Hub gear expert and aficionado Dave White has kindly contributed three more articles to the Sturmey-Archer section of this WordPress site. They deal with the dating of Hercules and Brampton 3-speeds, the design of Hercules and Brampton 3-speed triggers, and the possible use of BSA pinions to replace worn ones in Sturmey-Archer type A and F/FN hubs. To access this material, simply go to the home page, scroll down and click on the appropriate link: https://hadland.wordpress.com
Category: Bikes and cycling
This section includes various articles on cycle history, cycle technology and cycling. Scroll down to find more articles.
More esoteric Sturmey-Archer info
This WordPress blog is the descendant of a website that went live nearly a quarter century ago, on New Year’s Day 1998, and which for many years was known as Hadland.net. The website soon started carrying information about Sturmey-Archer hub gears that was not then available anywhere else on the internet, including how to repair most models produced prior to 2000.
Much more information on Sturmey-Archer hubs has been added over the years. This includes hitherto unpublished material provided free of charge by leading authorities on old hub gears. These authors include Jim Gill, John Fairbrother, Peter Fuller and Vernon Forbes.
Today (30 July 2021) new information from David White, on axles for the Sturmey-Archer types A and FN, has been added to the end of the existing article on axles, accessible from here.
Ron Thompson’s G4 Recumbent Bicycle
Ron Thompson, based in Maryland, USA, has created a recumbent bicycle concept which he calls the G4. The reason for this name is explained in the article he has written about his second prototype, P2. Prototypes P3, P4 and P5 have since followed, and development continues.
Ron and his wife have ridden the prototypes more than 20,000 miles. He thinks many people would enjoy them – both current riders and those not comfortable with conventional upright bikes. He is now looking for ways to make the G4 bike configuration available. A US patent based on the P3 configuration is pending. The focus of the patent is effective input of supplemental hand power, a matter which in the past has been contentious.
You can download Ron’s article in the PDF file “g4-bike” below. He would welcome your comments and questions, so his email address is at the end of the article.
STURMEY-ARCHER TRICOASTERS – and my 1914-15 FN Tricoaster in particular – by Peter Fuller
The Tricoaster hub, a combination of back pedal brake and three speed hub gear, has certain desirable qualities. The first is that there should be no freewheeling ‘no gear’ position between the gears, which would of course be very dangerous if found while braking. Secondly it is an advantage if braking is always applied through the Low gear train for maximum braking force regardless of the gear in use. Finally, as with any hub gear, it is an added bonus if a snapped cable does not leave the hub in High gear.
The model C Tricoaster of 1907 and the N and FN models that followed from 1910 to 1921 possess all the qualities listed above – on these hubs a snapped or slack cable gives Normal gear. Of the Tricoasters that followed, the KC of 1922-35 and the TCW series of 1952-72 did not apply the brake through the Low gear train regardless of the gear selected, and a slack cable gave High gear. The S3C, introduced in 1970, was a little better – it did have a ‘no gear’ position between Normal and High but this could not affect braking since in the S3C braking is always applied through the Low gear train, but a slack cable still left the hub in High gear. Of all the Tricoasters Sturmey-Archer designed up to and including the S3C of 1970, the earliest C, N and FN models were perhaps the best.
I had been having trouble with the back-pedal brake component of the Tricoaster on my 1914-15 Raleigh Special Roadster. It is fitted with an FN, an N type Tricoaster with the ‘fine’ axle thread adopted in 1914, becoming standard thereafter. The problem with my hub was that the back-pedal brake would only engage in warm weather. When tested on a sunny afternoon it would work fine, but tried cold the following morning the brake would not engage, the pedals just freewheeling backwards. Knowing, therefore, that it was temperature related, I hoped that a good clean up was all that was needed. I also knew it had not been serviced for about 10 years and that at its last service modern Sturmey- Archer gel had probably been used to lubricate it.
So, armed with an exploded diagram, I stripped it down to sub-assembly level (Fig. 1). I could not remove the screwed-on sprocket to service the right-hand ball ring since it appears a special tool is needed to do this.
The brake is applied by a worm drive, which was nicely gummed up in line with the diagnosis (Fig. 2). I cleaned everything up and set to work re-assembling using my preferred lubricant, SAE 30 four stroke lawnmower oil.
This is where I ran into trouble as these hubs do not go back together like the later types. In particular, adjustment of the right-hand cone is very different and although this expertise must surely reside somewhere in the club’s knowledge base I could find nothing online.
The procedure for adjusting the right-hand cone on almost any S-A hub from K Series on will be familiar to many – screw the cone up finger tight, back off half a turn, fit special lock washer, fit lock nut. On the FN Tricoaster the r-h cone/clutch screws up all the way until you run out of axle thread, without ever reaching a registration point. Scouring the early Sturmey-Archer catalogues on their Heritage website turned up unhelpful advice like ‘never disturb the right cone’, or worse ‘the right-hand cone is a fixture, and must on no account be meddled with’.
A lengthy session with the exploded diagram and a description of the workings of the similar type V hub revealed that the three speed element of these early hubs works quite differently to later models.
These earlier designs operate by moving a sliding pinion along the axle. Normal and High ratios are achieved by engaging the sliding pinion with internally toothed ‘clutches’ at either end of its travel, Low being activated when the sliding pinion is in its central position disengaged from either clutch.
With the cable slack the sliding pinion is in its left-most position and engages with the internally toothed clutch in the compound planet cage giving Normal gear. One click on the lever pulls the sliding pinion out of this engagement, taking it out of play but enabling a Low gear train. A second click pulls the sliding pinion even further to the right engaging it with the internally toothed clutch in the r-h cone/clutch and providing High gear. The progression of gears on tightening the cable is therefore Normal-Low-High, dictating the design of top tube and handlebar levers to accommodate this in a logical way (Fig. 3). There is no ‘no-gear’ position with this sliding pinion design.
The sliding pinion principle is used in the C, N and FN Tricoasters and the V and A type three speed hubs. Generally, from the K series onwards, the familiar sliding clutch method is used to change gear.
The key to adjusting the r-h cone/clutch correctly on the axle is that it should be screwed on just far enough that the sliding pinion teeth are flush with the upper face of the internally toothed clutch in the compound planet cage (Fig. 4). The upper pinion seen is the fixed pinion, part of the axle. The teeth of the sliding pinion can be seen just below it, correctly adjusted flush with the surface of the internal clutch teeth in the compound planet cage.
If the r-h cone/clutch is not screwed far enough along the axle the fixed pinion could engage with the internal clutch teeth in the compound planet cage and probably lock the hub. If the r-h cone/clutch is screwed on too far, the sliding pinion might not be pulled to the right far enough along the axle to engage High gear. When it is correctly positioned on the axle, it should look like the one shown in Fig. 5.
Since I could find no servicing instructions for these hubs, I have documented the process below. I am pleased to say my hub is reinstalled in the bike and the brake has worked consistently since.
Sturmey-Archer FN Tricoaster strip and rebuild
The following notes refer specifically to the FN Tricoaster Mark 1 1914-1918. In terms of re-assembly, the 3 speed section at least could be adapted to apply to the C and N Tricoasters and model V and A three speed hubs – the sliding pinion group of hubs of that era. Part names and numbers referred to relate to the exploded diagram (shown below) of the FN hub available on the Sturmey-Archer Heritage website at:
http://www.sturmey-archerheritage.com/images/photos/pic-22.1.jpg
I am not aware of any sources of spares for these hubs and would be pleased to know of any. These notes reduce the Tricoaster hub to its main sub-assemblies only, sufficient for cleaning.
To dismantle the FN Tricoaster Mark I to sub-assembly level
1. Remove the axle nuts and any spacers. It is useful not to disturb the relationship between N25 r-h cone/clutch and its star locking washer – to preserve this setting fit a spare axle nut to hold the star washer in place. If this setting has been disturbed refer to the reassembly instructions.
2. Unscrew and remove N6 l-h indicator rod and N7 r-h indicator coupling. N126 indicator spring may come out with the l-h indicator rod.
3. With the wheel horizontal, left-hand side up, remove the l-h locknut and N192 l-h adjusting nut/cone.
4. Lift off N152 brake plate & arm assembly and the N150 brake cone.
5. The axle complete with temporary axle nut, locking star washer, r-h cone/clutch and sliding pinion is now free to drop out of the right-hand end of the hub. It will be needed in place for step 8.
6. Loosen N34 r-h ball ring in the usual way using a punch and hammer. It has a two-start right hand thread. (At this point Sturmey-Archer instructions require you to mark the relationship between the r-h ball ring and the hub shell so that they can be refitted in the same orientation – I understand this to be a moot point).
7. Turn the wheel horizontal again left-hand side up and unscrew the mechanism by hand from the hub shell, keeping the l-h end uppermost. Note: the internal clutch nut N149 and Low gear cage (c/w worm drive) N164 are not secured – they could fall off if the mechanism is not kept left-hand end up.
8. With the axle in the mechanism and kept vertical, l-h end uppermost, clamp the r-h end of the axle in a vice.
9. Lift off N149 clutch nut assembly and N164 Low gear cage (c/w worm drive) assembly.
10. Remove the remaining mechanism from the vice and remove the axle assembly from N22 compound planet cage and driver and N34 r-h ball ring/drive sprocket assembly.
11. Unscrew N10 axle (internal) grub screw to remove N8 main axle spring if required.
To reassemble the FN Tricoaster Mark I
If the relationship between the right-hand cone/clutch, star washer and axle has not been disturbed proceed to step 5.
To check or reset the relationship between the right-hand cone/clutch, star washer and axle proceed as follows:
1. Screw N25 r-h cone/clutch onto the right hand (slotted) end of the axle. Clamp the axle vertically, left-hand end uppermost.
2. Drop N22 compound planet cage and driver and N34 r-h ball ring/drive sprocket assembly over the axle, drive sprocket down.
3. Observe the level of N197 sliding pinion teeth relative to the upper face of the internally toothed ‘clutch’ of the compound planet cage. The r-h cone/clutch is correctly adjusted on the axle when the sliding pinion teeth are flush with the internally toothed clutch of the compound planet cage (Fig. 4).
(If the r-h cone/clutch is not screwed on far enough, the fixed pinion could engage with the internal clutch teeth and probably lock the hub. If the r-h cone/clutch is screwed on too far, the sliding pinion might not be pulled far enough along the axle to engage high gear.)
4. Screw the r-h cone/clutch along the axle until correct alignment is achieved, fit the star lock washer and hold it in place temporarily with a spare axle nut.
5. From this point on assembly is the reverse of the dismantling procedure. When refitting N152 brake plate and arm be sure to align the actuating peg on N153 brake lever with the corresponding recess in N150 brake cone and remove the temporary axle nut that is retaining the star washer on the right-hand end of the axle.
The information provided here is presented in good faith, it worked for me but is not warranted – please use this information at your own risk.
Acknowledgements
Tony Hadland, The Sturmey-Archer Story, 1987.
Norman Richardson, for help and advice.
This article first appeared in The Boneshaker, journal of the Veteran-Cycle Club, Number 213, Volume 22, Summer 2020. It is reproduced with the kind permission of the club and of the article’s author, Peter Fuller.
Converting the Sturmey-Archer FW 4-speed hub into a 5-speed
NB: It is important to note that these instructions were written in the mid 1980s. Many items that were then current or easily available may no longer be so. The article is based on Appendix B of The Sturmey-Archer Story by Tony Hadland, published in 1987 by John Pinkerton.
Converting an FW into an S5/2
By far the easiest way to convert an FW to five-speed operation is to obtain a complete axle assembly for the S5/2 (HSA 329, HSA 330 or HSA 331, depending on axle length). This comes ready assembled, complete with sun pinions, dog ring, axle key and associated springs. The FW is merely rebuilt around the S5/2 axle assembly.
This conversion offers a gear which is virtually identical to the current five-speed hub. In the past Sturmey-Archer disapproved of five-speed conversions but, at the time of writing, the company is prepared to issue a list of the necessary parts for rebuilding FWs around S5/2 axle assemblies. They also market a retro-fit list consisting of the complete S5/2 internals and accessories for fitting into an FW shell, or an AW shell made before April 1984.
Converting an FW into an S5 (original pattern)
It is also possible to convert four-speeds to the original S5 style of operation; this involves a push rod in the left end of the axle, rather than the toggle chain used in the S5/1 and S5/2. The following conversion instructions for the FW were written by Denis Watkins of Castle Bromwich, after the discontinuance of the S5 and before the introduction of the S5/1.
1. The FW is really a five-speed hub in which, to permit its control with only one lever, only four speeds are used.
2. The extra low gear of the standard FW is brought into play by pulling the two sun pinions K409 and K408 to the right such that the dogs on K408 engage with the axle dogs.
3. If, when the FW is in top, it were possible to put K409 and K408 into the same position as in 2. above an extra high gear would be obtained.
4. To obtain both extra high and extra low, movement of K409 and K408 must be controlled by an additional lever. This can be done as follows.
5. Compression spring K8l3B is not required and must be removed.
6. Axle key K526A must be replaced by axle key K526 (used in AW).
7. Coupling/indicator rod K807ZA must be replaced by the type used on the AW.
8. Replace axle key K402 by a further axle key K526 and file ends of latter flush with surface of pinion sleeve K406.
9. Remove indicator rod K804 (K804A) and replace by a suitable push rod with end threaded to suit axle key K526. This is the only real difficulty. It is possible to use the rod portion of K504AZ (indicator for AW with long axle). It might be better to cut the outer end off an AW indicator rod and have a bit of similar rod welded “end on” to provide a total length such that, when the rod is pushed in to move K408 into engagement with the axle dogs, the outer end of the rod is flush with the end of the axle.
10. The push and release of the rod is conveniently controlled via a bell crank. Shimano have a very nice bell crank arrangement on their three-speed hub. Unfortunately it is threaded for a standard 3/8” (9.5mm) axle and there may be insufficient metal to permit drilling and tapping to Sturmey axle size.
11. A very important point; in early versions of the FW, K408 was made with parallel dogs. This is OK for conversion. Later versions of the FW had these dogs chamfered on the one face to facilitate engagement. These are unsuitable for conversion (unless an old type K408 can be obtained) as, if attempted, it will be found ‘ratcheting’ occurs in extra high gear and no drive is possible.
With regard to 11. above, the later FWs can also be converted if the larger sun of an S5 (HSA 269) or of an S5/1 (HSA 317) can be obtained. Of course, Sturmey-Archer produced a bell crank and push rod for the S5 (HSJ 679 and HSA 297 or HSA 288) but these are no longer available. The design of the bell crank evolved through three versions; plastic, pressed steel and machined steel. The latter seems to have been the most reliable. Some riders replaced the push rod with a modified flat-headed nail for smoother and more reliable operation.
An alternative to the bell crank was devised by Jack Lauterwasser. The push rod is made from a section of 12 gauge spoke and protrudes from the axle end by about 20mm. Threaded onto the external end of the push rod is a brass bush (made from a solderless nipple), drilled to permit the control cable to pass through freely at 90 degrees to the rod. An oversized tear-drop shaped brass washer is fitted to the wheel axle, with the pointed end of the washer pointing 180 degrees away from the cable fulcrum clip. The pointed end of the washer is cut out to house a solderless nipple, fixed to the control cable.
When the control cable is tightened, its far end cannot move because it is anchored to the tear-drop washer. The cable therefore straightens itself and, because it passes through the end of the push rod, pushes the rod into the hub, thus shifting the suns. The system works very smoothly.
The cable anchorage cut out, being keyhole shaped, permits quick release of the cable, merely by depressing the push rod whilst unhooking the cable end. Because the cable end is fitted with a solderless nipple, the push rod remains attached to the cable – with the bell crank system it is fairly easy to lose the push rod. The biggest disadvantage with this system is the risk of accidental damage to the exposed end of the push rod.
A somewhat similar system was devised by Mr P. Pottier of London during the 1950s. He used a Sturmey-Archer toggle chain, the end of which was riveted to the pointed end of the tear-drop washer; the chain passed through a steel bush push-fitted onto the end of the push rod. The control cable was attached to the toggle chain in the usual way; hence, when the cable was tightened, the chain moved the push rod further into the gear.
Non-Standard Controls for the S5
Many riders using the S5 type converted four-speeds use a derailleur lever for the left changer. This gives good ‘feel’ to the change (which, unlike that of the S5/1 and 2, is not designed to cope with crash changes) and reduces the need for cable adjustment.
Some riders advocate use of a derailleur lever also for the right hand changer; a practice greatly disapproved of by Sturmey-Archer because of the ‘no gear’ slip position between high and normal gears.
The Californian cycle engineer, Ernest Rogers, devised a Duo-Trigger Shifter for five-speed hubs. This consists of two of the metal three-speed triggers (not the current bulbous plastic type) bolted one on top of the other, the clamp of the top trigger body having been first removed. The effect is somewhat similar to the triggering arrangement on a double-barrelled shotgun.
Three teenagers cycle from the Thames Valley to the Black Forest in 1967
Planning the tour
Following the success of our 1966 continental cycle tour, Martin Taylor and I decided to try something a bit more ambitious in summer 1967. We had lost contact with our erstwhile cycling companion Tom McLoughlin, who had left our school to study elsewhere. However, our good friend and classmate Gerard McGlynn was keen to join us, so once again we were a team of three.
Our hometown was Reading, in the Thames Valley, 40 miles west of London. Reading in those days was noted for producing the ‘4Bs’ – biscuits, beer, bulbs and boxes. The biscuits were made by Huntley & Palmers (where two of my next-door neighbours worked), the beer was made by Courage (where my father worked), the bulbs were grown by Suttons (our school buildings included a former Sutton family mansion), and the (tin) boxes were made by Huntley, Boorne and Stevens, originally to put the biscuits in. The broadcaster Chris Tarrant’s father was a director of the company.
We were all in the Upper Sixth (year 13) of Presentation College, an independent Catholic grammar school on the Bath Road in Reading, run by the Presentation Brothers. They were an Irish religious order, jokingly referred to in later years as the provisional wing of the Christian Brothers.
Presentation College (usually shortened to ‘Pres’) was established in Reading during the 1930s, partly at the behest of Dr George Murphy-O’Connor from Cork, the father of Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, who attended the preparatory section of the school and eventually became head of the Catholic church in England and Wales. Cormac’s mother Ellen was an acquaintance of my mother and occasionally visited our house when we were kids. Mrs Murphy-O’Connor was very posh, whereas we were aspiring semi-detached suburban, so we had to be on our best behaviour when she visited.
Although Pres was an independent school, it had bilateral agreements with the surrounding education authorities. Consequently almost all the pupils were kids whose parents had average or even low incomes, and who therefore paid little or nothing in fees because most of us had passed the dreaded 11-plus selection exam, taken in the finally year of primary school (year 6). To put it simply, if you were a boy from a Catholic family who passed the 11-plus and lived within 15 miles of Reading, you usually ended up at Pres. The school had its strengths and weakness but our year did achieve the highest General Certificate of Education Ordinary Level results in the county of Berkshire, with an average of something like 10 passes per pupil. The A-level results were quite another matter and probably best forgotten.
Anyway, Martin, Gerard and I were finishing our seven year sentence at Presentation College in the summer of 1967. The plan was to escape to Europe as soon after the end of our General Certificate of Education Advanced Level exams as possible. I use the word ‘escape’ advisedly, as the last two years at the school had been a little like living in a concentration camp. The headmaster, Brother Fidelis Clifford, alias Fagin, alias Trug, particularly hated our year and, despite the availability of a splendid new school block, he kept us in army-style wooden huts (cold in winter, hot in summer), some distance from the main school buildings. He so hated us that he only appointed one prefect from our year, instead making younger kids prefects over us. Consequently, on our last day, some of us removed the screws from the window hinges, so that next time the windows were opened, they would fall into the playground outside.
(Less intentional damage resulted from the free third of a pint of milk that all schoolchildren received daily before ‘Margaret Thatcher – Milk Snatcher’ stopped it. As our hut was so far from the rest of the school, we didn’t take the empties back after the mid-morning break. Instead, we just opened the ceiling hatch and chucked the bottles into the loft. If only half of our empties from our two years in the hut ended up in the loft, that would have been some 6,000 bottles, and an insulation board ceiling is not designed to take that sort of load. Rumour has it that the whole lot came down some time after we left the school.)
But how were we going to make our escape abroad? On Steve McQueen motorcycles, as used in the 1963 film The Great Escape? Not quite. Martin still had his drop handlebar ‘boy racer’ bike (with derailleur gears that occasionally derailed) and I had my trusty Moulton Speed, with its robust 16-inch wheels, dual suspension, 4-speed Sturmey-Archer hub gears and big carrier racks fore and aft (which carried the newspapers I delivered to raise the money to pay for the tour). Gerard, our new recruit, had a much more sober machine – a 3-speed Raleigh Boulevard Tourist. Despite its name, it was a sit-up-and-beg heavy roadster, complete with full chaincase. It bore the time-honoured Raleigh ‘All-Steel Bicycle’ decal but Gerard nicknamed it the ‘All-Lead Bicycle’, due to its weight. He was new to cycle touring, having previously used his bike mostly to get to school and around town. Nonetheless, Gerard – astride his venerable mount – was to prove himself quite capable as a cycle tourist.
That year, Martin and I tried to raise some money from sources other than our own savings. We didn’t have much luck with commercial firms, although Dunlop did give us a map. But Martin discovered that we might be able to get a grant from the Scout Association. He and I were both Senior Scouts and Martin discovered that there was a new award called the Senior Independent Explorer Belt, which was supported by financial grants. The aim was to promote adventure and self-reliance in an international context. Our aim was to hybridise our cycling tour with doing whatever was necessary to gain the Senior Independent Explorer Belt and the grant that came with it. As Gerard was not a scout, he was not part of the expedition as far as the Scout Association was concerned. In fact, they knew nothing of his presence on the expedition.
To apply for the award, we had to prepare a brief and submit it for approval. Martin and I then had to discuss the proposal with a senior chap in the scouting movement who lived in a big house in Headley, Hampshire, about 4 miles south-east of Newbury. (We persuaded my Dad to drive us there.) The meeting led to some modification of the brief to meet the objectives of the award. Soon, though, we received approval and the promise of a modest but useful boost to our funds. Our proposal aimed at a better understanding of aspects of life in West Germany. It included modules focussing on:
– the housing problem in the Rhineland,
– goods traffic on the Rhine and the customs tariffs applied to it,
– juvenile delinquency in West Germany,
– bridges across the Rhine,
– devising and conducting an opinion poll in German, French and English on the Common Market and attitudes to Britain joining it.
Bearing in mind that none of us spoke German and that our schoolboy French was rudimentary, gaining the Senior Independent Explorer Belt was going to be interesting but challenging.
The Tour
Day 1: Monday 3 July 1967 – Reading to London by bike, London to Dover by train (44 miles of cycling)
For our 1966 expedition, we had cycled all the way from Reading to Dover and then caught the overnight ferry to Ostend. This time we found a combined train and ferry ticket that cost about the same as we had paid the previous year merely for the ferry. Normally there would have been a sting in the tail, as British Railways typically charged a child’s fare for the bike. But as this was an international journey, the bike was merely charged a small registration fee, as it would have been in Belgium. So this discounted fare saved us about 85 miles of cycling for very little extra cost.
We set out from the western suburbs of Reading and only had to cycle 44 miles to the station in London, which I think was Victoria. As in 1966, we cycled straight up the old Bath Road (the A4), to London, traffic being only a tenth the volume it is today. The journey was so dull and uneventful that I can remember nothing much about it. I guess we probably set off from home in the afternoon, as the train from Victoria would not have departed until the evening (maybe 8.00pm or later) and it would only take us about four hours to cycle to the station.
Day 2: Tuesday 4 July 1967 – Dover to Ostend by ferry, Ostend to Brussels by bike (80 miles of cycling)
Shortly after midnight, the ferry pulled out of Dover. This was still in the pre- Roll-On, Roll-Off era and the ferry was a packet boat of the Belgian Marine. The cars went into a hatch in the side and were turned on a turntable to face fore and aft. As Gerard recalls, I was quite alarmed when they put our bikes in a hessian net sling and dropped them into the hold!
The three of us had managed to get good seating inside and at first we tried listening quietly to the DJ John Peel on my small transistor radio. Peel was presenting his famously esoteric Perfumed Garden music show (mixing progressive and psychedelic rock with blues and folk music) on the pirate station Radio London. However, it was not quiet enough and a steward politely asked me to turn it off, which I did.
The crossing took about four hours, during which we dozed intermittently. Like many of the passengers, to save money we had not booked berths, so we had to make do with wherever we could curl up.
Dawn was breaking over the Flemish countryside as our ferry docked at Ostend. We picked up our bicycles from the station and set off down the Torhoutsteenweg (literally ‘stone road to Torhout’) for Brussels. We had hardly slept all night but we still managed to cycle the 80 odd miles to Brussels.
It was for the most part a repeat of the similar journey we had made the previous year, apart from Gerard and his roadster replacing Tom and his fragile lightweight. The Flemish terrain was fairly flat, the wind was behind us and the weather was pleasantly sunny. I remember riding along in the mid morning, somewhere between Bruges and Ghent, with the transistor radio on my front bag, tuned to the great Tommy Vance. Known as ‘the man with the golden larynx’, Vance, who was from Oxfordshire but who had worked as a DJ in the USA, had recently joined Radio London (‘Big L’) out in the North Sea after stints at Radio Luxembourg and Radio Caroline. But in less than six weeks, Radio London would be gone, forced off the air by the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act.
Towards the end of that long ride to Brussels, we were getting pretty tired but the free cups of coffee given us by a Flemish cafe proprietor gave us a boost and we were in the Belgian capital by 6 o’clock in the evening. For overnight accommodation, we made for the Chaussée du Wavre (Wavre Straat in Flemish) and the seminary of the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament, where we had stayed for two nights the previous year, free of charge. Once again, we were welcomed by the teaching staff. We ate a hearty supper and turned in fairly early. After all, we had been on the road for more than 12 hours and had not had much sleep the night before. As previously, we had a dormitory to ourselves, the seminarians (student priests) being away on summer vacation.
Day 3: Wednesday 5 July 1967 – Brussels
The next day we spent in Brussels, (scoffing strawberries, which were dirt cheap) a city which since World War 2 had taken on a new role as an unofficial European capital. Much of the old town had been demolished or rebuilt but it still had the most complete mediaeval square in Europe. We giggled at the nearby Manneken Pis, the small but famous fountain statue of a little boy urinating in the street, who has his own extensive wardrobe of various costumes and uniforms. There was also the huge Palais de Justice and St Gudule’s cathedral but for us possibly the most exciting structure in Brussels was the Atomium, which Martin and I had visited the previous year. You have to see it in real life to appreciate its immense three dimensional form. It was less than ten years old at this time and its lift was the fastest in the world. From the top there was a great view over the surrounding countryside.
Day 4: Thursday 6 July – Brussels to Geleen (71 miles of cycling)
After two nights at the seminary, we bid our farewells to our priestly hosts. When we had stayed there the previous summer, they had refused any payment, despite feeding us and providing overnight accommodation. This time they accepted roughly the same as a youth hostel would charge, which was still very reasonable.
Our next major objective was to get to Cologne, which would take two days. We passed through the attractive Flemish city of Leuven (Louvain), famous for its university, and then through the pretty little town of Diest, where we had spent a night the previous year. On entering Limburg province, we found ourselves in an industrial area in decline. In the early 20th century, the ancient city of Hasselt had become the centre of one of Europe’s biggest coal mining operations. But within a decade of our visit, the last mine had closed. However, probably because of the recession in the area, the prices in bars in this region were remarkably low and I remember downing a ridiculously cheap vermouth (a Martini or Cinzano) on our way through. Vermouth was outside my normal range of experience, being something drunk by James Bond rather than schoolboys from suburban Reading.
The whole of this stage of the journey the terrain was flat and the weather was pleasantly warm and dry. I was the navigator and I had my trusty Kümmerley & Frey map of Benelux. It was now early evening and we had cycled the best part of 70 miles as we approached the small village of Mechelen-aan-de-Maas. This is where, in January 1940, a Messerschmitt BF 108 carrying German plans for invasion of Belgium and the Netherlands crashed. The pilot and passenger were arrested by two Belgian border guards who arrived on bicycles.
On the map, it looked to me as if there was a bridge there across the River Maas, which separates Belgium from the Netherlands. Today, Mechelen-aan-de-Maas has grown and there really is a bridge, carrying the E314 dual carriageway, but back then there was just a small human-powered ferry on a cable, big enough to carry maybe a dozen people. It was a bit like a rural scene painted by John Constable and we had to ask around to find the ferryman. Eventually he appeared and, for a small fee, he conveyed us and our bikes safely across the river Maas and the unmarked border between Belgium and the Netherlands.
Mechelen-aan-de-Maas, never to be confused with the grand Flemish city of Mechelen (aka Malines or Mechlin), seemed to be the most rural backwater in Belgium. It was therefore a shock, as we scrambled with our bikes up the bank on the other side of the Maas, to discover the difference in the Netherlands. We found ourselves in a neat Dutch suburb, about three miles from the centre of the city of Geleen, with carefully trimmed grass, street lamps and curbed roadways. It also dawned on us that we had just crossed an international frontier without passing through any kind of control. However, that was the least of our worries at the time. After cycling all day, we just wanted to find overnight accommodation and have something to eat.
We soon found a Dutch campsite and booked in for the night. This year, having had problems with youth hostels and having discovered how good the German campsites were compared with the dire English ones, we had brought full camping gear with us. I wasn’t intending to spend another night risking hypothermia in an open barn on a windy German plain!
We also brought loads of food with us, as the xenophobic British press was always telling us how dreadfully expensive food was in Europe compared with the UK. So we had brought lots of packet soups and instant mashed potato, which we often mixed together to make a rather successful and flavoursome meal, when nothing else could be got. Gerard brought along a rather unusual and temperamental portable gas stove which enabled us to boil water for soup, mashed potato and hot drinks.
And then there were the pilchards. At that time, Glenryck brand South African tinned pilchards were so cheap in the UK, that my parents bought them for the cat. They were, nonetheless, pretty good to eat even if you were human. So the rear bag on the back of my Moulton contained a substantial batch of tinned pilchards, which lasted us as far as the Rhine.
Day 5: Friday 7th July – Geleen to Cologne (58 miles of cycling)
On Friday morning, we struck camp and soon got on the road. The weather remained pleasantly warm and dry. The Netherlands are only a few miles wide at this point and we soon reached the German border. This time there was a customs post and we were surprised to see a middle-aged local woman on a moped having her luggage searched. We Brits, however, showed our passports and were waved through. It seemed a bit odd that we chaps from outside the Common Market were given easier access than a local person living in a supposedly free trade area. Maybe she was a notorious drug-smuggling granny?
The journey to Cologne (Köln) was uneventful and less stressful than when we had cycled in that part of Germany the previous year. For much of the way we travelled parallel to our 1966 route but a few miles further north, passing through Jülich. The fairly flat landscape was similar, with farming in the foreground and open cast mining machinery in the middle distance.
We had an enjoyable experience on the outskirts of Cologne when we stopped at a tavern for liquid refreshments and were treated to three beers and bratwurst and chips by an elderly German. Apparently, he and his mates thought we were Dutch. The kind old chap kept proposing the toast ‘God save the King!’ in German. That tavern was one of the places where Martin and I sought responses to our opinion poll for the Senior Independent Explorer Belt.
After all that drinking, it’s amazing that we got into the city in one piece, without getting a wheel trapped in a tramline or suffering some similar mishap. But we did and we spent that night in the annex of the main Cologne youth hostel.
Day 6: Saturday 8th July 1967 – Cologne
Next morning we were given our marching orders by the warden. The hostel was completely booked up by school parties, he said. When we found that the other nearby hostel, Köln-Deutz on the opposite (east) side of the Rhine, was similarly booked up, we were really disheartened. However, we ended up using the pleasant municipal campsite and from there we toured the city.
In those days, Cologne was the fourth city of West Germany. It was mostly modern, as the town had been flattened during the war. Aerial photographs taken soon after the bombing make the city look almost as if it had been hit by an atom bomb. Cologne’s main glory is its cathedral which grows on you but is rather disappointing at first. We spent about an hour listening to a cleric playing the organ, mainly Bach we think. (By the way, that cathedral is freezing in winter, as I discovered many years later – thank the Lord for glühwein!)
While in the city, as part of our Senior Independent Explorer Belt research, we sought information from the Tourist Information Office about the housing problem and juvenile delinquency in Germany.
Day 7: Sunday 9th July 1967 – Cologne to Bonn (20 miles of cycling)
Next morning we cycled down the road along the west bank of the Rhine to Bonn, an easy flat and short journey to the centre of the city. However, the Bonn hostel was (and still is) on the Venusberg, a hill on the southern outskirts of Bonn, about three miles from the city centre. It was quite a flog getting to it and I recall us pushing our bikes in the midday heat up the steeper part of the hill through an area of allotment gardens. The views were nice when you got there and, if you had been driven up in a luxury coach, it would have been a pleasant journey. But on a hot summer’s day, pushing a heavily laden bike a long way up from the Rhine valley wasn’t such an appealing idea.
This time the youth hostel was not full of school children but of adults, mostly travelling by coach or car, some of whom, from their opulent appearance, could easily have afforded hotel rooms. In those days, British youth hostels did not even allow moped riders to use them, let alone motorists or coach parties. British hostels were for self-propelled hikers and cyclists. But not so in West Germany, home of the hostelling movement. This difference reflected the fact that Richard Schirrmann, co-founder of the youth hostelling movement, was a teacher who was specifically concerned with providing accommodation for school groups.
We did spend one night at the Bonn hostel but after this we gave up youth hostelling as just too much hassle. In fact, in the 50 years since that day, I have only ever spent one night in a youth hostel. (That was Wooler in Northumberland, England’s most northerly hostel, and it was fine.)
In those days, Bonn was the provisional capital of the German Federal Republic (West Germany). John Le Carré famously described Bonn, in the title of one of his spy thrillers, as A Small Town in Germany. It’s a pleasant place and we visited Beethoven’s birthplace and the Münster church. I believe that, in the 1990s, an arsonist set fire to Beethoven’s birthplace but, on an Oxford-Bonn twinning trip a few years ago, I was pleased to see that they have made a good job of restoring it and making it more interesting.
Day 8: Monday 10th July 1967 – Bonn to Koblenz (42 miles of cycling)
Our next stop was at Koblenz, which we reached a few hours after leaving Bonn. On a tour like this, it’s easy to forget which day of the week it is but I always remember that this was a Monday morning and some of the time it rained, though not excessively. In fact, it was the first rainfall that I can recall from the tour. The ride was easy, as we continued to follow the flat road along the west bank of the Rhine.
In West Germany, we mostly used the excellent road maps published by the Aral petrol company. The covers of these maps showed Germany as it was in 1939, including East Germany and the Polish provinces. (So too did the weather forecast on West German TV.) But the maps themselves only covered West Germany and sheets 4 and 6 covered all our riding in that country. They each cost 50 pfennig (half a Deutschmark) and I still have them, marked up with our route. There were more than 11 Deutschmarks to the British pound at that time and, so these maps were very inexpensive. My Kümmerly & Frey map of Benelux cost about ten times as much.
By lunch time, we had reached Koblenz and we booked in at the Rhine-Moselle campsite on the north bank of the Moselle. It was sunny and warm by then and we got ourselves some lunch. I think it was then that we made the mistake of buying a cheap bottle of wine. Rather than invest in a nice local Riesling (this being a time when drinking Blue Nun or Black Tower Riesling was the height of sophistication for most Brits), we bought a bottle of very cheap red Algerian plonk. Even our untutored teenaged palates told us this was a mistake. We should have bought a decent bottle of local Moselle, despite the higher price.
But not everything about the Moselle was lovely. We went for a swim in it, which was delightful until we detected a threatening presence approaching. Like something from a mash-up of Jaws and a malfunctioning sewage works, an impressively large Teutonic turd floated straight at us. I could have sworn that it leered at us. You’ve never seen teenagers get out of a river quicker. That put the end to river swimming for that holiday.
Day 9: Tuesday 11th July 1967 – Koblenz
My Collins pocket guide book described Koblenz as a very pleasant old wine town at the confluence of the Rhine and Moselle and I wouldn’t argue with that. The name Koblenz derives from the Latin word ‘confluens’ meaning (you guessed it) ‘confluence’. The headland or spit enclosed by the river junction, and just across the Moselle from the camping site, is called the Deutsches Eck, meaning German Corner.
(G. McGlynn)
In 1897, an immense nationalistic monument was erected on the Deutsches Eck. With an overall height of more than 120 feet, it was topped by a huge statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I on a horse. In World War 2, it was badly damaged by American shellfire and subsequently dismantled. So when we were there in 1967, there was nothing much to see of it apart from the plinth. However, in 1993, following German reunification, a replica was installed. I saw it in 2012, when visiting my German friend and co-author Professor Hans-Erhard Lessing, who lives just round the corner from it. I was staying with the good Professor because we were working on a book for MIT Press. As my introduction to Koblenz in 1967 was by bike, it was rather fitting that our book was Bicycle Design: an illustrated history!
Overlooking the Deutsches Eck, on a mountain on the east bank of the Rhine, is the massive Ehrenbreitstein fortress. It was built in the early 19th century as a replacement for an older fortress destroyed by the French. In 1967, it was best reached by chairlift which ran up the mountainside but did not cross the Rhine. (On my 2012 visit, I was able to travel in a large and luxurious cable car, all the way from the Deutsches Eck, across the Rhine, to the fortress – very civilised when compared to the chairlift, which was not for the nervous.) I remember in 1967 being greatly impressed by a huge wooden refectory table in the fortress which had bowls (or rather, bowl-shaped depressions) carved into its surface. Try putting that in the dishwasher!
By this time, our supplies of tinned pilchards had run out, so we were increasingly dependent on various types of cheap German sausage, such as Bratwurst and Bockwurst, often bought from roadside stalls, supplemented by bread, chips and the occasional cake. I wasn’t complaining.
While in Koblenz, as part of our Senior Independent Explorer Belt research, we sought more information from the local Tourist Information Office about the housing problem and juvenile delinquency in West Germany.
Day 10: Wednesday 12th July 1967 – Koblenz to Bingen
(43 miles of cycling)
After an enjoyable two days at the Rhine-Moselle camping site, with weather that could not have been finer, we continued our journey up the Rhine, continuing to follow the nice and fairly flat road on the west bank. Our next major objective was the city of Mainz, which would take two days to reach at a comfortable pace, bearing in mind the heat.
We travelled along the most picturesque part of the Rhine valley, with its vineyards and romantic castles on either bank. We stopped for lunch by the famous Lorelei rock, where, according to folklore, a siren’s singing was said to lure hapless sailors to destruction. It was here that we first tasted grape juice, a most refreshing drink.
It was possibly on this stage of the journey that Gerard’s Raleigh roadster sit-up-and-beg did exactly that. Most of his luggage was in two large pannier bags, well to the rear of his machine. I think he was using the two huge canvass ex-army motorcycle panniers that I had bought from an army surplus shop for my own old Raleigh several years earlier, before I switched to the Moulton bicycle, with its superior and better-balance luggage carrying arrangements. What happened was this: the three of us lads were sat at a set of red traffic lights, waiting for them to change. When they turned green, Gerard manfully put his foot down on the pedal so hard that the torque made the bike do a wheelie. The panniers put so much weight behind the rear axle, and Gerard’s stance was so upright, that the front wheel took off as the bike tried to roll backwards. Fortunately he survived the indignity.
So too, did Martin, when I absentmindedly ran into the back of his bike when he stopped at a junction. I failed to brake and the front carrier rack of my Moulton, caught on Martin’s rear tyre, pushing him forward and at the same time lifting my front wheel off the ground. Fortunately, Martin’s flexible plastic Bluemels mudguards survived a bit of concertina-ing!
We spent the night at a campsite beside the Rhine, near Bingen. It was opposite the town of Rudesheim, famous for its Riesling wines and I remember the lights of the town twinkling as dusk fell. Our campsite was very close to the ruins of the Hindenburg railway bridge, which was destroyed by the German army in 1945 to impede the advancing American forces. On the subject of bridges, all along the Rhine I was sketching significant bridges and making notes about them, as part of our Senior Independent Explorer Belt project.
The Rhinelanders were particularly kind, Gerard recalls. They had had a drought: there wasn’t a blade of grass on the campsite and the ground was very hard and dusty. But the attendant went off and cut some hay to put under our ground sheets, which was greatly appreciated. I remember being amazed at how easily I fell asleep that night, despite the lack of any form of mattress.
Day 11: Thursday 13th July 1967 – Bingen to Mainz (18 miles of cycling)
The following day we completed the ride to Mainz. It was a good job that it was only another 18 miles, as the temperature was 90 degrees Fahrenheit, as we would have said in those pre-metric days. That’s 32 Celsius, which is not at all uncommon for that part of Germany in summer but way too hot for most Brits after a few days.
We camped in a part of Mainz on the north side of the Rhine, most of Mainz being on the south side. (The Rhine in Germany mostly runs more of less south to north, so it’s generally safe to speak of the west and east banks of the Rhine; but between Bingen and Mainz, the river flows more or less east to west, so here the banks are described as north and south.)
Sadly, this was the day on which British racing cyclist Tom Simpson died on Mont Ventoux in Provence, from a combination of heat exhaustion, alcohol and amphetamines, whilst taking part in the Tour de France.
Day 12: Friday 14th July 1967 – Mainz
Mainz is an interesting town with a long history. Printing with moveable type in Europe started here and we visited an interesting museum that incorporated Gutenberg’s original workshop and a printing museum. The Cathedral is a very complete example of Rhenish Romanesque architecture and also well worth a visit.
We found the citadel rather disappointing when compared to Koblenz’s Ehrenbreitstein but not so the wine cellars of Kupferberg’s, the original makers of Sekt, the German version of champagne. We were shown round the pleasantly cool mediaeval and Roman cellars, cut into many various levels of a mountainside, and at the end given a glass a Sekt each.
At the Gutenberg museum, as part of our Senior Independent Explorer Belt research, Martin and I obtained further information about the housing problem and juvenile delinquency.
We noticed the remarkable number and quality of the shops in Mainz and came to the conclusion that to some extent it had become the shopping centre for the famous old spa town of Wiesbaden across the river, with its large American population. Fifty years later, there are still some 19,000 Americans, mostly connected with the US armed forces, living in the city.
The proximity of Wiesbaden to our campsite may have explained the unusual but not unpleasant quality of the drinking water on tap there, which tasted as if it had minerals in it. The water came out of the tap a milky white and if you left it you got a white mineral sediment. As Gerard puts it, it certainly did the old bowels a lot of good.
We were now firmly within the American zone of West Germany. This was the descendant of the American occupation zone following World War 2, like the British zone further north. Being in the American zone meant that we got good reception of the American Forces Network (AFN) on my trusty transistor radio. It’s hard to convey to younger folk how exciting hearing American radio was for us Brits back in 1967. Suffice to say that even some of the British newspapers used to list AFN’s programmes in those days, because you could receive them at night in the UK, as they bounced off the ionosphere, and quite a lot of British people listened in. The public service announcements on AFN were sometimes quite amusing. One that Gerard recalls was a Batman skit, intended to encourage American service people and their families to protect the dollar by limiting their expenditure in West Germany. Thus we heard Robin exclaim, ‘Holy Gold Flow, Batman!’
Yes, AFN was very slick and rather exciting. They had hip American DJs playing the latest transatlantic sounds and there were audio versions of American TV series, such as Gunsmoke (or, as it was inexplicably renamed in the UK, Gun Law). It was also interesting to hear the news from a different perspective.
Even the station identifications were super-slick, delivered in that unique American presenter style, whereby every word has a START, a MIDDLE and an END:
‘This is the American Forces Network, Europe.
At the sound of the last tone, it will be sixteen hundred hours, Central European Time.
Pip, pip, pip, pip, pip, piiiiiiip.’
Yes, AFN even had an extended final pip in their time signal, something the BBC did not adopt until some years later. It was like the last vestige of post-war rationing – even our pips were skinny compared to Yankee pips.
Day 13: Saturday 15th July 1967 – Mainz to Heidelberg
(55 miles of cycling)
We had been worried about how far we would be able to go when we finally left Mainz in view of the excessive heat of the last few days. We need not have worried. The day we were to leave, it rained all morning and we were stuck in our tiny tents. Around lunchtime it cleared and we were able to pack and leave. It was a beautifully cool afternoon and our only problem was that we had run out of cash and the German banks were shut, it being a Saturday afternoon. Actually, not being able to buy food was quite a big problem.
The terrain was flat because, although we were no longer in the narrow and picturesque part of the Rhine valley, we were now at the northern end of the Upper Rhine Plain, a rift valley about 220 miles long and averaging more than 30 miles wide. We continued following the river as far south as Mannheim.
In those days, many of us would have heard the phrase ‘Diet of Worms’ in our European history lessons and probably had a fit of the giggles. However, the Diet of Worms was not a dietary challenge on I’m a celebrity – get me out of here. In this context, ‘diet’ means an assembly or parliament. The one held at Worms Cathedral in 1521 was convened for the trial of the Protestant reformer Martin Luther, who had started his reformation movement in 1517. (As I write this, in 2017, the 500th anniversary of Luther’s reformation is being commemorated.) As our route passed through Worms, we visited the cathedral to see the sight of Luther’s trial.
At one point, as we cycled south, we saw a house under construction with what looked like a bush fixed to the roof. This turned out to be a ‘richtbaum’, a decorated tree-like wreath forming the centrepiece of a topping-out ceremony. Once the walls and roof timbers are erected, Germans often have a traditional topping out celebration featuring a richtbaum.
We passed through Ludwigshafen and, on the other side of the Rhine, the city of Mannheim. We were quite unaware that this was where, almost exactly 150 years earlier, Karl Drais had announced to the world his invention of the grandfather of all bicycles, the ‘laufmaschine’ (running machine), also known as a draisine or hobby horse. It was the first steerable machine with two wheels in line which you sat astride and balanced. Not at all an intuitive idea. There was no drive system – you just scooted along like on a kid’s balance bike. Mannheim is unusual for a German city inasmuch that it is built on a grid plan.
It was probably somewhere round there that we had a near miss with an American tank – not the kind of machine cyclists should mix with. I guess the locals were used to Americans charging around the countryside in tanks but we certainly were not prepared for that.
Although in 1967 we were unaware of Drais’s wonderful breakthrough invention, almost exactly 50 years later my wife and I attended the International Cycling History Conference at Mannheim’s wonderful Technoseum (a regional science museum that makes London’s look rather provincial) where the delegates celebrated the draisine and debated its creation story.
At Mannheim, the River Neckar flows into the Rhine. Our destination, Heidelberg, is on the Neckar, so we turned towards the south-east and followed the Neckar towards the city. One thing was puzzling: all the photos we had seen of Heidelberg showed it surrounded by mountains but, even when we were quite close to the city, we were still on the flat Rhine-Neckar plain. It transpired that Heidelberg is right on the abrupt junction between the plain and the mountains, so the eastern end of the city is surrounded by mountains, whereas the western end is on the flat plain.
Just before we reached Heidelberg, we stopped at a cafe. It was about 7.00pm and we were tired and hungry. But, as you may recall, we had no cash, because the banks were closed by the time the rain stopped and we were able to leave the campsite. So we were looking disconsolate and scraping together our small change; maybe we had enough for one sausage between three? Suddenly, a friendly middle-aged German chap came over to our table and introduced himself. He was Paul Nachtwachter (which translates as Nightwatchman) and I think he was an ethnic German who had been expelled from the German Polish provinces after World War 2. He spoke English and treated us to a light meal, which was very much appreciated. He also warned us about pick-pockets and thieves in Heidelberg. He was right about thieves in the city but in our case, it wasn’t the our pockets they were picking – more on that later!
Refreshed by the meal bought by the kind German, we soon finished our journey and booked into a campsite on the eastern outskirts of Heidelberg, beside the River Neckar.
Days 14 to 16: Sunday 16th July to Tuesday 18th July 1967 – Heidelberg
One of the ‘must see’ sights in the city is the Heidelberger Schloss (Heidelberg Castle). Partly ruined and perched on a mountainside overlooking the city and the Neckar valley, the immense and impressive building complex is well worth a visit. Some parts date back to the 13th century, though it also owes much to the Renaissance. The castle was adapted and extended for Elizabeth Stuart, the so-called Winter Queen of Bohemia, who married Frederick V of the Rhine Palatinate. Being a Stuart, she had strong British origins and connections: she was the second child of James I of England, sister of Charles I, a granddaughter of Mary Queen of Scots and grandmother of George I.
There is a funicular railway to save you the effort of the long and steep climb but that costs money. So, we locked our bikes up in the High Street and walked up to the Schloss. (We did use the funicular a day or two later, for a longer climb.)
An hour or two later, having visited the Schloss, we returned to our bikes. At first, all seemed fine: three bikes, each with the customary two wheels. But when Gerard lifted the handlebars of his Raleigh Boulevard Tourist roadster, the front wheel fell out. It then became clear that it was not his front wheel. Someone had walked up the High Street with a defective metric format wheel, knelt down and unbolted Gerard’s imperial format wheel, swapped the wheels over and sauntered off, bold as brass, with Gerard’s wheel.
We reported the theft to the Polizei who were helpful. However, the defective front wheel did not fit Gerard’s bike and so we had to move the bike without a front wheel. It’s really tricky if you have to move a bike in that condition any great distance. As it was a Sunday, the local bike shop was closed, so we left the bike at the police station overnight.
On Monday morning we returned to the police station and a policeman took us to the nearest bike shop. We left the bike there to have a new wheel fitted, pointing out that we just wanted a wheel and that we didn’t want to spend a lot, as we didn’t have much money. It was suggested that the bike shop proprietor might be able to obtain a suitable imperial format wheel from the PX store at the nearby American military base, the Patrick Henry Village.
A day or two later, the bike was ready. But when we went to pick it up, the bill was about £5. That was a lot more than we expected – about £85 in today’s money. The proprietor had fitted a metric wheel (plus tyre and inner tube, of course) and then had to fit a new front brake, as the original British one would not fit.
We spoke no German and the bike shop proprietor and his wife spoke no English. So we got the Tourist Information Office to help us. A very helpful young man from the tourist office, who spoke good English, visited the bike shop with us and tried to mediate. It ended up with Gerard refusing to pay the £5 and the furious bike shop proprietor removing the wheel and brake and hurling the bike into the street, while his wife berated us loudly about how badly we had treated her husband.
The young chap from the tourist office then led us back to his office, which was quite a distance away at the opposite end of town to our campsite. This involved more tricky manhandling of a one-wheeled bike through busy streets. At the tourist office, he tried phoning various bike shops but nobody had the right wheel. So Gerard decided that he would be prepared to risk fitting a metric format wheel without a front brake.
By scanning the phone book, our helpful tourism fellow found a suitable shop for us and told us how to get there by public transport. We left the bike with him and took a tram to a huge bike shop in a northern suburb of Heidelberg. We were taken down to a big basement workshop, which had a long row of wheels hanging up. Gerard chose a wheel and selected a matching Dunlop tyre. The friendly mechanic then rapidly fitted the inner tube and tyre to the rim, pumping the tyre up with compressed air. He charged a mere £2 or so and I remember us commenting at the time that his German was easier to understand than some dialects we had encountered.
Then it was back to the tourist office, where we fitted the wheel. Finally, Gerard was able to ride his bike again – but only with a rear brake.
During our time in Heidelberg, we did manage to do some sightseeing, in between visiting the police station, tourist office and bike shops. We visited the Jesuit church with its fine baroque interior but could not get into the main Protestant church was locked. We saw the university buildings, as immortalised in the operetta and film The Student Prince. And we took the funicular railway up the Königstuhl (King’s Chair) mountain.
On the Königstuhl is a concrete TV tower, which in those days was owned by the city of Heidelberg and which doubled as a water tower. It has a splendid observation deck, accessed via a lift, from which we had a 360 degree view of area, including the flat Rhine-Neckar plain, the contrasting Odenwald hills and, just where they meet, Heidelberg on the Neckar. Although I don’t have a good head for heights, I felt completely secure on that observation platform, which was solid concrete with a good high parapet. Today the mast belongs to the regional public broadcaster Südwestrundfunk (SWR). The public are no longer allowed access because of ‘safety concerns’. A big shame.
Whilst in Heidelberg, I invested in a Camping Gas Bleuet stove. Gerard’s butane stove, which was of an unusual make for which cartridges were difficult to obtain, was getting unreliable. By way of contrast, butane cartridges for the classically robust Bleuet could be found everywhere. So I bit the bullet and spent £2 on one. It was still working when I got rid of it, as surplus to requirements, half a century later.
Day 17: Wednesday 19th July 1967 – Heidelberg to Gernsbach
(55 miles of cycling)
After four nights in Heidelberg (which, because of the wheel theft, was longer than we had planned) it was time to move on. Our next destination was the Schwarzwald or Black Forest. From Heidelberg, we had a fairly easy ride, through the eastern outskirts of Karlsruhe (birthplace of Karl Drais, inventor of the draisine) to the small town of Gernsbach, 5 miles east of Baden-Baden, where we camped on the edge of the Black Forest. Gernsbach is on the small River Murg, a tributary of the Rhine.
On 28 July 1817, Karl Drais rode his machine from Gernsbach to Baden-Baden. Back in 1967, I had never heard of Drais but it is amusing to think that the inventor of the bicycle was riding his machine in Gernsbach almost exactly 150 years before we passed through on our bikes.
The campsite was away from the town. The cafe had a jukebox and we were keen to hear the latest British and American hits. However, each time one came on, the barman shot round to the machine and turned the volume down, which did not impress us. Equally unimpressive was the beer. It was so unpleasant that the name is etched into my memory – Alpirsbacher. Maybe it was a bad batch, or maybe that nasty barman put a shot of washing up liquid in it, but it had an unpleasant soapy taste. So much so that we ended up pouring it out of the cafe window, not something that impecunious schoolboys tend to do without good reason. I see that the Alpirsbacher brand is still going strong, so it can’t be all bad.
Day 18: Thursday 20th July 1967 – Gernsbach to Freudenstadt
(29 miles of cycling)
Today we had one of our stiffer rides. It was only 29 miles but the road up the Murg valley rises about 2,000 feet before reaching Freudenstadt, our destination, and in many places the road surface left much to be desired.
Much of the time it rained and once it was so hard that we had to stop for half an hour. The steep uphill road ran through the Black Forest, with pine trees everywhere. We saw the strange sight of clouds rising off the ground on the opposite side of the valley and forming convection currents between the valley walls. It was like something out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The atmosphere was beguiling yet threatening at the same time. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Rumpelstiltskin had stepped out of the bushes to confront us.
At one stage, the relatively low bottom gear of my Moulton enabled me to continue cycling at walking pace while Martin and Gerard pushed their bikes uphill alongside me. The Moulton had a Sturmey-Archer FW 4-speed hub and most of the time I only used the top three gears. However, when cruising along on the flat I sometimes founding myself switching back and forth between top and third gear: I’d have appreciated something midway between the two.
By the time we reached Freudenstadt, the weather was much better. We stayed three nights in the campsite just outside the town. Freudenstadt is a peaceful little health resort on a high plateau in the north-east of the Black Forest. In the 19th and early 20th centuries it had an international reputation and was visited by royalty and celebrities from around the world.
The town was badly damaged by French bombing and shelling during World War 2 and 600 buildings were destroyed. We saw no evidence of this, as the town had been almost completely rebuilt. Apparently, hundreds of local women were raped by Moroccan troops of the French army. We knew nothing of those dreadful events at the time.
Day 19: Friday 21st July 1967 – Freudenstadt
We spent this day exploring the town and its immediate surroundings. The weather was superb and it was enjoyable just to wander around and soak up the atmosphere. The town is said to have the largest market place in Germany and I remember colonnades where you could walk in a pleasantly breezy atmosphere protected from the sun and rain. I recall seeing a German lady walking in one of those colonnades during a shower: she still had her umbrella up, despite being under cover, which amused me. It was here that we saw a woman in a car bottle-feeding a baby chimpanzee, and we all fell about laughing, which unfortunately upset the woman!
We found the Lutheran Evangelical church particularly interesting. It has two naves at right angles to each other, with the minister addressing both congregations from an altar and pulpit on the splay. Apparently the two naves were constructed so that males would use one and females the other. Both sexes could see the minister but not each other!
We bought some cheap rum in the town. That evening, we took it with us for a walk in the Black Forest near the campsite as the sun went down. The atmosphere amongst the mountains and pine trees at dusk was very impressive, the rum less so. In fact, it tasted so bad I began to wonder if we hadn’t accidentally bought rum shampoo.
By the way, the piano instrumental A Walk in the Black Forest, by Horst Jankowski, reached number 3 in the UK singles chart just two years before our promenade in the Schwarzwald.
Day 20: Saturday 22th July 1967 – Freudenstadt, with excursion to Kniebis (8 miles of cycling)
A few miles west of Freudenstadt is another cure resort called Kniebis. In the blazing sun it was difficult to appreciate that in the winter Kniebis is also a winter sports resort. It seems that these days, the cure resort aspect of the local economy has more or less ceased. It’s winter sports that keeps the village alive.
The village gets its name from the Kniebis mountain ridge, which is more than 3,000 feet above sea level. We cycled there, which involved a long climb of maybe 500 feet over 4 or 5 miles, and had a most enjoyable picnic lunch. It was a Saturday, the weather was very pleasant and we sat on a grassy hillside, looking down on forests, meadows and scattered farm buildings.
The picnic comprised fresh bread, tomatoes and Limburger cheese. It was my first experience of Limburger, which originates not from the Black Forest, nor even from the German city of Limburg, but from the former Duchy of Limburg, which is now divided between Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. In fact, we cycled through it earlier in the tour. Some people absolutely hate Limburger but I loved it and that picnic remains one of my strongest and happiest memories of the holiday.
Afterwards, we coasted back to Freudenstadt, which was pretty much downhill all the way.
Day 21: Sunday 23th July 1967 – Freudenstadt to Strasbourg
(41 miles of cycling)
On the Sunday, we left Freudenstadt heading for Strasbourg. We first had to repeat the uphill climb to Kniebis. Then, just past the village, we crossed the watershed and there then followed fifteen miles of downhill riding with breath-taking views for the first five miles or so. Gerard, having only a rear brake, proceeded cautiously, accompanied by Martin. However, I could not resist the fast descent and the heavily laden Moulton was ideal for this, the suspension giving it excellent road holding and the rigid carrier racks ensuring that there was no wobble induced by the heavy luggage. At one stage, I overtook two women who driving along in a British-registered Triumph Herald car, enjoying the view.
After this thrilling descent, the Black Forest abruptly ended and we were once again on the flat Rhine plain, only 18 miles from Strasbourg. In fact we could see the cathedral away in the distance. I stopped to buy a Mars bar from a roadside shop and was happily consuming it by the time Martin and Gerard caught up with me. (We discovered that Mars bars, at least in those days, varied slightly from country to country, the proportions of caramel, nougat and chocolate differing subtly.)
We headed for the Rhine, passing through Kehl, effectively a German suburb of Strasbourg, before crossing the river by bridge into Strasbourg itself and France. We found a campsite, pitched the tents and then started to explore the city.
Day 22: Monday 24th July 1967 – Strasbourg (plus overnight train to Bruges)
We spent an enjoyable two days in the city of Strasbourg, formal seat of the European Parliament. The New York Times once described Strasbourg as ‘too German for France, too French for Germany’. The city certainly has an interestingly chequered history of occupation by Germany and France. Historically, Strasbourg was German speaking and we heard the local German dialect being spoken in a shop that we visited near the old defensive works on the local canal system.
There are plenty of picturesque black and white half-timbered Alsatian buildings in the old parts of the town. Strasbourg cathedral is also impressive. Like Antwerp cathedral, which Martin and I visited on our cycle tour the previous year, it was originally intended to have two spires but only one got built, leaving a capped-off tower base on the right-hand side of the main facade.
At the end of the second day, we started our journey home by catching an overnight train to Bruges in Belgium, where we were to spend a day or so before returning home. The train left Strasbourg about midnight and beforehand we killed time by watching a film in a cinema near the station. Our bikes had gone ahead of us, on an earlier train.
I remember standing on the platform, waiting for our train, and listening to the old BBC Light Programme on my transistor radio. The signal, which in those days was on 1500 metres long wave, from the Droitwich transmitter in the English Midlands, came in remarkably well.
Martin was always very diligent with our work for the Senior Independent Explorer Belt project. On the train, he sat up for a while, developing our reports, while Gerard and I tried to sleep. Needless to say, we did not have sleeping berths or even couchettes, just ordinary train seats.
Day 23: Tuesday 25th July 1967 – Bruges
Arriving at Bruges at 9.15 in the morning, we found that our bikes were missing. However, the Belgian official at the main station was very helpful. At first, he could not trace our steeds and asked us to return later, after he had made enquiries. But as we were walking towards the town centre, he caught up with us on his bike and explained what had happened. The French had sent our bikes to the wrong station in Bruges. Apparently, they assumed that the bikes were going straight to England, so they had sent them to Zeebrugge, the port of Bruges. Consequently, we had to visit the customs office at Zeebrugge to pick up our bikes. Once we had done that, we were able to find a campsite and pitch the tents for the night.
This incident did not upset our plans much. Bruges is a marvellous place, as interesting as any of the other places we visited, if not more so. (I never tire of it and must have been there about 15 times since the 1960s.) We went up the famous carillon belfry of the cloth hall, saw the town hall and its paintings, the various churches, the picturesque beguinage (a medieval religious community for lay people, rather than monks or nuns), the Minnewater or ‘Lake of Love’ (once part of the harbour of Bruges) and the Groeninge Museum. Today it is hard to imagine that, in mediaeval times, Bruges was one of the four most important towns of Europe. When we went there, it had a population of only 50,000.
Day 24: Wednesday 26 July 1967 – Bruges. In the evening, Bruges to Ostend by bike (15 miles of cycling) then overnight ferry to Dover
Around 5.30 in the afternoon of our second day in Bruges, we left for Ostend. Gerard was a little concerned at what his father’s reaction would be to the discovery that Gerard had been riding around since the Heidelberg wheel theft without a front brake. Fortunately, we passed a bike shop that was still open. At that time, bicycle components were relatively cheap in Belgium. So Gerard bought a front calliper brake that would work with his new metric wheel. We fitted the brake by the roadside and carried on to Ostend, where we spent the evening before leaving for England.
At Ostend station, where we deposited our bikes and luggage, a small group of fellow cyclists realised we were English and commiserated on the recent death of Tom Simpson. When stopping for a drink in Belgian bars, we had been impressed by how well the Tour de France was covered live by French TV, something which was not then seen on the UK. But what British TV did have that month was the first regularly scheduled colour TV broadcasts in Europe. Test transmissions had been going on in Britain and some other European countries for years. We saw Braun TVs in the windows of German shops with colour test transmissions. But just two days before we set out on this tour, the BBC started its colour TV service on BBC2, with live coverage of tennis from Wimbledon.
Now our tour was nearing its end and we walked around Ostend that evening killing time. We found a large double-fronted TV shop on the seafront and, despite the fact it was about 8 o’clock in the evening, the owner was standing in the doorway. He was a nice old chap who spoke fluent English and we got chatting. He explained how he was probably the first person in Belgium to have TV, having bought a British kit soon after the end of World War 2. He built the TV from the kit and set it up in his attic, pointing an aerial towards London. Eventually, he managed to get occasional reception, despite being well outside the official service area. This was much to the amazement of his friends and family, who initially thought he was a bit mad.
That evening, he had about a dozen TVs running in his shop windows, each receiving a different channel. (At this time, European countries would only have between one and four TV channels each.) Each TV had a little sign on it, indicating the channel. He had Dutch channels, Belgian channels (Walloon and Flemish), French channels and the three British channels. This was quite amazing at the time. Gerard recalls that the BBC was showing The Forsyte Saga, a hugely popular drama series.
We then found a nice cake shop and lurked outside, looking hungry, as closing time approached. Lo and behold, at about five minutes to 9 o’clock, we were invited in and given lots of cakes, which were either free or for a nominal sum.
We then proceeded to the station and boarded the overnight ferry to Dover.
Day 25: Thursday 27th July 1967 – Dover to London by train, London to Reading by bike (44 miles of cycling).
The journey back home from Dover was the exact reverse of how we got to Dover three and a half weeks earlier. After a night dozing in various corners of the passenger ferry, we arrived in the early morning at Dover and took the train to London. From Victoria Station, we cycled the 44 miles home, thus ending the tour which had taken us more than 1,000 miles, of which more than 600 were by bike.
Statistics
25 days, 24 nights – 2 in seminary, 2 in hostels, 3 on ferries or train, 17 camping.
Approximately 623 miles by bike plus some local mileage in the places where we stayed.
Average mileage per cycling day: 43 miles, plus some local mileage around locations we stayed in.
Total cost of holiday: approximately £42 (equivalent to £700 at 2017 prices).
Aftermath
Soon after we got home, Martin and I completed our project for the Senior Independent Explorer Belt. We submitted it and we passed, becoming the first Senior Scouts in Berkshire to win the award. We were invited to Baden-Powell House in South Kensington, London, where we were presented with our belts, with their specially cast buckles marked with the Scout logo and the points of the compass (I still have mine). We were also each given a very nice Primus butane stove. Mine lasted for many years, though not as long as the more utilitarian Camping Gaz Bleuet stove that I bought in Heidelberg.
When Martin went to university, I lost touch with him but Gerard and I continued to travel abroad together nearly every year until I got married in 1974. (He was my best man!) We hitchhiked and later travelled by minibus and car.
In the late 1970s, Martin got in touch with me. My wife and I visited him and his wife at their house in Goring-on-Thames. But they didn’t live there long and again we lost contact.
Decades passed: then, in the 2000s, Martin once more made contact. He was deeply involved in oil exploration and spent much of his time working in countries with names ending in ‘stan’. When not doing that, he lived in Essen with his German partner and enjoyed Scottish dancing. He came to our house and we had a very convivial lunch at a nearby pub. He had a bike in the back of his car and was still a keen cyclist. Sadly, soon after that, Martin died, quite unexpectedly. Meanwhile, Gerard and I are still good friends – may it ever remain so!
50 years later
This summer (2017) marked the bicentenary of Karl Drais inventing the draisine, the precursor of all bicycles. Because he launched it in Mannheim, the 2017 International Cycling History Conference was held there and I attended with my wife, Rosemary. It was only a month or so short of 50 years since I cycled through Mannheim on that 1967 tour, completely ignorant of Drais and his wonderful invention.
At the end of the conference, there was a coach trip to Heidelberg. Once again, I visited the scene of the crime, where Gerard’s front wheel was stolen. He kept his Raleigh Boulevard Tourist, complete with its non-standard metric front wheel, for more than 40 years, though he rarely rode it. Maybe today it is still out there somewhere!
Tony Hadland
24 July 2017
With many thanks to Gerard McGlynn for reviewing this story and adding his recollections.
They thought it was all over. But for us, it was only just beginning.
Three schoolboys pedal off to Europe in 1966
Marking 50 years since my first cycle tour in Europe
On the afternoon of Saturday 30th July 1966, the England football team beat West Germany at Wembley in the final of the World Cup. Tom McLoughlin, a 17-year-old schoolboy from Reading, attended the match. Early next morning, Tom and two of his classmates – Martin Taylor and myself – set off on our bicycles for the continent of Europe.
It’s hard to imagine today how exotic the Continent seemed in the mid 1960s. Although by that time some ordinary British people were able to afford foreign holidays, there were still plenty, including myself, who had never left the UK. For many families, including much of the British middle class, Europe was just too expensive to visit. But Tom, Martin and I had a solution which overcame the fact that our parents could not afford foreign holidays; we got on our bikes and pedalled east, leaving our homes in the Reading suburbs of Tilehurst, Southcote and Calcot far behind. Not for nothing is the bicycle sometimes called ‘the freedom machine’.
A lot of planning went into this trip, a process which I took on and greatly enjoyed. I made numerous visits to the travel section of our splendid new public library. I wrote to national tourist offices for free leaflets, brochures and maps. I bought a fine Swiss-made Kümmerly & Frey map of Belgium and the surrounding parts of Germany, the Netherlands, France and Luxembourg. I also bought some of the new Collins pocket travel guides, which were splendidly concise, compact and affordable. And I closely studied ferry timetables and youth hostel year books.
The original idea had been a cycling holiday in France. In the 1960s popular mind, a cycling holiday on the Continent was synonymous with a cycling holiday in France. It was something Brits had heard of but which few actually experienced or wanted to. It was something a friend of a colleague’s cousin might have done a few years ago. It was generally viewed in much the same way as bungee jumping is today – an activity for intrepid people who are a bit odd.
We didn’t care about the social attitudes but we did want an enjoyable and interesting holiday, not an endurance test of how many miles we could cover on our bikes. We noticed that France is very big and major towns are generally a long way from each other. So should we opt for the default French cycling tour or something else? And if we chose something else, wouldn’t that be even more expensive than France and therefore out of our price range?
Whilst studying a school atlas, I noticed a neat and compact little country called Belgium. Like most Brits, we didn’t know much about Belgium but the more I read up about it, the more I liked it. It had a fascinating history, closely linked to our own. In the north-west it had splendid world-class medieval art cities, conveniently only a few hours of cycling apart from each other and in flat countryside. In the south-east it had rolling countryside with river valleys and forests. And it bordered West Germany, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and France. Better yet, the ferry to Belgium was no more expensive than the short French crossings. So we decided that Belgium would be where we would do most of cycling, but with a few days in West Germany and maybe the Netherlands, too. Our aim was a fortnight on the road, which was about as much as we could afford.
Day 1 – Sunday 31st July 1966
When we set off early on Sunday 31st July 1966, our target was Dover, where we were to catch an overnight ferry to Ostend in Belgium. Reading to Dover was about 125 miles, which was more than any of us had cycled in a day. In fact, it was about twice as far as we had ever done in a day.
Today, finding an easily navigable, straightforward and reasonably safe route to cycle from Reading to Dover would be quite tricky. (Yes, there are the Sustrans routes and smartphone apps but they can be frustrating to navigate.) But 50 years ago, when traffic levels were about a tenth of what they are today, we just went straight up the A4 Bath Road from Reading to London, straight through the middle of the city, and out down the A2 to Dover. It took a while to get used to the effect of being passed by trucks, which first buffeted you, then briefly dragged you along in the low air pressure area behind them. But apart from that, it wasn’t too bad. In fact, it’s amazing to recall how little traffic there was on these major routes on a Sunday in ’66.
The morning went very easily. As we all came from church-going families, in which such matters were taken very seriously, we stopped off in Maidenhead to attend a mid-morning service. Haloes polished, we carried on to London. Tom, having witnessed the England victory at Wembley only some 19 hours earlier, was delighted when we spotted England captain Bobby Moore driving his car. What an amazing coincidence!
On we pedalled through the London suburbs and into Kent. The weather was good all day: not too hot but pleasantly warm, neither windy nor wet. Eventually, after cycling in built-up areas almost all the way from Maidenhead in Berkshire to Bexleyheath in Kent, we started getting into a more rural landscape. There were actually green gaps between some towns!
This was the era of offshore pirate radio, which in 1966 was at its peak in the UK. I shall always remember looking north, from the A2 near Whitstable, at Redsand Fort, a WW2 anti-aircraft installation about 7 miles away in the shimmering water of the Thames Estuary. Redsand Fort was the home of Radio 390, a very professional station with a powerful signal, aimed more at our parents’ generation. But, in the early evening, we often listened to 390, because it had the best RnB, blues and soul show on British radio, hosted by the late great Mike Raven.
Somewhere along the A2, Tom fell off his bike. But no significant damage was done to rider or machine.
On we rode and, by early evening, the strain was beginning to tell a little. Martin, who was younger and smaller than Tom and myself, struggled a bit to keep up. But by about 9.00pm, as light was starting to fail, we finally arrived at Dover ferry terminal. In fact, we had done very well. We had covered about 125 miles in approximately 14 hours, including about an hour in a church service and a few short breaks for food and drink. So our average speed while in the saddle must have been about 10mph. There were no punctures or mechanical failures, no navigational errors and the weather had been kind. As we embarked on the passenger ferry, we were tired but elated and very excited about the next stage of our journey.
Digression No.1 – the Bikes
The bikes we three lads rode differed considerably. They were all, in one way or another, a cut above the so-called ‘sports bike’ that was the standard schoolboy machine of the day.
Far from being a racer, the ‘sports bike’, sometimes described equally erroneously as a ‘light tourer’, was what the cycle trade would later call a ‘sports light roadster’ or SLR for short. (The ever-evolving language of marketeers is a wonderful thing!) This default aspirational schoolboy machine, the promise of which was often used by richer pushy parents as an inducement to pass the 11-plus (a selective secondary education exam), typically had 26 x 1⅜-inch wheels with full mudguards, a 3-speed hub gear, so-called all-rounder handlebars (fairly flat and but not as straight as mountain bike bars), pedals incorporating rubber blocks for grip, a ‘hockey stick’ chain guard and a sprung mattress saddle. All the ‘brightwork’ metal components were made of chromium-plated steel and the frame would be finished in a bright colour, sometimes with a two-tone finish, with white flashes offsetting the main colour. It was a modern-looking compromise between your granddad’s heavy, big, black, sit-up-and-beg roadster and a proper tourer or racing bike. But it owed much more of its DNA to the roadster than to a racer.
So what did we three boys ride? Certainly not one of the above ‘sports bikes’. Martin rode a dark green Halfords own brand ‘racer’, which he borrowed from his older brother. It had 27 x 1¼-inch wheels, drop handlebars, a leather racing saddle, metal ‘rat-trap’ pedals and 10-speed derailleur gears. Nobody would have seriously raced on it, as all the components were down-market heavy steel but it looked quite flash. It was also a bit big for Martin but he coped with it very well.
At first glance, Tom’s machine looked similar to Martin’s, apart from the colour, which was silvery grey. It had the same size wheels, similar handlebars, pedals, saddle and gears but all lighter and better quality. Tom’s bike was ‘the real deal’; a proper clubman’s bike, with quality alloy components. Very few schoolboys owned such a machine, which would have represented about a month’s pay for many fathers. In fact, I can’t remember any other classmates or friends owning such a high quality bike. I think Tom’s was a Falcon, made in the days when that brand was a genuine builder of quality lightweights.
As for me, ever the non-conformist, I rode a colorado red Moulton Speed with chromium-plated mudguards, which I had bought on hire purchase in November 1964. This was a completely radical machine, with 16 x 1⅜-inch wheels, full suspension and a 4-speed hub gear. It had big low carriers fore and aft that could safely carry 70 pounds of luggage. It was not the Speedsix racing version or the Safari full-on tourer. It was, nonetheless, quite sporty, with a leather racing saddle, steel rat-trap pedals and down-turned all-rounder handlebars on a long forward extension which, to my adolescent mind seemed rather sexy. (An indication, perhaps, of how sad teenagers can be!)
For those who don’t know, the Moulton bicycle became a British icon of the 1960s. It first caught my attention late in 1962, when John Woodburn (whom years later I had the honour of getting to know) broke the Cardiff-London record on one. In the mid-1960s, Moulton production peaked at a thousand bikes a week. The new machine turned the British bicycle industry on its head, arresting a steep post-war decline in UK cycle production by reigniting interest in cycling, hitherto increasingly deemed an occupation of the poor and under-privileged. More than a decade after the Moulton was launched, the mighty Raleigh’s biggest seller was a small-wheeler produced in response to demand created by the Moulton.
The great thing about the Moulton from my point of view was its multifunction capability. It was my daily personal transport, getting me to and from school and everywhere else I needed to go – about 50 miles a week. It was pretty fast and I never lost any informal race on the way to or from school. It accelerated markedly faster than a conventional bike, which meant when the light turned green, I got away first. Importantly, its superb luggage carrying capability enabled me to carry two newspaper rounds on it, which is how I earned most of my money.
(Cue soulful violin …) My Dad gave me only a shilling (5 pence) a week pocket money and my paternal grandmother gave me two shillings (10 pence), but, with the paper rounds done on the Moulton, I literally cranked my income up to more than a pound a week. That was how I was able to pay for the Moulton and the Continental cycle tour. So the bike was at the hub of a virtuous circle: it helped me earn the money to escape the pleasant dullness of English suburbia and then provided the means of transport for that very escape. Not quite Steve McQueen jumping the barbed wire on his motorcycle but as near as I was going to get in 1966.
As this tale of the tour progresses, I’ll tell you more about how each of these bikes performed.
Day 2 – Monday 1st August 1966
I have no recollection whatsoever of eating anything between leaving home the previous morning and arriving in Belgium. I’m sure we would have taken home-made sandwiches with us and we probably bought chips in Dover. I’m not sure we could afford fish to go with the chips.
The ferry from Dover to Ostend, operated by the state-owned Belgian Marine, departed about half an hour after midnight. It was small by modern standards, one of the last cross-channel packet boats. That designation meant it was a passenger and light cargo vessel rather than a ‘roll-on-roll-off’ car ferry. Consequently, our bikes were heaped up on a pallet and we looked on with some trepidation as they were craned into the hold.
I wasn’t a great sailor and, for anyone having trouble with the rolling and pitching of the boat, the smoky interior was enough to make you want to throw up. So we went on deck, where the air was fresh, and joined a whole gang of European teenagers. This was great, as we had met very few ‘foreign’ youngsters previously. There were boys and girls from Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. Everybody was having a great time, chatting and listening to British pirate radio (Caroline or ‘Big L’) on ‘trannies’. (I should explain that, in those days, a ’tranny’ was a small portable wireless and not what it means today.)
We were very impressed at how well most of these friendly kids spoke English. I asked one Dutch guy how it was that he spoke English so fluently. He told me it was easy for him, because his parents only had a small TV. The Dutch broadcasters didn’t dub English-language films into Dutch; they merely added subtitles. But because the TV was small, he couldn’t read the sub-titles; he just absorbed English through watching TV.
After all our cycling, we really should have tried to get some sleep. But we were so excited that we just chatted all night. The crossing to Belgium took about four hours. The boat initially headed straight for the French coast and then sailed parallel with it, a few miles out to sea, until we came to Ostend. Or, as the locals would spell it in their native Flemish, Oostende – meaning East End.
It was not yet dawn as the packet boat approached Ostend harbour. It was a pretty place, with all the navigation beacons, the floodlit cathedral and the three-masted sailing ship Mercator also lit up. Mercator was named after the famous Flemish cartographer (he of Mercator’s projection and one of a surprisingly large number of famous Belgians). She was a training ship and scientific research vessel, designed in Belgium, built in Scotland and launched in 1932. Fifty years later, she’s still in Ostend harbour but is now a museum ship.
We didn’t have to adjust our watches for Belgian time, as in those days Belgium and other western European countries didn’t switch to Energy Saving Time from spring until autumn. The UK was on British Summer Time (an hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time) which coincided with Central European Time, as used in Belgium, the Netherlands, West Germany and many other countries.
Many of the ferry passengers went straight to the nearby railway station, from which you could travel direct to Vienna. Until the 1960s, you could even take a direct sleeper train from Ostend to Istanbul, as in the Graham Green novel ‘Stamboul Train’.
We, meanwhile, waited while our bikes were craned out of the hold. Fortunately, they had survived the crossing without damage and we were soon on the road. Straightaway, I was aware of those little differences that give countries their individual character. For example, the massive electricity pylons around the port were quite different in design to the British ones. Also, most of the roads were surfaced with the infamous Belgian pavé – rectangular stone blocks. But – wonder of wonders – there were proper cycle-paths almost everywhere. This was quite a boon, as we instantly had to come to terms with the fact that Belgium (in common with the rest of western Europe) drives on the right-hand side of the road. Whereas in the UK and Ireland, right is wrong when it comes to driving.
Ostend was linked to Brussels by one of Europe’s first motorways but, needless to say, bicycles weren’t allowed on it. So we followed the old main road to Brussels, using those very welcome cycle-paths. The dual suspension on my Moulton bicycle helped ensure a pretty smooth ride on the pavé. As we cycled away from Ostend, down the Torhout Steenweg (‘steenweg’ literally meaning ‘stone way’), the sun came up. It marked the start of what was to be a very long day. We soon noticed that every village had its name sign sponsored by the Belgian tyre maker Englebert, which was quite a neat idea.
The landscape of West Flanders was famously flat. Some people find flat landscape boring. But as I lived on a steep hill, in a hilly part of southern England, flatlands were a novelty for me and I found them interestingly different.
The first major town we came to was Bruges (Brugge in Flemish, meaning ‘bridges’). Back in the Middle Ages, this beautiful city was one of the four biggest in Europe. It was a major international trading centre, with close links to England and many other places. But gradually the inlet to the sea silted up and the town became commercially fossilised. (Much later a new port was built – Zeebrugge, meaning ‘Sea Bruges’.)
The medieval buildings were well built by the city’s once prosperous burghers and stood the test of time. So today Bruges is one of the best preserved medieval cities in Europe. However, we didn’t have time to explore the place; we intended doing that on the way home. Today’s objective was to reach Brussels, which was still about 70 miles away. Also, our pace was continually dropping compared with the previous day. Our main priority in Bruges was to get something for breakfast as quickly and cheaply as possible, then get back on the road.
It was almost 7.00 in the morning when we arrived on the outskirts of the city. Some shopkeepers were already setting up for the day and by the time we reached the city centre, the wonderful bakeries and cake shops were open for business. What amazing cakes – so superior to what we were used to in England. Guess what we had for ‘brekkers’!
Soon, we were on our way out of Bruges, following the signs for Brussels. A few miles south of the city, we cycled up a ramp onto a smooth dual carriageway – a nice change from the pavé we had been riding on before. Almost immediately, we were pulled over by the ‘Politie’. Why? Because we’d inadvertently got ourselves onto the Ostend-Brussels motorway! The Flemish policeman was polite but firm and we had to push our bikes back to the slip road, cycle back into Bruges, then find the old road for Ghent and Brussels. We must have lost half an hour or more due to that mistake.
Once we were on the right road, we cruised steadily eastwards, heading next for Ghent (Gent in Flemish, Gand in French), about 30 miles away. As we moved from the province of West Flanders into East Flanders, the landscape remained flat. (A Belgian province is equivalent to an English county.) The sun shone brightly, there was not a hint of rain and I’m sure we were aided by the prevailing south-westerly winds. I was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and my arms turned brown that morning and stayed that way for years, the tan topped up by further cycling.
In the countryside and villages, apart from charming old farmhouses that could have come from an old Flemish landscape painting, we noticed many fine post-war houses. The standard of housebuilding seemed high and most new houses looked as if they were architect-designed. The brickwork differed from the British style, many of the bricks being less tall and sometimes longer. Apart from the normal pinks and reds, they were often in a shade of buff or yellow. It was the Flemings who re-introduced bricks to England in the Middle Ages. The Romans used brick in Britain but the Anglo-Saxons didn’t. Any decent English bricklayer will build you a wall in Flemish bond.
Another feature of Flemish houses was the big TV aerial rigs. It may seem odd today but, back in the 1960s, European countries typically had between one and three TV channels each. But people in Belgium, a small state surrounded by other countries, could usually pick up at least some of the neighbouring states’ programmes. So a typical Flemish house had a mast about 10 feet high mounted on the ridge of the roof and guyed back to the four corners of the roof. Atop this mast (usually a vertical lattice beam) was a stepper motor with a big array of antennas, capable of receiving all TV bands. Inside the house, next to the TV, would be a box with the points of the compass on it and a knob. If you wanted to watch Dutch TV, you turned the knob to ‘North’ and the antenna rotated to face the Netherlands. If you wanted French TV, you turned the knob to ‘South’. And, if you lived near the coast, you could try ‘West’ and you might get British TV. Naturally, you could also get Belgian TV. These big aerial rigs were almost standard in Flanders in the pre-cable era and would probably have cost more than the TV. But there were not many other places in Europe where viewers had a choice of up to a dozen channels – provided they could understand French, Dutch and English. Many Flemings could.
Another common feature of Belgian houses was an aspidistra in the front window. In Britain, aspidistras were completely out of fashion by the 1960s, a symbol of a bygone, dusty and old-fashioned age. They were mentioned in comic songs sung by Noël Coward and Gracie Fields. But in Flanders aspidistras were prospering in the 1960s.
About halfway between Bruges and Ghent, we were getting very thirsty. In those days, it was quite normal for a stranger to knock on someone’s door and ask for a glass a water. So that’s what we did. A very friendly Flemish lady, about 40 years old, came to the door. We made our request in English, as we had no Flemish/Dutch and I knew that Flemings could be offended if you addressed them in French. (I’ll explain why in a later digression.) The kind lady quenched our thirst and wished us a good journey. It occurred to me that she would have been our age – a teenager – when British soldiers of our parents’ generation liberated her country from the Nazi occupation. When you are young, 22 years seems a very long time. But as you get older, it’s like only yesterday. I think that memories of 1944 accounted to quite a large extent for the kindness and friendliness we received from older Belgian people in 1966.
It must have been about midday or later when we reached Ghent, another beautiful and well-preserved medieval Flemish city, with long cultural and trading links to England. (For example, John of Gaunt means John of Ghent and he got married in our hometown of Reading!) We stopped at a cafe for refreshments and were aware that, although we were under age to buy alcohol in England, in Belgium we were not. I’m not sure whether we actually drank anything alcoholic on that occasion. Maybe a cheeky little pilsner lager? But I suspect we stuck mostly to soft drinks, as we still had 30 miles or more to ride and it was a hot day.
Through the afternoon we cycled on towards Brussels. Fatigue was really showing now and our speed was dropping more and more. We passed from East Flanders into the province of Brabant. The landscape became more rolling and the farming emphasis shifted from smallish fields with cows, horse and pigs to market gardening.
In the early evening, we finally reached the western outskirts of Brussels. It was quite a thrill to experience this large city with its wide boulevards. I particularly remember a big poster that we saw several times on the gable ends of buildings. It showed a huge steam engine puffing out black clouds of smoke. The poster proudly proclaimed that ‘this source of pollution has now been eliminated’. Belgium, the first country in mainland Europe to have a steam railway, had just scrapped mainline steam engines, two years before the UK. Steam clearly held no romanticism in the eyes of the Belgian government.
That poster appeared in both Flemish and French versions, highlighting the fact that the Belgian capital – historically Flemish and surrounded by Flemish speaking Brabant – was officially bi-lingual. There was a big struggle going on between the more extreme supporters of the two languages. Road signs in Brussels showed place names in both languages. So the road to Liège (French) was signed also as Luik (Flemish). But often, one or other of the campaigning groups would paint out the other version. In the worst tit-for-tat cases, both versions of the place name were sprayed out! Brussels itself, needless to say, has two names: Brussel in Flemish and Bruxelles in French.
I was the navigator for this tour, so I now had recourse to a street map of Brussels, procured in advance, to find our ultimate destination, in the south-east of the city. We were getting quite close to journey’s end when, as we passed the Berlaymont building, headquarters of the Common Market, Martin’s chain came off. It was not the sort of problem we needed after all that travelling, but it was quickly and easily rectified. Also during our time in Brussels (I’m not sure precisely where and when), Tom dented one of his alloy wheel rims on a tram track, but the damage was not bad enough to hold us back.
For overnight accommodation on the tour, we were generally relying on youth hostels. However, our parish priest (a friend of my parents) had suggested making use of ‘monastic hospitality’. I was amazed when he first suggested this. I knew that, in the Middle Ages, travellers could knock on the door of an abbey and ask for basic accommodation at little or no cost. But I had no idea you could still do it. The priest assured me you could, so I wrote to the Belgian Tourist Office in London and asked for a list of monasteries that might provide such a service. I don’t think they were convinced that it would work but they nonetheless provided a list of about half a dozen places. One was a seminary (a training college for priests) at 205 Chaussée du Wavre in Brussels. (That’s 205 Wavre Straat in Flemish. All places in Brussels have French and Flemish names but from hereon I’ll stick to the French for simplicité.)
So, almost exactly 36 hours and 211 miles of cycling after leaving Reading, and with no sleep on the way, we arrived on the doorstep of a Catholic seminary. A rather puzzled concierge came to the door. He had no English, so we explained in schoolboy French what we wanted. He went off, still looking puzzled, and fetched a priest, a very nice chap called Father Wolf. Yes, of course, he said, come on in!
The students were all on vacation, which meant that the dormitories were empty. We were given free range to sleep there. Better yet, we were invited to join the priests for supper after we had freshened up.
At supper, there were about a dozen clergy sat at a big refectory table. They were all very well-educated people; professors of theology and that sort of thing. Some had travelled extensively. I was particularly impressed that Father Wolf, whom I think had worked in the USA, knew how to pronounce Reading properly! Most non-native English-speakers pronounce it like ‘reading’.
These venerable Belgian clergymen treated us three scruffy and exhausted English teenagers very well. There was no condescension at all and they shared their valuable local knowledge on how best to get about the city.
Having eaten a fine supper, we three exhausted lads headed for bed. We were exhausted but also elated at how well we had done. And tomorrow we were going to explore Brussels.
Digression No.2 – language
Although there has been a region called Belgium for a very long time, the present-day Kingdom of Belgium dates back only to 1838-9, when Belgium broke away from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. (It’s rather like how the Republic of Ireland broke away from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1922.)
Belgium has two main parts: Dutch-speaking Flanders in the north and French-speaking Wallonia in the south. There is also a small German-speaking area in the east, appropriated from Germany after World War 1. Dutch, French and German are all official languages of Belgium.
The capital, Brussels, was historically a Flemish city. However, over the centuries, French became the language of the ruling classes. Today, Brussels, though surrounded by Flemish-speaking Flanders, is officially bi-lingual. In practice, more of its inhabitants speak French as their first language than Flemish.
One of the factors that united the Flemings and the Walloons against the Netherlands was Catholicism. Belgium had a reputation until quite recently for being one of the most devoutly Catholic countries in Europe, on a par with how the Irish Republic was until the last few decades. Today, however, Belgium is one of the most secular nations in Europe.
Flemish is a form of Dutch and all Flemings can understand mainstream Dutch, which is taught in the Flemish schools and used in most formal publishing and broadcasting in Flanders. The difference between formal Dutch as spoken in the Netherlands and that spoken in Belgium is rather like the difference between standard British English and American English. There are differences of accent, idiom and vocabulary but the two forms of Dutch are mutually intelligible. However, what is spoken at home in a local dialect is something else altogether!
There is a cross-border organisation that ‘manages’ the evolution of Dutch; rather as the Académie française does for French but in a more sensible and pragmatic way. For example, soon after Word War 2, the Dutch and Belgians agreed to reform and simplify the spelling of Dutch. So, for example, the Flemish place name Passchendaele, familiar to students of World War 1 military history, is now spelled Passendal, representing better how it is now pronounced and saving quite a bit of ink.
In the newly formed Belgium of the 19th century, Flanders was an economically backward rural area. French-speaking Wallonia had coal and iron and became dominant during the industrial revolution. This economic supremacy, coupled with the ruling class’s use of French, made Flemish speakers second class citizens. Flemish was rejected not only by the government but by the army, the universities and the church. It took a long struggle, lasting into the 20th century, by Flemish artists, intellectuals and politicians to achieve equal status for their language. That was why Flemings might take offence if a foreigner sailed up to them and started talking to them in French. It was the assumption by foreigners that Flemings should understand French, coupled with the implication that French was Belgium’s first language, that was galling. In practice, most Flemings would have at least some knowledge of French and many were (and are) fully bi-lingual.
When we were in Belgium in the 1960s, the balance between the Flemings and the Walloons seemed fairly equal. However, over the next few decades, Wallonia rapidly lost its economic supremacy, as the old heavy industries became increasingly unprofitable. Meanwhile, Flanders modernised effectively, providing a welcoming home for new industries. Soon Flanders, which also outbred Wallonia, was the economically dominant part of Belgium.
Back in 1966, I realised that a lot of Flemish/Dutch words were very similar to their English equivalents, at least when written down. (It helped that we’d been studying Chaucer at school, because Middle English is even closer to Dutch.) For example, bread and butter in Dutch is brood en boter. The Dutch and Flemish live in a huis and enter through a deur. A Dutch or Flemish family might comprise a moeder, vader, zoon en dochter. We have summer and winter, whereas they have zomer en winter. We have water and mist and so do they. We might have a cat and a hound; they could have a kat and a hond. The kat could drink melk that comes from a kou.
However, the Dutch/Flemish pronunciation can sometimes mask these written similarities. Moreover, the pronunciation varies noticeably about every 6 miles as you travel east; so much so, that conversational West Flemish is often subtitled on TV so that Flemings further east can understand it. That’s comparable with Holby City (a soap opera set in the Bristol area) being subtitled so that people in Oxford could understand it!
It has been said that, if the Normans had not invaded England and injected so much French into Anglo-Saxon, English and Dutch would today be mutually comprehensible, in the same way that Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are.
Day 3 – Tuesday 2nd August 1966
On Tuesday morning, we awoke in the seminary dormitory, having slept very well indeed. We’d been invited (but not compelled) to attend a morning service in the chapel just down the corridor and it would have been churlish to have refused. I can’t remember much about it but I think it was a short and simple Mass.
One thing I can recall is that the chapel had ‘prayer-seats’. Unlike English churches, which tend to have traditional pews or chairs that clip together, these had a small, low seat and a tall back. You could sit on them in the normal way but when it came to a part of the service where the congregation kneeled, you picked up the chair (quite light) and spun it round through 180 degrees. You then knelt on the low seat and leaned forward on the backrest. These chairs were quite common in Belgium and France. I’ve heard them described as prie-dieu (pray-God) but a true prie-dieu is a prayer desk with a low kneeler and cannot be rotated to double as a seat.
Having been spiritually uplifted, it was breakfast time. Two things stick in my mind. Firstly, the coffee was excellent (proper ground coffee, not the indifferent instant variety common then in England) and it was drunk out of a bowl. Secondly, the milk bottle on the table bore the phrases ‘rincez moi’ (French) and ‘spoel mij uit’ (Flemish), meaning ‘rinse me out’. It’s funny how such odd little details stick in the mind.
One thing we travellers lived in fear of was ‘tummy bugs’. In those days, many Brits were very suspicious even of foreign tap water. (It was an article of faith, not entirely founded on fact, that only the British could do plumbing and drainage properly.) However, this was the 1960s and science had an answer for everything – or so we were told. Science’s answer to stomach upsets was not a traditional ‘after the event’ medication, such as kaolin and morphine (aka ‘concrete mixture’). Instead, the modern savvy traveller used a preventive medicine, taken daily while away on holiday. It was called Entero Vioform and everyone thought it was wonderful. I therefore religiously took my daily dose, despite the stuff being quite pricey.
However, some years later the active ingredient was linked to a massive outbreak in Japan of a serious disease of the nervous system. In most western countries, Entero Vioform was taken off the market. Today, we would tend to use Immodium, an ‘after the event’ medication developed, by happy coincidence, in Belgium.
So, having prayed, breakfasted, over-dosed on caffeine and protected ourselves from ‘the trots’, we three lads set off to explore Brussels. Although the Common Market then comprised only six countries (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, West Germany and Italy), Brussels was already being described as ‘the capital of Europe’ and we were keen to have a look at it. Thanks to the directions given to us by the priests, we easily got to the city centre. We left the bikes behind, preferring to use a mix of public transport and walking.
By then, we were coming to terms with Belgian money. There were 140 Belgian Francs to the British pound, which in those days comprised 20 shillings, each divided into 12 pence, each divided into 2 halfpennies. So a Belgian Franc was worth about 1.7 old pennies or 0.7 of today’s pence. ATMs, credit and debit cards as we now know them did not exist in Europe at this time (Barclaycard was launched in the UK that same year but only for the seriously rich), so we took a mixture of Travellers Cheques and cash.
We walked down the Mont des Arts and past the Royal Palace opposite the Parc de Bruxelles. Then we visited the famous Grand-Place. As Google succinctly puts it, the Grand-Place is a ‘huge city square completely encircled by elegant historic buildings dating back to the 14th century.’ It is, in fact, one of the most impressive medieval squares in the world, a real feast for the eyes. You can look up at any of the buildings and see innumerable subtle and elegant decorative features, such as carvings and weather vanes, many of them brightly gilded. It’s worth visiting just to stand there and look around. And it’s even better if you’ve first read up about the square’s amazing history. So many nations have occupied or controlled Belgium – Dutch, Spanish, Burgundians, French, Austrians, British and Germans – and anyone controlling the country needed to control this square.
Just off the Grand-Place is the famous Manneken Pis, a tiny 400-year-old bronze statue of a little lad peeing. (Manneken is Dutch for ‘little man’ and ‘pis’ needs no translation.) He’s the mascot of Brussels and has a whole exotic wardrobe of different uniforms and outfits which he wears for special events.
We spent quite a time wandering around the city centre, looking at the different kinds of shops and eateries – all very exotic if you lived in post-war suburban Reading. I made one significant purchase – my first ever 45rpm vinyl record. It was an ex-jukebox copy of ‘Wooly Bully’ by Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs, recorded in Memphis the previous year. Maybe buying my first record in Brussels was a portent, because from 1972 to 1974 I appeared every week on Belgian national radio introducing a new British single that I predicted would be a hit. But, of course, as a 17-year-old I had no idea that would happen!
Having had a brief introduction to the heart of Brussels, we set off by tram to the north of the city, to visit the Atomium. This is Brussels’ answer to the Eiffel Tower and was completed in 1958 for the World Fair, Expo 1958, as the main pavilion. The Atomium was therefore only 8 years old when we visited it. It’s an impressive and unique structure, about 340 feet high, comprising nine interconnected spheres, and representing an iron crystal enlarged 165 billion times. I’ve always found it ironic that the Atomium, modelled on an iron atom, is clad in aluminium. Anyway, it was well worth a visit, as the views from the top are amazing. On a clear day you can see all over the city and as far away as Antwerp.
Today, when youngsters go travelling, they can easily keep in touch with home via mobile phones, email and any number of apps on the internet. But back in 1966, there were no mobile phones and many families did not even have a phone at home. Moreover, the cost and difficulty of making international calls meant that they were only used in extreme emergencies. Nonetheless, despite the amazing trust placed by my parents in their 17-year-old son, I felt obliged to set their minds at rest as best I could regarding our progress. So I used the technology of the day – the postcard – sending four during the course of a fortnight.
Postcards also provided a practical and affordable way of getting images of the places we visited. Today, it’s easy and almost cost-free to bring back hundreds or even thousands of digital images from a holiday. But back then, film was expensive and I could only afford one Agfa-Gevaert 12-shot slide film for the whole holiday. I borrowed my brother’s Ilford Sport 4 camera, which was designed for use by kids and had just one adjustment – ‘sunny’ or ’cloudy’. It took large square colour transparencies on 127 format film.
From hereon, I’ll be including the postcards I bought and the photos I took on this tour.
Day 4 – Wednesday 3rd August 1966
On Wednesday morning, after another fine breakfast, we bid farewell to our hosts at the seminary. We offered to pay for our stay but Father Wolf very kindly said that this was not necessary. What a welcoming and encouraging start to our tour! I mentioned in my next postcard home that we had been given two days of ‘hotel-standard accommodation’ free of charge. Our parish priest had been right: monastic hospitality for passing travellers did still exist!
Tom, Martin and I now headed south, our aim being to spend the night at a youth hostel in Namur. The plan from hereon was to cycle about 30 to 45 miles a day, usually staying just one night in each place. Thus we could set out each day after breakfast, cycle to our destination by lunchtime, and then spend the rest of the day and evening exploring.
The weather, good ever since we left home, continued to be fine as we headed south through suburban Brussels. We briefly passed through a rural Flemish-speaking area just south of the bi-lingual city. Then we crossed the great linguistic divide: not just between Belgium’s Flemings and Walloons but between the whole Germanic language group (Dutch, German, English, etc) and the Latin-derived Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, etc). The strange thing about this border (which in those days was relatively unmarked) is that it simply runs through rolling open countryside. There is no range of mountains or mighty river separating the two tongues. It just seems that the lasting linguistic influence of the Roman Empire, as it expanded northwards, petered out in these Belgian fields, in a more or less straight line running (originally) from somewhere south of Calais to Aachen in Germany.
The most surprising thing to me is how static over hundred of years that linguistic boundary has been. Only in France, where Parisian French has been (and continues to be) firmly imposed on people who would otherwise speak local languages (such as Provençal, Picard, Flemish or Breton), has the boundary shifted significantly, and that has happened only in the last century or so. The area in question is around Dunkerque and Calais, from which Flemish has been all but eliminated. You have only to look at the placenames on a map to see where Flemish was once spoken: for example, Dunkerque is just a Frenchified version of Duinkerke, which is Flemish for Dune Church.
The linguistic divide also formed the border between the Flemish-speaking province of Brabant and the French speaking province of Namur. Today, Belgium is federalised, and that border is much more distinct. Flanders and Wallonia are significantly more independent of each other than when we visited in 1966, which was only three years after the language boundary was given legal status.
After about 10 miles of cycling, we passed through the village of Waterloo and, a mile or two later, we arrived at the monument commemorating the famous eponymous battle. This was where our very own Duke of Wellington and his Prussian ally Blücher defeated Napoleon Bonaparte, 151 years earlier, in 1815. (Cue Beethoven…)
We had some knowledge of the battle from school history lessons but Martin became a real Waterloo enthusiast as a result of this trip. Over the years to come, he visited the battlefield and its environs many times.
The battle is commemorated by an artificial mound, more than 140 feet high, surmounted by a 31 ton statue of a lion, cast in sections in Liège and assembled in Brussels. In those days, the visitor centre below the mound had the tacky look of a downmarket seaside resort and we did not hang around too long. We were soon on the road, continuing our journey across the gently undulating countryside. Passing through the famous Quatre Bras crossroads, we cycled on to Namur. We reached the town by early afternoon, having cycled a total of 40 or so miles.
Now we were in very different and more dramatic countryside, on the edge of the Ardennes hills. Namur (Namen in Flemish) is at the confluence of the major rivers Sambre and Meuse (the latter known as the Maas in Flanders and the Netherlands). The town was a strategically important location for Belgium and had been besieged within living memory (by the germans in 1914).
In fact, the confluence of the rivers has been defended by a citadel for more than a thousand years. In its present form, the fortress owes much to a 17th-century rebuild by the Dutch. It remained in service until the late 19th century, when it was superseded by a ring of new forts around the town. It’s open to the public and offers great views over the town. It also looks imposing when viewed from the opposite bank of the river Meuse, in the town.
The youth hostel was beside the Meuse, within easy walking distance of the citadel. We booked in and found the atmosphere and regime very similar to the friendly English hostels. (I’d done a hostel-based cycle tour of Berkshire, Hampshire, Sussex and Surrey two years earlier, when I was 15 years old, with another school friend, Paul Maclean.) The main difference was that Belgian hostels would accommodate petrol-powered travellers, whereas English hostels only took hikers and cyclists.
My most vivid memory of Namur is seeing the citadel floodlit at night with the river reflecting the lights of the town below. At an age when I had not yet even had a girlfriend, I thought that it would be a very romantic location to bring a young lady. Decades later, my wife and I spent a night in the town, having driven over from England. It may have taken a long time but I did finally get round to it.
Another less romantic memory is of trying to get to sleep in the hostel dormitory. I guess there were something like eight lads, including ourselves, in the room. We spoke various languages but one thing everybody understood was animal impersonations. Somehow, after lights out, an impromptu animal noise contest broke it. It lasted quite a time and was very puerile. But it was also an absolute hoot, in every sense. Well, you’re only 17 once.
Day 5 – Thursday 4th August 1966
Our next destination was Liège, the capital of Wallonia. In some ways, it was the Belgian equivalent of Manchester crossed with Sheffield: a thoroughly industrialised steel-making city that was also a major cultural hub. Foundries belched smoke just a mile or two from the museums, university and opera house. A city that was home to the religious and those who hated religion; where the Catholic feast of Corpus Christi was first celebrated yet where the original cathedral was destroyed by revolutionaries.
The whole 40-mile journey from Namur was along the south bank of the Meuse. It was a visually attractive and quite rural route. But it was busy, being the main highway between Liège and rest of the Sambre-Meuse industrial region to the west of Namur.
I had never visited an ‘old school’ coal and steel city before: there were no such places in my part of England. Liège was certainly big, very industrial and quite badly polluted: from a distance you could see a orangey-grey sulphurous haze over the city, and the buildings were blackened by a century or more of pollution. Nonetheless, the old parts of the city had a certain gallic dignity. There were some fine buildings, reminiscent of Paris as seen in TV adaptations of Simenon’s Inspector Maigret novels. And that’s quite apt, as Georges Simenon – one of the most prolific and biggest selling authors of the 20th century – was a native of Liège (and, of course, another famous Belgian).
Liège has a very long history and was by no means created by the industrial revolution that it espoused so effectively. The first written reference to the city is in the 6th century. It became the capital of a prince-bishopric, which lasted for 800 years until late 1700s. In rapid succession it became an independent republic, then Austrian, French, Dutch and finally Belgian.
Here’s a little piece of trivia about the name Liège. British people, myself included, often pronounce the name as if it had an acute accent over the ‘e’ – giving a long ‘e’ sound. Until the 19th century, it was indeed spelled Liége, to reflect that pronunciation. But the locals gradually adopted a shorter ‘e’ and so the spelling was officially altered to Liège in official French.
There is also a distinctive (but rapidly dying) French-related Walloon language, in which the city is call Lidje. In Dutch the name is Luik and in German Lüttich: the Netherlands and Germany are but a short drive away. Confused? You certainly can be when travelling in the area. Whenever you cross the now almost unnoticeable open borders, the spelling of the direction signs changes.
In Liège, we couldn’t find a youth hostel affiliated to the International Youth Hostels Association but there was a conveniently central student hostel, the Maison des Jeunes (Young People’s House), which filled the gap very well. I remember ordering a cup of coffee soon after we arrived there. The guy on the bar could only offer Nescafé instant coffee and was very apologetic about this shortcoming. I had to smile, because in our household, Nescafé was regarded as something of a luxury, especially if it was the ‘Blend 37 Continental’ variety (Saturday mornings only).
Before setting out from England, I had asked my Mum if there was anything she would like me to get her as a little gift. She had mentioned a perfume called Molyneux Numéro Cinq. I knew nothing of it and tried in vain to find it in the sophisticated perfume shops of Liège. In fact, I never ever found any anywhere. I learned many years later that it was created in the 1920s and was known as ‘the other No.5’; the famous one being, of course, by Coco Chanel.
My recollection is that, after walking round the city centre, we went to bed fairly early. Tomorrow another country beckoned: we were heading for West Germany. We mustn’t talk about the war, even though our parents never stopped talking about it. And especially, Tom, we mustn’t talk about that football match you attended at Wembley, less than a week ago.
But, joking apart, what could possibly go wrong for us in Germany?
Day 6 – Friday 5th August 1966
The weather on Friday morning was again pleasant. In fact, we hadn’t had a bad day since leaving home the previous Sunday. We cycled off from the student hostel in Liège, through the city centre, towards Aachen. We were excited by the thought of visiting another country, West Germany.
Our target was Aachen, the famous German spa and border town, known historically to the British by its French name, Aix-la-Chapelle. Indeed, I was aware of Robert Browning’s poem ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’, which was popular with my parents’ generation. We too were travelling from Ghent (which we passed through on Day 2) to Aix but by a rather less direct route.
Aachen was only 27 miles from Liège. We intended staying just one night but, with such a short journey, we planned to spend the afternoon exploring the historic city. It was once the residence of Charlemagne (Charles the Great), king of the Franks. Later, kings of Germany were crowned there. We were particularly keen to visit the famous cathedral.
As Liège stands at the confluence of the rivers Meuse, Ourthe and Vesdre, in the north-east corner of the Ardennes hills, the road to Aachen involves a very long and quite steep climb, away from the rivers, almost as soon as you start the journey. The climb sticks in my mind as the toughest of the entire tour and it felt as if it went on for about five miles at an almost constant steep gradient. In reality, it may have been more like two miles, but it was one hell of a drag and not good for morale first thing after breakfast. However, the view from the top, back towards Liège, did give an impressive view of the city and the smoggy orange-grey industrial haze hanging over it.
Once we had climbed out of the valley, we were in high rolling countryside. Near Battice, I stopped and took this photograph, which shows the view looking towards the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, which lies about 40 miles to the south. The area is known as Hautes Fagnes in French, Hohes Venn in German or the High Fens in English.
This is another area of competing languages, jostling elbow to elbow. We were still just in French-speaking Wallonia but a few miles south was Belgium’s German-speaking area and just a few miles to the north lay the Netherlands. There is said to be a small village in this region where the language spoken depends on the quarter the person lives in. It’s probably a myth but very close to reality.
About 40 years after I took that photo, I was contacted by a Liège-based engineering student for technical advice about Sturmey-Archer gears. By happy coincidence, the bike I rode on that tour had a Sturmey-Archer FW 4-speed gear. I sent him a copy of the photo and, amazingly, he tracked down the location and re-took it. There were some signs of modernisation but it was pleasantly surprising how little had changed.
In that same area, we stopped at a little shop and bought some boiled sweets (or, as Americans would say, ‘hard candy’). We noticed that the colours were much less bright than equivalent British sweets. We guessed this was because the Belgians used less artificial colouring. The sweets looked a lot less interesting than British ones but they tasted fine.
Whilst on the subject of confectionery, as the tour progressed we discovered that Mars bars varied from country to country. I’m talking here not of the American Mars bar (unique to the USA) but the international version, invented in the 1920s by a member of the Mars family in Slough, England (not far from my hometown, Reading) and sold around the world. We found that the balance of chocolate to caramel to nougat varied slightly, depending on whether you bought the Mars bar in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands or Britain. Sadly, whilst there is a living to be made as a wine expert, there is no financial future for a Mars bar connoisseur.
We also noticed that, like the UK at that time, customers paid a deposit on glass bottles, which was reimbursed when the ‘empty’ was returned to the shop. However, in Belgium there was also a deposit on other glass containers, such as jam jars.
For an hour or more, it was a pleasant ride through the gently undulating Ardennes countryside. Just before the West German border, we were amused to pass through a village called La Calamine. In those days, calamine lotion was found in many a British bathroom cabinet or medical chest. It’s based on a zinc compound and was the universal panacea for sunburn and skin rashes. The village, also known as Kelmis in German, got its name from the mining of the zinc ore used in calamine lotion.
It must have been about noon as we approached the West German border. I recall a mixture of excitement and trepidation. I had read a lot about Germany, a country I found fascinating and admirable in so many ways – the culture, history, landscape, architecture, work ethic and technological ingenuity. But also, there was the shadow of World War 2, which anyone of my generation could not entirely escape. I was born four years after the war ended, but my early years were dominated by the after-effects of the war – rationing, austerity and the older generation’s comments about Germany.
Those comments were by no means all anti-German. There was a recognition that we Brits were a lot like the Germans, with many genetic and cultural links. There was also great admiration of German technology and of West Germany’s post-war economic recovery. It was often said (and sometimes still is) that Britain won the war but lost the peace: the conflict ruined Britain financially and it took us 60 years to pay back the USA for the money we borrowed to fight the war. So we Brits had this mental baggage regarding the Germans: a mixture of admiration and respect coupled with incomprehension as to how Hitler had been allowed to go so far. As a naive 17-year-old, I found it all rather puzzling but very interesting.
It was important, to bear in mind that, following post-war partition, there were two Germanys: the Federal Republic of Germany (which we called West Germany) and, behind the ‘Iron Curtain’, the communist German Democratic Republic (East Germany). And, entirely surrounded by East Germany, was Berlin, the former German capital, itself divided into Western and Eastern zones by the infamous Berlin Wall, erected five years earlier.
Entering the Federal Republic of Germany, we would also have to come to terms with another currency. Farewell (temporarily) to the Belgian franc, at 140 to the British pound, with each of its centimes worth a mere 0.017 of an old penny. Now we needed the Deutschmark, the West German mark. There were just over 11 marks to the pound and each mark comprised 100 pfennigs. So a mark was worth approximately 1 shilling and 10 old pence (£0.09) and a pfennig was worth about 0.22 of an old penny. (Trivia gem: In Tudor times, England had its own mark, which was worth two-thirds of a pound. Not a lot of people know that!)
As we approached the border between Belgium and West Germany, it was very clear that we were entering another country. I have a recollection of tall, dark trees (cue Grimms’ Fairy Tales) and telecommunications or reconnaissance masts on the German side of the border. Just a hint of Mordor. Anyway, we were allowed in without any problems and were soon cycling downhill on a very smart and modern concrete cycle path, bordered by grass. We were now in North Rhine-Westphalia, the Federal Republic of Germany’s most populous state. All seemed to be going well, very well, perhaps too well…
With typically teutonic attention to detail, the top of the cut grass was level with the concrete surface. This looked very neat but spelled disaster. In a moment of inattention, Tom let his front wheel go off the concrete and onto the grass. Instinctively, he steered back onto the concrete. This would have been a good idea but for the fact that, for the top of the grass to be level with the concrete, the earth had to be several inches lower. So the lightweight alloy wheel rim crashed into the sharp edge of the concrete and bent Tom’s wheel. Tom was unhurt but the wheel now would not turn, so the bike was unrideable.
There was only one course of action open to us: walk a couple of miles into Aachen, dragging the damaged bike, and find a cycle mechanic to fix the wheel. This we did and the bike shop we found did a good job, quickly and at a reasonable price. The owner and his assistant were also very interested in my Moulton; they came out of the shop and spent some time examining it and discussing it. Meanwhile, I was amazed to see in their shop window that some new German roadsters still had plunger brakes, with a brake block pushing down onto the front tyre. Such crude brakes had not been used on British bikes for maybe 60 years.
With Tom’s bike fixed, we went in search of something to eat. We found a wonderful-looking cake shop and I bought a piece of chocolate cake. It looked really tasty and had been steeped in rum or brandy. To my surprise, I found it quite disgusting and completely inedible. In fact, for some time after, the very thought of my first bite of German cake made me feel queasy.
Now, to add to our woes, the weather broke. After a lovely sunny morning, we endured a thunderstorm – the proverbial donner und blitzung – and for the rest of the day showers came and went. We had lost a lot of time, so we decided it would be best to get our accommodation sorted out before doing anything else. The plan was to stay a night in the Aachen youth hostel.
It was my father who got me interested in youth hostelling. He had done it as a young man in the inter-war years. He told me about how youth hostelling was a great German idea. He even had a booklet about the German origins of youth hostelling. We therefore had a belief and expectation that German youth hostels would be like the English ones but so much better. Now we would find out.
It was about 2.30 in the afternoon when we arrived at the Aachen hostel. It was massive, very modern and rather impersonal; more reminiscent architecturally of a 1960s British secondary school than the small, cosy and domestic-scale English hostels with which I was familiar. A big surprise was seeing a huge modern motor coach in the car park, which had arrived full of well-dressed German schoolchildren and their well-dressed teachers.
We made our way to the reception area and approached the enquiries position. There was a member of staff working in the office. We indicated to him that we wanted to book in. He scowled and indicated that the office did not open until 4.00. So we had to wait for an hour and a half.
This we did, in the company of a small number of people in the same position as ourselves: people from around the world who looked like ‘real’ hostellers. Meanwhile, well-dressed teachers and schoolchildren swanned in and out. This was plainly an environment tuned to their needs, not to traditional hostellers.
With typical German efficiency, on the dot of 4.00pm, the official open the enquiry window. Hurray, we thought, now we could book our stay. But, what’s this? He tells everyone that the hostel is fully booked up. Plainly, he knew this when we arrived 90 minutes earlier. Welcome to German bureaucracy, inflexibility and schadenfreude – defined as ‘pleasure derived by someone from another person’s misfortune’.
So, the afternoon was almost over. The combination of the crash and being messed about by the hostel management meant we were not going to see the sites of Aachen. But we still needed somewhere to sleep.
The suburbs of Aachen spread right up to the Dutch border and we knew there was another hostel, just over the border in Vaals. We decided to give it a try and cycled off in that direction. After two or three miles, we crossed the Dutch border, notching up our third country of the day, and soon reached the hostel. There we were greeted by a very friendly and accessible warden, but sadly, his hostel was also full. ‘I wish I had a hundred beds,’ he said. This was turning out to be quite a bad day. Was this somehow Germany’s revenge for the decisions of the referee in last Saturday’s soccer World Cup Final?
What to do? As a long-stop, we had brought a three-man tent with us, but we had no sleeping bags other than the thin sheet ones required by youth hostels to save them from laundering sheets. We decided we would have to find a barn to sleep in or somewhere to pitch a tent. It was now about 5.00pm, it was raining much of the time, and the sky was heavily overcast.
Martin had a small methylated spirits stove but no fuel. It seemed a good idea to get some and eventually we managed to buy some brennspiritus, which we discovered was the German name for meths.
We crossed back into West Germany and headed in the general direction of Cologne (Köln), our next planned stop. It was so wet at times that we had to wear our waterproof capes and sou’westers, which made cycling that much drier but also more awkward. As we rode across the flat but wind-swept Cologne Lowland (as this area is known), we were surrounded by huge fields of cereal crops in the foreground and mining machinery on the horizon. We kept an eye open for farmhouses but didn’t get any response from the first one we tried. Maybe the occupants were cowering behind their curtains in fear of this strange trio of tired, hungry, thirst and anxious foreign teenagers.
Eventually, about 7.30 in the evening, near the village of Gürzenich, a few miles from the town of Düren, we struck lucky. We found a farm inhabited by some of the friendliest people you could hope to meet. I think the house was divided into two parts, as the people seemed to comprise two families, possibly related. These friendly folk took us in and allowed us to take over a corner of their barn. They sold us some fresh eggs which we must have boiled for supper, using Martin’s meths stove.
The idea of spending a night in a barn may sound very attractive, if you have in mind a warm, enclosed building with lots of soft, clean hay to nestle into. Something straight out of an Enid Blyton novel. However, this barn, on the windy lowland, was open-sided and contained only machine-compressed straw, which was about as soft as chipboard. There was no way you could nestle into that. With no sleeping bags, and only a small tent to lay over the three of us as a makeshift blanket, this was going to be a challenging night.
Day 7 – Saturday 6th August 1966
In the early hours of Saturday, I found myself awake and almost delirious. I was desperately thirsty. But in the draughty barn, on the dark Cologne Lowland, we had nothing to drink.
The previous day had been very arduous. Instead of an easy 27 mile ride followed by an interesting afternoon sightseeing and a night in a world-class youth hostel, we had faced one challenge after another. The longest, hardest climb of the tour; Tom’s crash, the walk into Aachen and getting the bike fixed; the thunder and rain; being messed about by the Aachen youth hostel management; the excursion into the Netherlands in the unsuccessful quest for accommodation; and the stressful, gloomy and wet ride east, in search of somewhere to stay for the night. Amongst all that hassle, we had not eaten well, and I had drunk far too little. I was now badly dehydrated.
I was also probably feeling the effects of Gilbert’s Syndrome, a genetic condition I did not know I had until 32 years later. A lot of people (mostly males) have Gilbert’s Syndrome. It tends to manifest itself in the teenage years. There’s no money to be made out of studying it or creating pharmaceuticals to treat it, so the medical and scientific world largely ignores it. Many doctors and nurses have little or no knowledge of it and the medical profession tends to play it down as having no harmful effects. The only upside is that having Gilbert’s Syndrome is believed to reduce slightly the risk of heart attack.
However, for some people Gilbert’s Syndrome can be quite a problem. Quite apart from the fact that it can lead to a false hepatitis diagnosis, it can easily result in a case of ‘instant jaundice’ if you over exert yourself and/or miss a meal and don’t drink enough non-alcoholic fluids. (Alcohol just makes the effects of Gilbert’s Syndrome worse.) There is also a nasty servo effect: miss a meal and you lose your appetite, just at the time you most need to eat. It’s very easy then to start spinning into a spiral of gloom.
However, once you know you’ve got it, and that you can modify your lifestyle to cope with it, life becomes easier. But I was in my 50s before I knew I had it and even then, finding out reliable information about its effects was not easy. Up to that point, I just thought I was a bit of a wimp. Now I can manage it and I understand my limits much better. I know not to defer or miss meals and I know how quickly I can recover from a mild attack, especially given a nice cheese and ham roll!
I knew none of this as a 17-year-old in 1966. So, at maybe 1.30 in the morning, I was so desperate for water, that I got up and stood outside the farmhouse. I cried out what I thought was the German word for water. Nothing happened, so I chucked a little pebble or two at the bedroom windows. Eventually just about everybody came out of the house. I then discovered that, in my delirium, I’d been saying the Dutch word for water (spelled water but pronounced vahter) which to our German hosts sounded as if I was calling for my father (vater is German for father, whereas water is wasser). Considering that I’d disturbed the sleep of about eight people, they were very kind and understanding. Most importantly, they provided me with plenty of water. After that, I managed to sleep a bit.
In the morning, Tom, Martin and I got up and, after breakfast, thanked our very kind and tolerant hosts before getting back on the road. The previous day, we’d travelled 24 miles more than planned but the upside was that we were only 27 miles from Cologne. (Which in those days we Brits always spelled the French way, whereas today we increasingly use the German spelling, Köln.)
But despite the relatively short distance ahead of us, we were still suffering the after effects of ‘Black Friday’ and I continued to feel quite poorly. Mercifully, the weather was good that Saturday morning and the terrain continued as before, mostly flat, as we headed east over the Cologne Lowland. Then, dropping down towards the Rhine valley, we reached the western outskirts of Cologne about midday. This is where a minor miracle took place.
I was still feeling the effects of dehydration. Sometimes, your body seems to know what you need to eat or drink when you are feeling ill. It’s like the way cats know that they’ll feel better if they eat a bit of grass. Plainly, at an intellectual level the cat hasn’t a clue, but something tells it what to do. It was like that with me and a sudden craving for Coca Cola. And, lo and behold, a nearby shop in this German suburb had litre bottles of the stuff. Yes, litre bottles!
A litre bottle of anything was almost miraculous to a Brit in those days. (Think the ape-men in the film 2001, transfixed by the big, black obelisk.) Nothing in the UK came in such a large bottle: we were used to half-pints, pints, splits, half-bottles and wine bottles, but nothing bigger than about two-thirds of a litre. Bearing in mind the gigantic bottles of soft drinks that you can buy everywhere today, it’s had to understand how amazing a litre bottle seemed. But believe me, for us it was truly awesome!
So, I bought a litre bottle of Coke, sat on the pavement (sidewalk) and drank it. It must have looked a bit odd to the Germans but I was oblivious to that. Almost immediately, I felt very much better. Years later, I discovered that cola (particular when flat) is widely believed to aid rehydration, in the absence of proper oral rehydration drinks. The diuretic effect of the caffeine must have been counterproductive but the caffeine kick certainly perked me up. Anyway, whatever the scientists say, it did the trick for me: a little curb-side miracle in suburban Cologne.
After that, we proceeded into the centre of Cologne and booked into the youth hostel. This time there were no problems registering. The hostel was, like the Aachen one, big, modern and impersonal, but it served its purpose. There were a lot of rules and woe betide anyone who transgressed them. There was a curfew at 8.00pm and silence was imposed from 10.00pm. It was evident that obeying orders was a very important part of German life.
My impressions of Cologne itself were of a thriving and very large city, combining efficient modernity with a long and rich cultural heritage. The Gothic cathedral, which houses what are supposedly the relics of the three wise men, was particularly impressive. I had seen an aerial photograph of Cologne after it had been bombed during WW2. The Royal Air Force dropped nearly 35,000 tons of bombs on the city. The devastation of the city centre was almost total and truly looked similar to Hiroshima after the atom bomb. It’s amazing that the cathedral survived, especially as it was hit by 14 British bombs. It was most impressive to see the rebuilt city, the biggest in North Rhine-Westphalia, just 21 years after the end of the war.
In my home town, they’ve been arguing for a century about building a new bridge over the Thames and still nothing’s happened. But, whilst the Luftwaffe did shoot up Reading town centre on one occasion, it was but a fleabite compared to what the RAF did to Cologne. Germany paid a high price to have its urban landscape remodelled.
Cologne was a name very well known to Brits in the 1960s. For a start, the perfume eau de Cologne was very popular, both with men and women. If you didn’t know what to give someone for a birthday or Christmas present, eau de Cologne was high on the list of possibles, along with the inevitable book token. Best known and widely advertised in Britain was the brand 4711, named after the address in the city’s Glockenstrasse where production started in the late 18th century. But Cologne was also known because of the British Army on the Rhine (BAOR), the army of occupation in the Rhineland and the northern part of West Germany from 1945 until 1994. Many British families had members who, at some time or another, were stationed with BAOR. In those days, no Dover-Ostend ferry crossing was complete without a bar full of British squaddies, en route to or from BAOR, imbibing substantial quantities of beer.
Because of the BAOR, there was a very popular radio programme called Two-Way Family Favourites. This show came on the air at noon on Sundays. It was on the BBC Light Programme, which in those days was on 1500 metres long wave (200 kHz) and could be received over the whole of the UK and most of north-west Europe. In West Germany, the programme was also on the British Forces Broadcasting Service (BFBS), which had studios in Cologne. There were two presenters, one at the BBC in London and one at BFBS in Cologne, and they played requests and dedications to and from British forces and their families and friends.
The programme was so popular that, on a hot summer’s day in suburbia, you could walk down a street and hear the show booming out of almost every open window. There must be many older Brits like me who still have a Pavlovian reaction to the show’s theme tune, With a song in my heart: we instantly start drooling at the thought of Mum’s roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, the standard British Sunday lunch of that era. Back then, if you were listening to Family Favourites, chances are you were either eating Sunday lunch or smelling it being cooked. Ah! Bisto, to coin a phrase.
We three lads were pleased to have reached Cologne. This was as far away from home as we were venturing, as we only had a fortnight and limited funds. A lot had happened in just one week since Tom witnessed the England football team beat West Germany at Wembley. We had now reached the mighty Rhine, so much bigger than the Thames. Tomorrow we would cross it and start the second half of our tour.
Day 8 – Sunday 7th August 1966
After a much-needed good night’s sleep at the Cologne youth hostel, we breakfasted and performed the housekeeping tasks allocated to us by the hostel management. We were then free to leave and we headed off for our next destination. This was Düsseldorf, about 24 miles of flat and easy cycling away. The weather was mild, though the sky was overcast. We crossed the Rhine to its eastern side via the Mülheim suspension bridge and then followed the road north-north-west through the town of Leverkusen.
The Agfa-Gevaert transparency film in my borrowed camera had the cost of processing and mounting included in the purchase price, as was often the case in those days. It was ironic that the address to which the film had to be sent for processing was in Leverkusen, the very place we were cycling through. The film was presumably made in Leverkusen then exported to England, before being briefly brought back to Leverkusen by me before being taken back to England, then posted back to Leverkusen, and finally returned to me in England. Those pictures had clocked up a lot of miles by the time I finally saw them.
Travelling in West Germany, we noticed several things that were new to us. For example, there were lorries with tail-lifts, something we had never seen in the UK. Also, some of the trucks had lift axles, so that the number of wheels on the road could be varied: we’d never seen that, either. It was a long time before tail-lifts and lift axles became common in Britain. To use, it was just another sign of how advanced and modern West Germany was.
In all our travelling, we constantly encountered types of automobile that were rare or unknown at home. In those days, foreign cars were rare in Britain, and boys like me were very interested in the German, French and Italian vehicles we encountered. Even the colours were different, with many more light-coloured cars on the European mainland. A white car was a rarity in Britain: a cynic might say (with some justification) that this was to mask the inevitable body rust.
As we entered each town or village, we noticed a standard format sign indicating the dominant religion of that community and the days and times of church services. Like Belgium, the Rhineland was strongly Catholic, so most places advertised Heilige Messe (Holy Mass). But there were also signs for the Lutheran Evangelischer Gottesdienst (Evangelical service). I think these signs are still used, with a yellow church symbol for Catholics and a purple one for Evangelicals.
We made good progress to Düsseldorf, the capital of North Rhine-Westphalia, which by happy coincidence was twinned with our home town, Reading. The main part of the city is on the east bank of the Rhine but the hostel was just across the river on the west bank. We crossed via the Rheinkniebrücke, which means literally the Rhine knee bridge, the knee being a sharp bend in the river.
After lunch at the hostel, we joined a happy horde of hostellers on washing up duty in the large kitchen. Holding court was an amusing German chap, doing impersonations of various English language radio stations and their station identifications. His repertoire included the BBC Light Programme and the American Forces Network, both of which had large audiences in West Germany. I’m pretty sure that what set him off was a kitchen radio playing the BBC’s aforementioned Two-Way Family Favourites.
Like the Aachen and Cologne hostels, Düsseldorf’s was a large, modern and typically 1960s building, with lots of glass. Sadly, there was a bit two much glass, and poor Martin walked straight into an almost invisible glass door, nose first. It was a hell of a whack, giving him a bad nose bleed and he suffered the after effects for some considerable time afterwards. Having witnessed Martin’s accident, I can understand why some countries, such as England, now require conspicuity markings on glass where its presence might not be obvious.
In the 1960s, Düsseldorf had an international reputation for being an upmarket bright and thoroughly modern place: a centre of finance, business and fashion. We wandered around the city and soaked up the atmosphere, which to us provincial suburban teenagers seemed very sophisticated and beguiling. Reading may have been twinned with Düsseldorf but in those days it wasn’t quite in the same league!
We were by now getting to know the local cheap foods and beverages. Apart from the ubiquitous American cola brands, there was something new to us: Fanta orange drink, something you never saw in England. (Only years later did I discover that it was a World War 2 German creation, devised when American cola ingredients were embargoed.) And, of course, it didn’t take long to work out that hot German sausages, such bockwurst or bratwurst, were widely available, tasty and filling.
Düsseldorf and its hinterland seem to have made a significant impact on Martin, quite apart from his whacked nose. He learned German and, in later life, lived with his German partner Ingrid in Essen, a mere 20 miles or so away.
Day 9 – Monday 8th August 1966
Having had a taste of the German ‘economic miracle’, as the British press called it, we now headed due west to the Netherlands. Our target was a youth hostel near the small Dutch city of Roermond, which by road was about 40 miles away.
The weather was good and the terrain ahead unchallenging as we left Düsseldorf behind. We passed through the northern outskirts of Neuss, Germany’s oldest city (a title it shares with Trier). Soon we were out in the countryside, heading for a city whose name we had heard many times on the BBC’s Two-Way Family Favourites (because of the British military personnel there) and on the sports news (because of its football team): Mönchengladbach. The famous football team, Borussia Mönchengladbach, gets its first name from a Latinised form of the name Prussia, the Rhineland having formerly been part of the kingdom of Prussia.
We passed through Mönchengladbach and, a few miles further on, passed another name familiar from Family Favourites, RAF Brüggen, near the village of Elmpt. Brüggen was a major Royal Air Force base during the Cold War and, in those days, was home to Canberra bombers. It closed as an air base in 2001 and then became an army garrison, as virtually all abandoned RAF bases seem to.
I guess it was about midday when we crossed the Dutch border into the province of Limburg. Because of the way boundaries have changed over the centuries, as various nations and rulers competed for territory, there are two adjacent provinces called Limburg. One is in the Netherlands and, bordering it on the west, another is in Belgium. Once they were part of a greater entity, but in 1839, the Treaty of London divided what was left of Limburg into the Belgian and Dutch parts we see today.
Today, Dutch Limburg forms the extreme south-east corner of the Netherlands, which is also the kingdom’s hilliest area. The most important city in the province is Maastricht, of treaty fame. You may recall that, when we couldn’t book into the Aachen youth hostel, we crossed the Dutch border in search of accommodation. That was in Vaals, the most south-easterly town of the most south-easterly province of the Netherlands but almost a suburb of the German city of Aachen. (Trivia gem with which to impress your friends: The name Limburg means ‘lime tree fortification’.)
At its narrowest point, Dutch Limburg is only about 3 miles wide, whereas we were staying in a part that was at least four times wider! We rode through the small city of Roermond, across the River Maas (which we had met in Belgium as the Meuse) to the village of Horn on the opposite bank. Horn is a pretty little place, with a small but picturesque castle and the mandatory Dutch windmill. On the southern outskirts of Horn is Beegden, where we booked into a charmingly homely rural youth hostel called ’t Sangershoes.
[Wiel Van den Broek kindly sent in this explanation of what the hostel name means:
Living in the area you are describing, I can shed some light on the Sangershoes. Sangers means Singers, but is a common local name in Limburg. A ‘hoes’ would be a stone building, important in the local village and surrounding farms. The owner would be richer and own more land, but would not work on the fields himself. Instead he would be alderman or ‘schepen’. In Middle Limburg soils were rather poor (sand), and the ‘hoes’ would be a larger farm. In the richer South (clays and loess), the ‘hoes’ would be more a mansion or small castle, like ‘house’ in England.]
What a contrast ’t Sangershoes was from the glass and concrete, highly institutionalised, mega-hostels of Germany! This was proper hostelling, similar in character to what I knew from home and from our limited experience in Belgium. Friendly, relaxed and cosy: for real hostellers, and not geared primarily to the requirements of coach-loads of well-dressed schoolchildren and their besuited teachers.
I particularly recall chilling out on that the sunny afternoon in the garden of ‘t Sangershoes. There were quite a few of us from various countries: sitting, chatting, having a drink or an ice cream. Someone had a big transistor radio, tuned to British pirate radio (Radio Caroline or Radio London, most likely flicking between the two). I was impressed that the signals carried so far: from the Essex coast to the German border in broad daylight, when long distance AM (medium wave) reception was typically at its poorest. Certainly, the signal was a bit hissy but it was quite acceptable. The fact that Dutch kids listened to it so avidly showed how influential the British pop scene was at that time. But let’s not forget that the Dutch had their own much-loved pirate station, Radio Veronica. This had been on the air since 1960, pre-dating the first British offshore stations by four years.
Of course, crossing into the Netherlands meant dealing with yet another currency. This time it was the Dutch guilder, also known as the florin. Over many centuries, various countries have had coins called a florin, named after a gold coin first minted in Florence, Italy. A much less valuable modern British florin was introduced in 1849, as an early move towards decimal coinage. It was a two-shilling coin (24 old pence), forming one tenth of a pound. It continued in use after decimalisation, with a value of 10 new pence, and you could still use a ‘two bob bit’ or ‘two shilling piece’, as it was formerly known, until 1993.
By a happy coincidence, at the time of our visit to the Netherlands, the Dutch and British florins had, for all practical purposes, the same value. Better yet, they were of similar appearance. Even better yet, while the British florin comprised four little sixpenny pieces, the Dutch florin comprised four very similar looking ‘kwartjes’ (little quarters), of identical value. And if that wasn’t enough, the Netherlands was the one country we visited where prices were lower than in the UK. (Belgium and West Germany were noticeably more expensive.) The low prices resulted from a government-imposed price freeze. Aptly enough, I saluted the Dutch price freeze by consuming an ice cream, bought with one shiny kwartje.
We enjoyed the pretty countryside of Limburg but were surprised at how backward the farming seemed to be, compared with Britain. This photo that I took of a Dutch farmer, with his horse-drawn wagon, illustrates the point.
My recollections of the meals we ate on this cycle tour are generally vague but I particularly recall supper at ‘t Sangershoes. I’d read about Dutch food being a bit dull but homely and filling: ‘peasant food’ as a condescending critic might put it. But ‘homely and filling’ suited me just fine. After all, it was the best most of us Brits could expect at home, even on a good day. I tucked in with gusto.
I’ll always associate that meal with learning the Dutch equivalent of the phrase ‘bon appétit’ or ‘enjoy your meal’. It’s ‘eet smakelijk!’, which even suggests to the English ear a combination of eating, the happy smacking of lips and liking it. (It literally means ‘eat tasty’.)
Our stay in the Netherlands was all too brief but it was a nice introduction. I have been back to that country many times since. Fifty years later, I am a proud member of our local Dutch club, De Oranje Duiven (The Orange Doves), based in Faringdon, Oxfordshire.
Day 10 – Tuesday 9th August 1966
There’s an old movie called If it’s Tuesday, this must be Belgium. Our cycle tour pre-dated that film by three years but the statement was nonetheless true. On Tuesday morning, we bid farewell to ’t Sangershoes and headed south-west for the Belgian border. We only had to travel about 7 miles to get to the border crossing, which was a few miles north of the town of Maaseik, the probable birthplace of the great Flemish painters Jan and Hubert van Eyck. However, we were not heading to Maaseik but to another small but charming Flemish town, Diest.
We were now in Belgian Limburg and today’s ride was across a plateau of heathland and pine forest known in Dutch/Flemish as the Kempen. The name derives from Latin: campus = field, so campina = region of fields; consequently, the French version is Campine. As the sandy soil is poor, there were few major towns in the area and, back in the 1960s, it was a pleasant rural backwater. The weather was fine and we covered the 48 miles to Diest quite easily.
The only town we passed through that sticks in my mind was Leopoldsburg, a major base for the Belgian Army. It seemed to be a Belgian equivalent of Britain’s Aldershot or Ireland’s Curragh Camp.
We arrived at Diest in the middle of the afternoon and I recall it being a very pleasant sunny day. Diest is a Flemish town, just over the border from Belgian Limburg in the province of Brabant. Back in the 1960s, Belgian Brabant was a single province with the language boundary running straight through it, east to west. But, way back in time, Brabant had been a big duchy, comprising what are now the Belgian provinces of Flemish Brabant, Walloon Brabant and Antwerp, the Brussels region, and the Dutch province of Noord Brabant.
Although Diest is what most people would call a small town, it is officially a city. Most of the world is not hampered by the historical nonsense we Brits have to endure regarding the status of our towns. It doesn’t matter how large a British town is, legally it can only be described as a city if it has been granted a charter by the Crown. Such charters are infrequently awarded and are treated as special honours. Thus my home town of Reading, with an urban population in excess of 300,000, can only call itself a town!
In the past, Diest was a more important place than it is today. The family that were later to form the royal house of the Netherlands, the Princes of Orange-Nassau, lived at Diest for almost 300 years. Consequently, Diest was known as the Orange City. In the Middle Ages and until the Reformation era, Diest benefited from the linen trade; not least, because it was on a navigable river and halfway between the economic powerhouses of Bruges and Cologne. But the decline of the textile trade and revolts against the Spanish occupation marked the end of this prosperity. The local economy later improved under Austrian rule.
Diest is a charming place in which to spend a day or two. The centre of action is the main square, known as the Grote Markt (literally Great Market). Around the square, there’s an 18th century town hall, a mash-up of a medieval church that allegedly took 18 architects to complete, and a cloth hall built in the 1300s, testament to the riches earned from the textile trade.
Apart from the peaceful pleasantness of our afternoon and evening in Diest, the thing I remember most about the town is its carillon. We knew the word carillon because it was the name of a coffee house in the centre of Reading. It was a hang-out for Mods and was run by a Belgian lady called Mrs St Niklaas, aided by the impecunious Austrian Baroness Erisso, the mother of singer Marianne Faithfull. (Marianne attended the same Reading convent school as my female cousins, St Joseph’s. My eldest cousin was a prefect and remembers regularly apprehending Marianne arriving late for school.) Needless to say, Diest’s carillon is not a coffee house but a proper carillon. But what’s one of those?
A carillon is a musical instrument, typically housed in the belfry of a town hall or church. The tune is played on large bells via a keyboard and (sometimes) pedals. It’s a Flemish invention, first heard in the city of Oudenaarde in the early 16th century. The name derives from the French word quadrillon, meaning four bells, although any carillon worth its salt has more than that. There are about 270 carillons in Belgium and the Netherlands and their use bridges the traditional religious divide between the Catholic south and Calvinist north.
In Diest, we stayed in a youth hostel called the Demergouw. (The river which runs around the north and east of Diest is the Demer and gouw means district.) Like at ’t Sangershoes, the Demergouw hostel’s warden not only rubber-stamped my youth hostel card but also applied a colourful little sticker with an illustration of the building. It all adds to the happy memories.
Day 11 – Wednesday 10th August 1966
On this tour, we were very lucky with the weather, apart from that ’Black Friday’ in Germany. Perhaps there was the occasional light shower that time has erased from my memory. But most of the time, we had pleasantly dry and often sunny weather. This Wednesday was no exception and we only had 30 miles of fairly flat terrain to cover. Our destination was a village near the south-eastern outskirts of Antwerp.
We set off from Diest heading west for Aarschot (which sounds like a painful injection), 10 miles away. Then we turned in a north-westerly direction; passing, after a further five miles, from Brabant into the province of Antwerp. Having cycled another dozen miles, passing many orchards, we reached the prettiest town of the day, Lier.
As Bradt’s guide to Flanders puts it, ‘It’s a hard heart that isn’t charmed by Lier’. It’s got all the usual pleasant ingredients of a small Flemish town, with a market place, a famous mechanical clock and lots of medieval buildings. In living memory, as many as 3,000 of Lier’s women made lace in their own homes but apparently that had stopped by the time we passed through. Lier is also famous for its tarts. (The edible kind – I can’t comment on the other sort. No, really.)
Here’s another gem for collectors of trivia: Lier is only four miles from Duffel, the town where, in the Middle Ages, the cloth used in Duffle coats originated. Just in case you are wondering, the town is spelled Duffel in Flemish, but the usual English spelling, as applied to coats and bags, is Duffle.
Another six miles brought us to our destination for the next two nights. We had decided to try monastic hospitality again, so we pitched up at ‘de klooster van de witte paters’ – the cloister (or abbey) of the White Fathers. This was at 45 Borsbeeksesteenweg in the village of Boechout, a couple of miles from the south-eastern outskirts of Antwerp. (These days it’s a nursing home.)
The White Fathers are officially known as the Missionaries of Africa. Their order was founded in Algeria in 1868, in response to a cholera outbreak that left many orphans. They wear white robes inspired by those of the Algerian arabs, which is why they became known as the White Fathers. I’m still amazed and impressed that these good folk, when confronted by three scruffy 17-year-olds, complete strangers from another country, welcomed us in and provided accommodation for two nights.
We had less involvement with the White Fathers than with the priests at the seminary in Brussels. As before, we offered to pay and they did charge us for the accommodation. But it was only about the same as we would have paid in a youth hostel. They left us to do our own thing most of the time and gave us the use of their rather fine common room.
I particularly remember that we played the Flemish edition of Monopoly there. (Just like the British version but with properties in Brussels and Antwerp.) We also had the use of their excellent radio. It was a very upmarket receiver in a hardwood veneered cabinet, with an illuminated dial and an impressive array of knobs and buttons. I think it was German (maybe a Grundig) and I’m pretty sure it had press button tuning, which was a real rarity in those days. Even car radios often did not have preselectors in those days. In fact, most British cars didn’t have radios at all.
That evening, as we relaxed in the White Fathers’ common room, we thought about what the next day would bring. Tomorrow we would cycle into Antwerp, one of the most interesting cities in Belgium and one of Europe’s greatest ports. There was so much to see there and we needed to prioritise our targets.
Day 12 – Thursday 11th August 1966
Antwerp: Flanders’ biggest city and Belgium’s second-biggest conurbation. After breakfast on this Thursday morning, we cycled the seven miles into the heart of this bustling metropolis.
Antwerp lies on the River Scheldt (De Schelde in Dutch/Flemish or l’Escaut in French), which flows into the North Sea and is navigable as far inland as the French city of Cambrai. Via the Albert Canal, ships can also sale from Antwerp inland to Liège. These connections, and the fact that Antwerp is further inland than its North Sea rivals, helped make it Europe’s second biggest port: only Rotterdam is bigger.
The city is the centre of the world diamond trade. But, as we were more concerned with how to pay for the next bag of chips, our attention was drawn to the city’s less expensive luxuries. These included the wondrous Rombouts ‘one cup’ coffee filter, which that very year was awarded a royal warrant by the king of Belgium.
Rombouts is an Antwerp company, founded in 1896. It devised the ‘one cup’ filter in 1958, for Expo 58, the international exhibition in Brussels that featured the Atomium (as mentioned in Day 3 above). The filter is essentially a truncated plastic cone with ground coffee, encased in filter paper, in its perforated base. The cone is placed in the top of a coffee cup and hot water is poured into it. A lid is supplied to cover the water.
Over the next few minutes, the water percolates through the ground coffee, delivering a stream of delicious fresh filter coffee into the cup. Once the process is complete, the lid can be removed, inverted and placed on the table to form a neat receptacle for the used filter cone and to catch any drips. It’s a masterpiece of industrial design and beverage marketing.
When we were in Belgium, the product had only been on sale for two years. The king of Belgium must have liked it, because in 1966, he granted Rombouts a royal warrant. But we weren’t in Antwerp just to drink coffee. From the huge range of cultural sites on offer, we had three main targets. Fortunately, they were all quite close together in the city centre, hardly more than half a mile apart.
Antwerp was famously the city of Rubens, so we paid a visit to the Rubenshuis (Rubens House), his palatial town house. Many famous painters were not particularly successful in their own lifetimes and often they died in poverty: think of Rembrandt and van Gogh. Rubens, however, did very nicely. As the Bradt guide to Flanders neatly puts it, ‘Rubens did for Antwerp what Elvis did for Memphis.’ The courtyard of the Rubenshuis impressed me enough to merit one of my last photos, as you can see here.
Another of Antwerp’s major attractions is the Catholic cathedral of Our Blessed Lady (Onze-Lieve-Vrouwkathedraal). It took the best part of two centuries to build, starting in the mid 14th century. Even so, they never completed the second spire, merely capping off the tower that should have supported it. The biggest Gothic cathedral in the Low Countries, it has survived a major fire, plunder by Protestants and looting by French republicans.
We were shocked to be asked to pay to enter the cathedral. These days it’s normal for major cathedrals in England and elsewhere to charge admission when a service is not on; or at least, to strongly urge a donation. But back in 1966, we had never heard of such an idea. As Catholic schoolboys ourselves, we felt particularly affronted: we were ‘insiders’ and surely we should get in free?
But no, we had to pay. Having grudgingly done so, we entered the splendid building. It’s major attractions include masterpieces by Rubens, including the famous and very impressive triptych The Descent from the Cross. The cathedral is, indeed, worth the admission fee.
We also visited the Museum Plantin-Moretus, a fascinating place, about 150 yards from the river. If you have ever been involved with typography or fonts, you’ll probably have heard of the Plantin typeface. Christophe Plantin was a French bookbinder who set up in Antwerp in the Reformation era. His firm became the biggest printer-publisher in the Low Countries. Plantin’s son-in-law, Jan Moretus, succeeded him and the firm kept going until the 19th century.
During the Reformation, Plantin worked for both sides. He printed Catholic liturgical texts for the King of Spain but was also official printer of the Dutch Protestant States-General, who overthrew Spain’s rule in the northern provinces. Thus Plantin’s business became very successful.
When, after more than 300 years, the firm closed, the city bought its headquarters; the printing works and offices remained as they had been when in use. The city opened the place as a museum 140 years ago. Visiting it is like entering a time machine and much more interesting than you might imagine.
It’s sobering to reflect on the turmoil Antwerp has undergone over the centuries under successive foreign regimes. Only 22 years before our visit, German V1 and V2 missiles were raining down on the city, destroying much of the centre. For nine months, roughly every 20 minutes, day after day, the city was hit by a rocket, according to Leslie Warne, an officer in a Port Construction and Repair unit of the Royal Engineers. One of my great-aunts was killed by a V2 in London. We youngsters were lucky to be born where and when we were.
All in all, we had a great day in Antwerp before we cycled back to the abbey in Boechout for a good night’s sleep.
Day 13 – Friday 12th August 1966
By Friday, we were nearing the end of our tour. There were, however, still three days to go, and we were determined to get the most out of them. Our next destination was Ghent, which we had passed through on Day 2. Now we wanted a better look at this interesting centre of Flemish culture.
Having thanked the White Fathers of Boechout for their hospitality and settled up with them, we headed first for Antwerp. (Years later, in the 1990s, when we lived near Coventry, we discovered that Tony Maguire, our parish priest, was a former White Father who knew Boechout well. By another happy coincidence, Father Tony ended his days as resident priest at the Warwickshire church where my parents and maternal grandparents were married.)
To get to Ghent, we had to cross the mighty River Scheldt. Unusually for a city of its size, Antwerp had no bridges at this time. This was primarily as a result of wartime damage but also to avoid impeding shipping. So we cycled in a tunnel under the river, then followed the road south-west towards Ghent.
After about 18 miles, we were near the town of Sint-Niklaas, halfway between Antwerp and Ghent. The area is known as the Waasland, formerly a swampy region. To improve the soil, the technique of crop rotation involving turnips (later taken up in England by Charles ’Turnip’ Townsend) was pioneered here.
We didn’t venture into Sint-Niklaas itself (which I later learned is twinned with Abingdon, not far from where I now live) but I do recall stopping at a nearby roadside café for a refreshing glass of lager. It was a hot sunny day and the glass of pils went down a treat. We learned that pils is the generic term in Flanders for a standard lager; it’s short for Pilsener, Pilsen in Bohemia being where the style originated.
These days, Belgium is famed for its phenomenal range of beers but back in the 1960s the variety was less apparent to the casual traveller. Major lager brands like Stella Artois and Jupiler tended to dominate the market.
Although I am now a member of the Campaign for Real Ale rather than a lager boy, that glass of Flemish lager certainly hit the spot as we sat outside the café near Sint-Niklaas. Back then, nobody in Britain sat outside a café to have a coffee, beer or a snack. How things have changed!
[Trivia gem: At this stage we were about six miles from the small town of Dendermonde. Six years later, I interviewed the musician Brian Eno for Belgian radio and he told me that his mother came from that place.]
Martin, Tom and I made good progress to Ghent, the total distance from Boechout being about 39 miles. The route was fairly flat, the weather good and, as usual, we suffered no major problems with the bikes. We booked into the youth hostel, which was called De Draecke (The Drake). It was in the old Sint-Pietersabdij (St Peter’s Abbey), less than a mile south of the city centre. That left the afternoon free to explore.
We weren’t really aware of it at the time but in those days, Ghent was a mecca for aspiring British racing cyclists. This was still the case 14 years later, when a certain Bradley Wiggins was born there: his racing cyclist father was based in the city.
There are so many sights to see in Ghent that, as usual, we had to prioritise. Just wandering around the medieval town centre was great, as everywhere you looked there were examples of fine old Flemish architecture.The city lies on the River Scheldt, at its confluence with the Leie (Lys in French), and there are numerous other waterways. The quality of the buildings along the old canals, such as the Grasleie, testifies to the prosperity of the city in medieval times.
We were impressed by the Geeraard de Duivelsteen (Castle of Gerard the Devil), both by its appearance and by its rather cool name. British castles tend to have dull names, such as Castle Howard, which doesn’t really compare.
But the star of our afternoon in Ghent was, for me, Sint-Baafskathedraal (St Bavo’s Cathedral). It’s the oldest of Ghent’s five dozen churches and the most impressive. And inside is the city’s greatest treasure: the amazing altarpiece known as The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb.
On Day 10, I briefly mentioned that we passed near the supposed birthplace of Jan and Hubert van Eyck. These brothers were the creators of this work of art, which took eight years to paint and was completed on 6 May 1432. It’s sometimes said that the van Eycks invented oil painting. That’s an exaggeration; but it was a new medium and they have a good claim to having perfected it. It’s 15 feet wide, 11 feet tall and painted on 12 oak panels, eight of which are hinged and painted on both sides.
The amazing thing about this painting is the level of detail, right down to individual leaves of grass and the petals of tiny flowers. It is so realistic, almost photographic: a true object of wonder. We could gaze for ages at the numerous scenes depicted, incorporating landscapes, architecture, portraiture and nature, quite apart from the religious themes. Remarkably, this vibrant work of art looks as if it were completed yesterday; whereas in reality it is nearly 600 years old.
We were able to stand, just inches away from the painting, and appreciate the fine detail of the work. Today, sadly, you have to stand back and view it through bullet-proof glass. Nonetheless, it is still worth making a journey to Ghent, if only to see The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb; it’s widely considered to be the most remarkable of all Flemish Primitive paintings.
Martin, Tom and I strolled back to the youth hostel in Sint-Pietersplein for the evening. (Plein in Dutch means a town square; plain is occasionally used in the same way in England, as in Bank Plain, Norwich.) It was pure coincidence that we had spent the previous two nights in a working abbey, whereas tonight we were in a former abbey from which the monks had been expelled by the French, 170 years earlier. For many years after it ceased to be a monastery, St Peter’s Abbey was an army barracks. Having later been a youth hostel, it’s now a natural history museum.
The abbey is said to have been founded by St Amand, 1300 years ago. The name of St Amand is well known in Flanders but not in England. However, the medieval wool trade forged strong links between Flanders and the Vale of White Horse. Consequently, the private medieval chapel of the Eyston family of East Hendred, Oxfordshire, is one of the few places of worship in England dedicated to St Amand.
As with the other Belgian and Dutch hostels that we visited, the atmosphere was pleasant. There was a great mix of interesting travellers. We were particularly impressed by the steed of a German couple. They were touring on the most luxurious motor scooter we had ever seen. It was an enormous, streamlined, Heinkel Tourist: the Rolls Royce of scooters, the like of which we had never seen before.
In the evening, we sat at a big refectory table enjoying the company of other travellers. A Canadian guy, in his twenties, assumed the role of master of ceremonies and regaled us with many amusing and insightful tales. He’d been travelling solo around Europe for months on a motorcycle. His comparative study of the styles of WC pan favoured by various nationalities, and the reasons why, was particularly amusing (though we were glad we had already eaten). He also showed us how to understand Dutch/Flemish a little better, using a stone plaque on the abbey wall as an example.
We slept well in the big dormitory, knowing that this was our last night in Belgium. Tomorrow we were heading for Bruges, then Ostend and home. But there was still much to see in the little time left.
Day 14 – Saturday 13th August 1966
Leaving De Draecke youth hostel after breakfast, we cycled the easy 28 miles to Bruges. This time, I think, we used the old main road through Eeklo (which sounds like a home for Eskimo mice), rather than the quieter road through Zomergem that we’d used when heading from Bruges to Ghent. Once again, the weather was fine and the bikes behaved themselves.
We arrived in Bruges about midday. As we were booked on the overnight ferry from Ostend to Dover, we had all afternoon to spend in the city. We planned to cycle the 15 miles to Ostend in the early evening, then spend an hour or two hanging out around the harbour, before boarding the Belgian Marine’s packet boat.
You may recall that, on Day 2, we broke our journey briefly in Bruges: long enough to have a breakfast of delicious Flemish cakes and send a postcard home to my parents. What we’d seen and read of the city had already enthused us and Bruges did not disappoint us now we had more time to explore it.
If you only visit one Flemish city before you die, make it Bruges, the capital of West Flanders. It is arguably the most perfectly preserved medieval city in Europe. At every corner you turn, and every time you look up at the rooftops, there’s another delightful view. People have lived there for 1300 years and Bruges got its city charter early in the 12th century. Some say it became the fourth biggest city in Europe. It was certainly bigger than London; and its Bourse, which opened in 1309, may have been the world’s first stock exchange. Bruges traded with England, whence came premium grade wool for the Flemish weavers, and it traded with the Hanseatic League, which had a monopoly on trade in many valuable commodities through the Baltic countries. The city also became the capital of the Burgundian empire.
All of this was possible because Bruges was then a major port, with direct access via the Zwin canal to the North Sea. But nothing lasts for ever: the Zwin silted up; the emperor, who’d been imprisoned and humiliated in Bruges, directed trade to Antwerp; and the English stopped exporting wool. By the Reformation period, Bruges was beginning to drift into economic decline. But because there wasn’t the money or incentive to rebuild, many of the well-constructed medieval buildings survived.
Three centuries passed and the industrial revolution made little impact on the city. Then, about the end of the 19th century, the French started to appreciate this almost perfectly preserved medieval city. The city emerged unscathed from both world wars and Bruges became ever more popular as a tourist destination. Today two million tourists visit it each year.
Culture is one thing, but beer, chips and cakes are another. Fortunately, Bruges caters for all of these things, and very well indeed. I mentioned the superb cakes in Day 2 but thus far have not sung the praises of Flemish chips. Back in the 1960s, we Brits were taught: 1) Britain invented everything worth inventing; 2) Britain did everything better than anyone else. (We now know that neither of these statements is entirely true; but it was a way for a bankrupt nation, enduring rationing and deeply in debt to the USA, to keep up its morale.) So naturally, we assumed that Britain invented chips (by which, dear American cousins, I mean French fries and not what we Brits call potato crisps). Naturally, we also assumed that British chips were best.
What a surprise then to encounter Flemish chips, Vlaamse frieten. I don’t really care who invented the chip; the Belgians and French have been arguing about this for years; it’s the gastronomic experience that matters. Well, what a taste and what texture these frieten had: double fried for a soft interior and crispy shell; served in a paper cone, from a mobile kiosk below the mighty belfry in the market place; and topped with creamy mayonnaise, quite unlike anything that went by that name in Britain back then.
Everywhere we walked in Bruges, there were delightful things to eat and drink. We could not afford to dine in restaurants but we were surrounded by the temptations of patisseries, bakeries, chip kiosks, chocolatiers and cafés. And I must confess, we succumbed a few times. Well, when I say a few…
You can walk all day around Bruges and never get bored. I found the Minnewater area particularly beautiful. Today the Minnewater is a lake but, before the Zwin silted up, it was a dock that could accommodate the largest ships from England, Italy or the Baltic. Next to it is the Begijnhof, a charming little walled village that started life as a sort of lay religious community in the 13th century. Winston Churchill so liked this area that he set up his easel by the Minnewater and painted the scene.
There are many ancient churches in the city but one that is particularly unusual is the Basiliek van het Heilig-Bloed. (That’s right, Basilica of the Holy Blood – your Dutch is really good now!) The unusual thing about it is that it’s a double-decker church. At street level, there’s a very plain Romanesque chapel; but upstairs is a more flamboyant place, housing a relic purported to be a piece of cloth stained with Christ’s blood. Whatever your attitude to medieval religious relics, the architecture is fascinating.
I really enjoyed wandering around Bruges for the first time on that sunny Saturday afternoon. So much so, that it became my favourite city. I must have been back about 15 times over the last 50 years.
In the early evening, we started cycling the 15 miles to Ostend. I still had two photos left out of the dozen on my roll of film, so we stopped on the way and took the two photos below. One shows me; the other features Tom on the right and Martin on the left, with the back of my Moulton bicycle. Note the GB plate: in those days, it was an advantage to let people know you were British when travelling on the Continent. (How things change. Brexit anyone?) Note also the white panel on the rear mudguard: this was a legal requirement in the Netherlands, the Cyclists’ Touring Club told us, and I used white insulating tape on my nice chrome mudguard, so that the tape could be removed on returning to Blighty.
Looking at those three stylish examples of how teenagers really dressed in the 1960s, (no, Austin Powers was NOT a documentary), now may be a good time to mention our clothing. Today, people agonise about what special clothing to wear for various types of cycling. Needless to say, the clothing industry responds accordingly. You can spend a fortune on cycling gear. Even I have about four different types of trousers/shorts for cycling these days.
So what did we do back then? Precisely nothing: we wore our ordinary leisure clothes. Why? (Cue mournful violins again) Because we didn’t have that many clothes anyway. They were expensive and we made do with whatever our parents supplied, which was as little as they could get away with. Secondly, even if you knew special cycling clothes existed and could afford them, you would struggle to find them in any local shop. Did we suffer greatly as a result? Not in the least!
While we’re at it, let’s mention the bikes. Despite being quite different from each other, they all worked well. Tom’s ‘proper lightweight’ did reveal the lack of robustness of such machines, when he bent his wheel near Aachen on ‘Black Friday’, having earlier dented a rim on a tram track in Brussels, but the problem was easily resolved. Martin’s ‘boy racer’ bike chucked its chain off once or twice but that was not a showstopper. My Moulton never gave any trouble, carried heaps of luggage better than the other bikes and, with its rubber suspension, gave a much smoother ride over the Belgian pavé. Its 4-speed hub gear proved quite sufficient and I never felt at a disadvantage compared to the other lads with their 10-speed derailleurs. (It’s not the number of gears but having the right gears that matters.) I don’t recall any of us having a puncture, so if we did have any, they must have been easily fixed.
And how about all the other British cycle tourists we met? Dear reader, in the whole tour I cannot recall meeting one British cycle tourist. Cycle touring was deeply unfashionable among our contemporaries in the 1960s. In fact, people thought you a little weird if you told them you had been cycle touring. They’d give you a pitying look while mentally filing you under ‘Harmless eccentric’. But you should never let fashion stop you doing something worthwhile and enjoyable.
Photos taken, we got back on the bikes and within an hour we were in Ostend. I guess it was about 8.00pm when we got there, so it was still light. We wandered round the harbour and found another of those lovely Flemish cake shops. However, we didn’t have that much money left and we had already eaten quite well. We just hung about outside, occasionally looking at the window display and giving it our ‘I’m so hungry’ look. It worked: the shop was due to shut about 9.00pm but before it did, the staff cheerfully gave us a big bag of cakes, which would otherwise go to waste.
In fact, we had so many cakes, we didn’t know what to do with them. This was deeply disturbing; I’d never experienced having too many cakes! I think it was Tom who decorated a car radio aerial with an extra-long chocolate-coated marshmallow. Fear not, we managed to get him home to England without incurring a Belgian Anti Social Behaviour Order.
Somewhere, either in Bruges or Ostend, I bought a box of chocolate zeefruchten (literally ‘sea fruits’ in Dutch or fruits de mer in French) to take home to my family. These days, you can buy the pre-packaged Guylian version of these tasty chocolate shellfish in any British supermarket. But back then, they were almost unknown in the UK, and you bought them in Belgium from a chocolaterie or patisserie. They would be neatly displayed loose on trays. The shop assistant would gift wrap them beautifully, at no extra charge, in a gold-coloured cardboard box, tied up with ribbon.
Ostend harbour was a pretty place as the sun set over the North Sea. The harbour lights came on, the cathedral was floodlit and the Mercator training vessel was illuminated. Soon it was time to board the ferry and head for Dover. Once again, the bikes were craned into the hold. We then found ourselves a corner for the night, with the hope of getting an hour or two of intermittent sleep.
Early tomorrow we would arrive at Dover and start wending our way back to Reading. But would we cycle all the way?
Day 15 – Sunday 14th August 1966
We slept better on the crossing back to Dover than we did on the way out. I guess that was down to there being fewer gregarious Continental teenagers around, less adrenalin left in our bodies and more tiredness. Dosing on deck or propped up in a corner hardly constituted a good night’s sleep, but it was better than nothing.
It was still dark when we arrived at Dover. Should we now tackle 125 miles of cycling to get back home? We still had some cash left, so we decided to get the train back to London. That would leave only 40 miles or so of cycling, which seemed a much more attractive proposition at the time.
I guess it took a couple of hours for the train to reach Victoria station in London. It was still only breakfast time for most people when we got there and the roads were very quiet. We cycled down the A4, the Great West Road, retracing our route of a fortnight earlier but in the opposite direction. Somewhere on the western outskirts of London, we stopped at a phone box to let our parents know that we were on our way and to expect us for Sunday lunch.
We made good, steady progress. Lo and behold, about midday, we reached our homes in the western suburbs of Reading. Two-way Family Favourites was booming out from thousands of radios tuned to the BBC Light Programme, producing that mass Pavlovian drooling response in anticipation of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.
And so ended our 15 day tour, my first escape from English suburbia to something more exotic sur le Continent. It was quite a modest journey by some standards. Nonetheless, it was one of the most formative events of my youth and the memories are etched into my mind.
Statistics
The whole holiday cost me £24, the equivalent in today’s money of about £313. More than a fifth of the cost was accounted for by ferry and train fares. This meant that the average spend per day – for food, accommodation and everything else – was about one pound and six shillings (£1.30). This approximates to £21 per day in current terms.
Our total mileage was in the order of 630 miles, making our daily average about 42 miles.
We spent six nights in youth hostels, four nights in monastic accommodation, two nights on ferries, one night in a student hostel and one in a barn.
Afterwards
Tom McLoughlin left our school; I believe he went to study at Reading College of Technology. Martin Taylor and I continued in the same sixth form: we attended the same church, youth club and scout troop, and so met almost every day. Tom, however, attended another church, didn’t go to the youth club and was not in our scouts. So we rarely saw him thereafter. We never fell out but just drifted apart.
Martin and I were sufficiently enthused by our tour to plan a further more ambitious one. For that, we were joined by another classmate, Gerard McGlynn. In the summer of 1967, we spent three and a half weeks cycling on the Continent, which was my longest ever cycle tour.
When Martin went to university, I lost touch with him but Gerard and I continued to travel abroad together nearly every year until I got married. We hitchhiked and later travelled by minibus and car.
In the late 1970s, Martin got in touch with me. My wife and I visited him and his wife at their house in Goring-on-Thames. But they didn’t live there long and again we lost contact.
Decades passed: then, in the 2000s, Martin once more made contact. He was deeply involved in oil exploration and spent much of his time working in countries with names ending in ‘stan’. When not doing that, he lived in Essen with his German partner and enjoyed Scottish dancing. He came to our house and we had a very convivial lunch at a nearby pub. He had a bike in the back of his car and was still a keen cyclist.
I thought it was time to have a reunion with both Martin and Tom. But where was Tom? I guessed he might still be in the Reading area, so I asked an old schoolfriend, Maurice O’Brien, news editor of the Reading Chronicle, if he would run a story appealing for Tom to come forward. Maurice helpfully obliged and my photo of Tom and Martin with my bike duly appeared in the Chronicle.
After some weeks, Tom contacted me by email. I think one of his children had spotted the article. It turned out that Tom was a chartered building surveyor (so am I) with his own practice in Reading. He too was still a cyclist. I suggested that the three of us should meet up but was a little disappointed not to get a reply to that email.
There was a sad reason for this. Some months later, Tom’s daughter emailed to tell me that Tom had died. To add to the sadness, Martin also died unexpectedly about the same time. Both friends were in their early 60s. So our reunion never took place.
Nonetheless, I am so pleased that I was able to contact both of them before they died. I like to imagine they are both having fun on a celestial velodrome, with no bent wheels or slipping chains. Chapeau, Martin and Tom!
Thank you for sharing my happy memories of this journey. I hope you have enjoyed the story.
Tony
New hub and bracket gear tables
You may have seen elsewhere on this site (in the comments on John Allen’s hub gear table in the Gears section) that Wiel van den Broek has created some very useful Excel spreadsheets for gearing choices involving hub gears and bracket gears. You can enter the tyre format, chainwheel and sprocket sizes and instantly compare the results given by different gears.
The gears covered range some more than 100 years old to others that are in current production. There is a metric (distance travelled per pedal rotation) chart and a gear inches chart (equivalent direct drive wheel diameter), both of which you can download from here: http://fietssite.jouwweb.nl/downloads
Many thanks to Wiel for creating these spreadsheets.
Tony
Economically upcycling a 1978 BSA (Raleigh) 20 folder
In a recent post I described a 1974 Raleigh 20 FE, in near original condition, that had been in the same ownership for 40 years. The husband of the FE’s owner also had a 20, which was a folding version, badged as a BSA 20, and made in 1978. I rescued both bikes from an almost certain final trip to the local tip. I sold the FE on eBay for less than its replacement lamp cost me. I didn’t mind though, as I needed the space and it saved the bike from a prematurely ignoble end. As for the BSA 20 folder, I decided to keep it and refurbish it.
My aim was not the ultimate ‘hot 20’, which could cost quite a lot of money. Instead I decided to upgrade the less desirable old components, mostly with items from eBay or the spares box, plus a few from St John Street Cycles or Amazon Market Place dealers. The following annotated photo sequence shows the end result, a very rideable hack which, because of its colour scheme, I call Cappuccino.
The 1974 Raleigh 20 FE, described in a previous post, weighed a hefty 37 lb (almost 17 kg) in orignal form but without its rear bag. (That, however, is a pound and half less than my grandson’s modern but relatively inexpensive mountain bike!) The BSA folder weighed 32 lb (about 14.5 kg) in its original form but after the modifications described below, it weighs 30 lb (about 13.6 kg) without bag, despite having the addition of a rear carrier. Further weight savings could be made by replacing the original wheels with new ones having alloy rims, alloy hubs and narrower tyres, and by replacing the handlebars and stem with alloy equivalents.
Above: A general view of Cappuccino, complete with the Carradice handlebar bag which, via Klickfix fixings, gets used on several of my bikes.
Another view of the bike, this time from the left side.
I decided to keep the original steel stem and handlebars, as they are in fine condition, are nicely rigid and allow lots of adjustment, both vertically and fore and aft. The Carradice bag (great for day rides) is easily detachable via a Klickfix bracket on the handlebars and has a handy shoulder strap. The ergonomic handlebar grips (cheap but adequate copies inspired by Ergon) make a big difference to comfort. The Tektro brake levers are also a huge improvement on the cheap steel originals, having far superior leverage, adjustable reach and cable adjustment.
A rider’s-eye view of the handlebar cluster, showing the Klickfix bracket, the Sturmey-Archer 3-speed trigger and a bell, tucked away to the left of the bag bracket. This set-up enables the bike to be stood upside for maintenance, with stable three-point support via the handlebar grip forward extensions and saddle.
A view of the handlebar cluster with the bag removed, showing the front of the Klickfix mount.
I decided to ditch the chainset and bottom bracket axle and bearings, and replace them with a cotterless assembly. The chainset was an inexpensive unused item from eBay but nonetheless has a proper detachable chainwheel. This enabled me to move the chainwheel to the left hand of the spider, which was very important to get a reasonable chain line. The chainwheel was sold as being for 1/8-inch chain but actually works fine with older style 3/32-inch chains (e.g. for 6-, 7- or 8-speed derailleurs). Also in shot is an MKS all-metal folding pedal, which replaced the very heavy solid bearing original pedals and enables the width of the bike to be usefully reduced very easily for transit or storage. I dispensed with the hockey stick chainguard and its mounting bracket, filing off the sharp corners of what was left of the fixing point on the strut behind the chainwheel.
Raleigh 20s and their badge-engineered brethren have ultra-wide (78mm) bottom bracket shells and are Raleigh-threaded. This is very limiting when it comes to converting to a cotterless set-up, especially at a reasonable price. So I reduced the width of the bottom bracket shell, on the chainwheel side, by 5mm. This enabled me to fit a relatively inexpensive Oxford 73mm-wide threadless bottom bracket cartridge. The letters and numbers stamped onto the bottom bracket are not a serial number but the postcode of the previous owner.
This shot clearly shows how the chain stays of the Raleigh 20 series were flattened and wrapped around the bottom bracket shell (to which they were brazed) before continuing forward to form bracing struts, brazed to the underside of the main beam.
A wider view of the same area. Note the struts, which join the main beam below the frame hinge on the right of the picture.
Another view of the MKS folding pedal and surrounding area. Note the frame hinge on the left and the TI ‘made in Britain’ sticker at the base of the seat tube.
A similar view but showing the pedal in folded mode. The difference may not seem much but a pair of such pedals can reduce the stored width of the bike by about 5 inches (12.5 cm).
Another view of the folded pedal, with the frame hinge at top left.
The wheels are in very good condition, the original Sturmey-Archer rims being true and almost perfect cosmetically. The front hub and rear hubs are also fine and the spoke tension is OK. So rather than spend a small fortune on new 451 wheels, I decided to keep the originals and just fit new inner tubes and new Schwalbe Kevlar-protected whitewall tyres. Yes, steel wheels have poorer wet weather braking but I don’t intend riding this bike much in the rain. Also, I upgraded the brakes, about which more below.
This bike did not have a carrier (rack) but I found this original Swiss-made Pletscher on eBay. This model of carrier was original equipment on some Raleigh 20s and fitted perfectly. It has a sprung parcel clip and I have added a couple of old-style toe-clip straps – often handy for securing items of luggage (such as a rolled up jacket).
Another view of the carrier.
And yet another shot of the carrier, but this time including the new longer and alloy micro-adjust seat pillar. This replaced the original steel seat post, which, for no good reason, was slightly shorter than the standard Raleigh 20 item, and which had an old-style steel saddle clip. The saddle now fitted is quite a nice one from the spares box. The original, supplied with the bike, was a very cheap vinyl-covered mattress saddle, with no main chassis springs – unlike the relatively plush Brooks item fitted to the FE described in a previous post.
Another view of the saddle and seat pillar. Also in shot is the Sturmey-Archer AW wide-ratio 3-speed hub. As can be seen, this was made in the days when they still fitted a lubrication point, so it’s easy to add a few drops of oil from time to time. The AW is a very efficient hub but the original gearing of Raleigh 20s is on the high side. So, although I kept the same number of teeth on the chainwheel (46), I fitted a larger rear sprocket (17 tooth). This lowers the top gear to 71-inches, a great gear for pootling along at a reasonable speed, without hunting between top and middle gear. Middle gear is now reduced to 54-inch, fine for many moderate slopes. Low gear drops to 40-inch, enabling easier hill climbing. For most people, reducing the gearing in this way is one of the easiest and most worthwhile upgrades you can make to a Raleigh 20 or derivative.
The original pressed steel calipers are not great (poor leverage and flexible arms), so I replaced them with these Tektro R365 dual-pivot brakes. The leverage at the caliper is much better (aided also by better brake lever leverage), they are quick-release and incorporate adjusters for brake block clearance and cable tension. As the brake fixing bolt that passes through the fork crown is retained by a threaded sleeve (rather than a standard nut) it is necessary to enlarge the hole through back of the crown slightly. Also, these calipers fouled the forward extension of the original mudguard. This was easily resolved by trimming back the mudguard. Visible in this picture, against the lower steering bearing, is the chrome-plated stop that prevents the forks being reversed. I took the opportunity of fitting new balls to the lower steering bearing. (The upper bearing is solid nylon, which damps the otherwise rather light steering. It can be replaced with a ball bearing unit, if desired.)
Despite the long reach of these brakes, the fixing hole for the rear brake caliper needed to be elongated downwards by a few millimetres to get the brake blocks low enough to avoid the risk of them rubbing on the tyre sidewall during braking. Slightly longer brake arms would avoid this problem.
A close look at a 1974 Raleigh 20 FE
The Raleigh 20 was the archetypal British city bike of the 1970s and Raleigh’s biggest selling product line in the middle of that decade. The company made up to 140,000 a year and the bike was in production from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. You can read more about it here: https://hadland.wordpress.com/2012/06/24/raleigh-twenty-r20/
Recently I acquired a 1974 Raleigh 20 FE (‘Fully Equipped’) that had been in the same ownership for 40 years and was in almost completely original condition, apart from modest wear and tear. It is a testament to the fitness for purpose of the product that the owner kept it and used it for so long. Here is a photo tour of the bike in question.
A general view of the 1974 Raleigh 20 FE.
A front view. Originally the bike would have had a plastic clip to hold the three cables together in front of the head tube more neatly but these clips tended to fall off and were not really necessary. The headlamp shown here is a replacement but differs only slightly from the original, which still worked, despite having a missing ‘glass’. All Raleigh 20s had a restrictor to stop the bike being ridden with the forks reversed. In models fitted with integral lighting, the stop was combined with the headlamp bracket.
Rear carriers (racks) varied between Raleigh 20 models. Some had none and others had a Pletscher alloy carrier with sprung parcel clips. The FE had a steel carrier with a plastic tray. This helped hold the removable holdall (shopping bag) that came with the bike. It’s rare to see the original holdall and this bike had lost its one. At the front and back of the tray you can see the elasticated cords that held the holdall in the tray. The rear lamp is combined with the rear reflector in the neat and very robust unit fitted to the rear mudguard.
The chain stays were flattened to wrap around the underside of the wide (78mm) Raleigh-threaded bottom bracket, to which they were brazed. The stays then carried on forward and were brazed to underside of the main beam. The result was a very stiff frame. Note the Raleigh heron’s head motif stamped into the steel chainwheel. The pedals were Raleigh’s own low maintenance type, which used non-adjustable, solid, sintered metal, oil-retaining bearings instead of cones and ball bearings. The end caps often fell off, as can be seen here. The hub is a Sturmey-Archer Dyno-Three AG3, combining a 3-speed wide-ratio hub gear and a Dynohub alternator to power the built-in lighting.
The rear hub seen from the left-hand side of the bike. The wider section of the hub houses the alternator. The hub gear was operated by a twist-grip on the handlebar. This had a friction clutch within it to automatically take up slack that might develop in the gear control cable. There are instructions for re-setting this function in the ‘Gears’ this website.
This bike is fitted with Raleigh’s Design Centre Award-winning self-adjusting brake levers. In common with many old-style automotive drum brakes, these detected increased brake lever travel and, via a ratchet mechanism, automatically tightened the cabled to compensate. Sadly, this was all too complicated for many bicycle mechanics and the levers were soon dropped.
A proper metal heron’s head Raleigh head badge, riveted on by hand. None of your cheap self-adhesive stickers in those days!
The type of saddle fitted to Raleigh 20s varied somewhat but was always a vinyl-covered sprung mattress type. A cheap version, sold under another Raleigh-owned brand name such as BSA, might well have a very basic, unbranded saddle, with no main springs. This FE, however, is a high-end model and therefore has a Brooks fully-sprung mattress saddle.
A view down onto the top of the main beam. As the label shows, the bike was sold in Newbury in the days when that town had 4-digit phone numbers. Some time later, in an office over a shop in Newbury, a company called Vodafone started life. Now most phone numbers are so long we can’t remember them!
This view shows, among other things, the twin bracing struts formed by extending the chain stays around the bottom bracket and up to the main beam. You can also see the Raleigh pedal, complete with the Sir Walter Raleigh logo moulded into the heavy solid rubber body – and the typically missing end cap!
The final picture shows the bottom bracket area from the left-hand side. The fixing for the very robust and reliable propstand is brazed to the underside of the bottom bracket. A nice touch on the Raleigh-branded 20s (as distinct from the versions sold under other Raleigh-owned brand names) is the cotter pin nuts bearing the Raleigh monogram.
HADLAND'S BLOG 