Veteran-Cycle Club soundtrack archive - An Interview with David Duffield

One day went to a veteran car rally and the man turned up said, 'Oh good, the commentator's arrived, start now.' Well, I only went out to put up the banners and help them sell some newspapers and things, but I got press-ganged into it. And from then on, I got the groundwork of working as a public address commentator. It's a bit, I suppose, like being in films or television. If you start out on the boards, you know, actually you with an order in front of you, you get some feeling for the reaction to it. So that was invaluable to me. When I'm doing my commentary, I try to imagine, like we're speaking here, I'm talking to somebody, not just talking down a tube. So it is quite onerous, the pressures on the commentators. With the headphones on, you've got the producer in your ear telling you going to an ad break, or telling you going to a queue break, or telling you something that he's trying to add to what you see. So the preparation is enormous before you go on air. The interviews, the riders, getting the paperwork together. And it really is something which you accumulate over years. If you look at many of the top commentators, they're not 23, 24, 25 year olds. You have to be at it a long time because always you are prepared when things go wrong. I mean, anybody can talk about when things are going well. Anybody can talk about a race when it's brilliant, when everything's happening, when P is going down the road and others are after him, dead easy. But when you've got a stage and you're on there for an hour and a half, six men go down the road, they get caught 10 km out, and it's a bunch sprint finish, and you're on air for an hour and a half, and that's all you see, boy you've got to work. Of course, I think that you fill those odd gaps with...

David asked me to go with him on some of the early Milk Race. In fact, I did 20 Milk Races, and most of them working with David. We'd get to the stage finish, and David had a photographic memory, and he would say exactly what had happened in the race all the way through to the crowd that was there, blow by blow. Everything. The race would finish, banging, may go off down the press room, and I had to stand there waiting for the tailenders to come in. And that wrist with them when they come with the mountains, that could be like half an hour. So I found I would talk about the route they'd been through, to put an extra side to it. I'd start to talk about things about the riders, what they did and what they ate and what we had, and this sort of other side of it developed because David had taken all the facts and figures off me. And so from then on, I continued to go down that route, and I've discovered also from the letters I...

Time and they want to see more background. And I know some cyclists complain that Channel 4 only do 17 minutes of racing, but the other people want to know about the bikes, the background, the food, the massage, the vehicles, and places they've gone through of historic interest. And that's why I'm fortunate, because sometimes when I'm on air for 2, 4, even 8 hours, it gives me time to explore these other angles and also to read out viewers' letters that they send in to me. So they're all part of the program, and I enjoy it that way. If it's just bike racing, I won't say get boring, but I like the other dimension, and fortunately the public like it too. Yeah, I think that some people have unfairly compared what you do with the things that Phil Liggett does on Channel 4, but of course he's got virtually all day to prepare it, it's recorded. So if he makes...

The whole attitude of Eurosport, if it's live, we'll cover it, which means we get World Service and all, because once the cameras start to roll, we're on it all the way through. We do some edited programs sometimes, but the majority of the cycling stuff I do is live. And I respect enormously what Phil and Paul Sherwen do, that cutting and shutting and trying to put it all together in a short space of time. We only got a few seconds here and a minute and 30 seconds there and two seconds here and a minute and something. It's very difficult to put the flowing, and we do an entirely different job, filling myself and I prefer what I have to do, the live stuff, much more than the other stuff. And so we're not comparable in that respect. We've got a different job to do, but we admire each other, we work together, and when we can't work, like he did a job for Eurosport this year in the Mediterranean when I...

Oh gosh, as a racing cyclist, I didn't start until I came out of the army, and I'd be then just coming up towards 21 before I started actually joining the Cycling Club. I'd always been interested, as kids are, in bikes anyway.

Well, the first one that I do remember, that my father brought during the war, was a new Hudson with an all-bath gear case, sports light roader with upturn North Road handlebars and cable brakes on it. And in fact, what happened progressively, I was at Worcester Grammar School at the time, I stripped off the chain case because that was too heavy, and bit by bit I put drop handlebars on it, and so I transformed it into a sports bike. I used to ride 5 miles to school and 5 miles back every day and think nothing of it. Then at Worcester Grammar School, uh, so afterward to King's Norton Grammar School, again I was riding about 4 miles to school and 4 miles back.

Advertising. Just after I left school, I went there as a very junior artist, a general dogsbody. And I'd go out to the clients and take artwork, and I'd go to the block makers. Art was something I could do naturally, but I liked the advertising business, and I went there. My father knew the people very well indeed. And amongst the magazines we had coming in was the cycling newspapers and magazines, and amongst our clients was the Cagal Cycle Company, Monitor brakes, and Bloomfield hubs. And so I was to read this lot, so I got interested in cycling a little bit then. And then I had to go in the army, got called up for national service. And within a few weeks, I was walking through the barracks and I saw this beautiful Hin curly stayed bike with these magnificent lugs. And being a bit of an artist, I thought that's magnificent, never seen a bike like before.

Do that, and it's how these coincidences jump. I was standing on the side of the A1, thumbing a lift back to Birmingham as we all did those days. A squad his Mike had brought his bike to Mulin. I was thumbing a lift, and his chat pulled up and stopped, and I got in this little Ford Anglia or something with the wings out the front, big headlights. I looked in the back, and there was a red frame on the back seat. And I said, 'Oh, I'm a bit interested in cycling, I'm thinking of getting a new friend because a friend and I are going to start cycling.' And the man said, 'Well, here's the catalog.' And so it was Fred Parks, from Cycles. Yes. And so I've got a coincidence. So I went to a local cycle shop, which was Charlie Mann's shop in King's Norton, ordered this F.C. Parks Autograph, and I had it, and it turned up. And then I started to buy bits and started riding in the army with Mike. Then we went out to Italy, and I saw a bit of the Tour of Italy out...

Yes, it did, but we didn't get a lot of opportunity. I was there six months, and there were actually Army cycling units that provided bicycles to the unit, and we had these bicycles. In fact, that's the first time I learned to put a tubular tire on, and I didn't stick them on, they came off the rim because I didn't stick them on. And so we rode those bikes for a bit. But much more in the Army, I was interested in basketball. I was doing a lot of basketball. I used to play for a local Italian basketball team. And also I was quite a reasonable swimmer. And the barracks we were on was at Muja, right on the sea. And I was also one of the sort of rescue people in the sea. I was swimming in water polo and that sort of thing. So cycling wasn't my number one thing. It was just something I did in connection with other sports. But I liked it, seeing the flamboyant corners of the...

Were first and foremost primarily interested in, at the time you were there, providing bicycles for the masses rather than for the people with the money?

Yes, it's an interesting story about Phillips. First of all, I was working at an advertising agency when I came out of the Army. I went back there, and I decided to spread my wings. I wanted to go to another agency to be a creative designer there and do all the layouts. So I went to another small agency, and I didn't see eye to eye with the studio manager. He was about 5'4" and I was 6'4", so more reasons than that. And so in the end, he didn't like my work, and I got fired. And my father said, 'No son of mine gets the sack.' In those days, it was like a criminal offense to get the...

Saw the ad and said, 'Look, Arthur, you want somebody to help you right after this bloke.' Now I said nothing about cycling, and I was only sort of half interested in cycling anyway, did a bit of racing but not much. And so he wrote, and I went to the interview and got the job. At the same time, Brooks Saddles wrote to me and offered me a job there as well. I'd applied for a job with them, again not knowing what it was. So I had the choice. I went to Phillips, and that was in 1952. And after the war, Phillips Cycles moved into bicycle manufacturing. Before that, they'd been just component manufacturers. In fact, 1952 was their 50th anniversary, and they started out just making pedals, that's the first thing they did. And they decided after the war to go into complete bikes because they had the steel for the export business, and went into complete bikes. And you're right, when I went there, it was the...

Bread and butter area. Yes. And so they were just beginning to move out of just the solid go-to-and-from-work bike. They had a very big range, even right down to little tricycles, Little Red Knight tricycles. I remember those well. And I think there was one called the Silver Steed with a beautiful little sort of stylized boot to it, a pointed rear boot. And that's the Gran Fl field that started that off first of all down in South Wales, and everybody followed in the industry. But at that particular time, there wasn't a lot of innovation. All the bikes were straightforward diamond frame. You go to a bike exhibition, I was in the advertising department so I had to go to these exhibitions before I went out on the road as a rep, and you just look at the serried ranks of bicycles, and they all had the same down tube, just the frames got smaller and the wheels got smaller, and they went to the kids' sizes with like 14-inch wheels.

It wasn't my own volition to leave there. I first went to the advertising department, then I went out as a rep on the road. I was the youngest salesman they'd got. They had 14 salesmen, and most of them were older than my father. And so I went out as a rep on the road for them, mainly up in Manchester, Lancashire, North Wales, Cheshire, Shropshire. Enjoyed it tremendously. I started to feed back information from the field. I started to design colors and graphics for the bikes using my artistic background. So I found myself spending more and more time back in the office. And Armstrong was part of the group, the lightweight side. So they merged Armstrong in with the Phillips side, and I took over as product group manager of the Armstrong business. So it was another start to a slightly different career within the same company. And then having merged the Armstrong business, the two advertising managers, McLintock of Hercules and Arthur Northwood at Phillips, were...

Sent down to London with £10,000 to spend on advertising. In those days, you went down to the media, you didn't do it through agencies. The agency did the artwork for you, but you went and booked it direct with the newspapers. And he went out and did the best deal he thought, and he came back to see Edmund Crane. Before he saw Edmund Crane, he said, 'I've got all these, I booked this, I've done that, I've done this, and by the way, I've saved you £130 or something.' And Crane said, 'You go back on the train and spend the money, McLintock. I told you to spend £10,000.' And he sent you back to London to spend the difference. Amazing. But so they were both going to retire, and I was going to take over on the advertising, all the advertising of the whole group, because by then we'd merged the manufacturing. Hercules were in our factory at Downing Street, and Phillips were in there as...

And motorbikes and things like that, and the bike trade was declining tremendously. And so that was when you say seven-year itch. I didn't want to leave, although it was declining, there was still a lot to be done. And the rationalization was going on, and we were handing Rally. Rally were losing money, and we knew we got on their backs. The W they so, Tak of BSN and Sunbeam that already had all the Rudge of the Humber, all the other brands in there. And so just these two big groups in the UK, British Cycle Corporation on one side, TI on the other one. So when I moved, it wasn't that after seven years, seven-year itch, the merger came about, and I had the opportunity of going to Nottingham. Now in those days, you didn't get redundancy. If the companies merged or folded, you were out on your ear, and that was it. And we thought when TI actually took over Rally...

Many more things to develop the product in a particular way, and those Rally stick-in-the-muds. So we thought right, we now start running their business, but the reverse happened. TI gave the management to the Rally people, and they came and looked around Smethwick, and they offered only about six of us from the management, apart from the main board directors who were still running the operation as it's merging of all the senior management there and even the clerks and everything else. They only offered six of us work in Nottingham, and I was one of those six. And I went there, and they wanted to put me in the advertising department with no specific job, and I turned it down, you know, after being in competition for those years. So it wasn't a seven-year itch I went, because it just happened at that time. And coincidence again, I happened to...

Who was the publicity manager at Temple Press that published 15 trade and technical magazines including Cycling. So just the time I was getting disillusioned, didn't want to go to Nottingham, Chris Lowe who wanted an assistant was speaking to Rex Harr, and Rex signs me up and Rex says, 'David, get down, I think there's a job for you in London.' So I went down there for two years on the train. Yeah, so it wasn't seven-year itch, that was just the merger came about and we were put out, you know, a few of us were given jobs.

Yeah, I'm a marketer and a salesman. Selling is part of marketing anyway, and that's been my...

You're in record breaking, whether you're marketing or whether you're commentating, there's an element of risk in all these things. It's not predictable at all. It isn't like having two and two making four. All those three are unpredictable in their own way, and I like unpredictability. I also like being on my own. And if you're in marketing, you're often making decisions on your own. It isn't always a group think. You may take information from people, but when you make the decision, boy, it's your head on the block. If you're going for a record attempt or you want to do something, it's your decision, and you're exposed. Everybody, when you're commentating, there's only one voice they're listening to, and if you make a mistake, boy, you're hammered. So there's not anything dissimilar about these three ways of earning a living, except that most people probably find it a bit hectic. Chronologically, after the...

When Alex had his open day, once he opens it up to people to go there, and Roy was wandering around and he saw this building which he recognized as being a drawing office because Roy was a draftsman. So he high-tailed it across, despite the sign saying 'Private property, keep out', looked through the window and discovered this bicycle, and high-tailed it back then to Alex Molton. Alex wasn't all that upset about Roy seeing the bike because that was a period when Rally was saying that they weren't going to make the bike, and Alex was looking around. People knew bits about bikes, and Roy Dale, though he lived in Kim, had worked with BSA, so he started to help Alex in the early days. He got in touch with me. Roy did show me this bicycle, and he said he's looking for something to run this business. So I then met up with Alex, and then I took off with Alex. That was at Molton. I was there about four years. Then I went to Martian Baers for...

To go to Martian back from Martian back Rally. I was there seven years, and then I moved on to Halfords. So you say what hadn't got the greatest reputation at that particular time for being the sort of you know involved with cycling as I had been. And my job in fact was to change that. When I went to Halfords, what about 1977 or thereabouts, there was a move on the auto side to squeeze bikes out. Definitely they were shoving them upstairs, they were putting them downstairs, and it had gone into a bit of a trough. They were R's biggest customer, they were selling over 200,000 bikes a year and only buying from Rally and from their own factory, Halman, which was making...

Which is a real dog's dinner. There were little things in little packets and you know all over the place, and it wasn't well presented. So I then started to revamp the range of bicycles and to control the way which it was operated in the stores, and started to introduce new ideas and new things, got enthusiasm back into the organization. And as I'd come from Rally too, I knew what Rally were up to, and so I was able to do certain things both in conjunction or separately from Rally. And certainly one of the early things I did was to get involved in cycle sport, and particularly cyclocross, because the bikes at Halfords, 50% of them were sold in the last three months of the year, amazingly enough.

Interested too because we also had cyclocross events we sponsored all over the country, and we invited the managers to the functions so they actually come out and see something going on. We then got involved with Alan Rush's city center cycle racing, the same thing, putting banners around the course and getting people to go there. And we had down Clark just as the one-off rider for Halfords. I couldn't afford a team, a big team, but by looking at different ways of doing things, you can actually get a lot out if you really look and try to be creative about it. Yes, so that helped transform, not totally transform, but it got the impetus going for Halfords. And I was mainly interested in the workforce and getting everybody there behind it, and the same thing with the people who made decisions on space allocation in the shops, to get them to switch their thoughts too. So I had to...

Increase the margins on the bikes and components so we were ahead of what was happening on the auto side. And because it was something that they almost would hope would go away, some of the people there, I was left very much to my own devices again. I ran it as a private fiefdom. And when I joined the company, it was 14% of the company's turnover, bikes and accessories. I left, it was 28%. I doubled the percent of the company's turnover. Now one may say the auto side should have grown and kept the 14% down. I wouldn't have minded that, but it just showed I could push it forward and do a lot of transforming. But the biggest transformation must have been BMX. We'd been selling Choppers and Grifters and things like that, and the Grifter market wasn't going up, it was dropping down. I'd seen BMX, and I went over to...

Track at Redditch, the first public track. The AMO people, Malel Jaris, he built a track on some private land. He got a small one, he was bringing bikes in, and one or two had been playing around with the top end stuff but had no tracks to race on. So we built the track at Redditch, and then a chap called Jeff W.S., the next Pro Champion, was just retiring from the sport. We put him on as our national consultant. He went round all the councils helping them build tracks, because I knew without the tracks there'd be no BMX. And the cost of putting a track up wasn't that great once you showed them how to do it. So together with Alan Rushan again, who was helping with the publicity side and sorting out a governing body, we drove the BMXing forward. The first 12 months, we plowed all the profit back into promotion. There was no profit taking from the company at all. I just plowed it all back into promotion.

Bikes, we were getting them into shops. The parents were going in with them to buy bicycles deliberately so. And that, John, of course Halfords went on to sponsor the ANC Halfords racing team too. So it was an image building job, and look where they are now. I mean, what, 20% of the UK cycle market? Yeah. And when I went there, there were people, in fact some shops they took bikes out, and we did two experiments like that, one in Abingdon and one down in London. And they found another shop, temporary shop, and put the bikes in there, and they took the space for auto parts. The biggest shop was to sell more auto parts. The auto parts in both those shops never increased. The bike sales rocketed. So then they realized if we do the bike thing even better, we'll sell more bikes. Then came the era of the big sheds.

From BMX riders now buy mountain bikes or buy them for their kids, they've got that image in their minds. So that was a marketing exercise which I enjoyed. But the time, as ever after seven years you say, was to go.

No, in those days only main board directors were allowed to go to America. And I'd been to one or two cycle shows, but it was like pulling teeth to get the money to go and do these things. Now I paid out of my own pocket. I went down and flew by Laker on the cheap flight, booked my own hotel, paid all my expenses, and came back and presented to the board my findings. Then by then I had to explain...

Days carry a lot of things that the smaller bike shops, which are having to concentrate on mountain bikes and the new gadgetry that's been reinvented for mountain bikes, don't carry anymore. So if you want some of the simpler things, you go to Halfords and get them. I mean, for instance, in Dumfries, if you want a 27 and a quarter tire, you go down to Halfords because they've got them on the shelf there, at least on the hook. So although they don't carry the specialist market, the specialist lines for the specialist cyclist who can spend much money anyway, they're still looking after the masses of people, which I think is where cycling's got to go.

We never really used the brand very much. So and Norman Cycles part of the group, but they seem to stay down in Ashville a lot longer. I can't remember what happened, I think almost got closed down rather than merged in. But our main brands were certainly Hercules, Phillips, Armstrong. The main brands. The Sun Cycle Company went to it didn't go then, it must have gone later to Rally because Rally became part of Sun Carlton. So there was this big group. And Rally now, I believe that when Alex was trying to find a manufacturer for his bike, did he try Hercules first? I don't know, I never caught up with that because when I got involved with Alex, the...

Been involved because then it came different. I had to look at it, and nobody ever spoke to me about it, which unless he'd got some sort of secrecy act going, I would have been sucked in to look at it. Were there Hercules or Phillips in those days? So I think he may have gone direct to Rally, but certainly they said no, and again they said no because they felt there wasn't a market for 200 bikes a week. That was the level at which the factory said they wouldn't tool up. And the first full year production we hit 800 a week average at Moulton.

Well, no, let me take you through what happened then, John. Because breaking them all, I say Roy Day spotted this unusual bicycle, got in, he and I got talking about it. I went down and rode it. And there again, you see, you've...

Businessmen come, employ those sorts of people, prosper better than people who have no cycles about the place. That's a fact of life in the cycle industry. So when I got to ride the bike, I felt this is great, and I really could feel that something there. And I didn't want to leave Temple Press, I was doing well there, but it was too much of, you know, moved back to Bradford-on-Avon, lovely part of the world. And so I went down to Bradford-on-Avon to start off with Alex. I'd already been doing some work to prepare for the cycle...

I'd already been doing some work to prepare for the cycle show, and I thought, 'This is it.' So I left Temple Press and joined Alex. And we launched the Moulton at the 1962 Cycle Show. And the rest, as they say, is history. We had a fantastic response. The orders came flooding in. And we were making 800 bikes a week within the first year. So it was a huge success. And I stayed with Alex for about four years, and then I moved on to other things. But that was a great period of my life, working with Alex Moulton, a true innovator.

Show while I was up in London because I had the three-month period before I could join Alex, so we prepared the ground. I was given the job of getting the stand organized, all the publicity material organized. Alex went on getting the bikes made, the early samples. I advised him on colors and graphics specification. Originally he was only looking at one bike. I was the one who said no, you go for these.

Again, I wanted many things there so it looked like a very professional country from day one. We had bump rigs, we had slides going, we had bikes that had been ridden across Iceland, we had a copy of the bike that Woodburn was going to attack the record on. So he made a really positive presentation of the show. And when we opened up on the Saturday, we'd already had a big exposure in the newspapers because we got Anthony Armstrong-Jones appearing in the Sunday paper—as it was then, Lord Snowdon later—riding one. And we had a big exposure. The Express came down. Ron Webb, bless his cotton socks, he came down supposed to be for the Sunday Express, and the Sunday Express being what it was, broke the embargo, didn't they? And on the Friday, the proverbial hit the fan. There was this half-page of this bicycle and all the other.

The Tonight program and panic buttons. So by the time the show opened on the Saturday, we had people swarming in, you're right, wanting to buy the bikes, giving us their names and addresses. It was just unbelievable. I was pressing any of my friends who came down to the show to help. We'd already got cards written out where they came from and everything else, so it wasn't much taking orders, it was taking names and addresses of people. We had people coming with checkbooks wanting to write the checks out there and then on the stand. Now this was on the Saturday, Sunday. Those days the cycle show didn't operate on the Sunday. It opened up again on the Monday. And on the Monday, we had one cycle dealer coming late on Saturday from a local one. He said, 'I've had a customer in my shop wants to buy one of those bikes, can I have one?' I said, 'You're going to have more than one. I said because we're going to sell you two. Can I have your name and address?' He said, 'Well, I only want one for this customer.' I said, 'Come on, I said we're not committing us.'

Bikes came anyway. On the Monday, the cycle trade came in and there was our stand. You'd have thought around the stand we got a moat full of piranha fish. We were on the stand thing and they come and the dealers go, 'Never sell, wheels are too small, never look at the price, oh never.' So I'm not joking, John, I'm grabbing them and pulling them on the stand, people I knew, and say, 'Well come on, you must be an agent. Look at all these, we got stacks of inquiries, we got boxes of inquiries that came in on Saturday.' Yeah. And so, 'Oh well, I might have one.' I said, 'Look, you know.' So we started writing down names and addresses and telling what we're going to do. And one or two of the more thoughtful dealers agreed that you what. So it built up during that time. So the orders we came away with were the public, the dealers reluctantly, some of them would.

The shops exactly as we said. They only had two and they had to put one on display. And the thing with the small wheels, I got this idea of the cardboard that was around the outside could be cut and you could wrap paper around it, hang it behind the bike, because if you had it in with other bikes you couldn't see it because the wheels were too small amongst all big bikes. So I got deals to put solus window displays on of the stuff hanging behind the bike with all the features on it as well. And that would be the ducks. And the standard was for riding round as a demonstrator. I said, 'Unless they ride it, people won't know how the springs are, they won't understand the bike.' And again, 'Oh, it'll be second hand.' I said, 'You'll still be able to sell it for trade price. In fact, there'll be a premium price. We want these bikes.' That's right. And where the dealers didn't put the displays on, I sent the reps around. They actually did the windows themselves to get the.

Have the bikes built up in. Kirby had the frames built at Fish near Wolverhampton. We just couldn't cope. Yours Moulton doubled the size of his factory. When we were actually at the show, British Motor Corporation then stepped in to help us. We just could not have met the quantities. But what we could see coming through, the dealers reluctant but the public were right behind them. Yeah, that's right. Someone said to me at the cycle show just last week, and they're a young chap, they'd learned about Moulton through Tony Hadland's book and they own a Moulton. And they asked me, 'Really, what went wrong with Moulton? Why hasn't it changed every bike to small wheels with suspension?' And the only answer I could give him really was that the

His shop. Yeah, yeah. And this chap was talking to me about, he said, 'Well, that's the only conclusion that I could come to, that you know there was a resistance from the trade in general.' Well, I think that's partly true. The way I see it, John, looking at it now objectively all these years later, was that we got the momentum going then. As with all products, you get a bell shape, starts going on the other side from the early publicity. So then we went on television, the first company to go on television. We had a very simple little commercial made by Longman Hoffman, a company that I eventually went to work for. And they did this lovely little commercial which actually won an award at the Television Festival down there. And we went around and we did presentations at the television studio, never been done before. Pulled the

Version half the license up in the Midlands. So we then had to sort of put this bike in there, then we would get the advertising and get it going again. So it then began to get a level of business, and we were filling in with the various dealers where we found gaps on the maps. I sent the salesman out and we quite right, we had to convince some dealers. Lloyd B's favorite trick was if there was a set of steps in the cycle shop, was to ride down the stairs. Anyway, so we had to get to ride around the block and it was really like pulling teeth. But a lot of them supported us very well indeed, and there was a nice core business coming through then. As we were getting established, it was going to be much more level business. Whatever numbers it was, it settled down. I don't know. Rally came.

Things back. Forks had to be beefed up because they cracked. Because when new, stretching manufacturers and was making by hand, we had one or two little problems. And so Rally promptly came in. Rally brought quality to small wheel bicycles, you know. And they had how of this quality, that was first thing they came out. Secondly, underpriced us. And thirdly, in those days a lot of bikes were sold on hire purchase. We didn't have credit cards like we've got today. And Rally controlled the hire purchase business because both the British Motor Corporation and Rally had had their own hire purchase companies. They merged and there was no one doing hire purchase except the Rally hire purchase company. And they also had a lot of 100% Rally shops that only sold Rally brand bicycles and weren't allowed to sell anything else. And so they had this dominance in the marketplace. Big advertiser and they spend oh I

Can have it cheaper. It's also got dynamo hub and something, and the dealers are selling down. The dealers always sell the cheapest, not always but majority of them think the easiest way to sell is the cheapest. So we were struggling then on this price basis, not performance, because it was a much better performing bicycle. I mean, broken records on it, done track things on it, and you couldn't race their eyes, there were 16. So we were in competition with them, and it's pretty obvious to me then that they were going to smash us just by the sheer weight and size of the money. They wanted us out because we got right at their nose with the publicity, the position of the marketplace, the innovation, everything. There were a number of people wanted to smash at Rally, and the fact that they turned it down as well. Yes. And so what happened then was this war. And that's when I, going through this war, I left. Not that I was a coward and didn't want to fight the war, it's obvious that Rally was going to suck.

Benjamin recipe. And we ran the business for Alex. He didn't have the sort of support in the same way. They took it on, just load it and load it, load it down until in the end it was so small they flattened it. How did you find Alex as someone to work for? Hard taskmaster. He has to be to get where he's got to. Exactly. You see what Alex has done, no ordinary bloke could have done that. If you got a nice man who doesn't want to upset people, you don't get done what Alex has got done. If he ruffles up a few feathers occasionally, at least he gets the job done. And we wouldn't have the bikes we've got today if it hadn't been a man like Alex to do it. Not only did he do it once, but he did it twice and now he's done it the third time in the new series. Yes, he's very active mentally and physically. Obviously gets a bit fractured when things don't go the way he wants it, because he sees something, wants it, he wants it tomorrow.

We're still very good friends. We meet from time to time. I enjoy his company. We're entirely different people anyway. And I think I've got a great deal of respect for him on his engineering side and his mention. I think he respects marketing side. The two as we can add the two together make what we do. But I still think the bike has got the APB which has come along. I that had to be rescued too. On one of my, when I became freelance, I used to have time in the winter to do consultancy work. And after the APB was put into W Pases, the P business went all over the place. Had a lot of financial problems for various reasons, and they neglected the

Cheap equipment onto it to make the price down. They were aiming for price points rather than saying let's put the best equipment on because it's the best bike. They despecced it. And so my job was to bring the specification up, and also particularly in respect to the wheels and tires and rims to get the rolling better and do many things there, which I did. And what's happened now since then, it's again come on a quantum leap, though the actual frame and everything hasn't changed at all. And there's still more room to develop that bicycle, and that is going on. But if out of steam, it's more difficult sometimes to pick things back up again. And I still think the APB has got another life and some more volume in it. Do you think that the fact that the APB now is branded as a Land Rover, do you think that's going to do a lot of good or it's been very

Trundling around the lanes or when it's going on a mountain bike or when they're going on cycling holidays. A lot of people are taking to cycling now like we haven't seen before. Work Sustrans is doing with the paths is tremendous. So people want to start riding bikes again. And a lot of people don't want to ride the same bike everyone else has got. They don't understand diamond frame and it just looks like everybody else's bike. That's why mountain bikes are being so popular, because they got all these gears and big tires and things. You try and do all this like it's a new thing. Go to the golf club on this thing, look what I've got. So you got a Range Rover, you turn up, you take a Land Rover bike out the back, you only ride five miles, at least it's different. You wouldn't find that man putting in you know another sort of bike for instance. So it's helped again expose the brand. This is what you have to do in marketing. You have to be constantly doing something to promote it, doing something new, doing new.

On finding, yes, stimulate all the time. What's the thing that you want putting up on the wall when you shuffle off from this life? Is there anything that you'd like to be remembered about, something that was really dynamic? I don't know. I've done so many things actually over a period of time which in their own at that period have been something I look back and said that was good. I suppose it has to be launching of the Moulton bicycle, and it has to be in parallel with BMX, funnily enough, because both those products were things that people didn't think would take off, and they have done. And I think they've done a lot for the cycle industry. So those are two areas on the marketing side that I look back and say yeah, that I'm proud of being involved with. Yeah. And that fits into your ideas about marketing that you've got to have something new to sell. It's no

What we were doing was coming out with a new color. If I was there, we went through into the flamboyant one time. They were flat color into flamboyant and then the graphics. And the graphics used to be done by the transfer printers, and they used to design them, and they used to just get artists doing for I know box tops of chocolates I suppose or anything. So they do any old graphics and they weren't very good. That's why I got involved in designing graphics to suit the bikes and the colors. And that's all we could do really was colors and graphics and just change some little bits of componentry. People go to Cycle Show and look for great detail how the L has been cut for this year's model and things like that, and nothing fundamentally changed. And that's why the industry was in a trough. It needed a shakeup, which is what I did, to get all this new thinking going. Marketing isn't just about shaking people up, it's

Cycling career, but you haven't been a professional, have you? No. I was going to take a professional license to ride the Parbrest Parry race which was held once every 10 years or something, and just about to do it, the race was cancelled, so I never took out a pro license. But you see, I couldn't become a pro rider for a number of reasons. First of all, I was more interested in my job at all times. I didn't put cycling in front of my job. I rode as a tricyclist or racing cyclist on two wheels as and when I could fit it in with my job. Because when I became interested in cycling, there were practically no British professionals racing over on the continent. It was a bit of a closed shop over there. I also knew from the few road races I'd ridden that I wasn't a very good climber, you know, at my height and my weight, I just wasn't any good.

Instance, the one race I'd love to ride, the Puy de Dôme for instance, I do a lot of cyclocross riding. It's a course that suits strong men who are thick, prepared to ride hard mainly on your own. But no, I turned pro? And really looking back, I don't regret it at all because I got on and did other things. I think you've taken something like 12 records in the UK. You told us earlier about cycling to and from school and your holidays presumably and that sort of thing. When did the bug bite? Did you get into time trialing or was it the sort of distance? I mean, just tell me. Well, I met up with this chap in the Army and we go youth hosting and riding around

In those days. So I joined the Beacon and I'm still vice president of the club now after all these years. And so I joined, went along there and they said, 'Would you like to race?' And so I said, 'I suppose so.' So they entered me in a medium gear club 25 about two weeks time. I had to go and buy the racing gear or anything. So I went off on this single fixed bike and I fell off at the turn and I won first handicap. So I thought I like this, except the falling off. And then about six weeks later I didn't race again. I wasn't that bothered by it. And I went to ride the Werson John's 25 because my her had got me interested in cycling, it was his event. And I finished ninth in that race, full field, and got first handicap. So I was obviously set out to

Break at the end. The break that finally lasted to the finish. And about three laps to go, I was feeling like Dicky Bose and Johnny Perks and all that lot, all internationals. I was this big gangling fellow stuck in there and I was going well, and I punctured and that was it. I think looking back, if I'd done a lot more road racing I might have been okay at that. But then the following year, Phillips Cycles asked me to become a salesman on the road. That put a stop to my training, put a stop to my racing. And from then on, I only fitted in the racing as and when I could find training time. Was most of your work, most of your riding done with the Beacon or did you go off with anybody else? I had a short period with the Greenford Club down in London when I lived in London for two years because George Dixon organized some of my record attempts then, particularly the infamous London

Went like stink. And that was on the Greenford colors that I did that. You've now proved to yourself that riding a tricycle is enjoyable and you found out that you can ride long distances, and by the sound of it the further you go the faster you get. What was the progression of your other record-breaking activities? Well, the first one I went for the 100 mile record which was found to be short afterwards, and at that point I thought I'm not going for another record. But then having ridden this 24-hour, and we looked at it we said, 'Well why don't you go for the Thousand Mile record?' And in fact I've got the maps here of all the routes and everything else that we did. And we and I went off to do this Thousand Mile. And we did it actually. I said I'm normally racing best at the end.

Towards S do up towards Norwich and turn back, and then rent all over the up towards Chester and out into Wales. And over the Whitsun weekend, kept pumping around this old tricycle and I broke the record, knocked a bit off it or something, remember correctly. So again, it was good training for the uranium if I had a problem, at least I'd got a few miles. And we looked at do that way you see. And also rode very much on my own. I didn't have following cars, we just had checkers out along the way. It was like a big training ride over Whitsun, a thousand miles, and had a one-hour sleep at my grandmother's place in Birmingham and another hour in Worcester, and that's all. And we also found when we checked back that I'd gone through Len John Gr's distance 873 miles faster than the Len John Gr's record. So we thought, well that's

Customers on a bike because I used to go up to Manchester on the train and ride around Manchester and Lancashire calling on the dealers on my bicycle. I remember going out to North Wales on the train out to Conway, riding back on the coast. So here I was early spring getting a lot of miles in. So again we thought right at Whitsun, let's go for the Land's End to John O'Groats. Start at John O'Groats, say it's never been done before, like to do different things. So I started in the north. And everybody warned me against it because you get headwinds on the way down. But at the early part of the year, sometimes sort of June, and I think that was a very late Whitsun, you can get anticyclones and you can get calm weather coming from the north or no wind. The Tor and I set off about 8:00 at night from John O'Groats and rode down.

Again regular to and from work that I went and broke the 50 mile record with 1 hour 57 minutes. I got inside 2 hours, that's over 25 mph on the tricycle. And this is going back, if you see the way to my trike and realize what it is like, I was probably as proud of that as any of my long distance records because the other end of the spectrum. We didn't have a 25 mile record in those days like they've got now. The 50 was the shortest, and to get the shortest and the longest I thought was quite interesting. But then you weren't satisfied with going from north to south against the headwind, and can ask in that ride. I've read the Alan Rays book on the end to end record rides, and almost all of them that broke the

Vehicles up there. The whole objective was I went up by train. I booked into Birmingham railway station with my tricycle and bought a single and a tricycle to Wick, which was absolutely you never had a single trike a week before. So I went up there. The idea was as I rode down, we'd be accumulating enough coupons for the vehicles to pick me up further down south. Also again, a thousand when I did that, if it all came and fell apart at the seams and I did have terrible headwinds and I couldn't manage to get down, then I could at least ride down to Birmingham training, just spend the time just coming down with cancel record attempt. So off I set without a following vehicle, and I had a really bad patch during the night because it was so cold up there. I didn't realize the snow was still on the mountains, and I was riding through. I got some night clothing on but nothing like the clothing we have today, and I

This is it, you know, when I get down to Perth where the first vehicle's going to be, that's it. I'm just going to pack it up. I'm going to get as far as Perth and knock it on the head. And I was really struggling. And in fact, one time I was sitting on the side, spewing up in the hedge, and know awful. And then I got this is only like 150 miles away from the start, and I came across John Arnold of all things, a great tricyclist. He'd ridden all the way up to the top of this mountain somewhere in Scotland. And he brewed up some tea and gave me something to eat and spoke to me like a long lost uncle and sent me on the way. And you know, I never looked back from that moment on. I thought I can't let John down, I've got to keep going now. And so gradually I got back into the schedule of things and rode down. We had thunderstorms, nothing I remember broke really. I do remember getting down to Exeter and

All the way down to the finish. And the fascinating thing coming back though was that when I got down there, Jack Ron and the ekeper had used my car from Gler down to Land's End. And I got down LS about 4:00 in the afternoon. One of my clubmates rode the last from Penzance behind me because the car went on to time me. I went down to Penzance into the L, down the steps to go to the toilet. As I came back out, I could hardly climb up the steps. I thought, you silly old bugger, you've got 10 miles to go and you can't get up these steps. They so sore my legs. I got on the trike, rode to the finish. And then we went back to this bed and breakfast place and had a shower and got all cleaned up. And we started to drive back.

And everybody else in the car is asleep, so I take over and I drive the car back to Gler and they're all asleep around about me. You had the easy job, all you had to do was ride the bike. The adrenaline was going though, you know, that's what it was. So yeah, little things go on on the journey like that. But otherwise, you just get stuck in and just keep going. And then of course, not being satisfied with doing John O'Groats north to south, you then did it south to north. Yes. What happened? Within 6 weeks, Albert Crimes, who wouldn't attack the record because a fellow called Bert Parks had held it and Bert Parks had got Albert into tricycle racing, so he wouldn't attack it as long as Bert's record was there. Bert came and saw me at the finish. He came down part of the way on my record. So that then once I broke, he went the other way and he set off about 6 weeks after I did and knocked a

Right. I looked for opportunity when I get it back again. And of course after the sew thing, then I went back to work on the road. And then after that I came back to Phillips and I was able to put 12 months training in, more than that, 18 months training in, and had another go for it from the south to north the next time round, which is the logical way to go in some respects. But there again, it's illogical because the further north you go the colder it becomes, and therefore you're using your body. And also the hills, I think are easier from the north. I think the slopes are easier from the north, which a lot of racing cyclists don't realize who go for the end to end, is that when you go through Gretna Green and start to go up into Scotland, you only just have a halfway. That's right, Scotland. And it's in the night, there's nobody out there, and you're going, it's cold and it's miserable, and you know it's maybe a

You haven't done or you think you might like to have done. Not really. I've had a wonderful opportunity to do many things which have interested me at that time. There is one thing I would like to do. In fact, I'm already mapped it out. I think this country needs a damn good single day classic. And I've worked out why Alan Rushton's classics failed, not because I think he did it, it's because the way sponsorship changed and the way the courses couldn't be run effectively. And I've already plotted a course that could do a very good special single day classic. And I know what sort of sponsorship I want and I know how to get on television. And I'd like to think that if I could later in my life now put together a race which went on in perpetuity because it had something about it which was appealing to the public and television, then at least I've done something that I

The time though, find the time to do it, John. So it may happen a long time down the road, but I've worked very hard at it mentally so far and I think it's quite feasible. Are there any things that you haven't done in your life? Any places you haven't? Have you got any regrets about your life? I look back at the Pembroke London record which I tried twice and didn't get, and I would like to have got that. I don't like failure. And for one reason, I didn't actually get that one. And that in sporting arena was something I was sad about. But other than that, John, I've been very lucky. And I know I still got certain things I want to do in the future. And I think it's been, I've been very fortunate in everything I've done so far. I can look back and say, 'Hey, that was great, enjoyed that.' And it seems to work. I think I think in

Thank you, John. It's very nice having you down here. I hope we go and see each other for a long time yet to come. Absolutely.