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Lord Mandelson of Foy in the county of Herefordshire and Hartlepool in the county of Durham, single shareholder in the late lamented Millennium Dome on Bugsby’s Marshes, talked confidentially to an unseen interrogator who appeared to be crouching on the floor of his chauffeured limousine as he drifted across London; and who remained, within earshot of an eavesdropped soliloquy, while the real PM perched in his office, alone with his compulsively agitated gizmos, grape-peelers, yoghurt spoon-removers, young men who read newspapers for him and blunt Irish fixers chewing on unrequired advice. Dripping with froideur, an imperious Mandelson nailed the upstart coalitionists for their absurd sense of entitlement. Hannah Rothschild’s vanity promo, unaccountably offered to the great unwashed by BBC4’s Storyville strand, sold itself on privileged (and clinically controlled) access to the ultimate political voice of the era, the oracle of tie-straightening and pantomimed sincerity. And how fascinating it was, after the fastidious documentation of eyebrow lifting, the heart-rending sighs over the shortcomings of colleagues and patrons, to be granted an unposed snapshot of the child behind the man, Mandelson’s short-trousered induction into political life. Boy Peter on a Hovis bicycle! That was the madeleine moment in an interminable chronicle of not-saying, arcane rituals of grazing and trouser-changing unmatched since Roberto Rossellini made The Taking by Power by Louis XIV for French television.

Triggered by an archive clip of his maternal grandfather, Herbert Morrison, another ennobled socialist cabinet minister, Mandelson launched into a memoir of cycling around Hendon, committee room to polling station, bearing leaflets, carrying messages as proudly as the freshly baked loaves in Ridley Scott’s celebrated commercial, shot in 1973, on the picturesque slopes of Shaftesbury. Carl Barlow, the youth who featured in the advertisement, underscored by the slow movement of Dvorak’s Symphony No 9, arranged for brass, went on to become a fireman in East Ham. And, presumably, to find himself caught up in the aggravations of the Thatcher period, the climate of economic belt-tightening and union-bashing. Lord Tebbit’s helpful remarks, delivered to a sea of grey heads, at Blackpool in 1981, in the aftermath of the Handsworth and Brixton riots, will have carried a special charge for Barlow. ‘On yer bike!’

Hovis preceded Boris (Mayor Johnson) as sponsor of the cult of cycling, but the whole business, so attractive to ad men and lavishly rewarded imagineers, never moved far from Scott’s syrupy terrain. (Scott was a cycle obsessive. His first short film, made in 1965 in his student days at the Royal College of Art, and featuring his younger brother Tony schlepping around Hartlepool, was called Boy and Bicycle.) Every inch peddled, every tiptoeing carbon-footprint advance, is a political act. YouTube is blistered with competitive bicycle imagery: naked propaganda for anarcho-liberal bikes-for-all schemes funded by the generosity of corporate bankers. Cyberspace has been colonised by guerrilla footage of the real Boris Johnson jabbering on his cell phone and wobbling towards City Hall, as well as faked sequences of a clown with an unshorn flop of albino hair stunting around underpasses and concrete ramps. The Tebbit sound-bark has come back, to remind us how neatly bogus bicycle rhetoric chimes with agitation in the streets, with the slashing of social services, while tickling the belly of Leviathan, the corporate monster. Thatcher’s employment secretary, a former BOAC pilot, not yet parachuted into the House of Lords, summoned up the defining moment of his childhood, and as with Mandelson, it involved a bicycle. ‘I grew up in the 1930s with an unemployed father,’ Tebbit avowed. ‘He didn’t riot. He got on his bike and looked for work.’

Man and machine intermingle, molecules shaken by the cobbles, until the tragic paterfamilias, puffing from factory gate to factory gate, becomes a symbol of the decade, a centaur of integrity, half-man, half-bike, in the fashion of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman. How far Father Tebbit actually travelled in his quest for employment is unclear. Norman was born in Ponders End and elected to Parliament as the member for Chingford, a distance of about three miles. Ponders End is more of a transport collision than a settlement and nobody needs much political arm-twisting to move on. Probably the best account of the place is found in a Gerald Kersh novel, Fowler’s End (1957). A character, setting out to locate this uncelebrated railway halt, navigates by revulsion. Starting on Tottenham Court Road, he heads north, always choosing the worst option when the path divides. ‘Who Ponder was and how he ended, the merciful God knows. Once upon a time it was a quagmire; now it is a swamp, biding its time ... Here the city gives up the game.’

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Vol. 33 No. 3 · 3 February 2011

Iain Sinclair suggests that the new urban cyclist is a phenomenon of the last decade but the move from the kind of bicycle culture figured in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning may have occurred much earlier (LRB, 20 January). The design historian Reyner Banham argued that in Britain there had been a shift from the proletarian cyclist to a new type of urban middle-class rider, symbolised by the Moulton, a bicycle with small wheels, an innovative design and a progressive cultural image. The Moulton appealed to the socially mobile, according to Banham, partly because of an ingenious technical specification in the form of a polythene ring on the chain wheel, designed to keep clothing free from oil and constituting ‘a minor cultural revolution’, liberating the rider from ‘that badge of social shame: trouser clips’. Banham rode a Moulton himself and considered it to signify his own transition from working-class ‘scholarship boy’ to metropolitan intellectual. For ‘Central London and the West End’, it was the ‘thinking man’s vehicle’.

Chris Goldie
Sheffield Hallam University

In his article on Boris bikes and North London canalside activity, Iain Sinclair claims that ‘tight T-shirts’ are obligatory for the self-punishing joggers of Hackney. Let the record show that I favour a looser fit.

Phil Rhys Thomas
London N1

Vol. 33 No. 4 · 17 February 2011

Iain Sinclair’s article on cycling in London reminded me of my short time working as a courier in the mid-1990s (LRB, 20 January). The semi-crazed feelings of megalomania that scything through the streets and pathways of the City of London gave me were intoxicating and frightening (and thankfully short-lived). The sense of invincibility and power was tempered by the guilt that roamed my thoughts in the evenings, after the adrenalin subsided and the dirt and sweat – sometimes blood – were washed away. Even today, when I see such freewheeling behaviour, I occasionally feel somewhat shamefaced at the memories. Frightened pedestrians, astonished motorists and dented cars were the collateral damage of work that relied on speed and aggression for its meaning, satisfaction and productivity: the quicker the jobs were completed, the more jobs done, the more money made. Your equipment mattered too. My Brick Lane-bought Raleigh road bike was woefully inadequate, but was soon painted (first kingfisher blue, then Marin fluorescent yellow) and modified. Derailleur gears were quickly removed and clothes and bag were adapted. I learned my lessons: about London, its geography, streets and how it fits together. Based at Slaughter and May’s car park near Moorgate, small gangs of us – novices, masters and legends – would smoke and eat and fidget with radios, keen to be on our way. Conversation was never very expansive. Stories of accidents and death were common. Some of the career couriers were cycling obsessives, had all the gear, and worked because it paid for their training. For others, like me, it was simply casual work, if somewhat in your face.

Simon Down
Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Wasn’t it Jarry, mentioned by Iain Sinclair, who used a revolver instead of a bicycle bell? And didn’t he reassure a pregnant woman who complained that he had so startled her that she might lose her baby: ‘In that eventuality, madame, I shall make you another’?

David Maclagan
Holmfirth, West Yorkshire

At the risk of being anorakesque I’d like to point out that Dr Alex Moulton did not invent any outer ring to protect the rider from chain ring teeth, and while a clip-on plastic ring appeared on F-frame Moultons, there is no such thing on later space frame machines (Letters, 3 February). Guarding against the chain goes back into early cycling history, the full chain case appearing on Raleigh, Humber, Rudge etc any time from 1900, and on Dutch bikes still today, although nowadays plastic. Top of the range Sunbeam, made famous by Elgar, had its patent Small Oil Bath. Riding my Sunbeam wearing plus-fours (correct period costume), I don’t need to worry about the social implications of trouser clips. Later chain guards became the ‘hockey stick’, light steel bearing decals of the builder’s name in Britain, often aluminium pressed with the maker’s name in Europe. As for ladies’ protection, the skirt guard needed many small holes round the top of the rear mudguard and a web of string down to the chain stay to keep the skirt out of the spokes of the rear wheel.

Some are of the opinion that the trouser clip is very middle class, any working man cycling to work just sticking his turn-ups into his socks, or if wearing overalls being unworried by oil. Should a Marxist academic renounce that bourgeois badge of shame the trouser clip by sticking his trousers into his socks?

Stephen Kay
Abergavenny, Monmouthshire

I recall the 1950s, when a group of cycle-clip unchallenged teenage friends would meet at Liverpool Pier Head on Sunday morning, cross on the ferry to Wallasey and cycle 30-odd miles on the New Chester Road (suicidal today) into the Clwyd Hills of North Wales, pack-lunch and back again; a prospect far less daunting than Iain Sinclair’s experience battling the Peletonistics of Boris’s Barclays branded bike battles on the towpaths of North London, where I imagine neither Moulton small-wheelers nor unbranded loose T-shirts are much in evidence (Letters, 3 February).

Gordon Petherbridge
Buckingham

Vol. 33 No. 5 · 3 March 2011

Iain Sinclair’s treatment of John Major – ‘a gap-year, work experience prime minister sleepwalking through the job as a profile-raising opportunity’ – is wonderfully imperceptive (LRB, 20 January). I used to say hard things about politicians for a living, but I tried to watch the facts. In 1990, John Major inherited not just membership of the ERM, but the pound’s too high valuation there, which had been insisted on by Margaret Thatcher. A speculator’s bouncy castle, it was a horrid start. However Major had one asset: exit meant devaluation. With Kenneth Clarke, he managed the consequences wholly successfully, as ministers after 1949 and 1968 did not. There followed four years and more of rising economic growth, inward investment and employment. In foreign policy, Major turned the Gulf War to good use by securing the Kurdish enclaves, which are still working. Both courses of action represented good, intelligent government. A contemptible petty bourgeois in Sinclair’s eyes, the evidence shows Major as exercising serious purposes not very evident since 1997.

Edward Pearce
York

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