Category: Sportspeople

A cold, wet January morning was not the best time to enter Llandrindod Wells. The town looked tired: the streets mean and unwelcoming; shops closed or empty of customers; a few wan pedestrians moving sluggishly, inadequately protected against the relentless rain.

It had not always been like this, for Llandrindod Wells has mineral springs, and the advent of the railways in the 1860s led to an economic boom as wealthy visitors arrived with their servants from South Wales, the Midlands and the Northwest of England. From May to mid-October, they drank the chalybeate waters.

Hotels and boarding houses, shops, theatres, parks, gardens and boating lakes opened to serve them. Rock Park, a woodland area traversed by paths, waterfalls and bridges fell steeply to the river where the Victorian spa buildings, bath house and pump room, were located. Here the orchestra played while the patrons sipped tea to take away the taste of their sulphur and saline elixirs.

It all ended with the First World War when refugees and wounded soldiers were billeted on the hotels. By the 1920s and 1930s the fashion had swung away from spas and instead holiday makers sought seaside guesthouses and lodgings. The final blow came with the closure of the Mid-Wales railway line in the 1960s. The lights went out, the musicians packed up their instruments, the grand hotels closed or were converted into flats and offices.

Yet there are always hidden gems in what may at first look an unprepossessing environment, and I have a partiality for small run-down towns nestled in a time warp. So as my umbrella directed its runoff down the back of my neck, I made a perambulation of the town in the footsteps of those early spa visitors. And there is a worthy array of Victorian and Edwardian architecture, all balconies, brickwork, and bay windows. Moreover, even when the town had passed its heyday two magnificent art deco garages, Pritchards and the Automobile Palace, had opened to service the new motorcars, even though the latter were only passing through.

I was less enamoured with Rock Park; I have never shared the Romantics maudlin enthusiasm for gloomy woods, and the forsaken spa buildings looked pitiful.

So quickly back to the town centre and the Metropole Hotel, opened in 1872 as Coleman’s, and famed for receiving an unwelcome guest in the form of a lioness in 1889 when Wombwell’s Menagerie was exhibiting on the lawns opposite. In 1911 Elizabeth Miller bought up the cutlery, china, and carpets from the defunct Metropole Hotel in Cromer; since all the items bore an “M” monogram she renamed her hotel to match them. The hotel survived requisitioning in both world wars, replaced its stables with garages, boasted an outdoor pool in the 1930s, and through the decades exercised a protean capacity to reinvent itself and survive where others failed.

Today its income is bolstered by the conference and wedding trade. And, as I discovered when I settled into its “sun lounge,” a conservatory-like structure running the length of its façade, it is an extremely popular spot with the ladies of the town for morning coffee. It is an accommodating place where the friendly staff are pleased rather than otherwise if you explore the public rooms and staircases admiring the older fixtures and fittings.

Posters advertised forthcoming “Dinner-Dances.” I have never been to a dinner-dance; I thought they had vanished in my childhood. They sound at once quaint and glamorous. Having a “date” – another phenomenon which I assumed had disappeared half a century ago until it reappeared in the rebarbative, coy expression “date-night” – is obviously a prerequisite. If you can rustle one up, I recommend that you head for the Metropole at the next opportunity.

But in the absence of date, dinner and dance, I sought the object of my visit to Llandrindod Wells, the National Cycle Museum. You do not have to be a cycling aficionado to love this museum. It has a wonderful collection of vintage cycles: from an 1818 hobby horse, through a selection of transitionals and velocipedes, a wooden tricycle, penny farthings, a sociable, tandems, shop bikes, police bikes, and ice cream carts. Sleek modern racing bikes and carbon fibre models compete for attention with trophies and badges recalling past races and cycling clubs. Old photographs trace changing fashions in cycling apparel.

But I was in quest of one particular artefact: the gravestone of Maurice Selbach.

Selbach had no connections at all with Llandrindod Wells. His origins were more exotic. He was born in Paris in 1889 to an American engineer father of German descent and a Polish Countess mother, Marguerite Kossakowska. They moved to London during his childhood.

Selbach was a successful amateur cyclist, specialising in long distance time trials. He broke records for Lands’ End to London and for London to Bath and back, and for the 100-mile tandem trial. He turned professional in 1922 after cycling in the Anerley 12 Event* on a day when he was meant to be at work. His boss was competing in the same race, and as Selbach overtook him an angry shout advised him that he was sacked.

Riding for the French Louvet team in the Paris-Roubaix race in 1923, Selbach was the first rider to represent Britain in a major continental road race.

After his success in the six-day cycle race at Olympia the same year his fellow American Gordon Selfridge set up a display in one of his shop windows with Selbach’s bike surrounded by stars and stripes and union jacks.

In 1924 when Selbach retired after fourteen years as a competitor, he opened a business in south London, designing and producing bicycles to the highest standards. Selbach bikes were distinguished by their advanced level of technological innovation. Cycling buffs speak in hallowed tones of his use of tapered tubing and roller bearings in quality frame building, and of the Selbach crownlite alloy bolt-on calliper brake. They recall his design of the first curved seat tube for a tandem. In short, in the 1920s and 1930s, a Selbach was the nonpareil of lightweight bikes.

Selbach was also a fan of American cars: he owned several and used his Buick to deliver his bicycles to London customers. But he continued to cycle to work, and one morning in 1935 as he tried to overtake a truck, his front wheel caught in a tramline. Selbach crashed into the truck and fell under its wheels; he died on the way to hospital.

A delightful grave-marker, in Streatham cemetery in south London, bore his portrait, a sculpted bicycle leaning against a milestone, a finger-post, and the words

He died as he lived, a cyclist.

But in the 1990s there were plans to clear the cemetery for commercial development. Two local cycling enthusiasts, reluctant to see the memorial disappear, acquired the stone and persuaded the National Cycle Museum to transport it to Llandrindod Wells. And there it is today, surrounded by bikes, including two manufactured by Selbach himself.

Next year, on 4 July 2027, the Tour de France Grand Depart Stage 3 will pass through Llandrindod Wells. Selbach will be there to cheer the riders on.

_____________________________________________

*For fascinating detail on the history of the Anerley Bicycle Club, one of the oldest in the country, and the Anerley 12 Event see anerleybc.org/history-1881

The National Cycle Museum, run by lovely volunteers, and located in the former Automobile Palace is well worth a visit.

http://www.cyclemuseum.org.uk

Happily,Streatham cemetery had a reprieve, as there are other interesting people there…

The first sign appeared in late January when I noticed that the wine rack had been pushed to one side to accommodate a generous collection of beers. The Six Nations Championship was imminent, and my partner was making his preparations. When I was teaching I always received two forewarnings as the Head of Games would hand out Sweepstake Charts. A little judicious questioning at home usually enabled me to surprise the staff room with the moderate accuracy of my predictions.

Now there is only the one alert signifying that during  the coming six weeks I will be periodically banned from the television room unless I guarantee To Remain Silent or at least Not To Ask Stupid Questions. (This stipulation rises to a crescendo during the cricket season.)

The temptation to watch some exceptionally large men apparently bent on inflicting the maximum amount of pain on one another is not great and I rarely infringe the ruling. Occasionally, under the mistaken impression that a match cannot yet have begun or must be over, I encounter the pre- or post-match discussion. Once I recognised one of the pundits who had been on my PGCE course many years ago. My partner has never been more impressed: “Lock Forward,” he murmured in awed tones, “three caps in the 1989  British Lions tour of Australia. Part of the England side that won the Five Nations Grand Slam in 1991. You knew him? You never mentioned this before?”

“Well, I hardly knew him, we just did our teacher training in the same department.” I dredged my memory. “He was the only one who avoided a scolding if he missed classes, and the first to be offered a job.” A faint recollection stirred, “I think it was in quite a prestigious school, but they didn’t have any slack in the English department, so they offered him some junior Latin. We were all impressed until he revealed he only had O-level Latin. It was obviously the rugby they were after.” My partner gave me a look of contempt, clearly I did not recognise the importance of my brief encounter.

The only other reminiscence I could conjure involved standing chatting to the great lock forward as we waited to go into the examination hall. Suddenly he was joined by half a dozen of his mates, and as deep, hearty voices resounded, I found myself trapped in a forest of massive denim thighs: “It was like being surrounded by giants. Literally, I was at eye level with all these huge thighs, while voices boomed above me.”  “The second row,” said my partner with a weary and withering sigh, “are always very tall.”

This was the longest discussion we ever had of rugby  until we took a holiday in the south of France. There in Menton, at the top of the Colla Rogna hill, on the site of the old castle above the town, sits a stunning little cemetery. Its fortunate occupants, shaded by the cypress trees, can view the harbour and the promenade, the Mediterranean stretching in one direction to the Italian Riviera and in the other to Cap Martin, and all beneath an intense cerulean sky. We climbed up through the narrow streets of the old town, and at the top I wandered through the section of the cemetery generously provided for the residents of foreign colonies. In the nineteenth century  large numbers of minor poets, academics, and clergymen from chilly, northern countries brought their agues, distempers, and infirmities to the sunny place, though they seldom survived for long.

A sudden shout from my partner drew my attention to one flat and one upright marble stone, surrounded by beribboned railings and fronted by a collection of plaques.

The upright stone provided all the explanation I needed:

The small plaques presented by rugby teams and enthusiasts pay further tribute to this achievement:

Here lay the man hallowed by rugby enthusiasts around the world. He attended Rugby School from 1816-1825 and is credited with picking up the ball in a school football match of 1823 and running with it thus inventing the new game, whose agreed rules were later written down by boys at the school in 1845.

The veracity of this story is however in some doubt. It did not surface until 1876, more than fifty years after the putative event, and four years after the death of Webb Ellis. In the intervening years no one seems to have heard it. Its origins lay with  Matthew Bloxam, Old Rugbeian, and antiquarian of Rugby, who claimed to have learnt it from an unnamed source. In 1895 when the Old Rugbeian Society investigated the story they were unable to find any first-hand evidence of the occurrence. Contemporaries of Webb Ellis did not remember the infamous match and others recalled that running with the ball, though not unknown, both before and after 1823, remained forbidden in the 1830s.

Moreover, almost concealed beneath these new stones, the original flat grave marker makes no reference to rugby, recording only the death of the rector of a London church.

It is indeed improbable that the actions of a single boy changed the game and more likely that it evolved gradually. Some authorities* go further suggesting that the 1895 investigation was an attempt by Rugbeians to assert their school’s authority over the sport at a time when they were losing control of it following the schism between rugby league and rugby union, and that for this they needed a specific character and a good story. Webb Ellis’ relative obscurity for the rest of his life added to the mystique and he died entirely ignorant of the role posthumously attributed to him.

Back with the world’s oldest tournament. On the penultimate Saturday  a triumphant shout reached me in the garden as England won 23-22 against Ireland who had been tipped for the Grand Slam. It was also drawn to my attention that Italy had defeated Scotland 31-29 in Rome. This was Italy who had earlier lost 36-0 to Ireland, before beating Scotland, who beat England, who had just beaten the Irish: it was results like these that made the tournament so fascinating. I glazed over.

Today the tournament ended with Ireland winning the championship, albeit no Grand Slam. The beer bottles are in the recycling, the wine restored to its usual place, the television quiet, and on the Cote D’Azur an oblivious William Webb Ellis slumbers on.

*E. Dunning and K. Sheard, Barbarians, Gentlemen, and Players: A Sociological Study of the Development of Rugby Football (1979)

See also Michael Aylwin, Webb Ellis didn’t even invent rugby, so why is his name on the World Cup? in The Guardian 16 September 2019. Feelings run high on this issue.