Bert Harris Of The Poly – A Cycling Legend, Dick Swann (1964)

A brief spin around the world of late Victorian velodromes in pursuit of one that that era’s outstanding stars

Vance Harvey Publishing Octo 69pp £1.30

When Bert Harris died in 1887, after an accident during a race in a velodrome in Birmingham, tens of thousands of people lined the streets of his native Leicester to pay their respects. Little wonder. The 24-year-old cyclist was among the best five or six riders in the world. Competing in the UK, France, and Australia, he could beat pretty much all comers in distances from quarter of a mile to ten miles – and was rarely out of the top three.

His name, today, like most late Victorian and Edwardian sportsmen, is all but unknown. This is not that surprising – the world inhabited is long gone. The rise of road racing, motor sport and football made that moment when there were dozens of velodromes up and down the UK, and everywhere else in the developed world, seem almost impossibly remote.

This account of Harris’ life is rather dry. It is a competent chronicle of his racing career, assembled largely form contemporaneous newspaper accounts, but there is little in the way of cultural contextualisation or the testimony of contemporaries.

There are some interesting notes however, the track-cycling legacy enjoyed by other sports to this day, for example. Aston Villa’s ground, the Oval cricket ground, Headingly cricket ground and the Leicestershire country cricket ground all started life as velodromes.

The dramatic way that successive technical development shaped cycle sport in a short space of years is also fascinating. Tyre and wheel technology evolved very quickly in the 1890s and early adopters of pneumatic tyres and tubeless tyres, to give just two examples, gained significant short-lived advantage over their competitors.

More than anything, however, this volume left me yearning for a book that treated the early years of cycle racing as a whole – what a fascinating read that might make.

Incidentally, for those not familiar with the club, the Polytechnic Cycling Club is a venerable, and still extant institution that was spun out of Regent Street Polytechnic (known subsequently as Westminster Polytechnic and The University of Westminster).

PS Aug 10