Beryl Burton had a simple motto. “Anything lads can do,” she told herself, “I can do.” And then she got on her bike and showed the world the truth of her assertion through achievements that provided an early sign of what we now believe to be true: that in endurance events, whether cycling or open-water swimming or ultra-marathon running, the gap between men and women decreases as the distance grows.
Between the ages of 19 and 39 the Yorkshirewoman won enough cups and medals to fill a house. They included two world road race championships, five world pursuit titles, 72 national time trial championships at distances from 10 to 100 miles, 12 national road race titles and a further dozen national pursuit titles. As a record breaker in time trials at all distances, she was beyond compare. Most of her national records lasted 20 years; one stood for half a century.
When it came to showing she could compete with “lads”, one incident has entered into legend. In September 1967 she made the short journey from her home in Morley, south of Leeds, to take part in the 12-hour time trial run by Otley cycling club. She was 30, and at her peak. The male competitors were due to start first, at one-minute intervals, followed by the handful of women. Among the men, the final starter was Mike McNamara, who was on his way to the coveted title of best British all-rounder.
During his description of the event in The Greatest, his biography of Burton, my colleague William Fotheringham records her list of the food she prepared for a ride that started just after seven o’clock in the morning and ended an hour before sunset: “fruit salad, peaches, rice pudding, fruit and honey cake, egg and milk, peppermint and blackcurrant, coffee, glucose, malt bread, bananas, four bits of steak and some cheese”. Most of this was loaded into the support car driven by her husband, Charlie, who, having introduced her to cycling when she was in her teens, acted throughout her career in a purely supporting role that not all men – particularly, perhaps, in the Yorkshire of 50 years ago – would find easy to accept.
Burton’s list does not include what became perhaps the most famous bit of food – if you can call it that – in the history of British cycling. Having completed 235 miles, still with almost two hours to go, she overhauled McNamara, who had started two minutes ahead of her and had been trying to keep her at bay, which meant repressing an urgent need to pee. As she went past, in a rather ambiguous gesture of consolation, she passed him a liquorice allsort. At that point he finally gave in to the need to climb off and empty his bladder.
Earlier in the day Burton had suffered a persistent stomach ache, relieved only when Charlie drove up alongside and offered her a nip of brandy. In the final hour she allowed McNamara to repass her and sat safely 100 yards or so behind him until the end of her 12 hours by which time she had covered 277.25 miles outdistancing McNamara by almost half a mile and setting a record for all-comers, men or women. A woman had beaten all the men in a major endurance event while competing against them in exactly the same conditions.
Photograph: John Knoote/Daily Mail/Shutterstock
The time trial was Burton’s thing and the only reason she never won the world time trial championship is that it wasn’t there to be won. By the time the governing body finally decided to allow women to race against the clock for a world title, her career was long over. It was the same with the Olympics: when women cyclists were finally admitted to the Games in 1984, she was 47 years old – although that did not prevent her from hoping vainly for a place in the British team.
Beneath the image of a straightforward Yorkshire lass, Burton was a complicated person: strong willed and obsessively competitive. At 11, having just endured the blow of unexpectedly failing the exam that would have secured her a grammar school place, she had suffered severe complications from rheumatic fever, keeping her in hospital for nine months and convalescent for a further year. It was not until her new boyfriend got her on a bike that she found her means of self-expression, one that justified the years of maintaining her strength through hard toil on a rhubarb farm.
The most moving and troubling passages of the book concern her relationship with her daughter, Denise, who followed her into cycling. On the day the 20-year-old beat her mother to win the national road race title in 1976, the pain of defeat was so strong that Beryl could not bring herself to congratulate her daughter. Six years later, however, they were sharing a British 10-mile tandem record.
At the end of September the world’s best cyclists will gather in Yorkshire, competing for the women’s and men’s rainbow jerseys over roads Beryl Burton knew well. Having set an example that advanced the cause of women in sport, she died in 1996 while out on her bike delivering invitations to her 59th birthday party; the heart attack that killed her may have had its origins in her childhood illness.
“She was well known but no one truly knew her,” Fotheringham writes; he is a knowledgeable and sympathetic storyteller but the reader is left with the feeling there are layers still waiting to be peeled away, if time has not sealed them permanently together.
The Greatest: The Times and Life of Beryl Burton is published by YouCaxton (£20).
