Tommy Chalmers
Reading through old copies of Cycling Plus I found this in the February 2005 issue. Tommy Chalmers is the kind of cyclist who would be in the League of Cycling Purity if it was real.
Below is the text from the article.
Tommy Chambers
Winter and again those schnell breezes come scything though the spokes. Time for another spin around the great indoors. Chuck a few logs on the radiator, Gwyneth, fix us two cappuccino and settle me down with a good read. Enthralling exploits,say, by some indefatigable biking icons. Men like Binda, Opperman, Coppi, Harris, Anquestil, Anquet Merckx, Armstrong and Chambers.
Just a tick I hear you think Gordon Bennet, who the Dickens is Opperman?
We’ll leave the illustrious Aussie and his phenomenal rides of the 1930s for the moment, recalling only Sir Hubert Opperman’s great and much appreciated legacy to the sport “the Oppy” peaked cotton racing cap still flourishing in the pro bunch today Actually, my mind is on that other celebrated epic rider who also bequeather something special. Tommy chalmers, by chance, freewheeled into the sunset exactly 20 years ago.
That same bachelor, Tam, regularly catered of an evening in claustrophobic Glasgow scullery for a coterie of pals, and was thus affectionately known as the “frying Scotsman”. Chalmers was also a Peyps of the pedals, an indomitable record holder, witty and indubitably eccentric. And he kept a diary. To be accurate, his pedalling passage through life was festooned with diaries, cryptic but meticulous records of jaunts, haunts and cycling paraphernalia.
Anyone, of course, who in half a century had clocked up precisely 799,405 miles on an ordinary push bike and earned a mention in the Guinness book of bizarre dispatches, was also emphatically staunch. A man who got to just about ever recess of the British Isles under his own steam, whose self denial at times resemble dire stairs and yet who left a small fortune in his wake, had decidedly achieve idiosyncrasy. Humour was merely Tommy’s Clydeside culture, his natural sheen.
I met him years ago, one afternoon not long before he abandoned the top-floor, room-and-kitchen flat he occupied all his life, to die in 1984 in a Glasgowe nursing home. Big Tam was still full of verve and vigour, just as I’d suspected.
He was 80, then, a Scots cycling legend who’d done it his way, making heavy weather of recent pelvis and thigh fractures from a daft street accident. Up the the three flights of stairs I went to have a chinwag with this impatient patient, in a house of plain fare - tea, bread, beans and bacon - and laughs. Naturally this same menu was served warm over the decades to many of his fellow bike enthusiasts and buddies who regularly congregated at his Glasgow abode.
An untypical delay and the front door swings open to frame the 5ft 11ins, bald and mildly pugnacious bachelor with a grin and a glinting eye. Soon, over a cuppa from a teapot nesting in a cast iron range of Edwardian antiquity, the senior citizen who is already probably the worlds greeted distance cyclist (with evidence to prove it) makes light of his ills, then proudly leads me off to admire his clever new toy.
Mile millionaire
The bedroom, to be euphemistic, is stark. At the hole-in-the-wall bed stands a large Freddy Grubb machine, minus handlebars, the rear wheel on a stand and the forks held by a leather strap to the mantlepiece, possibly for moral support. The bike’s, not Tam’s. He fumbles under the bed, produces and oft recobbled pair of cycling shoes then awkwardly straddles the frame at the headset and, safely aboard, gives the pedals the welly. “Get the idea?” the octogenarian beams. “As yet I’m not reconciled to early retirement”.
In due course, however, the exuberant Tam bent to the inevitable, conceding reluctantly thet the million miles he badly wanted to clock up on the small cyclometer at his front wheel was never to be. “I suppose”, he later deduced, “now we’ve gone metric I’m a millionaire in kilometres!”
That affluence of spirit was in wacky conflict with the austerity of the house and its incumbent.
Tommy’s cycling couture was at best economic, a hangover from the austerity of WW2, and the height of sartorial inelegance. Over the decades and in all weathers he wore the same pair of khaki shorts, a woollen jersey or cotton jacket, a beret or cap, and shoes but no socks.
Later, when most of his generation were house or zimmer-bound, even nurturing daisies, he continued his methodical marathon biking in long trousers tucked into the tops of his stockings, plus-four style.
His cupidity for miles, in fact, came soon after he began to shoulder a bike up and down the stairs of his long-term residence at 664 Pollokshaws Road in Glasgow's Strathbungo south side, in 1922. He logged them in in the cryptic notes he was to revert to all his life what he called a “a pathetic 5000 miles” in each of the next couple of years. Never again in half a century, he reminded me, did any of his eventual ten minimalist machines register less than 15,000 miles annually.
Tam’s spontaneous combustion over that period, mostly aboard the Glasgow Built frame of his preference, The Flying Scot, would have driven the locomotive of near-comparable national renown. When he was 63, chalmers topped 20,000 miles for the second time, a telling average then of 400 miles a week. Considering his age and the era, prevailing road surfaces, a ubiquitous single gear, mostly fixed and rarely free, poor national diet and training options, and the fact that he was strictly an amateur with hard work days to put in, Tam’s relentless biking remains more than remarkable.
He was known often to squeeze in up to 100 hilly miles into his normal workday shift as a railway station slater, often up and away solo on the road lond before dawn to have the bothy fire roaring at Wemyss Bay, Ayr or wherever before the rest of the squad arrived by train from the city.
His quip about these outings? “On a good day i’d take the long way home.”
Cycling Socalists
The first cycling club he joined, and later briefly my own, was the Kinning Park Carlton, originally an energetic outlet for Young Socialists. But the institute that held him firmly from 1929 was the Douglas Cycling Club, its later blue, red and yellow banded racing jersey and eye-catcher in every rural niche.
Tam liked to recall that he covered 219 miles to win an important Lancashire 12-hour race in 1930 when he was 29 and was still able to clock an amazing 217 in a Scottish half-day event in his 61st year to take the British veteran’s record.
Along with biking facts and philosophy, Tam dispensed jokes. Notably on subjects like the protracted agony of all day racing. He alleged a slow-motion, 24-hour man spotted a dawn shipyard worker reading the sports page at a bus stop and asked, “is the result of this race in that paper?”
He claimed a priest on Largs seafront greeted the approach of a 50-mile tester on the Sabbath with the alert: “You’re riding on the road to Hell!” A fast receding rider was heard to respond, “Is that a fact? Whit’s the course record?”
“It’s all been what you would call a compulsive pleasure”, Tam told me. “I’ve never been able to analyse it, exactly. The bike gives me some hard times. But mostly for me it was easy.”
The big miles club
In the end, Chalmers became the doyen of the Fraternity of 300,000 Milers, a group of British cyclists who meticulously recorded their daily trips. Just before Tam’s death, Frank Fisher of Market Drayton, club secretary, reckoned that nobody with documented proof approached the near 800,000 miles of the Scot. Nearest at that time ws 676,000 miles by Ron Cook of Ipswich, who had died six years earlier in 1978.
A surprising aspect of Tam’s epic 30 times around the world is that it was all accomplished in the UK and Ireland. His obsession with statistics reveal that he disposed of 254 tyres, 33 pedals, 76 chains, five saddles, 126 fixed cogs and three freewheels: in total ten bikes and all painted black for easy maintenance, He once reckoned that every 1000 miles cost him £1.
For much of his life he’d looked after his elderly widowed mother. He had a girlfriend once, he said, but the affair came to nothing. A sister had got married and lost touch and an elder brother died with the International Brigade in Spain. His best friend, amateur weightlifter Jock Preston told me, “Tommy was a great conversationalist, grand company, yet in his own way a loner.”
Reticence seems odd for a man who every quarter year for 35 years summoned his coterie of Has-Beens to tea and sannies at his place in Glasgow, and celebrated the 100th occasion of these gatherings at a city pub in 1971.
Any cyclist today on his/her £2000 machine casting a glance at Tam’s ambulatory bedsteads would assume the owner short of a bob, or plain stingy. Canny he was, but tight, never. Mourners paying their respects to Chalmers might have choked quietly on their funeral canapes at hearing he had left £22,500 (maybe £100,000 today) mostly to the People’s Palace, a Glasgow folk museum where his gold Albert watch and racing medals were long on show. His legacy also funded the purchase of some popular Scottish paintings, still exhibited. The city’s prime reference point, the Mitchell Library, has his diaries on show.
Jock Preston called in close to the end to see to his ailing mate’s affairs and have him comfortably looked after in a Langside nursing home and was shaken as anyone at the extent of the 83-year-old Chalmers’ estate. He shook his head and smiled. Tam, the old Douglass CC captain, used to enjoy taking his mates for a ride.
End of article.
I would point out that he was a true West of Scotland man as all his bikes were black. Alistair Gow of Wheelcraft knew him and probably has more stories. All this was achieved without a support team following in a van feeding him scientifically proven goop.
Tommy Chambers
Winter and again those schnell breezes come scything though the spokes. Time for another spin around the great indoors. Chuck a few logs on the radiator, Gwyneth, fix us two cappuccino and settle me down with a good read. Enthralling exploits,say, by some indefatigable biking icons. Men like Binda, Opperman, Coppi, Harris, Anquestil, Anquet Merckx, Armstrong and Chambers.
Just a tick I hear you think Gordon Bennet, who the Dickens is Opperman?
We’ll leave the illustrious Aussie and his phenomenal rides of the 1930s for the moment, recalling only Sir Hubert Opperman’s great and much appreciated legacy to the sport “the Oppy” peaked cotton racing cap still flourishing in the pro bunch today Actually, my mind is on that other celebrated epic rider who also bequeather something special. Tommy chalmers, by chance, freewheeled into the sunset exactly 20 years ago.
That same bachelor, Tam, regularly catered of an evening in claustrophobic Glasgow scullery for a coterie of pals, and was thus affectionately known as the “frying Scotsman”. Chalmers was also a Peyps of the pedals, an indomitable record holder, witty and indubitably eccentric. And he kept a diary. To be accurate, his pedalling passage through life was festooned with diaries, cryptic but meticulous records of jaunts, haunts and cycling paraphernalia.
Anyone, of course, who in half a century had clocked up precisely 799,405 miles on an ordinary push bike and earned a mention in the Guinness book of bizarre dispatches, was also emphatically staunch. A man who got to just about ever recess of the British Isles under his own steam, whose self denial at times resemble dire stairs and yet who left a small fortune in his wake, had decidedly achieve idiosyncrasy. Humour was merely Tommy’s Clydeside culture, his natural sheen.
I met him years ago, one afternoon not long before he abandoned the top-floor, room-and-kitchen flat he occupied all his life, to die in 1984 in a Glasgowe nursing home. Big Tam was still full of verve and vigour, just as I’d suspected.
He was 80, then, a Scots cycling legend who’d done it his way, making heavy weather of recent pelvis and thigh fractures from a daft street accident. Up the the three flights of stairs I went to have a chinwag with this impatient patient, in a house of plain fare - tea, bread, beans and bacon - and laughs. Naturally this same menu was served warm over the decades to many of his fellow bike enthusiasts and buddies who regularly congregated at his Glasgow abode.
An untypical delay and the front door swings open to frame the 5ft 11ins, bald and mildly pugnacious bachelor with a grin and a glinting eye. Soon, over a cuppa from a teapot nesting in a cast iron range of Edwardian antiquity, the senior citizen who is already probably the worlds greeted distance cyclist (with evidence to prove it) makes light of his ills, then proudly leads me off to admire his clever new toy.
Mile millionaire
The bedroom, to be euphemistic, is stark. At the hole-in-the-wall bed stands a large Freddy Grubb machine, minus handlebars, the rear wheel on a stand and the forks held by a leather strap to the mantlepiece, possibly for moral support. The bike’s, not Tam’s. He fumbles under the bed, produces and oft recobbled pair of cycling shoes then awkwardly straddles the frame at the headset and, safely aboard, gives the pedals the welly. “Get the idea?” the octogenarian beams. “As yet I’m not reconciled to early retirement”.
In due course, however, the exuberant Tam bent to the inevitable, conceding reluctantly thet the million miles he badly wanted to clock up on the small cyclometer at his front wheel was never to be. “I suppose”, he later deduced, “now we’ve gone metric I’m a millionaire in kilometres!”
That affluence of spirit was in wacky conflict with the austerity of the house and its incumbent.
Tommy’s cycling couture was at best economic, a hangover from the austerity of WW2, and the height of sartorial inelegance. Over the decades and in all weathers he wore the same pair of khaki shorts, a woollen jersey or cotton jacket, a beret or cap, and shoes but no socks.
Later, when most of his generation were house or zimmer-bound, even nurturing daisies, he continued his methodical marathon biking in long trousers tucked into the tops of his stockings, plus-four style.
His cupidity for miles, in fact, came soon after he began to shoulder a bike up and down the stairs of his long-term residence at 664 Pollokshaws Road in Glasgow's Strathbungo south side, in 1922. He logged them in in the cryptic notes he was to revert to all his life what he called a “a pathetic 5000 miles” in each of the next couple of years. Never again in half a century, he reminded me, did any of his eventual ten minimalist machines register less than 15,000 miles annually.
Tam’s spontaneous combustion over that period, mostly aboard the Glasgow Built frame of his preference, The Flying Scot, would have driven the locomotive of near-comparable national renown. When he was 63, chalmers topped 20,000 miles for the second time, a telling average then of 400 miles a week. Considering his age and the era, prevailing road surfaces, a ubiquitous single gear, mostly fixed and rarely free, poor national diet and training options, and the fact that he was strictly an amateur with hard work days to put in, Tam’s relentless biking remains more than remarkable.
He was known often to squeeze in up to 100 hilly miles into his normal workday shift as a railway station slater, often up and away solo on the road lond before dawn to have the bothy fire roaring at Wemyss Bay, Ayr or wherever before the rest of the squad arrived by train from the city.
His quip about these outings? “On a good day i’d take the long way home.”
Cycling Socalists
The first cycling club he joined, and later briefly my own, was the Kinning Park Carlton, originally an energetic outlet for Young Socialists. But the institute that held him firmly from 1929 was the Douglas Cycling Club, its later blue, red and yellow banded racing jersey and eye-catcher in every rural niche.
Tam liked to recall that he covered 219 miles to win an important Lancashire 12-hour race in 1930 when he was 29 and was still able to clock an amazing 217 in a Scottish half-day event in his 61st year to take the British veteran’s record.
Along with biking facts and philosophy, Tam dispensed jokes. Notably on subjects like the protracted agony of all day racing. He alleged a slow-motion, 24-hour man spotted a dawn shipyard worker reading the sports page at a bus stop and asked, “is the result of this race in that paper?”
He claimed a priest on Largs seafront greeted the approach of a 50-mile tester on the Sabbath with the alert: “You’re riding on the road to Hell!” A fast receding rider was heard to respond, “Is that a fact? Whit’s the course record?”
“It’s all been what you would call a compulsive pleasure”, Tam told me. “I’ve never been able to analyse it, exactly. The bike gives me some hard times. But mostly for me it was easy.”
The big miles club
In the end, Chalmers became the doyen of the Fraternity of 300,000 Milers, a group of British cyclists who meticulously recorded their daily trips. Just before Tam’s death, Frank Fisher of Market Drayton, club secretary, reckoned that nobody with documented proof approached the near 800,000 miles of the Scot. Nearest at that time ws 676,000 miles by Ron Cook of Ipswich, who had died six years earlier in 1978.
A surprising aspect of Tam’s epic 30 times around the world is that it was all accomplished in the UK and Ireland. His obsession with statistics reveal that he disposed of 254 tyres, 33 pedals, 76 chains, five saddles, 126 fixed cogs and three freewheels: in total ten bikes and all painted black for easy maintenance, He once reckoned that every 1000 miles cost him £1.
For much of his life he’d looked after his elderly widowed mother. He had a girlfriend once, he said, but the affair came to nothing. A sister had got married and lost touch and an elder brother died with the International Brigade in Spain. His best friend, amateur weightlifter Jock Preston told me, “Tommy was a great conversationalist, grand company, yet in his own way a loner.”
Reticence seems odd for a man who every quarter year for 35 years summoned his coterie of Has-Beens to tea and sannies at his place in Glasgow, and celebrated the 100th occasion of these gatherings at a city pub in 1971.
Any cyclist today on his/her £2000 machine casting a glance at Tam’s ambulatory bedsteads would assume the owner short of a bob, or plain stingy. Canny he was, but tight, never. Mourners paying their respects to Chalmers might have choked quietly on their funeral canapes at hearing he had left £22,500 (maybe £100,000 today) mostly to the People’s Palace, a Glasgow folk museum where his gold Albert watch and racing medals were long on show. His legacy also funded the purchase of some popular Scottish paintings, still exhibited. The city’s prime reference point, the Mitchell Library, has his diaries on show.
Jock Preston called in close to the end to see to his ailing mate’s affairs and have him comfortably looked after in a Langside nursing home and was shaken as anyone at the extent of the 83-year-old Chalmers’ estate. He shook his head and smiled. Tam, the old Douglass CC captain, used to enjoy taking his mates for a ride.
End of article.
I would point out that he was a true West of Scotland man as all his bikes were black. Alistair Gow of Wheelcraft knew him and probably has more stories. All this was achieved without a support team following in a van feeding him scientifically proven goop.