice is rightly, if not universally, held in high esteem by the London cycling community. But, the more I ask around the white establishment which still sits at its heart, the more I get the sense that the issue has never been truly addressed. It’s easier not to.

  Once when I go and see Maurice at his shop, he keeps me waiting for a long time. A customer has come in who is parting with a significant sum of money. Maurice has his priorities and at times like this, understandably, I am not one of them.

  I have no objections to this hiatus since it grants me an opportunity to mooch around his shop, glancing at the bits and pieces on display, as well as the dozens of images covering all the walls. There are old posters from his racing days in Belgium, faded photographs of Maurice snarling over his bars in numerous close finishes. There is a framed shot of him on the podium that day in Leicester, smiling at his detractors.

  Every now and again, a famous name jumps away from the print and catches the eye.

  Maurice Burton raced with Bradley Wiggins’s late father Gary Wiggins in Belgium. He knew him well. When Bradley was born, he had held him in his arms within a few days. Back in London, long after the dissolution of the Wiggins’ turbulent marriage, Maurice maintained sporadic contact with Bradley as he grew up. He watched him with a distant associated pride. In the most recent picture of the two of them, Bradley looks young. He is wearing the red and blue of the national champion, his hair betraying some ill-advised experimental blond highlights. He is standing next to Maurice and grinning awkwardly. In British cycling, it seems, you are never more than one or two removes away from champions.

  There are pictures of Maurice’s son, Germain. There are spaces on the wall for more, although he has been allocated a narrow corridor towards the rear of this shop. He’s the boy on the time-trial bike, the boy winning the hill climb, the boy on the podium; the sixteen-year-old prodigy.

  But, in flesh and blood, he’s also the boy behind the till who’s just left school and now works in a bike shop. Maurice Burton’s two sons (Robert is a couple of years younger) are highly rated prospects. They are good, exceptional even, in their age groups, and both have been talked about as potential future champions, although getting their stoical father to admit that is a near impossibility. He’s far too cautious, modest and inscrutable.

  I talk to Germain while I wait for his dad to finish. He sits at a high stool, the cash register in front of him, occasionally serving a customer. He thinks hard about what he says before he says it. He has his father’s slow, deliberate delivery. He tells me how he is devoted to the road, and has no experience of riding on the track. It’s the opposite from his father’s persuasion. But strangely it is having similar repercussions; he has ended up racing in Belgium. The junior scene there is flourishing, and fast; the average speed of their races often equals or exceeds the best amateur races back home.

  He sits at the till, casually letting drop the names of Belgian towns, races, teams and riders. There are not many South London teenagers, I imagine, who can differentiate between West Flanders and Antwerp. Germain Burton can, just like his old man could.

  In 2012, Germain was selected to ride for Great Britain in the Junior World Championships, and finished strongly in the main field. His potential seems boundless. But his father is always there to demand more, to warn of the potential pitfalls, and to put on a firm handbrake when ambitions shoot too far ahead of application.

  ‘Right, Ned. Sorry to have kept you waiting.’ We break off and I follow Maurice back into his office. He’s reading a freshly printed invoice as he goes.

  ‘That looked like a good bit of business, Mo.’

  The customer has left the shop. He was a well-dressed man
in his early fifties at a guess, tall and slightly out of context for Norbury. Maurice tells me he is high up in Lloyds Bank in the City. ‘What was his final bill?’

  ‘Eight thousand pounds.’ Maurice barely registers any emotion. ‘That man’s come to me because he doesn’t want to go to Evans or wherever. He wants to come to me. I know a bit about what I’m selling.’

  I suddenly think about that bike he ‘half-inched’ from the front garden. He’s come a long way. From Catford, to Norbury, via Belgium.

  Quickly, we are back in the seventies.

  If any fragile bond had existed between the rider and the country of his birth, the experience of being booed on the podium of the National Championships had broken it.

  ‘They just didn’t like me, I think.’

  It’s hard to know what the reality of the selection was. But after a solitary trip to the Commonwealth Games in 1974 in Christchurch (from which he returned without a medal), Maurice Burton never represented his country again.

  ‘I felt like I was a foreigner. I didn’t feel like I was British. It was like I was in no-man’s-land.’ And so, it was only fitting that it was the original no-man’s-land that drew his attention. Flanders.

  It was Christmas Day 1974 when Maurice Burton arrived in Ghent. He headed straight away for the Kuipke, the legendary velodrome. Here, under this canopy, and around this vertiginous track, was the beating heart of the sport north of the Alps. This was always the starting point for a generation or two of the hopeful, the misguided and the tenacious from Britain and Australia trying to make it on the Continent. And what’s more, the night he arrived, the place was in full cry.

  Christmas Day racing was a tradition, the track, beery and smoke-filled. Already he was very far away from his home in Catford where his family would be quietly celebrating Christmas. The scene laid out before him was cacophonous, unruly, thrilling, a far cry from the reserve with which the sport was ‘enjoyed’ back home.