PEDALLING POLAND, BERNARD NEWMAN (1935)
Peach Publishing, 978 1 78036 327 1 2017 eBook reissue 351pp £3.99
An engaging roadside portrait of Poland in the thirties
‘Spyclists’ sparked a wave of British scare stories in 1937. Pedalling members of the Hitler Youth, it was feared, were touring the countryside taking careful notes that might assist an invading army. MI5 instructed Chief Constables to keep a special eye on Teutonic two wheelers as they traversed Blighty’s byways.
How real was that threat is hard to know. What is certain, however, is that Britain’s spooks had been sending cycling intelligence gatherers to Europe for many years before the ‘spyclist scare’.
On the available evidence, Bernard Newman was the greatest of them all, not least because he worked in plain sight.
Newman wrote more than 30 cycling books between 1930 and 1960, as well as 120 other volumes, some fiction, others devoted to espionage, about which he was a renowned expert.
His covert activities began on WW1’s western front where his fluent French made him a useful intelligence gatherer.
He finished the war a staff sergeant, and after demobilisation took a junior civil service role. Soon though, his travels, writing and lectures enveloped his life. A staple of the ‘magic lantern circuit’ he gave over 2,000 lectures, he produced books in 12 weeks, and for decades published three titles a year.
By the time he and his three-speed roadster – George – rolled into Poland in 1934, he was nearly 40, an established author, and painted himself as an unathletic everyman. He sailed into Danzig (now Gdansk), then rode though the ‘Polish corridor’, and to Warsaw, Krakow, and Silesia, before returning through Lviv and then north to East Prussia.
The Poland he visited is that of the ‘Second Republic’, whose recomposition was arguably the miracle of the Treaty of Versailles. For the 150 years previously, the country had been divided between Germany, Russia and Austria. Among Newman’s most interesting observations, are the radical differences in development between the three areas of occupation.
Deploying the easy prose of a professional, he observes town and village life, the state of roads, the apparent class structure of communities, and, where they exist, the racial tensions. He has an extraordinary knack of falling in with people from every walk of life, and getting into colourful scrapes. His unplanned turn as a cabaret artiste and his escape from a charging bison are among the best. Without any sense pomposity, he lunches, by chance, with squires, mayors and government ministers as well as bedding down with tramps.
The result is an extraordinary picture of a country reasserting itself as a major European power for which Newman is full of praise. It makes a brilliant, and illuminating primer for anyone seeking to understand the country, even 90 years after original publication. There are changed features, of course – Danzig and ‘the corridor’ become fully Polish, Vilnius was returned to Lithuania, and a huge swathe of land around Lviv becomes part of Ukraine. Such fluid borders seem now extraordinary.
Occasionally his characterisations of subsets of people is an uncomfortable throwback to the 1930s. For example, “I can hand (Polish women) no prize in a beauty competition, I take off my hat to their brains. The peasant women is acute and intelligent, the educated woman almost invariably brilliant.” He is no antisemite, but his portraits of Jewish living conditions in some cities makes uncomfortable reading.
In common with most commentators that year, Newman has no sense of the catastrophe awaiting Poland. He has seen Nazis up close, and senses that enthusiasm for Hitler among Germans has peaked.
Taken at face value, Pedalling Poland is the kind of comprehensive and clear-eyed briefing that would be useful to anyone needing to gain a quick understanding of the country. (A recent Polish reissue received good notices in Poland itself.) During his lifetime, Newman both hinted that he was a spy, and denied the possibility. More recently, his family have become convinced that, as well as travel material, he made discreet notes, presumably of critical infrastructure, and public sentiment, that he passed to the UK’s security services.
Given the challenging course of Britain’s early intervention in WW2, perhaps too few spyclists were deployed? Or maybe there simply weren’t enough sharp-eyed fellows who could ride 100 miles a day, fall into easy conversation with anyone they met, and produce compelling narrative? If that is the case, Newman’s endeavours deserve nothing but praise. Fresh appreciation for his work following recent republication of his cycling titles is surely the least recognition he deserves? It diminishes the book’s quality not one jot that his real significance might lie in works that he wrote for a far smaller audience.
TD Oct 25