Among those who competed in Simpson’s final road race in Britain was Harry Hall, the mechanic who would, eight years later, desperately fight to save his life on the Ventoux. He and the other competitors asked the organizer to give Simpson all the prize money, as he was off to France the next day and he would need it. The other lads made do with the puncture repair outfits, tyres and bike shop vouchers which typically made up prize lists in those days. Clearly Simpson’s move was common knowledge, and his fellows were supportive: he must have been well-liked.
It was a hurried departure, partly because of Simpson’s need to avoid the draft. Doing National Service would mean putting his professional career on hold. Simpson knew the call-up could come any time that spring: ‘He said that if the letter from France came before the National Service forms, he would go,’ says a Harworth contemporary. His papers came through the Festival Avenue letterbox the day after he departed. His father was not keen on him missing the draft, and their parting was tinged with rebuke.
As a draft-dodger his future visits to England would be brief; for the next couple of years he would be dodging the Military Police. On one occasion, he cancelled a racing trip after it was rumoured, correctly, that they would be waiting at the airport. Simpson wrote to Shaw on September 1, 1960: ‘This winter I won’t be home for long ’cause I don’t want to get nabbed, St Raphael are paying me more next year. So my social life will be spent in France where I don’t have any army worries.’
Simpson wrote long letters from France, sometimes up to four pages, and Shaw was by no means his only correspondent. He asks George and Marlene to write longer letters: ‘You write the progress of the races, George, and Marlene you write some juicy bits, I’m a right one for a bit of the local news.’ He was clearly homesick, a problem born of his inability to speak French. ‘It can be very lonely at times, in the four-day [race] I spoke with only one man who spoke English for about a quarter of an hour,’ he wrote on May 12, 1959. ‘I live a pretty silent life, you can understand that this doesn’t agree with me. I am not one of the silent types.’ Six years later he would be fluent enough to make puns in French which would put a native to shame.
In 1959, France was still sufficiently unfamiliar territory for the English to prompt Simpson to reassure Shaw that ‘the food is almost like in England’. The fishing port is one of Brittany’s less attractive towns, but clearly it compared favourably with the Nottinghamshire coalfields – ‘very beautiful’, wrote Simpson that April.
Not that it was comfortable. Soon after arriving at his digs above the Murphys’ butcher’s shop at 15, Rue de Rennes in April 1959, Simpson wrote: ‘The only problem is that housing is a little behind in modern fittings such as baths, hot water, carpets on the floor, paper on the walls and clean toilets, otherwise it’s just the job.’
Brittany was, and remains, a hotbed of the sport. It served Simpson’s purpose well: the racing in the area was of a high standard, and there was cash to be made. Money was Simpson’s preoccupation. In the letters, the amount of prizes he won always takes precedence over the wins themselves. Presumably, winning races was nothing new; the novelty was in earning £35 a time for doing it. ‘Oh boy, this is the place for me, when I have built my house I shall expect to see you,’ Simpson’s first letter concludes – after a lengthy exposition of the cash on offer.
Nowadays, a talented cyclist will spend at least a full season proving himself as a top amateur before landing a place in a professional team, but Simpson’s apprenticeship was remarkably brief. On July 9, 1959, within three months of alighting in Saint Brieuc, Simpson wrote to Shaw: ‘I have been very lucky recently, and have had two [team] contracts offered me, with Mercier and Rapha Geminiani. I will probably ride with Rapha.’
The ‘very lucky’ is sheer modesty. In getting a professional contract, a rider makes his own luck: Simpson won his second race within a week of arriving in France; within five or six weeks he had won five races. His progress up the ladder was rapid, as it had been in the world of English pursuiting, and as it would be when he arrived at the Rapha squad.
Rapha included Brian Robinson, the Yorkshireman who had already made the breakthrough Simpson was seeking. Mercier were a smaller squad with less money, but with several Breton riders who had doubtless seen Simpson in action. Robinson, Simpson and the Rapha manager Raymond Louviot met when the Tour de France visited Rennes on June 29, and agreed terms: 80,000 old francs (£80) a month. This was exceptionally good money for a debutant; more than Rapha were paying Robinson, who had a Tour stage win to his credit.
A first professional team place is a momentous breakthrough in a cyclist’s career; even better, Simpson had two teams competing for his services. It was a major achievement, but typically, he deflates it: ‘. . . my first race will be the Tour [de] l’Ouest with [ Jo] De Haan & Co. (oh I do like to be a water carrier).’ The aside indicates, modestly, that he thinks he will be a mere domestique or team worker – the French term is literally porteur d’eau. In the event, he nearly won the race.
Considering the momentous nature of the first pro contract, one would expect him to be bursting to break the news. Instead, he spends the first page and a half of the letter pondering Shaw’s achievement in finishing the Tour of Britain, contemplating the fact that, contrary to an arcane British rule about sponsors, Shaw lists his trade sponsor, Ovaltine, before his bike supplier, Alp.
You can imagine him sitting at a table with Shaw’s letter in front of him, replying to what his friend writes before adding his own news. ‘Well you finished the Tour [of Britain], that is something many couldn’t do, I read in The Cycling that it just about killed everybody but [Bill] Bradley . . . I’m glad to hear you are winning the team prizes (Ovaltine Alps eh), have you had a comic letter from the BCF about the Ovaltine before the Alp, you naughty boys you.’
In the same letter, Simpson reveals something which has lain hidden until now. After winning the final stage of the Route de France amateur stage race that June, he was offered a place in that year’s Tour de France with the international team. This included several Britons, of whom Robinson was one. ‘I turned down the chance to ride the Tour, I’d had enough,’ Simpson wrote. ‘Maybe in a couple of years I will ride the horrible thing.’
It was a year later, in fact, in July 1960, that a letter which Simpson had headed ‘Equip [sic] Grande-Bretagne, Tour de France, France’ dropped through George and Marlene’s letterbox in Wilson Street, Sheffield. Simpson was in the middle of his first Tour de France, but travel arrangements for Marlene to visit Paris the week after the race fill the letter, down to the cost of the taxi and bus fares. ‘It’s a hell of a fast race,’ is as much as he offers. The letter ends ‘PS: I’m 19th overall now’ with no explanation of how or why, causing one of those moments when George and I both laugh out loud. The note of anticlimax empitomises Simpson’s ambition. For most people, lying 19th in the Tour de France would be worth shouting about. Clearly, it was incidental to him: he almost took the yellow jersey earlier in the race and 19th was probably something of a disappointment.
The same side of his character is seen on an undatable postcard from Genoa – ‘Yesterday the Milan–San Remo, did not win.’ It sounds like irony, but Simpson would have begun the race thinking he could win; that he did not was noteworthy. The only thing he seems to take seriously is money, a constant theme through the correspondence.
Reading Simpson’s spidery writing – which gets increasingly ragged as he gets older and leaves his draughtsman’s training further behind – it is impossible not to warm to him as Shaw, and many others, clearly did. His interest in his friend’s affairs, his modesty about his own achievements, and his self-deprecation all help to explain his popularity. Even so, Simpson’s confidence shines through. It may be bravado, but apart from his admission that he was ‘lucky’ to get a team place, there is no indication anywhere in the letters that what is happening to him is any more than he expects. In fact, sometimes he consciously downplays a major stepping stone,
as in this double entendre: ‘Next week I’ve got my first race with the pros (no the bicycle riding type)’.
In a similar vein, when he turns independent in May 1959 – the first stepping stone to a professional licence – he laughs it off by putting it in the context of the campaign among sports officials at the time to do away with the status: ‘I am now inde. [sic] so I have now joined the ranks of the untouchables.’ He is not one for dramatic flourishes. That vital life event, his marriage, is mentioned as a brief footnote. ‘Oh, by the way, I’m going to get married I hope’, he wrote from Saint Malo after stage five of the Tour de France on June 30, 1960. Sleeping in the same room as his boyhood hero, Fausto Coppi, during his attempt on the world hour record in Zurich was treated equally coolly. ‘At the track I shared a room with Coppi, [Rik] van Looy and Batiz1 but I didn’t get the magic touch,’ says the postcard of the Alps he sent to George and Marlene.
At times, despite his flippant tone, the fatigue creeps through. On July 9, 1959, Simpson writes: ‘How did you find the mountains [in the Tour of Britain]? I had my taste at the Route de France, oh boy did I suffer.’ The stress can also be felt during Simpson’s third Tour in 1962: he bought a postcard in Saint Malo, but clearly he had no spare time to write it until he reached Bayonne, five days and 600 miles of racing later. ‘It’s the fastest Tour ever till now, and it’s very hot. This is written in bed, I’m trying to prepare for the mountains but at the moment feel b—— [sic].’ It is easy to imagine the scene. The young man is lying on his hotel bed, following the advice of senior pros and attempting to save his energy by lying down rather than sitting in a chair. While he writes, he thinks for a few moments about life away from the race. A day and a half later he will pull on the yellow jersey and win his place in cycling history.
Roubaix, northern France, 26 June 1961
The group of about 80 cyclists is strung out in single file as they speed towards the finish of the second stage of the Tour de France. White eyes peer out from faces black with coal dust which has been sprayed over them by the day’s rain. Mud is caked on the torn, dirt-stained jerseys and bleeding elbows of those who have fallen in the day’s huge pile-ups on the cobbled roads.
Tom Simpson is at the end of the string, eyes fixed on the back wheel of the cyclist in front. It keeps moving away from him as the group accelerates. He can’t hold the pace. Since his crash on these same roads in April he has been out of form: the knee injury, the little illnesses, the food poisoning, the rash. Some have said he’s just lost it because he has got married and has been spending time with his wife instead of training as he should.
Why the knee pain won’t go away, he does not know. He’s rested it, kept it warmed up, rubbed in the lotions the doctor gave him. It’s wrecked his season. He didn’t dare train before Bordeaux–Paris because of the pain, then he couldn’t even start. No contract money. He shouldn’t be here either, but there’s always the chance it might go away.
Pete Ryalls has been behind him for the last 20 miles. Every time that wheel in front pulls away, Pete puts a hand on his backside and pushes him towards it. If one of the guys in front can’t hang on, and sends him backwards, Pete pushes him round so he stays in the shelter. He’s grabbed his arm a few times when he’s slowed down, and slung him back to that wheel like a cricketer bunging a ball.
He’s known Pete since they were juniors, now Pete’s here in his first Tour, and has been told to push him, keep him in the race. Why won’t Pete leave him alone? Why can’t he just stop pushing? The decision is made: Simpson slows down, mutters ‘there’s no point, just leave me to it’, and watches the peloton disappear into the distance as the convoy of support cars passes him. Defeat is accepted: tomorrow he will go home.
1 Jose Batiz, an Argentine sprinter active on the professional track circuit at the time.
CHAPTER FOUR
‘Unstable Dynamite’
Benny Foster, England team manager, on Simpson
IN AN EVENING of laughter with George Shaw, there was one wintry intervention of grief: a two-page letter from Helen Simpson postmarked October 2, 1967. She is writing partly to thank George for selling Tom’s remaining team kit on her behalf: ‘It breaks my heart really but there is no point in keeping them, only to keep in the cupboards.’ The house, Helen writes, is ‘very quiet now without a house full’. The people who have come to support her since the death have left – Tom’s parents came for a fortnight, her mother for a few days. She must be newly aware of the hours passing, because she writes the time, 3 p.m. Saturday, on the letterhead. Her earlier letters are not even dated.
In her letters and postcards written to George and Marlene on Tom’s behalf, Helen is more formal than her husband, more conventionally matter-of-fact, with no hint of Tom’s chatty style. Now, it seems, the freshly bereaved widow is writing at least in part to externalise her feelings. She now feels prepared to ‘face up to the long years ahead of me, which at the time [of her husband’s death] seemed unbearable . . .’ There is an undertone of quiet desperation in the letter. ‘Sometimes I feel so depressed and lose all courage . . . One doesn’t seem to realize how much one depends on the other in marriage. Even though we were only able to live six years together, it seems too hard to understand why he had to go so young and leave me alone.’
Meeting Helen was an intense experience, and left me feeling drained. It was not, however, for the reason I expected, which was that I was worried I would say the wrong thing and end up feeling embarrassed. I felt that talking to someone who had lost a husband in such a painful way was beyond me. If I ended up exhausted, though, after a long afternoon with Helen and her second husband, Barry Hoban, the feeling of being constantly on my guard was only a small part of it. The root cause went back 40 years: to the intensity of the six short years Helen spent with Simpson. For all its brevity, the marriage has left her with a densely woven tissue of memories.
I had grown to like Simpson myself in the few months I had spent hearing and reading about him; it was impossible not to react as Helen’s memories spilled out one after the other. As she told her story, I would recognize elements that I had discovered elsewhere. I would make the link to a different anecdote and this would prompt further memories from Helen. So we spiralled from digression to further digression for several hours, in what at times felt like an emotional form of memory ping-pong.
There is emotion but no unease at revisiting the past. Helen has the tone of a woman who has faced up to her loss and embraced it, rather than cutting herself off from her past. I mention ‘closure’ at one point and she responds sharply: ‘Why would I ever want to close the book?’ And so we opened it again.
In April 1959, Helen Sherburn was working in Saint Brieuc as an au pair when she was told about an English cyclist living a few houses down the same street, Rue de Rennes. She set off to find him. Simpson was sitting in the garden when she arrived at the Murphys’ and asked, in perfect French, if this was where the young Englishman lived. Assuming she was merely an inquisitive Frenchwoman, he replied ‘Bugger off.’
In spite of this inauspicious start, the pair found they had much in common. Helen was 19, Simpson 21. Both were abroad for the first time; this in a period when travelling abroad was rare and living abroad rarer still. Helen’s parents farmed in the Yorkshore village of Sutton, close to Doncaster, 20 miles from Simpson’s home on the other side of the Yorkshire–Nottinghamshire border. They were amazed by the coincidence.
Simpson was homesick, so the Murphys had actually told him about Helen and he had already tried to visit her. He had got as far as knocking on the door, only to realize that if one of the French family opened it, he would not know what to say to them. He had run off down the street like a small boy.
Helen’s first impression? ‘Dishy’, she says, as a 19-yearold girl might have in the late 1950s. And ‘determined’. The pair talked for hours, or rather Simpson did most of the talking, telling Helen of his plans. ‘After a few minutes, I could see he knew what he wanted in
life.’ Cycling, however, was something completely new to her. Her father was mad about cricket, but she had no idea it was even possible to make a living from racing a bike. ‘I decided it was something I could cope with,’ she says wryly. She would walk past the Murphys’ house when she took her family’s children to school in the morning, and would stop to talk to Tom when she came back.
Helen was struck by Simpson’s avid desire for information about his chosen profession. He read every magazine from cover to cover. As a professional, Simpson was constantly asking his colleagues questions. He is the only cyclist I have ever heard of who would visit libraries to get the books he needed. Most would simply not bother.
Helen moved to Germany after just two months, but she and Simpson kept in touch, and in 1960 he drove over to see her in his new Aston Martin. She took the train to Paris to meet him when he finished his first Tour de France that year: ‘a wreck, his face covered in blisters’, she recalls. By the end of June 1960, a little over a year since they had first met, Simpson was already planning to marry Helen, or so he wrote to George Shaw from the Tour de France. Over 40 years on, this is news to Helen; when I told her, she could only say, ‘He probably hadn’t mentioned it to me!’
The couple holidayed in the Black Forest in November that year – ‘we have a beautiful country house (all to ourselves)’ says the postcard, addressed to ‘Shaws’ouse’ – and were engaged that summer. They intended to marry in October 1961, when the racing season would be over, but what followed on January 3 was that most romantic of events: a spontaneous, unplanned wedding.
‘It was typical Tom – don’t hang around, don’t mess about, do it now,’ says Helen. They were standing on Doncaster station when he put the idea to her; she was ‘not fussed’ about having a big wedding. She went with her mother to Sheffield, bought a dark green fitted suit, and they had a small family wedding. ‘We had a Christmas cake that hadn’t been cut, so we scraped the decoration off and used it as a wedding cake. It was magical.’
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