Put Me Back on My Bike Read online

  It was a shock for those around them. After the decision had been made, they visited Helen’s aunt, who did not know about it. Simpson could not resist loudly humming, ‘I’m getting married in the morning.’ The aunt failed to take the hint. Simpson showed the wedding ring to his teammate and mentor Brian Robinson at a dinner the day after the ceremony, and the stolid Yorkshireman was convinced it was a joke. Shaw too was convinced it was another Simpson prank.

  Helen Simpson’s new husband was a mercurial character, with a hunger for new experience, a man of dreams. ‘One ambition [of Tom’s] was to buy a train, do it up and live in it, a train with a carriage. He talked about it so many times. He was going to have a boat, a plane as well.’ Simpson was planning a house on his land in Corsica when he died: it was ‘to have a tree growing through it’.

  He was a man quick to fall in love with places. Within days of moving to Saint Brieuc he was writing to George Shaw about building a house there. A year later, he was talking of buying a hotel in Normandy. A racing trip to New Caledonia in 1964 prompted him to talk about moving to the Pacific islands. Initially, however, he and Helen shared a sparsely furnished flat with Brian Robinson in the Paris suburb of Clichy, moving to Ghent in October 1961. Helen stayed on in Belgium after Simpson died, moving to mid-Wales when her second husband, Barry Hoban, ended his long career as a professional cyclist in 1980.

  Helen is tall, imposing, with fine features. Together, the Simpsons made a glamorous couple. The magazine photographers of the time often snapped them together out on the town: Helen with her butterfly glasses and beehive hairdos in the finest 60s style, atop a delicate set of cheekbones, and Tom with his sharp suits, sparkling eyes and laughter lines. ‘He was avant garde with his fashion, and obsessive about his clothes,’ recalls Helen, who remembers her husband shopping for clothes in the boutiques on the Champs-Elysées. ‘There was a mandarin-collared suit with brass buttons, a pair of black leather trousers,’ she adds. Later, there would be the bowler hat and the umbrella.

  The quick-fire wedding epitomised Simpson’s impulsiveness, his belief that it was better to act at once than wait and see. This was seen constantly in his racing, but spilled over into all areas of his life, whether it was heading off for Saint Brieuc to make his fortune, or his decision to ride from Harworth to London and back in two days to be fitted for his Olympic uniform in 1956.

  ‘Sometimes he didn’t think,’ says a fellow professional, Michael Wright. ‘The ski accident [in 1966] came just when he could have started to make serious money, but the start of that season was ruined.’ Simpson would surprise his colleagues in other ways. Robinson, for example, recalls Simpson’s choice of a first car: ‘He said, “I need some transport now,” so I gave him the address of a Peugeot agent round the corner so that he could get something which would “just do for now”,’ says Robinson. ‘I came home and there was a fucking great Aston Martin – “a second-hand DB2 from 1953”, according to Simpson – parked outside. I said, “Oh Tom, what have you done now?” “It’s lovely,” he said, “half the price it would be in England.” He shipped it home and it stood in his wife’s parents’ barn for a long, long time. It was typical Tom.’

  It wasn’t just cars that caught his eye. ‘Went out and spent a fortune on furniture the other day,’ Simpson wrote to George and Marlene after moving to Paris. ‘Real old-fashioned stuff, you’d just rave about it Marlene, don’t believe in this trashy moderne [sic] stuff.’ Helen still wears the diamond ring he bought her for one birthday.

  Cars were an obsession with Simpson, just as they have always been for many professional cyclists. He bought a 1913 Peugeot, which he drove around the streets of Ghent for a Belgian TV documentary, sitting upright in his suit and bowler hat. The car was kept in the showroom of a Peugeot dealership. In April 1964 he went shopping for other vintage cars – getting particularly excited by an 1898 Benz dog-cart, but not clinching the deal.

  After the Aston Martin ‘there were the Mercedes, Jaguars and BMWs,’ recalls Helen. He would ‘fling ’em and flog ’em’. Another dream was to have a Jensen. ‘I used to get so worried, because I never knew what would come up next.’ As well as putting down the deposit on the Mercedes in Ghent as ‘something to aim at’, before he died Simpson had apparently ordered an E-type Jaguar, which turned up at the house in Ghent and was sent back.

  You only have to sit in a car with a cyclist at the wheel to be aware that they tend to push the envelope when driving, just as they do when flying down mountain descents on their bikes. It’s partly the fact that cyclists spend many hours at the wheel, partly that racing a bike breeds the ability to read a road and its surface at speed. Many professionals have a touch of the toad about them. A disproportionate number die in fatal car crashes. The most celebrated victim of the 1960s was one of Simpson’s heroes: the pedaleur de charme, Hugo Koblet. More recently, the 1998 Tour de France and Giro d’Italia winner Marco Pantani wrote off a succession of sports cars and four-wheel-drives, just at the point when his career had plumbed the depths. Happily, the only casualty was his bank balance.

  Cyclists are not more macho than other sportsmen. It’s more that risk-taking is part of the sport, and top cyclists tend to be impatient, and competitive. Simpson was typical. ‘Driving through the West End of London at 60 mph’ was nothing, Helen says. Norman Sheil, for one, says he would never get in a car with him.

  Simpson had more crashes than most. From the back seat, he forced Helen into a head-on collision on the way home after his disastrous 1965 Tour de France. Helen was driving him back from hospital after the operation on the septic hand which had put him out of the race. ‘He kept saying, “Put your foot down and let’s get home.”’ They lost control and spun into another car. ‘If we had not been in a Mercedes, I would not be here now.’

  On another occasion, George and Marlene Shaw were travelling with Simpson to a track race in Brittany in June 1960 when he went off the road in a hired Renault Dauphine, rolled the car three times and wrote it off. Marlene broke her collarbone. They were hauling the little car back onto the road when a lorry driver stopped and said to Shaw, ‘Simpson, eh?’ ‘Oui, oui,’ he answered. The man in the camion tapped his head Obelix-style and said, ‘Ah, they’re all mad.’

  Later, writing to the Shaws about the incident, Simpson shrugs it off. ‘I am honestly sorry, but you didn’t seem too bad in France, did you?’ George Shaw was convinced that Simpson would die driving and indeed Simpson did not behave as if he was aware of his own mortality. He dreamed of the future, but focused on the present. He lived fast; he would die young.

  The cars also provided a perfect symbol of the Simpsons’ social ascent. The contrast with what Simpson left behind was apparent when he and the family revisited Harworth in their Inspector Morse-style Jaguar, which had anti-static strip trailing underneath to stop the children being sick. ‘People would come up and say “Hey, missus, there’s something hanging from back of t’car”,’ says Helen. ‘They used to look gobsmacked.’ As well they might: merely owning a car was not universal in Britain at the time, let alone having a Jag.

  Helen still remembers the slightly unreal feeling of hobnobbing with stars of cycling such as Jacques Anquetil, who cut a glamorous figure with his wife Janine. When Simpson was an amateur racer in Saint Brieuc in 1959, almost two years after Anquetil won the Tour de France, she and Tom would look at Anquetil’s picture in cycling magazines; that status had seemed unattainable. ‘We were in awe of people like them; the wives like Janine seemed like film stars. When we went to a race there was always a hotel en route where they would have arranged to eat. We’d be eating, in would come Anquetil and he’d sit at the table. It was unreal. At the finish of the Tour one year, Janine and her daughter came and stood and chatted with me, and I thought, “Am I dreaming this?”’

  On a postcard of Mont Blanc dated January 10, 1966, she writes to George and Marlene Shaw from the Hôtel Relax in the ski resort of Saint Gervais: ‘[We] were out till four with the Anquetils,
it was Jacques’ birthday.’ The skiing holiday again symbolised the couple’s movement up the social and economic ladder. ‘Just a few words to make you envious,’ she writes.

  There were soirées with pop stars of the time such as Petula Clarke, with whom Tom got on particularly well, and Sacha Distel. And Simpson met the Queen when she was on a state visit to Brussels. ‘She talked about the Tour and how hard it must be climbing all those mountains.’ Simpson, never one to resist the chance to joke about a solemn event, would later tell journalists that he had refused to meet Her Majesty as she wouldn’t pay his expenses for the trip.

  In Ghent, where there was a sizeable community of English-speaking expatriates, about 300-strong, Helen became secretary of the British Colonial Association. She kept herself busy organizing cocktail parties and ladies’ lunches for the wives of employees of multinational companies such as ICI and Monsanto.

  The Simpsons’ social ascent was typical in a decade of class flexibility. This was a time when opportunities for status and wealth were opening up for those with talent and drive, and when barriers were breaking down. It no longer mattered where you had come from or gone to school if you had charisma and were the best in your chosen field. If David Bailey, the son of an East Ham tailor, could become a society photographer and, in August 1965, marry Catherine Deneuve (with Mick Jagger as best man), what was to stop a Durham miner’s son becoming a world champion, driving an Aston Martin, and rubbing shoulders with pop stars? After all, just a decade before, Simpson’s great hero, Fausto Coppi, had begun life on a hill farm in Liguria and had gone on to grace the salons of the Italian Riviera.

  Despite the fact that Simpson’s visits home were limited owing to his fear of the Military Police, he kept in touch with his past. Older members of the Harworth and District Cycling Club recall how he would accompany them on the Christmas club run for a traditional dinner at the café at Edwinstowe, where Robin Hood is supposed to have married Maid Marian. The abundance of letters and postcards in George Shaw’s collection testifies to the rider’s need to keep in touch with fellow cyclists back home: Simpson even managed to get him a postcard signed by the entire 1960 British Tour de France team.

  In early 1960, 10 months after he left England, Simpson was writing to George Shaw from his team’s training camp in Narbonne that ‘behind the hotel is a hill like Fox House’, a hairpinned climb 10 miles outside Sheffield which is an obligatory part of every club run returning to the city. That reference could be mere homesickness, but it also shows an affection for what he left behind, something which Shaw saw when Simpson returned to race on the Isle of Man in 1961. ‘He was the star, and we went with him to a presentation after the race, in the casino,’ Shaw recalls. ‘People kept talking to him, and eventually he came to us and said “quick”, and we nipped over the road to a pub. It was full of all the guys from the Rockingham, the Harworth, the Scala, and all the local guys from cycling clubs around this way, and we spent all night with them.’

  Simpson’s attachment to his roots came through in another way: his patriotism, which can only have stemmed from his working-class background among the coal-mining villages. ‘He was like a man possessed when he put the Union Jack jersey on,’ says Denson. Shaw concurs: ‘He was so patriotic it was untrue. He was absolutely proud to be British.’ This did not just mean riding hard when wearing a Great Britain jersey; Simpson also felt passionately about cycling in his homeland, so much so that he regularly promoted the idea of a British professional team in his ghosted articles and he eventually began a subscription fund to set up a squad. (The idea, intriguingly enough, was to be emulated some 30 years later by a team in the Basque Country, Euskadi, which made it as far as riding the 2001 Tour de France.)

  These are the reasons why Simpson lies buried in the cemetery at Harworth, in spite of the fact that, had he lived, he would probably have ended up making his home in either Corsica or Ghent. ‘He wouldn’t have gone back,’ says Helen. She wrote to George and Marlene Shaw after her husband’s death: ‘I feel it’s so far away but I know that Tom would have wanted to be there in his dear old England.’

  The man Helen Simpson married in January 1960 was as utterly meticulous and focused in his approach to his cycling as he was impulsive and mercurial in other areas of his life. Inevitably, Helen’s marriage and her family life were moulded by Simpson’s goals, which were ‘to look after himself and win races’. The best example of this was his obsession with diet. It had begun young, after the pursuiter Cyril Cartwright taught him his secrets. Helen still largely sticks to the principles which Tom followed, and lunch when I visited would have pleased the finicky Cartwright: fresh vegetables predominated.

  I had heard that Simpson took a diet book written by the French nutritionist Raymond Dextreit with him everywhere he went. ‘Of course,’ says Helen and, in one of those moments when past and present elide seamlessly, nips into the kitchen to get it. Les Cures du Jus is a small, thin, orange book which deals with ‘the problems of nutrition studied in the light of science and naturalist experience’. ‘It won him the world championship, Bordeaux–Paris and the Tour of Lombardy,’ says Helen.

  Dextreit goes through the various healing properties of all vegetables and fruits, and, for easy reference, lists physical problems together with the vegetables to cure them. This presumably is why Simpson travelled with it, as it could be looked at in case of need. If, for example, you had insomnia, Dextreit would tell you to take lettuce and mandarin.

  Simpson was obsessed with carrot juice. He believed it would ward off illness and boost his haemoglobin levels: as he said to one teammate, ‘You never see a rabbit with a cold.’ He would get through ‘10lb a day in winter’, according to Helen, which liquidized down to about a litre or a little more. It is a massive quantity and the carrots all had to be peeled, which would take at least half an hour a day, every day. Helen would buy the carrots in bulk at a market in Ghent. Her hands would go yellow from peeling them and the Simpson house would end up full of piles of orange sawdust. ‘I remember one day I thought I’d get ahead of myself so my father and I peeled two sackfuls and bottled them and put them on the floor in the kitchen in sealed glass jars. They fermented.’ She was understandably heartbroken.

  Pigeons were another fetish of Simpson’s ‘because they were very good for the digestion. The cleaning lady kept them and used to deliver them ready-plucked. I used to cook them very lightly in a pressure cooker.’ Her husband had acquired other dietary quirks, a mix of old wives’ tales and good science: duck and trout skin, for the vitamins they contain, for example. He was also a great man for his herbal teas, particularly blackcurrant, for its Vitamin C, and also raspberry leaf, for its muscle-toning properties. He ate ‘garlic in copious amounts’, for its antiseptic and blood-thinning qualities. Simpson was, incidentally, not the only cyclist to believe in garlic: in the early 1980s, Sean Yates, who would go on to wear the yellow jersey in the 1994 Tour, disgusted his flatmates with his garlic consumption in an attempt to ward off colds.

  The time when meals were eaten was critical – ‘never late at night’, to ensure proper digestion. Sometimes Simpson would fast for about a week at a time; at other times he would go through cycles of carbohydrate starvation and super-compensation, to stimulate his body to burn its fat and to enhance his ability to absorb energy.

  Any great athlete builds his or her own support network. In Ghent, Simpson had his soigneur Gus Naessens; his doctor at the Gentse Wielersport club, Vandenweghe; his wheelbuilder Ted Wood; and training partners such as Vin Denson, Alan Ramsbottom and Barry Hoban. Helen played a critical role by ensuring that, in the build-up to a major goal, all her man had to think about was training, eating and sleeping. ‘He used to set his goals every year, for example winning Bordeaux–Paris, or winning the Tour that year he died, and when preparation time came he had to be very strict. He would get very concerned about his diet and sleep, so I would see he had nothing to worry about apart from the bike.’ Helen would pack Simpson’s cas
e, making sure that tiny but vital items such as shoelaces were not forgotten.

  Helen would deal with everyday household chores, such as paying bills, in addition to looking after the couple’s two children: Jane, born in April 1962, and Joanne, who arrived in May 1963. Tom’s heavy woollen cycling jerseys and shorts, soiled daily on the road in training, had to be washed by hand – ‘a nightmare’. She would also deal with extraordinary jobs too, such as selecting her husband’s choice of records for his appearance on Desert Island Discs in 1965, as Simpson was not a great music fan.

  Most curious of all, perhaps, was the job of sewing ‘sausages’ of cloth into the backsides of Simpson’s shorts. These were for the winter six-day races, which included ‘madison’ relay events. In these, the team of two cyclists would change over by grabbing the backside of the other rider’s shorts and ‘throwing’ him up to race speed. The ‘sausage’ gave better purchase as the smooth woollen shorts were grabbed.

  Simpson was a person with ‘only black and white in his life, no grey areas’, and this was reflected in their home life, which was one of highs and lows. ‘When he prepared for races I’d be hoping and praying that nothing would happen, no falls. If he fell and hurt himself it would put him back however many months or weeks. If he became ill, I would worry. Was it the food he’d been eating, or had he not done something the soigneur told him to do?’

  Life chez Simpson was not normal, Helen now reflects, principally because a constant eye had to be kept on anything that might affect Simpson’s performance, whether he was racing or not. ‘Even in winter he had to be careful because every kilo meant an extra 100 miles that had to be ridden. Social life [as a couple] was non-existent. I often used to think it would be really strange living a normal life, going out and having a meal with people.’