Chloroform and cocaine: the secrets of a 100-year-old Tour de France film
Ned Boulting’s voice is synonymous with cycling coverage and, as one might expect, he has a devotee’s commitment to the sport. “This is the story of an obsession,” he writes at the beginning of 1923, a curious, absorbing mix of historical sleuthing and travel writing. He’s not lying. The pandemic arrested the usual rhythms of Boulting’s life: “I measured out my life in yellow jerseys,” he notes, when he’s confined to providing commentary from the studio, biking to Kent rather than the mountain passes of France. To add injury to insult, he also broke his arm and was left in a deskbound state, mourning the general shutdown. Into this gloom came an unpromising curio – an old reel of unknown provenance up for auction, claiming to contain footage of a 1930s Tour de France. A maximum bid of £140 and a tricky, outsourced conversion to digital format later – the newly viewable file clocking in at a modest 5 gigabytes and a silent two and half minutes – and Boulting’s life had renewed purpose, as he began an all-consuming mission to learn more about it.
The isolating circumstances in which Boulting acquired the film were the catalyst, rather than the drama of the film itself. The footage was remarkable more for its historical remoteness than any action. The film mostly featured a fairly standard peloton ride, but towards the end there was an “attack” – an attempt to accelerate away from the pack – by a “Beckmann”, over a bridge. Even for Tour anorak Boulting, this Beckmann chap wasn’t ringing any bells.
As interesting as the story of how Boulting pins down the precise year of the film, 1923 – weather reports and clothing confirming it couldn’t have been 1924’s appalling heatwave – and starts to attach names to faces is the insight he gives into the “heroic age” of cycling. The roots of the Tour were in a battle for supremacy between competing papers, and egos, as well as an urge to teach the French about their own nation – “France was still in the process of convincing its constituent parts … that it was indeed a whole and coherent entity”. Added to this was, by 1923, an air of defiance to the immediate post-War Tours, cycling through the devastated landscape in which the guns had finally fallen silent.
The enormity of the physical toll taken on the riders of the period is astonishing. As Boulting explains, the Tour de France was – at the time of his film – aptly named, taking in more than 4,000km of French terrain and lasting a month. In fact, as he begins to identify certain figures on the film, he discovers that one of them was behind a mutiny, one year later, against the conditions.
“We ride on dynamite,” 1923 winner Henri Pélissier told journalists, his kitbag including chloroform and cocaine, needed to push his body through the torture of the Tour. It wasn’t Pélissier but this “Beckmann” – actually the Belgian Théo Beeckman – who most captivates Boulting, however.
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 – his career would be one of near-misses and making fairly little noise. His dedication in the face of widespread indifference begins to parallel the story of the largely ignored film itself; Boulting discovers that, at the time of its first showing, the Pathé reel from which it came played second fiddle to a feature film about a famous German Alsatian. Boulting’s drum-banging on Beeckman’s behalf is touchingly like trying to start a fan club for one of the centre-backs from the Stanley Matthews Cup Final.
Boulting has his own run-ins with ill fortune, contracting Covid on his first pilgrimage to Beeckman’s home town, Ninove, having contacted distant relatives of the cyclist in the hope of sharing his research with someone who might care a fraction as much as he does. When he is finally able to talk to Beeckman’s granddaughter and outline what he’s found out he touches on his motivations: “To be the gatekeeper to so much information was both a responsibility and an honour.” Boulting comes closest to meeting a counterpart in the form of a local historian of La Roche-Bernard, the town caught on his reel, who helps him to identify the sites he’s been forensically studying, almost 100 years on, with a seemingly encyclopaedic knowledge of the local geography.
There are plenty of tangential, historical sub-committees along the way, revealing Boulting’s desperation to find any and all information he could, touching on Sarah Bernhardt, the boxer Battling Siki and bombs in the occupied Ruhr – one can practically picture Boulting’s spider diagrams. Ultimately it’s the enthusiasm that proves most beguiling here, not only for doggedly uncovering facts with extremely limited clues, but for bringing back to the light a remote, unsung figure and honouring his life – and career – even though it wasn’t one of garlands or headlines. As Boulting writes: “What made this attack different to an almost infinite number of other, unrecorded moments, is that somehow, it had dodged oblivion.” Beeckman finally caught a break after all.
1923: The Mystery of Lot 212 and a Tour de France Obsession is published by Bloomsbury at £18.99. To order your copy call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books
