Sample extract
There are a lot of butchers in this story. The setting for it is mostly in the Nineteenth Century iron and coal producing area in the upper reaches of the Cynon and Rhymney Valleys of South Wales. The town of Merthyr Tydfil creeps in there as well, as does Cardiff and also Newport. London plays quite a role, just as it always seems to, with the really juicy bits occurring where else but Paris.One Saturday morning mid-December there were four of us sat drinking tea in the kitchen at Brian Walbeoff’s house. He had only recently stopped being a butcher, here in New Tredegar. The business had been founded by his grandfather round the time of Arthur Linton’s funeral. Everyone in this village had been served their chops and shanks here at one time. All the goings on down the decades had been related over the counter. Here we were talking mostly about Willy Michael, brother of Jimmy, the butchers boy of Aberaman who had been lent his first bike by his neighbour – the same Arthur Linton- and went on to the short life of a celebrity champion. As the mood between us, the other two being Mrs Walbeoff and a lady whose impish remarks belied her advanced years, lightened it was as if some kind of time blanket had draped the Rymney Valley. The air was thick with coal dust from Elliott’s colliery once more and Willy Michael could be heard shovelling in the coal for a neighbour younger then himself by 20 years.
This was most probably the most wonderful thing to have happened in the fifteen months it had taken to trawl through the records and the premises of a group of men long dead. A community without a sense of time, bound together by personal images of places, machines and achievements for which only tenuous reality still exists.
They were present at the most momentous of events, those people of Aberaman and Aberdare lining the route and following the cortege on that far-off July morning. In the kitchen of the house behind the butcher’s shop the funeral was still going on, really.
The first question people would ask when told that the first winner of a bona fide World Cycling Championship and the first man to be recognized as ‘World Champion’ by the citizens of another nation both came from one community in a remote valley at the very edge of Europe is “How?” “How did that come to be? Aberdare? Where’s that?”
Funeral notice
Arthur's preparation for Bordeaux-Paris included 4th place in the first-ever Paris-Roubaix (April 1896). The roads around Cysoing, 30km from the finish of the 'Hell of the North' haven't changed very much.
In the Cynon Valley, mid 1960's. a different kind of cycle racing 'Hell' near Mountain Ash. There were 10 sets of level crossings every lap!
The other Arthur - Gould and Linton two champions'
' reproduced from 'Une Journee en Enfer' (2006) Phillippe Bouvet et al.
Following Arthur's funeral, Tom Linton became contracted to race in New York, where his chief rival in a three year period was no less than Jimmy Michael. These two extracts from the New York Times give a measure of the excitement the Aberaman boys created. Click here
'More pictures of the original Ras De Cymru in its glory years (1965-75) have been suppiled by Bob Phillips'. Click here
The Milk Race made many passages through South Wales throughout its 35-year history, this clip details one of the most memorable. There is a connection to the story of Jimmy Michael, his family roots lie in the Irfon Valley, also home to Devil's Staircase.
More will follow concerning the Milk Race, no coherent written history is in print as yet.
DVD including this edition of the Milk Race and Paris-Roubaix History available for £5.99 via PayPal or by phone 01924 501928
Aberaman Cycling Club 23 August 1931, submitted by Haydn Williams of the Cynon Valley History Society. Not a hint of lycra or a plastic helmet to be seen.
