Monthly Archives: February 2024

Remembering my Nan, 30 years on

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Nan at her 100th birthday party, Cardiff, 1991

It’s hard to believe that my grandmother, Nan, died 30 years ago today. It’s seems like yesterday.

She was the perfect grandmother (and great grandmother) – a deeply caring person who loved the company of the younger generations. We in turn were thrilled to spend time with someone born during the reign of Queen Victoria, years before the first aeroplane flew.

I loved listening to her stories, which went back to the 1890s, including her memories of Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1897. More poignantly, Nan recalled fetching oxygen cylinders by hansom cab for her dying father in 1912. That was the year she turned 21, just days after the Titanic sank. Her life milestones seemed to coincide with historic events: Nan got married in 1919, the week Alcock and Brown became the first people to fly across the Atlantic, landing in a bog in Ireland. She herself took her only flight at the age of 92 in 1983 – the short hop from Cardiff to Bristol.

Nan delighted in telling me how her husband Frank, the grandfather I never knew, insisted that one day there would be radio with pictures. Frank almost certainly never saw his prediction come true as television, unless he happened to come across a rare demonstration set in a London store before the outbreak of war in 1939, when the BBC’s fledgling TV service closed for the duration.

With Nan at her centenary party

Nan is the only person I’ve known who lived to 100. Her centenary party in Cardiff in 1991 was a marvellous celebration of a special person, with everyone who loved her crowding the capital’s County Hall.

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1923: Ned Boulting’s Tour de France obsession

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Cycling journalist Ned Boulting’s latest book, 1923, is the story of how the purchase of the fragment of a newsreel report about a century-ago edition of the Tour de France led to an obsession with the forgotten rider seen on the film crossing a spectacular bridge. But this is far more than just another cycling book. It tells the story of a Europe still riven by tension and hatred five years after the Armistice.

The story begins when a friend pointed him to an item for sale in an online auction:

Lot 212. A Rare Film Reel from the Tour de France in the 1930s? Condition unknown.”

Ned bought the film for £120, and began a fascinating journey (literally and metaphorically) of discovery. The question mark over the date in the auction house listing was appropriate. The film, just over two minutes long, actually featured the 1923 Tour de France. Boulting found that the early Tours after the Great War followed exactly the same route, so he resorted to reading old newspaper articles, and even searching for weather reports, to establish that the stage from Brest to Les Sables d’Olonne featured in the film took place on 30 June 1923.

That £120 purchase could have had disastrous consequences. The company that made Boulting a digital video out of the ancient reel told him that the original was a nitrate film, and so highly flammable. Ned didn’t admit to the film restorers that the item had sat next to the radiator of his house after popping through his letterbox after he won the auction. If you happen to have a very old film reel at home, do check that it isn’t nitrate…

Théophile Beeckman leads the peloton over the bridge at La Roche-Bernard. Photo: Ned Boulting, 1923

This is one of the defining images from the 1923 story. It shows the hero of the book, Théophile Beeckman, racing ahead on the bridge across the river Vilaine at La Roche-Bernard. As the subtitle of the book, The Mystery of Lot 212 and a Tour de France Obsession, suggests, Boulting became obsessed with uncovering the story of Beeckman, a man so obscure that he has all but vanished from the records. (As Ned discovered, there was virtually nothing about the rider online until he published 1923.)

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