We have a new book of cycle routes being published
this spring - On Your Bike: Hampshire & The New Forest by Mike Edwards.
In preparation for sending out the review copies and
publicity material, I asked Mike if he could let me have a few lines about
himself that I could use. He really is a
very charming man and we had a lovely chat over the phone. He recounted some wonderful anecdotes to me
and I asked if he could write some of them down and send them to me.
Well, he did, and I have enjoyed the piece he has
written so much that I couldn’t resist sharing it. He certainly gives a whole new dimension to
the phrase ‘On yer bike!’
About
Mike Edwards – in his own words
Born into bikes!
I was born in Coventry – the birthplace of the bicycle - and most of my
family were engineers. I went from pram
to tricycle and onto the roads at an early age.
I was seven when war broke out in 1939 so there was no new bike at
Christmas for me – tanks and guns were the order of the day. You got an ‘austerity bike’ to go to school
on – a single-speed, sit-up-and-beg, black-all-over monstrosity. I wanted a brightly coloured bike with
dropped handlebars, so that I could become a racer. I used to spend every Saturday afternoon at
The Butts racetrack where I could watch the races and drool over the exotic
racing bikes.
The only answer was to build my own. The wreckage from all the homes demolished in
the many air raids (not just the November 1940 Coventry Blitz) was piled in
long heaps on the town rubbish tips and a little probing would soon bring forth
a battered, mangled bike which still had quite a few useable parts. The bits you didn’t want could soon be
swopped at my Bablake School for what you needed – pedals for a saddle and so
on. So I soon had my bike – with dropped
handlebars, a racing saddle and reasonably light in weight. Then I set to work to paint it – silver for
the wheels, light blue for the frame and bright matching tape for the
handlebars.
My bike meant freedom – the door was open – where to
go? The local area was quickly
explored. Sunday rides were soon
extended to Kenilworth, Warwick, and then Stratford-on-Avon. My target was to do 100 miles in a day. Oxford was a tempting 49 miles away so one
Sunday I got up very early, filled my waterbottle, cut a pile of Marmite
sandwiches and set off. But this was no
quiet Sunday! There were Marshals in
cycling gear on many traffic islands and corners, and shadowy figures on racing
bikes shot past at regular intervals. I
discovered this was a time trial, a legal race against the clock, common in the
UK on Sunday mornings. So I got the
competitive bug. I arrived home,
saddlesore and very hungry, but made myself ride a mile down the road and back
to complete my first hundred – a ‘century ride’.
Competition looked tempting. Joining a club seemed to
be the first step. So I went to see
Ernie Viner, secretary of the Coventry Cycling Club, and paid up for junior
membership. He gave me a badge for the
bike and a lapel badge which I proudly wore to school on Monday morning.
Now I was no longer a spectator at The Butts. I was scheduled after school to sell
programmes and tickets, help in pushing a rider away at the start of a race (I
once pushed the national champion Reg Harris away!) and so on. Mine wasn’t a track bike, but it would cope
with training runs which the club operated most evenings. I trained every day on my own to be able to
keep up with the Club run, and eventually I could manage 100 miles in 6 ½ hours
which was the standard Sunday Training Run.
The Club was famous for its Lady Champions and I had
always admired the National Sprint Champion, Eileen Sheridan. She was less than five feet tall but could go
like the wind – anything from a 440 yard dash to the Lands End to John O’Groats
record which she held for decades! I can
remember blushing to the roots of my red hair when she rode alongside me on a
weekend training ride, casting doubtful looks at my homemade contraption from
her scintillating racing bike!
On the touring side I soon discovered the YHA. In the 1940’s it was a superb chain of
hostels on which you could plot a tour and go all over the country. (9d a night, 9d for a meal). On one tour I cycled from Coventry to Lands
End then along the coast to the Isle of Wight, and back through Arundel (having
squeezed £5 out of Mum). No one asked
you to phone or write, you were free, you had a bike, you just went!
In 1947 we went to Australia as £10 pommy immigrants,
sponsored by Bruce Small, owner of Malvern Star Bikes. I was recruited as office boy but as nobody
thought of giving me a bike I had to work for it. Sir Hubert Opperman, famous as a competitor
in 6-day races in Europe and a member of the Australian Tour de France team,
was a Director and my duties included taking him his morning coffee, pausing as
long as I dared to admire the trophies displayed on his office walls. I saved my pay, and bought myself a
second-hand touring bike; heavy and crude but good enough to take me into the
Bush. My happiest memories include being
befriended by old bushmen, eating damper by their campfires, watering the
horses and listening to their stories far into the night.
At the age of 17 I was awarded a Commonwealth
Cadetship to the RAF College at Cranwell, England to train as a pilot. I planned to ride my bike from Bombay to
Cranwell so I worked as a drink-waiter in Mario’s nightclub for a while to
finance the trip. I arrived in Bombay in
April 1950 with adequate finance and the whole summer to get to England. But there was trouble in Abadan (Dr.
Mossadeq had nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co.) and the Embassy told me
that if I tried to get through Iran I would probably get shot. I did some
training runs (getting badly sunburnt on a trip from Bombay to Poona) but with
no way through, and a deadline to make, I caught the P&O Liner Strathnaver and arrived at Cranwell on
13 September 1950.
There was little chance for cycling during my 3 years
at the RAF College. As I had no home in
the UK I was taken home to Yorkshire by Dick Calvert, one of my colleagues, to
spend Christmas with his family. His sister, Anne-Marie, was planning a cycling
trip round Scotland and the Hebrides using the YHA and we lost no time in
planning to ‘share a tandem’ if we got the chance in later life!
Dick and I went on together to learn to fly the RAF’s
first jet fighter, the Meteor. We shared
a room in the Mess but I still did not dare tell him I planned to steal his
sister!
Anne-Marie and I married in 1955 and took every chance
to cycle tour around the UK and France, using the YHA or when abroad a tiny
tent. We even cycled to our new
postings, which irritated RAF Accounts as there was no mileage rate for ‘an
officer’s missus on a pushbike!’ On one
tour on our racing bikes we passed through Camaret in Brittany. Anne-Marie insisted on visiting a local
artist’s gallery where she fell in love with an original oil painting of the
little harbour. Cognac appeared when the artist saw a likely sale and only
later did we lie in our tent discussing how to get an oil painting home on a
bike. With large quantities of brown
paper and string it was secured on the rear of my bike. Fortunately the weather
stayed dry. When we eventually arrived
at Customs in Plymouth the officer asked
‘What on earth
have you got there Sir?’
‘It’s an
original oil painting, officer.’
‘Get away with
you Sir!’ – and with a broad grin he waved us through.
Anne-Marie had always promised me the super
made-to-measure bike of my dreams one day and, sure enough, on my 75th
birthday a Roberts Audax Bike was waiting for me. It joined my stable with my Lemond training
bike, a Gazelle off-road machine and even a Unicycle. Anne-Marie has written many outdoor and
literary books over the years so when her lady editor charmed me into writing On Your Bike in Hampshire and the New Forest
I already had all the bikes I could possibly need to cover the glorious
lanes, tracks and Secret Places I hope you will enjoy in this book.
I hope you have enjoyed reading this as much as I
did. Mike has certainly inspired me to
get out and about on two wheels and take to the open road. Not sure I could manage 100 miles in one day
… well, not this week, anyway!
We have a wide selection of On Your Bike titles http://www.countrysidebooks.co.uk/book-catalogue-category.php?category=36&sub_cat=12
There is a 20% discount for all books ordered direct
from our website. For a full list of all
our books please visit www.countrysidebooks.co.uk
Happy Cycling!
Deb
