GOING SOLO How one Yorkshireman conquered Britain's greatest cycle race By Joe Shute

There were just 30 miles to go when he felt the bump. The crank had started to loosen and air was hissing from his back tyre. Ken Russell, the “Lone Wolf” on the verge of winning the greatest cycle race Britain had ever seen, knew it was serious. He looked around for support. Breathing hard, teeth bared, and eyes squinting against the pale September sun, his rivals were starting to overtake him, pedalling furiously ahead. Being on his own was something Russell had grown used to over the 14 legs of the 1952 Tour of Britain. The short, stocky Yorkshireman had tackled the past 1,440 miles against the best in Europe as the only solo rider in the race. He had no teammates and only a wreck of a van, loaned to him by the bike shop he worked for, in support. As usual, his driver was miles behind. Were he to wait for him to turn up, his fragile four-minute lead would be obliterated and one of the most stunning individual performances of all time would come to nothing. The 22-year-old attempted some futile running repairs to the steel frame, but he could feel the bike, and his chances of winning the race, weaken with each pedal stroke. To have made it this far alone was a feat nobody had ever managed or will ever match. Even winning a single stage race without team mates in a sport where success depends on the support of those around you, is impressive. To win an entire tour was verging on miraculous. With victory so close, Russell resorted to desperate measures. Alongside him was a rival from the Belgian team named Marcel Michaux, who was at the front of the pack and aiming for a top 10 finish. The pair had barely exchanged a word, but Russell turned and putting on his best accent said: “Donnez-moi votre bicyclette?” Incredibly, the Belgian obliged.

00:00 00:00 Saved by the Belgian

What followed should have secured the cobbler’s son from Bradford a place in the British sporting pantheon. Yet somehow, it never happened. Few, apart from die-hard cycling enthusiasts, have ever heard of Ken Russell and those remarkable two weeks of racing in 1952. ***

Ken Russell was born in Idle, Bradford, in 1929. His father, William Russell, was a cordwainer, "not quite a cobbler," as Russell insists. Cordwainers work with fine soft leather rather than the hobnails and wooden soles of normal shoemakers. Such distinctions made a big difference in the Thirties in places like Idle; proud communities defined by hard graft where the work had started to dry up. William Russell had served during the First World War with the Durham Light Infantry, fighting at the Somme and at Ypres. He survived the war, but like many of the lost generation, returned with hidden scars. “My dad was a sick man,” Russell says. “He had shell shock and it affected his mind. But he was a super bloke. He never spoke about it much. The only thing I remember he did tell us was when some of his comrades were shot at dawn for desertion. I think that affected him as much as anything.” Despite this mental trauma, William Russell managed to rebuild his life in peacetime. He married Marian, in 1922, and had three sons, Ken, Aubrey and Harry, and a daughter, Mary. He worked quietly and determinedly for his family. “He was an excellent shoe repairer,” says Russell. “He could nail and sew soles on so that you couldn’t see the stitching. But I’ll tell you, quite bluntly, we were born into absolute poverty. “Home was a back-to-back, one-up-one-down terraced house. Us boys slept in what they call a box room, it fitted a three-quarter bed [six inches wider than a single] which we all slept in. All three of us shared that.” “I pulled the brake, nothing happened. I had to choose between a cast iron lamp post or a dry stone wall. I hit the wall.” It was on these terraced, cobbled streets, stained black by the hulking mill chimneys, that William Russell presented eight-year-old Ken with his first bike. He had built it himself from scratch using foraged scrap metal from local tips, and some paternal intuition meant he gave it to Ken, his youngest son. “It didn’t have a saddle on so I had to sit in the loop of the frame. For my first ride I set off down the hill we lived on but my dad hadn’t tightened the draw bolt on the front brake. When I put it on, nothing happened. It was fairly steep and I had to choose between a cast iron lamp post or a dry stone wall. I hit the wall.” The family’s fortunes slowly picked up during the late Thirties and by the outbreak of the Second World War they had a new house, a modest-three-storey terrace in the nearby village of Thackley. And Ken had a new bike: a second-hand 18-inch frame Raleigh Roadster on which he used to cycle the 16-mile round trip to Carlton High School, in Bradford. He persuaded his parents to buy him the bike as travel sickness prevented him from taking the trolley bus. Like most working-class teenagers, Ken left school at 14 and went to work, at Martin’s Dyers and Cleaners in Apperley Bridge on the outskirts of Bradford, earning £3 a week. “Quite a good wage for the time,” he says.

After returning traumatised from the Western Front, Ken’s father William Russell wed his mother, Marian, in 1922 Ken, 15, right, and his eldest brother Aubrey, 17, left Ken, centre, with his first cycling club on the steep terraced streets of Thackley Ken on his first racing bike, ‘it was all black, only the handlebars were chrome’

His oldest brother, Harry, earned slightly more, as a bicycle mechanic at Ellis-Briggs Cycles in the nearby mill town of Shipley. The shop had opened in 1936, founded by two Leeds businessmen, Thomas Briggs and his brother-in-law Leonard Ellis, and was one of dozens of manufacturers and frame builders in an area where the bicycle ruled and nobody owned a car. But when Britain went to war, Yorkshire’s bike builders and riders downed their tools and went to fight. Harry volunteered to join the RAF. Ellis-Briggs Cycles was reduced to selling anything from stove enamel to toy battleships. On the outbreak of war, Ken’s brother Harry left Ellis-Briggs Cycles and volunteered to join the RAF Harry was sent for training at Bomber Command No.166 Squadron at RAF Kirmington, in Lincolnshire. But he died before he even made it into battle. On July 30, 1945, the 21-year-old and all five other crew members were killed when a Lancaster Bomber they were training in crashed on approach to the airbase. Some 3,000 crew members died in Bomber Command training accidents during the war. The condolence letter received by the Russell family from Wing Commander R.L. Vivian, dated July 31, 1945, was curt. Ken recalls seeing his father cry for the first time once he had read the typed single page bearing Wing Commander Vivian’s signature in green ink. Losing his first son was to prove his breaking point. He struggled on for a few more years before being sectioned at the Menston Mental Hospital. He was never released, remaining a resident there for 20 more years before he passed away. Soon after Harry’s death, his mother, Marian, went to visit Leonard Ellis and Thomas Briggs. She returned with a new bike, specially built by the shop’s remaining mechanics for Ken in memory of his brother. “It just happened,” he says. “I didn’t know the details of what had been discussed. I just got this bike. It was what you’d call a sports bike, with drop handlebars and gas pipe tubing, and it was all black, the rims and everything. Only the handlebars were chrome. It wasn’t as if they saw any talent in me or anything like that; my legs were too skinny for that.” Compared to anything he had ridden before, this bike was a beauty. The 16-year-old and his friends formed an amateur cycling club. Russell started to cycle in earnest. On weekends he would head out on mammoth rides into the Dales. On one occasion, he crashed into a sheep and was briefly knocked out. After that, and following the dry stone wall incident, he insists his lesson was learnt, not least as his mother would inevitably apply stinging iodine to his cuts.

00:00 00:00 That's how my racing started

Cycling as a sport was in its infancy. A ban on road racing implemented in the late 19th century had persisted until the 1940s and it was still frowned upon after the war. The bicycle was, on the whole, seen as a machine of the working classes and viewed with suspicion for the mobility it gave the common man. Britain’s elite did not relish the idea of mill hands and factory workers racing along roads that, until then, had been the preserve of those who could afford a car. Even after the ban was lifted, Ken remembers being stopped by the police during races. The West Riding of Yorkshire, however, was a hotbed of talent honed on its ferociously steep hills. Ken joined the Bradford Racing Club and started taking part in evening time trials and speedway races. In his spare time, he worked as a frame builder at the Bradford bike shop, Whitaker and Mapplebeck. Soon, he was winning amateur races and making a name for himself against national riders. “There was no hope of a career at that time,” he says. “I did it because I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the competition. I enjoyed winning. I suppose you could call that ruthless, but I rode to win.” In 1948, called up for national service, he joined the RAF and stormed through Armed Forces cycling time trials as well as continuing to win numerous road races. “That,” Russell says, “was when I really got going.” In between races and his RAF duties, every spare minute was spent training on his bike. Home on leave in Yorkshire in 1949, he was invited to the Christmas lunch of the Aire Valley Road Club and, for want of anything smarter, he wore his RAF uniform and decided to take the bus. It was a good day to be looking his best. A talented young club cyclist called Renee was also at the lunch. Ken, who was a rather shy, private young man, caught her eye. “It must have been the uniform I fell for,” smiles Renee. Soon, they were courting, going to Saturday night dances at the King’s Hall in Idle. In 1950, Ken was demobbed. The following year the first ever Tour of Britain was launched: a 12-stage race over two weeks starting in Hastings and going as far as Glasgow before finishing in London two weeks later. Organised by the British League of Racing Cyclists, it was to be a fairly haphazard affair: roads remained open to the public so riders had to dodge cars and stop at every halt sign, or face arrest. Some 55 cyclists from 13 teams from Britain, France and Ireland took part in the event. Ken, racing for a team called I.T.P, was part of a strong Yorkshire contingent. The county even boasted its own separate “Yorkshire” team, which included a 24-year-old scrap metal dealer from Leeds called Jimmy Savile. His racing name was “Oscar”, after the Oscar Egg bike from France that he rode, but true to form, Savile also called himself “The Duke”. “Before a race he would get one of his friends to bring a brush, comb and mirror to the start line,” says Ken. “He would turn up in a tuxedo and strip off. It was all show. He was a showman.” However, the showman “packed” (abandoned the race) early on. Ken’s team, too, was beset by problems. He recorded one stage win, between Cardiff and Wolverhampton, but otherwise he and his team-mates struggled to keep up with the pace. He finished 14th. Even now, he refuses to elaborate much beyond that. ***

Cycle racing has a barely-concealed dark side. Ferociously competitive and physically and mentally gruelling, there comes a point when riders must retreat deep within themselves. Even back then, many relied on drugs, albeit a far cry from the sophisticated blood doping practised by Lance Armstrong and countless other modern-day cyclists. Ken first became aware of the use of amphetamines in 1947, a hangover from the Second World War when the energy-boosting properties of the drugs led to them being distributed among soldiers. The scale of the problem was highlighted 20 years later by the death of the British cyclist Tommy Simpson, who collapsed during the Tour De France on Mt Ventoux in 1967. Amphetamines were found in his blood and more of the drugs in his hotel room. “I didn’t take them,” Ken says, “I wouldn’t have known where to get them from, anyway. I’ve never even had a drink, really. I take a shandy now and again but I’ve never been a drinking man. One reason was I probably couldn’t afford it, and my father didn’t drink, you see.” Ken was motivated by something else. Similar to last year’s Tour of Britain winner Sir Bradley Wiggins (whose estranged alcoholic father, himself a talented cyclist, died in suspicious circumstances in Australia), thoughts of his dad drove him. But whereas Wiggins's success stems from a determination not to end up like his father, for Ken, it was rather more simple: he wanted to win for him. At the end of 1951 he followed in Harry’s footsteps and moved to Ellis-Briggs Cycles to become a frame builder. Ken recalls the whole building rattling every time the steel cutting machine was turned on. He approached proprietor Leonard Ellis a few months after starting work, catching him on a good day when he hadn’t been to the pub. “I told him I wanted to ride for Ellis-Briggs in the 1952 tour and asked if they were prepared to provide the vehicle and back up. We didn’t talk about a team. That’s how it was. There was only me prepared to do it, I suppose.” Ken took the two weeks required to complete the race as his holiday allowance. The Tour of Britain has been through numerous guises over more than 60 years of history. The (now defunct) Milk Marketing Board sponsored it for 35 years from 1958 to 1993. The 1952 race was sponsored by the Daily Express newspaper. That year's field was far bigger than the previous year's, with 78 riders from 16 teams including France, Italy, West Germany, Ireland and the RAF. The favourites were the Viking team, led by the powerful six-foot Scot Ian Steel, who had won the previous year. For the 1952 tour, Steel had four riders supporting him. In cycling, everything depends on your teammates. Lesser riders are charged with the duty of protecting their team leader, riding close in front of them to provide a wind barrier and allowing them to rest their legs before they make their break. Ken, on his own, was seemingly without a hope. ***

The Tour of Britain began on August 22, beneath clear blue skies on the seafront at Hastings. Tens of thousands of holidaymakers lined the streets to wave the peloton off. The entire field of steel bicycles was estimated to be worth £4,800. Spare inner tubes were slung over cyclists’ shoulders, water bottles suspended from the front of the bike in the manner of a commuter’s shopping basket. A no-racing rule was imposed through built-up areas so the riders had to coast along for four miles before the “de-neutralisation” flag was waved and the pace shot up to 35 miles an hour. “At the start of the race I didn’t think I had a chance of winning,” Ken says. “I didn’t have a plan so much, I just rode as I always rode: to do my best.” At the end of the first 99-mile stage he finished second, close behind a young London rider called John Brackstone. “At inches”, was the official ruling, although Ken insists even now that he was ahead. The next day, an 85-mile loop between Southsea and Weymouth, Ken stormed first over the finish line in a lung-bursting sprint finish. Awarded the yellow jersey, his rivals started to take note, even though nobody thought it was anything more than beginner’s luck. But Ken had a more immediate problem: the 1936 Austin Van which Ellis-Briggs had hired as his support vehicle, driven by a friend of Ken’s from Bradford Racing Club called Frank McEnill, and which carried all his food and spare parts, could not keep up with the riders. The 1936 Austin Van which Ellis-Briggs had hired as his support vehicle often failed to keep up “He was supposed to hand out food and drink but the van was just never there,” Ken says. “Especially on the hills. I’ve no idea how fast it went, but not as fast as us.” The next day, after a gruelling climb over the Brecon Beacons - in parts so steep that Ken was reduced to jumping off his bike and running with it on his shoulder - the tour embarked on a 179-mile stage in brilliant sunshine between Aberystwyth and Blackpool. Ken once more left his van – and the other riders - for dead. The race organisers started to worry about the man the newspapers had dubbed the “Lone Wolf”. “My abiding memory is the head of the tour, Doug Peakall, the main bigwig, standing in the middle of the road waving his hands and shouting ‘Get him some food! Get him some food!’ because you see my van was way back. As it happened I was all right. I was always a bit like a camel, I could ride a long way without food and drink. That was probably one of my failings in the end. People used to tell me if I ate more then I would have done better.” By Stage 6, the race was in the north, and Ken was on home turf with the crowds on his side. The newsreels played his previous stage wins in picture houses and news of his early success was spreading. But the other teams were starting to gun for him now. He lost the yellow jersey at Carlisle, failing to finish in the top three either here, or in the next stage to Glasgow. 1952 Stage guides Stage 1 Stage 2 Stage 3 Stage 4 Stage 5 Stage 6 Stage 7 Stage 8 Stage 9 Stage 10 Stage 11 Stage 12 Stage 13 Stage 14 Renee – by then Ken’s fiancée - joined him in Scotland. She had managed to get a week off work as an office clerk and her presence made an immediate difference. She booked a room each night in hostels recommended by the Cycling Tourists’ Club handbook so that Ken was well away from the press pack that flitted about the other riders. He could enjoy his breakfast – milk beaten with two raw eggs and sugar followed by a bowl of cornflakes – in peace. The race swept up into Dundee, then Edinburgh, but Ken failed to achieve a podium finish in either stage. With only 49 cyclists left, the top teams had fought their way back into the race. Stage 10, a gruelling 112-mile ride between Edinburgh and Newcastle, was where many thought the tour would be decided. As they crossed the border back into England, another of the pre-race favourites, Leslie Scales (backed by the Sun team) stormed through to take the Yellow Jersey. Robert Maitland, for BSA Cycles, moved up into second place on general classification. Ken, who finished five minutes after the leaders along with a large bunch of 34 riders, dropped down into third place over all. That day, he nearly gave up the race. “I started feeling this pain in my knee,” he says. “I got very worried about it and in the evening I did talk about packing. I’d only packed once in a race before.” By the time he limped into Newcastle he needed urgent treatment, but all the official race physios were working for the big teams and refused to help. In desperation, Renee rushed to the first phone box she came across. While she was flicking through the directory, a man tapped on the glass to tell her he wanted to use the phone. Renee glared and said she was trying to find a masseur. "You've found one," he replied. The man was training to be a physiotherapist. He agreed to work on Ken's knee and refused payment. Renee wrote his name – John Durkin – and his address on a race programme which she later accidentally handed out to a fan.

78 riders were competing in the tour from 16 teams including France, Italy, West Germany, Ireland and the RAF When he was awarded the yellow jersey at the end of Stage 2, his rivals started to take note Once Ken started to win races, the newspapers dubbed him the “lone wolf” By stage 6 the race was in the north and news of his success was spreading

The next day, Ken stormed through Stage 11, finishing first on the Scarborough seafront, inches ahead of Ian Steel and nearly five minutes ahead of the main pack. Back in Yorkshire, the crowds were magnificent. The Mayor of Scarborough even promised Ken and Renee a free one-week honeymoon in the town once the tour was over. “Down south, very few people knew me, but up north it was different,” he says. “Scarborough was tremendous. Supporters had come all the way from Bradford, travelling 80 miles to see me either by bike or train – not many had cars then. It was wonderful.” With only three stages left, the rival teams tried to bully him out of the race. “Only once did I really feel they were ganging up on me,” he says. “On the Nottingham to Norwich stage (Stage 13) just before Grantham, there was this short climb and I found myself boxed in by the other riders. I did get out but it was too late. I had to really get my head down and do my nut to catch them on my own. I still managed to keep the yellow jersey, though.” Stage 14, the final leg, was a 119-mile route from Norwich to London. It was a Saturday, the sun watery in the sky, and Ken had a four-minute lead on his rivals. The field had by now nearly halved to 43 riders. One slip-up and he would lose the race. The pack tore along at 24mph with riders attempting breakaways just 15 miles into the stage. They shot through Thetford, then Newmarket, with Ken straining every sinew to keep his rivals in check. Then, coming out of Stevenage, his pedal crank began to work loose. In the years following the race, Ken and Renee became close friends with the Belgian Michaux and his wife Yvonne, staying in contact until his death a few years ago. Even now, Ken cracks a grin and tears spring to his eyes when he recounts the moment Michaux decided to give him his bike. At the time, there was not even a second to dwell on it. Ken leapt on to the borrowed machine and tore off to catch the pack. As he pedalled, he realised Michaux’s front forks were also cracked. All he could do was avoid the potholes and pray the borrowed bike stayed together. “Well, I said to myself, ‘now I’m going to bloody win it’.” The capital loomed and the roadside crowds thickened. Supporters had scrawled the riders’ names on the road surface, Ken, head down, couldn’t see his among them. “Well, I said to myself, 'now I’m definitely going to bloody win it',” he says. “I’d never seen that many people come to a race before. The final few miles were amazing. All I could think was, 'get to that line'.” He crossed the finish at Alexandra Palace in North London after a steep sprint and crumpled, stunned, to the floor. Someone pressed some flowers into his hands and he was mobbed by watching friends. The crowds roared as he was presented with the silver trophy and he was forced to make what he admits now was a “hopeless” speech. The press pack surrounded him for the first interview, but Ken had one thought: to get back to Yorkshire to see his dad, who had been following the race on the hospital radio.

00:00 00:00 They took me to see my dad