Put Me Back on My Bike

by William Fotheringham

  Simpson’s body was placed in cell 3 of the hospital’s morgue, where a few reporters went and found him to pay their last respects. ‘The trolley glided slowly, the white sheet seemed endless,’ wrote Miroir-Sprint’s man on the race, who seemed to find the business gruesomely fascinating. ‘At last his face appeared. Tom looked to be sleeping. He seemed peaceful, his lips pink, his eyes half-closed. His half-open mouth still seemed to be gasping for air. The sheet accentuated his tan.’ One journalist hid his face in his hands but a photographer kept shooting away, saying ‘I’m sorry’ after each exposure.

  Hall did not know that three tubes of amphetamines had been found in Simpson’s jersey and handed to the police; only the Tour organizers and the police were aware of it. ‘We knew there was going to be a hoo-ha about drugs, knew we had to keep that side of things quietened down,’ he says. To add to the feeling of unreality, Taylor, Naessens and Van der Weide spent the night in the police station in Malaucène answering questions. The following day the hotel was searched, more drugs found, and Hall too was arrested, in farcical circumstances. Together with his fellow mechanic Ken Bird, he was taken to the police station in Sète, where the stage finished, and the British car was impounded. They were in a panic, but eventually the two of them merely waited for the gendarmes’ attention to be diverted, and then jumped in the car and drove away. That was the last Hall heard from the French police.

  The Tour has a strict daily routine: eat, race, eat, sleep. Sticking to it is a prop in adversity. This was how it was for Hall and the team. He recalls the remaining 10 days of the Tour as a matter of survival, of numbly going through the motions. Members of the Motorola team in the 1995 Tour said the same thing about the days after the death of their team member Fabio Casartelli. Hall has no memory of what was said at meals between the riders and staff. He does not even remember meal times ‘although we must have had them, and I must have been there as there wasn’t much work to do’. Taylor did his best to keep the team together: Hoban, who had won the stage the day after Simpson died, tried for a second victory; and Lewis and Metcalfe struggled through. ‘We said we’d get to Paris whatever, for Tom.’

  Hall’s race notebook also offers insights into the demands on this numbed little group of men. It records how they had to dispose of their dead leader’s possessions, even while they were coming to terms with his loss, coping with an emerging drug scandal, and of course competing in the world’s most demanding cycle race.

  In the back pages is an inventory of Simpson’s kit and a list of the people who came to take it away: three pairs of lightweight 28-spoked wheels, around 40 tubular tyres, including the ones he had had specially made in Paris by the Clément company, four bikes. Glued onto one page is a receipt signed by a representative of Peugeot who was sent to take the bikes back. Another page towards the end of the notebook records that Simpson’s suitcase with his belongings has been put in a certain lorry, and that two wreaths for the funeral have been organized on behalf of the team.

  The tragedy affected Hall far beyond the point when he went home and laid flowers at Simpson’s grave in Harworth. Taylor and Ryall are now dead, so journalists or film makers now come to Hall’s door whenever they want a first-hand account of Simpson’s death. As with so many involved with Simpson, one way in which Hall came to terms with the trauma was to ride up the mountain. He did not steel himself to return for a quarter of a century, but then rode up it twice in one day. He found it tough: ‘The second time I said, “Come on, Tom, you’ll have to move over.”’

  In his dreams, he would have flashbacks of his team leader dying in front of him. He was disillusioned with cycling for several years after Simpson’s death due to the revelations about drugs: ‘I wasn’t going to do the job again. I didn’t want to go abroad on professional races, the continental scene . . . that it could end in someone killing themself for it.’

  Hall had seen where the sport he loved could take a man if he was desperate enough: ‘You always know other people that could be that way. There’s a report from a London polytechnic which says that cycling and rowing are the two most dangerous sports for that. The individual is pushing a machine which doesn’t know when to stop. It always asks for another pull of the oars, another pedal stroke.’

  Not everyone shared this view of the dead champion as a victim of an implacable machine, however. Hall still remembers Taylor’s words when the manager came back to the hotel in Malaucène. Taylor had spent the brief trip tuning in the car radio to stations across Europe, all discussing the death of the man he had hoped would win the Tour de France. ‘He [Taylor] came in and said “he’s dead” and then he said “the stupid bastard.”’

  Saint Brieuc, August 2, 1959

  A baking day on the ‘pink granite coast’, the sumptuous seaboard of northern Brittany. The holidaymakers have left the beaches in force to cheer the cyclists in the Tour de l’Ouest as they pedal along the cliffs and through the fishing villages. At the front of the peloton, Tom Simpson is puzzled. He is wearing the leader’s jersey in his first stage race as a professional. Two days ago, in Quimper, on his first day riding for the Rapha-Geminiani squad, he won. He was trying to tow his team leader, Pierre Everaert, to the front of the race, but Everaert could not hold his pace. So Simpson kept going, across to the lead group and on to the finish, arms raised in the air, the other five cyclists yards behind.

  Yesterday, just to make the point that he is the strongest here, he won the afternoon time trial around Brest. 26 hilly miles in under an hour. Everyone was tipping Jean Forestier, who has won the Paris–Roubaix and Tour of Flanders classics, but he was almost two minutes slower. Two wins in two days: not bad for a 21-year-old in his first pro race.

  Today, though, something funny is going on. There is a group of cyclists ahead, but the Rapha team won’t make the pace, to keep that group within reach, so that the peloton can catch up by the finish. They keep telling Simpson the front-runners will slow down, but that’s not how it looks to him. ‘Job Morvan’s in there,’ they keep saying, ‘so we have a rider from the team in the group.’ By the finish, Morvan and his little group are five minutes ahead, and Simpson has lost his leader’s jersey.

  Later, Simpson will learn how he has been betrayed. Morvan is a local rider. He is retiring at the end of the year. He has tried to win the Tour of his home region five times. It’s a bigger story for the local press, more exposure for the sponsors. Even if he is not a worthy victor, the team would prefer a Breton to win, rather than an unknown Briton.

  It is Simpson’s first lesson as a professional: being the strongest in a race carries no guarantees.

  1 Sadly, Harry Hall died in late 2007.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘PS I’m 19th Overall Now’

  THE LETTER IS dated February 28, 1957. The address is 4, Festival Avenue, Harworth, Nottinghamshire. It is nothing more than a note from one 19-year-old boy to another. Both are cyclists, and the note is to arrange their weekend’s training ride. The writer can’t manage a ride on Saturday but, all other things being equal, they will meet at 9.30 on Sunday morning and ride to Nottingham and back, a distance of some 50 miles. If the letter had not been written by Tom Simpson, it would be merely a piece of flotsam left over from the youth of his training partner, George Shaw, which had somehow happened to survive in a drawer in his Sheffield home. Shaw himself cannot quite work out why he still has it, together with another 25 letters and postcards from Simpson. ‘You have thousands of letters in your time. You tell me why I saved a letter from another young lad in February 1957. I can’t explain it,’ he says.

  Brief it may be, but certain things stand out. To begin with, the letter is a reminder of the added complexity of organizing life in the age before everyone had a telephone. It reveals a little of the writer. The handwriting is careful, curlicued and ornate, reflecting the fact that he is learning to be a draughtsman. And he is a cyclist who is motivated and focused enough to be thinking ahead, both in the short and medium terms. It cle
arly matters that he gets that training ride in: it matters enough for him to write a letter to make sure it happens. He recognizes the need to have a companion. He already knows what he is doing on Saturday – taking a pair of wheels to a bike shop to be rebuilt. He is clearly well organized, which is far more than can be said for many adult cyclists.

  Shaw was born three months before Simpson in 1937, and lived in Sheffield, some 20 miles away from Harworth. The first he knew of him was at a regional junior championship in 1955 when the man helping him out told him: ‘Watch Simpson, he’s been winning everything.’ After they were both selected for the North Midlands Division team for the national junior road race title later that year, the friendship blossomed. Before car ownership was widespread, racing cyclists would spend the whole weekend on their bikes. George and Tom would ride to their races and head off with their mates to a café in the Peak District afterwards – Over Hadden, near Bakewell, was the favourite. They would sit there yarning and stagger into their homes at nine o’clock at night.

  At the time of writing that first letter to George in 1957, Tom had already been competing on a bike for 16 years, according to his mother, Alice. She recalled Tom racing on his tricycle, aged only three, already trying to keep up with the older children. ‘They would send him away,’ said Alice Simpson. ‘But he would get off his bike and say “I’ll show you buggers who’ll make a cyclist.”’ He is unlikely to have used precisely those words as a three-year-old, but clearly Alice had already seen unusual determination in her son.

  Shortly after Tom’s death, Alice Simpson and her husband, Tom senior, were interviewed by Ray Pascoe for his first film about their son. A small clip appears in Something to Aim At. Pascoe lent me the uncut version, on which Tom senior can be heard sucking on his pipe throughout. Time after time Alice sets her husband right, with more than a hint of her son’s sharpness of mind. Both have kept their lilting north-eastern accents in spite of 20 years spent living in Nottinghamshire.

  In a photograph taken at the first Memorial Race in Harworth after their son’s death, the couple look every inch the retired miner and his wife: Tom senior, broad-shouldered in his braces and floppy sun hat, his stomach curving over his outsize trousers; Alice slight and nervous-looking in her floral dress. Tom senior was a large, outgoing, generous man. ‘Whatever money he had he would give away, he’d shout the bar, tip the taxi driver,’ says Harry, Tom’s elder brother. He would perform comedy monologues for the family. Both traits would be passed on to Tom junior. The resilient, intense Alice managed the money; Tom junior would inherit her determination.

  Alice and Tom senior had six children in Station Street in the Durham mining village of Haswell: Tom was the youngest, born on November 30, 1937. He was not to be the only sportsman in the family. When Tom senior was not down the mine – his job is given on the birth certificate as ‘conveyor worker’ – he had been a sprinter on the northeastern semi-professional running circuit.

  As a child, Tom junior was good with his hands. ‘There was not much he could not take to pieces and put together,’ says Harry, Tom’s elder by a year and 10 months. In the future, Tom would be fixated with his equipment as a professional, even to the extent of making his own saddle. Young Tom was ‘determined and obsessive, [he] would not be denied’ and was ‘always on the lookout to make a dollar’, recalls Harry. Both these character traits would combine to fatal effect on July 13, 1967.

  After the war, as new coalfields opened up, the family moved to Harworth, a north Nottinghamshire village dominated by its vast pit heap – the biggest in Europe, it was said at the time – and the winding gear of the colliery. The Simpsons’ home was in Festival Avenue, among the rows of 1930s houses which were built in the fields, between the pit and the old village centre with the church and the cemetery where Tom was to be buried. Number Four is still there, a brick end-of-terrace house in a quiet estate. It doesn’t smack of riches, nor of hard times: it is modest but must have been a step above the family’s house, with outside toilet, in Haswell. The family were not exactly poor, but they were not rich, and poverty would only have been one piece of ill fortune away.

  Fortunately, Alice was a good manager. Mashed potato and gravy were the typical staple foods. Harry can remember only two family holidays, to Redcar and Seaton Delaval. Tom senior would say that, for a pitman, moving on was the only way to get on; for young Tom, cycling was the way on, up and out.

  Tom and Harry raced around the block on the clunky old bike which they shared, but it was Harry who was the first to take cycling seriously, although he never became a true fan. He joined the Harworth and District Cycling Club, winning schoolboy time trials, and passed on the cycling bug to his younger brother.

  Harry was ‘always kicking a ball against the wall’. He went on to play schoolboy cricket and football for Durham and Sunderland, and later non-league football, getting as far as a trial for Blackpool United. Tom, on the other hand, had ‘ball skills bordering on the inept’, according to his brother, who, to his irritation, would be asked to take Tom along to play cricket and football even though he was ‘hopeless’. Harry turned his hand to most sports; Tom followed him into cycling and, straight away, found a sport that he could do and stuck at it.

  Young Tom covered the walls of his little boxroom with pictures of the cycling heroes of the late 1940s: Fausto Coppi, Ferdi Kubler, Hugo Koblet. ‘He devoured the stories of the greats, he read them and read them,’ recalls Harry. Tom pasted their photos into his schoolbooks, and said to his mother, ‘I’m going to be one of them.’ Later he would tell the readers of Cycling that there was nothing wrong with hero worship: he had been through it himself.

  Most British cyclists start their racing with a local time trial, over five or 10 miles: at the age of 13, Tom was no exception. Riding the butcher’s bike he used to deliver meat for a local shop, he covered the five miles on a course close to Harworth in a relatively slow time of 17 minutes and 50 seconds. Then, showing the nose for a deal which was to be a hallmark of his adult life, he painted his heavy clunker red and swapped it for a sports bike belonging to a local miner.

  So the scrawny youth entered cycling club life, a world of evening time trials, weekend grass track races and long club runs, when the Harworth and District would slog in an orderly crocodile to a café in Cleethorpes, a round trip of 120 miles, or into the Peak District. Tales are still told about older members attempting to burn off Simpson on the steep hills in the Peaks, and always finding him with them at the top. Harry Needham, the club secretary, nicknamed the youngster ‘four-stone Coppi’, because of his slight physique: ‘A referral he readily accepted,’ says Harry Simpson. John Noble senior, one of a whole family involved in the club, was one early mentor: he took young Tom under his wing, according to the current club secretary, George Morris, and Tom would often go to his house for help and advice.

  The money Tom earned on his delivery round ‘was put to the purpose of purchasing frames, wheels, gears, anything’, says Harry, to feed his drive ‘to be not only competitive but always first’. It was winning that mattered, as Tom’s friend and rival Lenny Jones could testify: Tom would not speak to him if he, Jones, won a race. Once, after losing to Jones, Simpson was so desperate to avoid having to acknowledge him that he took off into a ploughed field and walked behind the hedge, pushing his bike for a good 200 yards.

  At Worksop Technical College, which he attended from the age of 13, Tom Simpson stood out from the crowd, recalls one schoolmate, Peter Parkin. It was partly down to his Geordie accent, partly his liveliness, he explains: ‘He was always taking the mickey out of the teachers, he used to like telling jokes. He’d have us in fits.’ Parkin recalls walking to the school bus in Worksop and going past a butcher’s shop where Tom opened the door and shouted ‘Have you got any sausages left?’ ‘Yes, plenty,’ said the butcher. ‘Serves you right for making too many,’ came the answer. Most of all, however, it was Simpson’s obsession with cycling which set him apart. ‘He talked about very l
ittle else, where he’d been, what he was going to do,’ says Parkin. ‘He was a rum kid.’

  By 1954, as he approached 17, Simpson had matured enough physically to compete with the seniors in the Harworth club. The 20-mile daily cycle ride to his work as an apprentice draughtsman at Jenkins, an engineering company in Retford, must have helped. By the end of the year, he had grown out of the club.

  In his autobiography Cycling is My Life, Simpson recalled ‘shouting the odds’ about winning a local time trial, which made him unpopular in the club. His obsession with road racing, European-style, had led him to propose that the club join the breakaway British League of Racing Cyclists, which ruffled feathers. Simpson was more than just a highly competitive teenager, however. He also realized that, if he wanted to progress, he had to move on. He was sure that he would be able to beat the rest of the Harworth club soon, and needed ‘to find a club where I was a rabbit again and try to beat the other members’. That club was the Scala Wheelers in nearby Rotherham – the rather incongruous Italian name showing its loyalty to the BLRC. Ever the individualist, Simpson began his own team within the Scala. There were four of them. George Shaw was one: ‘I don’t think Scala Wheelers ever knew it [the team] existed. Tom got Italian national champions’ jerseys made up, red, green and white, which simply read “Scala” in a band on the chest. Tom just wanted to be an Italian pro.’

  By the time they were racing as juniors, Shaw could see the difference between Simpson and the other lads such as himself. ‘When it really hurts, that’s when most of us drop off the pace. Tom never dropped off. We read the magazines, or rather we looked at the pictures because we couldn’t translate the French. We all wanted to ride the Tour de France, but really he wanted it and we dreamt it.’