Cycling is a sport rich in endurance records, but there can have been few tougher events than "the Year," in which a single rider tries to cover more miles on his bike in a year than anyone has ever managed before. It was a particularly big deal in the decade running up to World War Two, and on January 6th 1936 a Yorkshire engineer, blacklisted out of his trade because of his communist activism, began his attempt.
At that time, the record-holder (at 43,996 miles) was a professional cyclist in Australia, who'd done his mileage in warm weather, on good roads, with a full support team. Walter Greaves, by contrast ... well, Walter was an amateur, stony broke, on his own, mostly riding on Pennine tracks, starting during an especially vicious winter, and dressed in "little more than rags."
And he only had one arm, having lost the other in a childhood accident.
Born in 1907 in Bradford, Walter was soon involved in the family business: travelling the North of England, selling home-made herbal tonics. Being a quack doctor wasn't much of a living for a young fellow, and there wasn't a lot else on offer for school-leaver Walter, with his one arm and his outspoken beliefs. A socialist from a socialist family, a passionate recruiter for the Communist Party, he was also a militant vegetarian and the teetotal son of a heavy-drinking father.
Cycling was his escape, as it was for so many young people in those years of economic depression, and Walter wasn't bad at it: as a member of various cycling clubs, including the Vegetarian CAC and the Spartacus CC, he proved himself useful at time trials, sprints and endurance runs.
Walter seems to have decided to have a go at the year record partly because he was unemployed, and partly because he was a man rarely known to underestimate his own capabilities.
He set off from Bradford Town Hall with a target of 130 miles a day. His ride took him through gales, snowdrifts, and icy roads. He was knocked down by a bus in London, and had countless other falls, including eight in one day. One crash caused an abscess on his leg which put him in hospital for a fortnight, costing him thousands of lost miles which all had to be made up when he resumed. On another occasion he was hospitalised with frostbite. He once rode 374 miles without sleeping.
But in the end, Walter Greaves took the record with time to spare: his 44,000th mile came on December 13th at Speakers' Corner in London, before a large crowd of fans. He had, incredibly, gained weight during his ride, on a daily diet which included 21 pounds of brown bread and a terrifying quantity of tomatoes.
Back in real life, when his celebrity as a rider had faded, he ran a bike-building business with the help of his pet monkey (it's no good you reading that line again, it doesn't make any better sense the second time), served a spell in prison for theft, experienced destitution, got married, divorced and married again, ran a cyclists' cafe, retrained as a blacksmith, and became moderately famous once more in later life, this time as a folk singer and concertina player known as the Singing Blacksmith. (He was also a poet and a sculptor, but I couldn't quite fit that into the sentence.)
Walter died in 1987, aged 80. His 1936 record of 45,383 miles had been broken almost immediately, and repeatedly, but his achievement is surely immortal.
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Sources:
The Year by Dave Barter (Vertebrate Publishing, 2015)
www.merlincycles.com/blog/the-crazy-world-of-pre-wwii-extreme-cyclists/
https://grahamstevenson.me.uk/2011/12/12/greaves-walter/
https://ayearinthesaddle.wordpress.com/2011/12/19/the-year-endurance-cycling-record/
www.cravenherald.co.uk/news/19099686.walter-greaves---one-armed-vegetarian-cyclist-smashed-world-record/