Jeremy Wilson - Beryl: In Search of Britains Greatest Athlete

BERYL

In Search of Britains Greatest Athlete

JEREMY WILSON

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by

Pursuit Books

An imprint of Profile Books Ltd

29 Cloth Fair

London

EC1A 7JQ

www.profilebooks.com

Copyright Jeremy Wilson, 2022

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Typeset in Sabon by MacGuru Ltd

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 178816 292 0

eISBN 978 1 78283 574 5

The decision to largely refer to Beryl Burton by her first name rather than the more conventional biographical surname gave pause for thought. The central importance to the story of two other Burtons Charlie and Denise was one reason, as was their preference for Beryl. It also felt right. It was how she was simply known by just about everyone in her sport.

Similarly, the majority of my interviewees thought that it made most sense to refer to them by the surname they were best known by in cycling, whether that was their maiden name or their married name.

The magazine now called Cycling Weekly has chronicled British cycling, especially time trialling, since its inception in 1891. It has gone by various names, but has mostly been known just as Cycling and is referred to as such throughout.

Various competitions and organisations were central to Beryls career and are known by the following acronyms:

British Best All-Rounder (BAR): Annual time trial competition for the woman with the fastest average speed for their best rides over 25, 50 and 100 miles. For men, the average speed is calculated over 50 and 100 miles as well as 12 hours.

British Cycling Federation (BCF): The governing body for track racing and mass-start road racing. Now known as British Cycling (BC).

Cyclists Touring Club (CTC): Founded in 1878 to support recreational cycling on British roads. Now known as Cycling UK.

Road Records Association (RRA): British organisation founded in 1888 to adjudicate various place-to-place time and distance records.

Road Time Trials Council (RTTC): The governing body since 1922 for time trialling in Britain. Now known as Cycling Time Trials (CTT).

Sports Journalists Association (SJA): Formed in Fleet Street in 1948 and organisers of the oldest annual British sports awards for the outstanding sportspeople of the year.

Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI): The world governing body of cycling.

Womens Cycle Racing Association (WCRA): Founded in 1949 to further womens cycling by organising races and campaigning for inclusion in events like the world championships and Olympic Games. Disbanded in 2007, having achieved its aims.

It is a unique and yet instantly recognisable sound. The whirring of a bicycle wheel freely rotating until it slowly stops, not because a brake has been applied but because the momentum from the last push of a pedal has gradually ceased. It was the fading sound that accompanied the last breath of Beryl Burton after she collapsed on the side of the road in May 1996 while out riding her bicycle on the outskirts of Harrogate. It was also the sound that cut poignantly through the silence during an afternoon play on BBC Radio 4 some sixteen years later, when the actor Maxine Peake recreated her sudden death. The play, written by Peake herself, was adapted for the theatre in 2014, and a capacity audience for the opening night at Leeds Playhouse included Beryls daughter, Denise, and her then eighty-five-year-old husband, Charlie.

Denise gazed across a theatre filled with more than 1,000 people who had known little of her mothers extraordinary life only two hours earlier. People were sobbing, she said. It was surreal. Just incredible. And then, as a projector replayed rare footage of Beryl powering along on two wheels, the statistics from a career that was quite plausibly the finest in all cycling history were narrated by Peake:

Time trialling: British Best All-Rounder, champion 25 successive years. The first woman to beat a time of 1 hour for 25 miles. The first woman to beat a time of 2 hours for 50 miles. The first woman to beat a time of 4 hours for 100 miles. Track racing: 3,000 metres pursuit, world champion five times, national champion thirteen times. The first woman to beat a time of 4 minutes. Road racing: world champion twice, national champion twelve times. In 1967 she became the only woman to beat a mens competition record, riding 277.25 miles in 12 hours. Awarded the MBE in 1964 and the OBE in 1968. Beryl Burton.

As the curtain came down, the tears that had just been shed slowly turned into a climax of cheers. People rose to their feet and loudly acknowledged the accomplishments of a local champion who had literally pedalled herself to death just a few miles up the road.

The sudden end to Beryl Burtons life following heart failure while out delivering invites for her fifty-ninth birthday sent a jolt shuddering through British cycling. The years when she dominated the sport had long passed, but she remained a familiar face on the domestic scene and, although it was a time when such news travelled more slowly, the outpouring of correspondence that appeared in Cycling magazine just four days later was overwhelming.

It underlined not just the shock at her unexpected passing but also an enduring and undiluted awe at her achievements. Graham Webb was the 1967 mens world amateur road race champion and had competed against Eddy Merckx when cyclings cannibal was in his prime. Webb wrote in to assert that Beryl was the greatest racing cyclist who ever lived. Eileen Sheridan, another pioneer for womens cycling, described her as quite simply the greatest sportswoman of all time. Peter McGrath, the chairman of the Road Time Trials Council, said that Beryl was not just one of the greatest cyclists ever, but one of the greatest athletes. Beryls clubmate and friend Malcolm Cowgill contended that undoubtedly the greatest cyclist of all time was also unfortunate. If she had achieved comparable feats in a different era or in a more popular sport, often beating the best male competition, she would have been a household name all over the world, he wrote. The Yorkshire Evening Posts John Morgan agreed that Beryl would have earned a million or more on the continent and walked as tall as the Eiffel Tower.

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I saw Beryl Burton in person just once, in the summer of 1984. I was eight and, although that may seem like an impossibly young age, it was sufficient to leave a lasting impression. Sebastian Coe and Daley Thompson at the Los Angeles Olympics and Evertons FA Cup triumph against Watford at Wembley are literally my only other memories of that entire year. Beryl was riding in the national womens 25-mile time trial championship, which was being staged in Ringwood, about 35 miles from our home in Andover. My father was a keen club cyclist, very much of the touring rather than racing variety, but sufficiently curious to join a considerable roadside throng. It was a time when cycling had a rather different place in the fabric of British sport and, although Beryl could have walked down the nearby Bournemouth promenade unnoticed, this was a vibrant little pocket of European culture in which she was revered.