Lemonade and Turnips.

Being left is never a nice thing.

Being left at Dunkirk during World War II is a totally different thing altogether. Assigned to blow bridges up to stop the German advance, or if not halt it, slow it right down, Jim's squadron never made it in time from the front line. Years later, Jim would say, "Hollywood makes blowing bridges up, look like child's play."

The reality of rigging bridges is standing up to your neck in bloody cold water for hours on end, usually in the dark! Along with being cold, hungry, living in fear of being shot or if you're not careful, blown up! Now try and have a sleep for an hour, there in the mud, soaking wet through; no change of uniform here Mr. Hanks! Under sporadic attack for days, possibly weeks depending on your whereabouts and orders. Where's the nearest public convenience? That bush a luxury, toilet paper, your trousers. Your friends have been shot! There's a cow in a tree that has been blown there, but not by the wind. Dead horses in the street with human corpses at your feet, and now the majority of the British army that you belong to have buggered off back to blighty in retreat. Chuffing hell! An understatement. Only one thing to do, move and hide. Preferably West along the Dunkirk coastline in hope of a boat home. Away from the Jerry? Who knows? If the army has pulled out it's anyone's guess, instinct and wits are crucial now and the countryside is always the safest place to hide.

And a lemonade factory in the countryside is an unlikely place, even for the S.S. to search, that and the advantage of having something clean to drink. The only edible food in this neck of the woods however, was to be found in a turnip field! Too bad (?) that supermarkets being stamped all over the country was to be over fifty years off into the future. Living off the land, whilst lying close to it and being quietly patient paid off. Eventually what was left of Jim's squad found a boat that was going homeward bound.

A Different Breed

Although they were lucky and escaped, Jim for one paid for his efforts later on; as they all would do in some way or another. Eating and drinking dirty food and water, being cold and damp for long periods, under extreme stress caused Jim stomach ulcers and he had to have half his bowel removed. Which, at that time, Olive had thought, was to be the end of him, at the age of thirty-one! That was some operation in 1950. Somehow Jim fought through this too and survived, even riding and finishing three Tours of Britain in 1951, 52, 53, in spite of this illness and its surgery, and long after his best athletic years, which was mainly taken up by services to WWII! Even so he was regularly in pain, (that he rarely showed or talked about) for the rest of his life!

Having to go to the toilet regularly with stomach pains such as these meant no regular job for Jim, who would employ him? There was no such thing as a toss off job in those days. Not that he would have wanted one, then again, nor any mundane nine to five job for that matter. Jim was the kind of person that loved to live life, and if at all possible, would take care of himself, therefore a war charity or pension would not have been sought either, if there were such allowances! Nevertheless a toilet when required was obviously for the moment a prerequisite! So still slightly shell-shocked and knowing well all the values in life, Jim decided to set himself up in business from home, where he could at least have some homely conveniences and be able to work hard and still be at leisure! Occasionally singing the blues to a real Hammond in the living room at the back of the shop, at a time when trustworthy customers would let Jim know that they were there by exclaiming, "Anybody in!"

In the meantime Jim had many original ideas, facets, and ways to make a living, 'enjoyably', usually through hard work and "using your head," as I was eventually to find out! Although Jim started out a little before 1948 at the premises of 220 city road as an electrical and radio repairer, (learnt in the army from mine diffusing etcetera,) the love of building bespoke racing cycle frames that were years ahead of contemporary designs, (and then building these up into completely hand built racing bikes), took over and became established! Which tied into my dad's psyche as he truly loved the sport of cycling, and was an engineer before the war, and during the war! His regiment was the Royal Engineers! Jim establishing J.F.Wilson Cycle Manufacturers in 1948, and here sharing for the rest of his life, a naturally helpful enthusiasm for the sport with anyone and everyone.

As Jim was a keen racing cyclist before the out break of the Second World War, whilst in the army he would try to use the bike at any opportunity - when permitted - only allowable as transport, this British establishment's Cinderella of sports! Much better to sit in your barracks on your backside smoking and playing cards, talking games don't you know! Jim used any chance to keep extra fit, in between twenty-five mile forced marches!

Ironically, later on cycle racing successfully in Germany, and at the highest level! (e.g. 6th Hanover-Brunswick, 7th Warsaw-Berlin-Prague Classics, and also finishing Major Classics such as the Tour of Flanders with no help but an armpit's, shoulder's and neck's supply of spare tubulars!) Making some good friends there in the process. Here watching and perceiving how the continental racing teams worked, which would be the key to Jim's teams' (e.g. J.F.Wilson Cycles, Elswick-Hopper Cycles) domination and success when returning home to Britain.

Before Jim's own cycle frame spraying days he used to visit an enameller on the outskirts of London, and he wouldn't think anything of cycling there from Sheffield with two cycle frames and forks around his neck and shoulders, returning with two other finished frames in the same manner! Once in a mix up with the colours, Jim convinced one customer that mauve was after all, much more of an 'original' colour than Royal Blue!

Milk, Rock 'n' Roll, Alcohol Abuse and a Strange American Sausage Stew

Supporting his business for a number of years working as a roofer during parts of the day and evening, playing the keyboards with various singers and groups around the country at night, which from distant memory included Cream, Steel Eye Span, Mott the Hoople etc.. Culminating in appearing playing the organ on German television.

Although for me personally, and for Jim too I' am sure, the most enjoyable and musically satisfying time was when he was backing a blues singer from Chicago called Jack Dupree; when I was at the age of two I remember us visiting Jack's family in Bradford, and I recall stirring a deliciously smelling and bubbling stew which amongst other ingredients contained full length uncut sausages that kept bobbing up for air! For today's generation Jack's the same guy that plays the piano and sings on one of the Budweiser adverts, don't think I'm mistaking him for T.J.Hooker, T.J's the one doing the ad playing the guitar and singing. Jim also formed and managed a Sheffield pop Group in the Sixties called The Four Blades; Four sharp lads from Sheffield, a four piece Group fronted by a sixteen year old singer called Robert Wass, his stage name being Bob Andrews, later to change again to Bobby Knut, with Ken Timms on bass, Phil Galley on drums, Rodger Bailey on lead guitar and Graham Palmer on rhythm guitar and vocals. I remember Jim saying that at one point earlier on in band's career that he had turned Joe Cocker down (who at that time was working for the gas board as a gas fitter with Graham Palmer) for Bob.

The group toured with the Milk Race one year entertaining the crowds at the finish of each stage. Then the band would go to the South of France playing in the night clubs and American Army bases. Here being on the verge of a record and radio station deal, until Roger Bailey and Graham Palmer went for a ride in a blue Cadillac belonging to an American soldier stationed over there at St. Nazaire. Apparently the G.I. had been drinking alone! Either way, I ask you, who are the most foolish, those that drink and drive or those that choose to ride at the side of a driving drunkard? The answer came on the road to La Baul when the Caddy and company was involved in an RTA, Roger dislocating his shoulder and Graham breaking his back, the G.I. walked away! Graham recovered over the next twelve months but never returned to the band, the Blades just seemed to fizzle out after that until there was Ken and Jim left. Ken joined a band to work on the clubs and Jim started playing and singing the blues.

Bobby didn't think the band would go abroad by all accounts and had left the band for the Whirlwinds, and then he left them and formed a comedy duo with their keyboard player, naming themselves Pea and Knut, luckily Bob's agent persuaded Bob to go it alone.

Whilst on the subject of music, we still have a Vox amplifier that Jim loaned out to the Beatles - I think via Peter Stringfellow - when they played Sheffield. As these things sometimes workout, John, Paul, George and Ringo were going to be playing just up the road from the Shop! The Fab Four could have literally collected the amp on their way to the gig.

Olive and her hairdressing salon rightly deserves a mention in the supporting of Wilson Cycles, for twenty five years my mother worked above the cycle shop in a bedroom salon with an hair-washing room extension that Jim had built over the shop's (our house's!) kitchen. Ladies used to have to walk through the shop and go up the stairs past my bedroom to have their hair cut and washed well! - that is it was like having an Indian head massage with water, shampoo and conditioner included, and all for 50p! Today you will be lucky to get a lifeless tickle for seventeen quid, another modern day industrial rip off that the 'vast majority' of us must have excepted. The programme Watchdog should focus on the bigger picture for a change - our industry of an inferior culture! Child of its own Industrial clone! Super markets are clean, clean of the humanity in life! But not clean of Modern life, Sterile on the inside with carbon monoxide on the outside, ideal! - See my letter to Alexei Sayle. - This present day situation in our society, reminds me of Edgar Allan Poe's The Masque of the Red Death.

Jim had a gift in being able to be to couple his enthusiastic love, insight and knowledge for cycle racing to a natural instinct towards the untapped and talented. - that was again a head of its time! Peter Ward a rider in my father's team actually wrote a book entitled Champion of Champions using some of Jim's ideas - a gift that Jim would subtly apply to any up and coming, home-growing raw talent, young lads the likes of Ron Coe and Tommy Simpson that he had befriended, knocking about on the roads or at races, mentioning to them to call in at the shop, (our home!) lads without much of a clue, nor the chance to show their full potential in time trialling "thou shalt ware only black" England.

Wading Through the Blackness

Not much has changed in this Country regarding cycle racing rules and their black tape but at least the colour of the racing apparel has eventually been allowed to! Although this position has only been relaxed in the last decade! Colours!? Coloured shorts and socks! and Sponsors' names? The planet Pluto would have had more chance of catching fire! As usual, after many years of painfully unnecessary and detrimental waiting, these things finally arrived thanks to a loop hole found when mountain bike teams wanted to race for their sponsors on the road, not even the traditionally great British blinkered blazers could ignore the possibility of a voluminous increase in membership revenue, and of course bent the rules when it suited them.

Even then, in my case alone, it took a costly five years, as the rules slowly changed, annually designing and then having to redesign my racing jersey to enable it to fall within their ridiculous rules. At last today we have just enough freedom to be able to achieve a racing kit something near to inspiring, modern and professional looking; first off though you could only have three lines of advertising on the whole jersey! Then these lines had to be no larger than… I won't bore you further; God forbid! If the three sheep and the two telegraph poles that might be watching the federation's races should look up and see a SPONSOR'S name flash past! Somebody that was giving financial assistance to help British riders and paying more money in the form of affiliation fees to their federation for relatively NOTHING but a love of supporting their chosen sport and the privilege of having a constant bureaucratic slap in the face by a host of little Hitlers. Yes, after every race we were mobbed by a plethora of television crews and media, clammering for an exclusive interview, and the police had their work cut out holding the thousands of surging fans and rival supporters back! It's a good job that they couldn't make out the sponsors' names on the dull team jerseys as we squeezed through the maddening hordes or we would have been crushed and torn apart in the frenzy! There is something to be said for the British Cycling Federation's plan of being plain, unnoticeable, undistinguishable and uninteresting after all! Thanks must go to these archaic-minded people, over many, many years, for quite literally NOTHING!

Just be thankful the ATB`ers arrived with six or seven sponsors on the same jersey and of all sizes and colours! But the British stick that continuously jangles in the front wheel of any of its up and coming, outgoing, original thinking people was being applied at a grass root level, and from what I can see, this is still the case today!

Being Our Own Worst Enemy

Where as in the rest of Europe the young racing persons in their local cycling clubs are being helped by sponsors with all their club's members' open arms, in bitter Britain the clubs aren't going to help the hand full of young talent that appears in their midst from time to time, as if by magic! That is to say from Mums' and Dads' and Enthusiasts' Efforts and Funds!

When a willing sponsor came along offering their assistance it was a no go situation! For instance my British club's chant at every A.G.M. year after year was basically, "we are not going to have six or seven riders with certain privileges and the rest of us getting nothing from it!" - How selfish, small-minded and woefully blind is that? - i.e. staying as they are for fear of possibly helping young fellow member of their own club!

The young talented road racers then had no option but to leave to progress, they needed to be in a like minded environment and try to find a team to stand a chance within the extremely hard, tactical and competitive sport of road racing. This soon creates a vicious circle as the riders' original clubs are left with an increasing amount of dinosaurs keen to hold onto a rigid system that holds back any healthy sporting development. And these riders that had to leave their club lost out on years of built up friendships when all that was needed was an obvious compromise by a board of people that you never saw on club runs or at races! I often wonder now that if it had been their Son's and Daughter's sporting future whether they would have been so keen to stay as they were?! These people always carried the vote and obviously influenced the club's membership that is why I decided after a decade of lost years (and races with no team mates) trying to teach blind old dogs new tricks to form my own racing team! Even though my father was a life member of the Sheffield Phoenix C.C. who had joined myself along with my mother! as members from when I started cycling on the road at the age of about five! I can tell you personally that this loyalty is the only reason I didn't chose to do this ten years sooner! No wonder that I say, write your own newspapers, start your own television stations because I realize how easy it is to become swallowed up in someone else's view which isn't necessarily right, especially in a World where like John Lennon once wrote, 'there are people standing round who'll screw you into the ground!'

The Sheffield Phoenix cycling club had over one hundred members, even abroad a sponsor would be hard pushed to sponsor everyone in a club of that size, but of course abroad this isn't an issue because these people know how important any help of this kind will be. In the first place the European clubs are being run by a different kind of person, persons with a sporting history! I.E. WINNERS!

People who know how their sport works in conjunction with industrial people within the real World to the benefit of young, up and going places people. The saying, cutting off your nose to spite your face, must have originated in Britain! - Any way, back to somebody that really wanted to help you with all his soul, heart, body and mind! - Not only encouraging all kinds of riders with their riding and racing, but also helping them with their bikes, usually free of charge, a great help to anyone in those days. Ron Coe turning into a World class sprinter who would go on to beat Andre Darrigade, and become a multi British Road Race Champion for the Wilson Cycles Team. Along with this advice and service, and perhaps more importantly for Tommy Simpson, Jim gave Simpson racing team contact addresses in France; Tom was then a future World Road Race Champion in the making, and even today, after nearly forty years, he still is Britain's only World Road Race Champion!

Imagine, a little shop on City road taking on and regularly beating the biggest teams in Britain! Imagine over! It happened! Which established Jim's name in cycle racing, particularly in the Nineteen Fifties, (as a rider and manager) and very much in business from then on, because Ron for one like many from this era was proud to be winning the biggest races on hand built British racing bikes, specially custom built for Ron and team mates alike, by of course, Jim Wilson himself.

Riders who were being looked after: managed, trained, helped and sponsored by the same man via a natural and mutual team understanding of helping and promoting each other on and off the bike. Something that is greatly lost on today's arrogant, super market, Earth shy, prima donnas, riding literally 'at all costs' their Italian and Taiwanese pop cans! (See letter to Cycling Weakly.) The difference? In attitudes! Plus there was no British contrary to Britain! E.G. Bull Shiting and Brain Washing media; and above all Britain had not long since lost Millions of our Men, Woman and Children fighting for our Country, fighting the Germans, Italians, etcetera! Equipment e.g. planes, tanks, guns, in fact anything engineered had to last and be of the Greatest Quality!

This ideal of Quality rubbed off onto in its people too! because if an item failed people got seriously killed! This ethos was more than drummed into our Nation. To win our 'Industry' in every sense of the word had to be better than the best!

This mentality carried through the Fifties and Sixties, people worked hard and long and saved the same for something they wanted, and what ever it was it had to last! Unlike today there was no such thing as a twelve month guarantee or an extended warranty; you shouldn't have to have guarantees in the first place if the products are excellent!

No Bullshit! If something was crap and broke after only five years people expected a replacement or a free quality repair! Today we expect things to be promptly useless! We must do! Or why do we Pay Extra! For extended guarantees? And when a guarantee runs out, or we do not choose an extended one 'we' except things to be thrown away! Because we have become accustomed to expect failure! Courtesy of modern day 'industrial' thinking, specifically designing in-built failures! Guarantees subsidise the invention of a no lose industry of inbuilt obsolescent trash and tat! The guarantee costs more than the product is worth, Ten Fold! This farce seems to have started from the mid to late Nineteen-Eighties and increased with a mindless decadence of buying stupidity!

Back then, nearly six decades, and after such a sobering epoch as was the case at the end of the Second World War, we would be damned if we were going to support rival countries via their industry, - I hope you are reading this you trek, colnago et al, all foreign and sundry but British riding and vouching Nob-Heads! - and blindly turn our backs on our own Industry and Country! We were simply more Nationalistic for very obvious reasons. Apart from mad extremists we have forgotten ourselves. Time moves everyone on, for people of all Nations, and we all need to get along, but on our Isles today we need a similar spirit but in a new way. We have let other Countries 'get stuck in' and work for us; brain-washed by an easy glossy media, like anything else this needs to be balanced, because the long run has been ran and this is now working against us.

Un fascist

I'm all for competitiveness and I have nothing against any Country or anyone from any other Country trying their best for themselves and their Nation. My aim is to help my Country in the ways described throughout my written work, and if I felt that another Country or person(s) were struggling in the same manner in which we are, and in a certain area that I could be of assistance, naturally I would oblige.

Chris Ledger recalls the time when he was an up and coming cyclo-cross rider in the late seventies and was astonished to hear Jim, as he tinkled on a piano in a small airport near Worksop, matter of factually mention that he had signed up Dutchman Hennie Kuiper and Italian Francesco Moser at a cycle show. The story goes that Kuiper had switched the bunch at the end of the amateur World road race championships that year and was in hot water with various federations, governing bodies and riders. Hennie was obviously keeping his options open!. Moser's is another story and while Chris reminds me of these two, so is Germany's Klaus Peter Thaler! Not many British teams could ever boast of such names on their roster. And remember at this time these riders hadn't yet reached their full potential! Had Britain been more of an open SPORTING Nation I guarantee that Jim would have easily found the bigger sponsors to hold on to these riders.

So Long! Auf Wiedersehen!

Jim belonged to a unique generation, where there was many a helpful soul, as if they appreciated other people's lives as their own. Maybe this was one of those rare silver linings to gleam out of World War II. It made those involved, who had survived, respect everyone's aspect in life! As though they might not be there together tomorrow.

Today a lot more people know about cancer through the media! (see 'Wash Your Own Brain'…the media is at its best…) and thankfully we have become educated to be aware of the signs and catch it in time. For years, when Jim was in a lot of pain we always put it down to his 'war wound', not prostrate cancer! And still, I have never met a person since with so much patient, happy inspiring drive, sheer love for life and the people in it.

~ N.W.

 

Website created by Tina Bell and design by Nigel Wilson
as part of the Sheffield Community Information project