News Wheely great memories
The mid 1950s - a club run at Robin Hood’s or the Major Oak, Edwinstowe, Sherwood Forest.
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With former members of Goole Wheelers Cycling Club due to meet for a re-union later this month (March 16), MIKE MARSH recalls cycling with the Wheelers 50 years ago.
They were good days. In most respects, happy, carefree days. Few of us could drive then, fewer still owned a car or a van. The bike was our wheels - our way of getting to everywhere we wanted to go that was within reach of people like us.
The bike was a constant companion - all day on Sundays and at least some part of every weekday. The bike was our way of getting out of Goole, of roaming far and wide. Yet, when we streamed back into town - usually amid Sunday's gathering twilight, whatever the time of year - most of us seemed to be glad to be back where we belonged.
Life was slower then - on the open road and everywhere else. There were no motorways; stretches of dual carriageway were few and far between. Except in summer on roads which led to coastal attractions, heavy Sunday traffic was the stuff of headlines. Even the busiest roads in the land could be used for early-morning time trials.
This was the way it was for members of the then Goole Wheelers Cycling Club half a century ago.
Some of us enjoyed the racing. Others enjoyed leisurely 'club runs' which took us to Sherwood Forest, the Yorkshire Dales, North Yorkshire, towns on the East Coast or Derbyshire.
Some of us spent far more money on cycling than on girlfriends - new saddle, new tyres, a different style in handlebars, the latest design in shorts made of materials which have long since been given fancy names. Some of the older club members, though, still had bikes they had ridden before the war. One often rode out on Sundays wearing a tie; another occasionally turned out in plus-fours.
Some club members felt they could ride fast. Others prided themselves on their speed uphill or when descending. Quite a few of us fell off with some regularity. Those of us who raced never got around to replacing mudguards afterwards. So when it rained we got wet in those places which a cycle-cape would never stretch to cover.
Those of us who were young then spent many hours in the saddle, secretly day-dreaming of making a mark on the Tour de France or, at least, the Tour of Britain. We would train a couple of nights a week and sometimes before breakfast on weekdays, too. We would ride a club ten-mile time trial on the Howden-Selby road on Thursday nights, and a race elsewhere on Sundays.
Races on Sundays often meant leaving Goole at 5am and riding 15 or 20 miles to the event start. Then, after a race, when possible, the racing members would ride to join up with a club run. So, by the time they returned to Goole, that day they would have covered 150 to 170 miles.
Oh yes, we took it seriously. We ate what were deemed to be healthy diets; we had plenty of early nights; we shaved our legs like professionals did; some of us even dabbled with weight-training in winter. Not that it made much difference though, for, 50 years ago, no Goole rider had ever completed a 25-mile time trial in less than an hour. In the club's ten-mile trials, a time under 23 minutes was considered exceptional.
It was the older members, though, who really kept the club alive and held it together. They invariably knew the best routes to the best destinations and the whereabouts of the best tearooms which welcomed cyclists - halfway there and when we were ready to turn round and head for home.
Naburn, Stamford Bridge, Wentbridge, Aberford and Leven - to them all and others when bound elsewhere, we were lured many times by the prospect of a pint pot of hot tea to go with sandwiches fished from the saddle-bag. An additional attraction in winter would be the chance to linger by a roaring fire.
It was the older Wheelers, too, who handled the nitty-gritty. They organised meetings - frequently in Fred Kitwood's cafe in Mariners Street - various club races, and an annual dinner in the annex at the old Baths Hall in Pasture Road.
That annual dinner would always be a launch-pad for ambition. We would watch someone else receiving a trophy and tell ourselves that a year from then it would be our turn. Sometimes it was, but in cycling, as in most other forms of sporting activity, there were then, and still are, far fewer winners than losers.
Yet in so many clubs like the Wheelers, and not just in cycling, the real attraction was sharing a common interest, a bond, with like-minded people. Frank Marshall, Clarrie Guest, Les Ellin, Norman and April Franks, Alan and Ken Brown, Derek Cutts, Colin Chessman, Ted Atkinson, Mike Donoghue, Colin Abdy, John White, Brian Alp, Shirley Raspin, Dave Simpson, Alan Broughton, Don Sweeting, Norman Walsh, Paul Butler, Steve Peck and Bryan Hunt - they and others were companions of the road.
And whatever the destination for the day; whatever the weather, and no matter what happened along the way, the road always led to friendship.
Published on 8th March 2007 in News.
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