Joined in 2023 
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63 About this deal
There is in part real-world, real-time sleuthing, as I drag my project into the light of the day, a century later. It felt like a curious responsibility to keep someone’s memory alive like that, becoming another big mission of mine that came randomly from this film. I have no idea how Boulting managed to get this so wrong, missed Gallica’s captions and somehow dated the pictures to 1925.
The description cautioned: ‘Not viewed at time of cataloguing, this lot is on a reel without a box, hence it has possibly been exposed to light, there is obvious cracking and broken areas on the first section of the film edges, we have not looked at the whole film as we have not taken it off the reel or have not looked at it through a projector. In the autumn of 2020 Ned Boulting (ITV head cycling commentator and Tour de France obsessive) bought a length of Pathe news film from a London auction house.
Not only is it very brittle with the passing of age but also highly combustible, something I didn’t realise at the time but subsequently was pointed out to me – that even having it in my house would have invalidated my buildings insurance. It’s no exaggeration to say that what began as a journey to satisfy a certain curiosity, during that long, sad first Covid winter rapidly became an overwhelming obsession; one which spun off in any number of different directions, all of which seemed to me to be uniquely fascinating.
Even with added adjectives you can see that a written description of two-and-a-half-minutes of film won’t fill a 300-page book. It all started with that chance purchase at sport specialist Graham Budd’s auction in November 2020. I was very concerned they would look in their archives and say it turns out we’ve got five copies of this film already so don’t worry, but not a bit of it, this is definitely the only copy,” says an obviously relieved Boulting. There is the unsettling background of the covid pandemic distorting our sense of distance and connection.
A brief e-mail from a friend about an auction lot turns the author’s enforced home stay, necessitated by a serious bicycle crash and then the Covid-19 pandemic, into a remarkable bit of time travel to the world of a century ago. The book covers a single day – June 30, 1923 – that marked a single stage in the arduous cycling marathon that is the Tour. Even changing gear meant dismounting and using a spanner to take off the rear wheel, flip it round and put it back in again and the chain back on – and you had only two gears anyway, one for the flat and one for a mountain. Bradley struck gold with his debut, The Cat and the City; stories of loneliness in Tokyo connected by a strange, recurring cat. Ned set about learning everything he could about the sequence - studying each frame, face and building - until he had squeezed the meaning from it.
A rather brutal character, he was noteworthy for the strike he led with his brother and another rider in the 1924 race, dropping out on Stage 4 and giving an interview to journalist Albert Londres that became the infamous “Convicts of the Road” story about pro bike racers. The world was shutting down again outside and so I needed an escape hatch and the film presented me with exactly that.And so – in the same way that, today, Bianchi and Peugeot and Gitane are owned by the same company – Alcyon had subsidiary brands in its portfolio. Beeckman was a solid if unremarkable member of his cohort; his attack captured on film a rare occasion in which he especially troubled the limelight. From the off he’s told us he knew little of the history of the Tour in this era, how he had only vaguely heard of Henri Pélissier, who won the 1923 race. So my next confusion was that the film could have been from any one of five years and I had to figure out which one – that was hard work.
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