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  In the early 1960s, British cycling was a genteel, pastoral world. As now, Cycling set the tone, for the majority at least, and at the start of the decade the magazine was little changed from the 1930s. Alongside editorials attacking ‘road race madness’ were touring articles by writers with pseudonyms such as ‘Nimrod’ and ‘Centaur’ with titles like ‘A Day on Clare Island’, or ‘An Adventure for Two Lads’.

  It was impossible for the establishment to ignore Simpson’s spectacular achievements. He erupted into this tranquil milieu much as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones did into the wider world, making a whole generation of British cyclists aware that they inhabited a cycling backwater, cut off from the mainstream. Across the Channel lay money and celebrity: the success of Brian Robinson a few years earlier had hinted at the possibilities, but the level of Simpson’s successes and his near-misses hammered the message home.

  When he wore the yellow jersey in 1962, he was greeted in Paris, Cycling reported, by ‘cheering excursionists from as far north as Teesside and as far west as Plymouth’. The fact that large numbers of British fans had gone to France was news in itself. ‘Quite a few made an early start to the social season and for them dawn broke before bedtime’, the magazine said primly.

  Jacques Goddet was editorial director of L’Equipe as well as Tour organizer. He was explicit about the wider significance of what Simpson had achieved when he took the yellow jersey in 1962. Goddet wrote in his editorial that day that the English saw the Tour as ‘a funny old thing, a typical invention of a country where they eat frogs’, and called on his readers to ‘rejoice in this historic date for cycling, which will widen its international appeal. Let’s hope this will rejuvenate British cycling and make them consign their black alpaca jackets to mothballs.’

  A few months later, Goddet and Simpson appeared at British cycling’s gala night, the ‘Champions’ Concert’, organized at the Royal Albert Hall by time trialling’s governing body, the Road Time Trials Council. They were guests of honour among 4,000 cyclists, entertained by the Moulin Rouge-style Cavalcade Girls – ‘lovelier than ever despite the scanty costumes’ reported Cycling – along with jugglers and ‘dare-devil roller skaters’. Resplendent in his yellow jersey, Simpson pedalled on a set of stationary rollers for a few minutes, ‘amid a crescendo of enthusiastic applause’. Six years earlier such a scene would have been unthinkable, as British cycling fought its civil war and Simpson was banned under NCU rules for six months for failing to respect a ‘Stop’ sign.

  The British fans would throng to see Simpson on the rare occasions when he appeared in the UK to race. His feats encouraged British promoters: in August 1964, there were queues a mile long as 12,000 fans turned up at Crystal Palace to watch Simpson ride a circuit race. Two months earlier, the Herne Hill track in London had been packed for a meeting with Simpson and Jacques Anquetil topping the bill.

  Simpson’s successes and the sport’s higher profile led to other spin-offs. Peter Clifford’s book Tour de France sold out in 1965. Cycling magazine was prompted to organize trips to the Ghent and Antwerp six-day track races to watch Simpson; by 1967, the Sportsmen’s Travel Club and a rival, Page & Moy, were organizing trips for fans to attend the fateful Tour de France, at 35 guineas a head. The Falcon bike company ran a successful ‘Majorca training camp with Simpson’ in 1966. This was a boom time in British cycling. No fewer than 33 foreign stars – including Stablinski, Altig and Anquetil – were flown to the Isle of Man for the Manx Premier race in 1962. Major sponsors such as Corona, Players and Fyffes entered the sport – the banana company specifically to back the ill-fated 1967 British Tour team. Even the London six-day track race was revived in the year of Simpson’s death, on the back of his success.

  Simpson brought a confidence to British cycling which it had never known before. This was best expressed by Alan Gayfer when Simpson won his world championship in 1965, a feat which had always seemed unattainable to British fans. ‘We have waited 38 years for this moment, for the time when we could hold our heads up . . . a young miner’s son has proved that anything a Belgian or a Frenchman can do, we can do better.’

  Simpson knew the importance of the home audience. A fellow professional, Michael Wright, remembers missing the plane on the way to ride a race in England with Simpson, Hoban and Denson. Simpson spent all their contract money on hiring an eight-seater to get them there. ‘He absolutely wanted to do it so as not to let the organizer down. We earned nothing, because it all went on the plane.’

  British cycling mattered to Simpson in a wider sense as well. He encouraged any British cyclists who came over to his base in Ghent, and in 1964 he began campaigning in the press for a team sponsored by a British company to bring together the best home cyclists to compete in Europe – led naturally by him. By the time of his death he had founded, together with Albert Beurick and the writer Peter Clifford, a subscription fund which was to have supported the team. Simpson had other, wider ambitions as well. He seems to have been determined to restructure the entire sport in Britain after his retirement. Given the effect he had already had, plus his clout, his connections, and his determination, he would have had more than a fighting chance of pushing the sport to a higher level. What he might have achieved off the road, as well as on it, will remain British cycling’s great might-have-been.

  When Chris Brasher of the Observer went to interview Simpson in Paris in the early 1960s, he expected to meet a rough-hewn Durham miner’s son. He found the opposite, he told me, a vision of continental sophistication which he would never forget: ‘an impeccable Englishman in a Prince of Wales suit’.

  ‘I asked if he knew a good restaurant; he did and it was Michelin-starred. I made notes on my paper napkins, brought them home and put them on my desk and the article just flowed, which was a tribute to Tom rather than to me. I don’t know how many interviews I’ve done over 40 years, but that sticks in my mind. Tom had style.’

  In Britain, Simpson’s feats were in keeping with the times. Like the country’s other sporting greats, he epitomised a brief period when Britain was riding high. This was the time of confidence which had led Harold Macmillan to declare in 1957 that ‘most of our people have never had it so good’. In sport, Britain was still used to taking on the world and winning. In 1963, Jim Clark became the youngest Formula One world champion ever, and then, of course, there were the events of the 1966 World Cup. That a Durham miner’s son could conquer a sport as alien as cycling typified a time when anything seemed possible for those who had talent and a dream.

  The world championship in 1965 was Simpson’s breakthrough into the wider world outside cycling magazines and sports pages. Classic wins and yellow jerseys were not easy concepts for the British media to deal with: a world title needed no translation. Simpson’s three tabloid exposés in the People were only one way in which his profile was raised. The BBC had shot the half-hour documentary ‘The World of Tom Simpson’ earlier that year – and it was repeated.

  As a world champion, Simpson won three separate ‘Sportsman of the Year’ awards: the BBC’s ‘Sports Personality of the Year’, the ‘Sports Writers’ Personality of the Year’, and the Daily Express ‘Sportsman of the Year’. By 1967, five British newspaper sports writers were following the Tour de France to cover Simpson. Four of them drove together in an Austin Maxi, drawing amused comment from their European colleagues. The reports, in the Guardian at least, appeared near the top of each day’s sports page.

  At a time when coverage of all sports was limited, Simpson’s attempt to win the Tour was allotted a large amount of space: at least as much as the cricket, and more, proportionally, than the Tour would be given now. Earlier in 1967, ITV’s ‘World of Sport’ had covered the Milan–San Remo classic for the first time. This was the beginning of a 15-year connection with cycling through Simpson’s friend the journalist David Saunders, which lasted until the demise of the independent channel’s flagship sports programme.

  Simpson’s acceptance speech at the ‘Sports Write
rs’ award, delivered in the presence of the Prime Minister Harold Wilson, was the classic Simpson mixture of frankness and self-deprecating humour. Simpson noted that the PM was also ‘in the saddle but I hope his bottom doesn’t hurt as much as mine’. He went on to call for British industry to take note of cycling; he hoped that industrialists would wake up to the advertising potential of cycling teams, with the advent of the Common Market and proposals for a tunnel under the Channel. The latter, he added, would be a useful thing, because ‘the kids are always sick on the boat on the way home’.

  The speech was a little marvel of deadpan delivery and perfect comic timing, and it was also a perfect example of Simpson’s ability to play to almost any audience. He was clearly aware of the importance of promoting himself in any way he could, in the places it mattered. Sometimes this backfired. In the same autumn that Simpson won the hearts of the British press, he also created a sensation by being one of the first top cyclists to ‘kiss and tell’. In 1965, the new world champion sold his story to the People. It ran over three Sundays: September 19 and 26, and October 3.

  All the features were in the first person; the first bore the headline: ‘World champ but they call me a crook’. It dealt with the persistent allegations of race-fixing against Simpson; he revealed that he had offered the Irish rider Shay Elliott £1,100 to help him win the 1963 world championship, which Elliott had turned down, and that he had once taken £500 to help another team. Not noble acts, but these were relatively common practices in cycling.

  ‘Nobbled by a secret doper’, the following week, gave ‘the whole story’ about drugs. This amounted to little more than that Simpson had once thought he had been given a drugged bottle, and that he used ‘tonics’ provided by his doctors. ‘Nobbling’ was clearly a preoccupation of the paper’s: alongside Simpson’s articles that autumn was an exposé of greyhound doping, involving ‘bent’ races, crooked kennel girls and spiked sausage meat.

  The final episode, ‘I blew my top at the champ’, referred to a scuffle between Simpson and a fellow rider, Henri Anglade. This article’s gist, among the hyperbole, was that cycling was a no-holds-barred sport in which it was possible to make a lot of money. Not exactly news, and confirmation that the paper was doing its worst with relatively innocuous material.

  Lame and overblown it may all have been, but in Europe, for any cyclist to talk to the press about selling races and the use of drugs was a major event. For the newly crowned world champion to do so was explosive. The articles appeared translated in full in European newspapers; the scandal and the fall-out made the front page of the French sports newspaper L’Equipe for several days.

  Simpson’s explanations were inconsistent. First he stood by the articles, then he said he had been misquoted and would sue. His motives were also unclear. His constant need for money had to be one, but he also claimed the exposés were intended to raise the profile of cycling in Britain. This is not as disingenuous as it sounds; the issue was a constant refrain of his, and he was quite capable of merely seeing the end and assuming no one else would disapprove of the means.

  However, there was general disapproval. One French newspaper cartoon depicted the world champion as a bell, with bags of money where the clapper should have been. Simpson’s team manager, Gaston Plaud, and his personal manager, Daniel Dousset, condemned his rash conduct. His sponsor, Peugeot, came close to sacking him. He received anonymous letters accusing him of being unworthy of the world champion’s jersey, and was rumoured to have been cold-shouldered by his fellow professionals. ‘Cycling will not pardon him’ thundered a French Sunday paper’s editorial.

  Simpson donated the money to a cyclists’ benevolent fund and won his pardon two weeks later with a simply stunning victory in the closing one-day Classic of the season, the Tour of Lombardy. It was a show of strength worthy of his hero, the Italian Fausto Coppi, or any of the greats. He escaped alone and had enough time in hand at the finish in Como to talk to the press before the second-placed rider arrived: a ‘marvellous revenge’ as the headline in L’Equipe put it. Only one man had done the world championship/Tour of Lombardy double before – Alfredo Binda in the 1920s. Any victory by a world road race champion is notable; wearing the distinctive rainbow-striped white jersey, the champion is a marked man whose every move can be followed.

  His fellow cyclists’ reaction to the People affair had meant that Simpson was doubly marked. It all made the story even better: the world champion gained several weeks of notoriety. For a man who made his living from appearance money, from drawing crowds to races, this was hardly a disaster.

  Simpson’s talent for self-promotion is best shown by his embrace of his alter ego, ‘Major Tom’. The ‘Major’ first popped up after Simpson’s surprise fourth place in his first professional world championship, at Zandvoordt in Holland in 1959. A headline in L’Equipe read: ‘Les carnets du Major Simpson’ (the notebooks of Major Simpson), a reference to a popular book of the time Les carnets du Major Thompson.

  The original is a gentle mocking of the French, seen through the eyes of a fictional expatriate English gentleman, written by Pierre Daninos, who also covered the Tour de France for the newspaper Le Figaro. Simpson was the embodiment of Major Thompson as he appeared in a caricature on the cover of the book: slender, sharp-featured, well turned-out, exuding a crisp ‘English sense of humour’. It was a convenient way of pigeon-holing a British cyclist: Brian Robinson had also been compared to the ubiquitous major by the press.

  ‘Major Tom’ was born after Simpson’s Tour of Flanders win when a journalist from Miroir-Sprint magazine brought a Thompson-style bowler hat and umbrella to the cyclist’s Paris apartment for a photo shoot. Simpson already had the sharp suits. The idea had come from his manager Daniel Dousset, a man with a keen eye for a new way of selling his protégés. Simpson was photographed selecting his morning Times from a bookstall and sipping tea in a café, and a minor legend was born.

  British fans would have seen a resemblance to the sardonic, bowler- and brolly-wielding John Steed from The Avengers, which first screened in England in January 1961. The note of ‘swinging London’ played well on the Continent. Simpson was clearly touting his Englishness to the full to a willing Continental audience but it was merely an act: he always seemed perfectly at home in Europe. He eventually decided that the bowler hat had jinxed him, and stopped wearing it, but there was a final curious twist: after his marriage to Helen Simpson, Barry Hoban recycled the bowler and brolly by posing with them for a magazine in the guise of ‘the gent from Ghent’.

  Even after the bowler was abandoned, Simpson retained a sartorial edge over the opposition. Typically, he turned up at the start of the 1967 Tour wearing a blue blazer with a red rose embroidered on it. Equally typically, he quipped: ‘I’m not going for stage wins, just the Most Elegant Rider and the Most Unfortunate Rider’s prizes.’

  To promote himself to his various audiences, Simpson did more than simply dress up: in the 1960s, double-page articles bearing his byline were a regular feature of Cycling. He gave his inside view of the great races, passed on his training tips, and expounded his arguments for the foundation of a British national professional team. The articles were apparently ghost-written by the editor Alan Gayfer, but they bore the indelible Simpson stamp of brutal honesty and wry humour. His inside view of victory in Milan–San Remo writes off some of the field as ‘the most hopeless lot of cowboys you could ever meet’. In another, a few months before he died, he says of his failed hour record attempt in 1958: ‘I learned nothing. I was too stupid to learn then.’

  Simpson was happy to accommodate the clichéd French view of the typical Englishman, but he also knew exactly what his home audience wanted. In his inside account of the 1962 Tour he delivers the perfect homespun touch: ‘The only celebration I had [after taking the jersey] was my pot of tea and bread and jam in bed before my massage.’ The thought of their boy putting away his jam butty in between battles with Johnny Foreigner would have melted the heart of any English cy
cling fan.

  There was a serious purpose to all this self-promotion. As early as the 1960s, the trend for sportsmen to be as much entertainers as athletes had begun, something which would be most strikingly seen later in the decade with Muhammad Ali. As a younger professional, Simpson came across a cyclist called Roger Hassenforder, by then past his best but still legendary as the clown and prankster of the circuit; the man who would, for example, pedal around a velodrome sitting on his handlebars and facing backwards.

  Simpson would have observed that Hassenforder gained more and better contracts than his somewhat meagre racing results merited. When it came to making money, a cyclist’s profile and ability to draw a crowd mattered. Indeed, Simpson admitted learning much from him. He did Hassenforder-style stunts of his own, such as the time he grabbed a large stick out of the hedge and pretended to assault a fellow cyclist. ‘He [Simpson] used to laugh and joke about, but it was more calculating than that. He’d see someone in the crowd at the start of a race, go and borrow something and act the fool,’ recalls Alan Ramsbottom. ‘He’d pick up musical instruments, hats and all sorts.’ If the hat looked funny, Simpson would wear it, be it Stetson, bowler, or lofty traditional Breton lace coiffe. ‘It was pure performance,’ says Brian Robinson.

  However, this was more than mere imitation of Hassenforder: Simpson was a natural comedian. He could spot the potential in a situation or a prop, deliver a joke’s punchline with pinpoint timing, and come up with a quick retort when required. If he learnt these things anywhere, it was as a small boy, when his parents ran the working men’s club in the Durham village of Haswell, and Tom and his elder brother Harry would lean out of their bedroom window to listen to the comedians working the audience in the evenings.