CONTENTS 1 Moore the Merrier 2 Tracks of Tears3 Trials of Our Times4 Strange Tales from Abroad5 Secret Success6 And, Therefore, This Country is at War ...7 Road to Victory8 Welcome to the Pleasuredrome9 Six-Day Wonders10 The Name on the Frame11 Monsieur Robinson; Mr Tom12 Milk Makes a Man of You13 The Firing Squad14 The Unknown Hero15 Sixty Minutes of Sixty Seconds16 Dash for the Cash17 Gold at the Rainbow’s End18 A Scandal on Wheels19 Un Millar Peut en Cacher un Autre20 This Sceptred Isle

Appendix

- The Tours of Britain

Arthur Metcalfe (winner of the Milk Race in 1964)before the start of the 1965 race at Brighton

13THE FIRING SQUAD

The grand gestures of the bike trade in the 1950s were its death throes.

The pro team didn’t nish Hercules but it did little to keep it going.

The same went for BSA and the rest. By 1958 BSA, Triumph, NewHudson and Sunbeam were part of Raleigh; Hercules, Armstrong, James, Norman, Sun and the chain company Brampton and others had all beentaken over by Raleigh’s rival, the British Cycle Corporation.BCC was in turn owned by Tube Investments, which ran the bikeconglomerate to protect its market. Its chairman was John Reith, theterrifying, heavy-browed and scar-faced 1st Baron Reith of Stonehaven

who became Director General of the edgling BBC in 1927. He left there

in 1938 to run Imperial Airways, the start of a steady decline in his career which took him to Tube Investments after the war. Although brilliant inhis conception of public-service broadcasting against the commercialismof its American equivalent, he was dour and unmoving and hardly the

man to put re into a dying bike industry.

A sternly religious man with old-world attitudes, Reith insisted theBBC broadcast nothing on Sunday mornings and only solemn music inthe afternoons. He was forced out of that when pirate stations openingon the French coast took his audience, but he stuck to his principles and

was said to re employees who divorced. Persuaded not to dispense with

one broadcaster, he thundered: ‘He can stay, but ensure that he never reads the epilogue.’ The epilogue was the end-of-day religious readingon which Reith insisted.Reith could afford to wait. He watched Raleigh open a third factory in Nottingham – the guest was the equally abrasive Bernard Montgomery,the wartime military leader and Eisenhower’s troublesome deputy for D-Day – and slowly overextend itself.‘The future was set for a clash of the Titans: says Mike Breckon. ‘The