Jock Wadley

John Borland Wadley was an English journalist whose magazines and reporting opened Continental cycle racing to fans in Britain.
Wadley covered 18 Tours de France from 1956. He worked for the British weekly, The Bicycle and then started and edited the monthlies Coureur and International Cycle Sport. He also wrote a number of books.

Cycling origins

Wadley began cycling with the Colchester Rovers club when he was 14. He and a friend, Alf Kettle, were between the towns of Kelvedon and Coggeshall when they took a wrong turning into a farm track by moonlight, riding by the light of acetylene lamps. Kettle called Wadley "Willy", because it was what all new members were called. He said it was "like the Tour de France". It was the first time Wadley had heard of the race, which was still in the era of daily stages that started at dawn and rode on unsurfaced roads. He wanted to know more.
He went to the world track championships in Paris when he was 19 and came home starry-eyed over riders like Jeff Scherens and Lucien Michard. He ordered the daily paper L'Auto, which organised the Tour, from a newsagent in Colchester. The man warned him it cost 1½d and that the cost was extravagant.

Journalism

Wadley joined The Bicycle soon after it started, in February 1936, and became the magazine's foreign correspondent. The paper opened in opposition to Cycling, to counter Cyclings perceived establishment views, which included not covering massed racing on the open road after the Second World War and giving what some readers saw as little attention to professional cycling, such as the Tour de France. Cycling was originally dismissive of a breakaway organisation, the British League of Racing Cyclists and campaigned against it and did little to cover its races; The Bicycle saw itself as neither for or against the BLRC but saw massed-start racing an exciting part of cycle-racing. The Bicycle appeared on Tuesday rather than the Friday of its rival.
Wadley translated reports in French and Belgian papers, and cuttings sent by the magazine's correspondent at L'Auto and cycled around the Continent reporting the races he saw and writing accounts of the riders he had met. Adrian Bell, the British publisher who compiled a collection of Wadley's work, wrote:

And so began a pattern of working life and, with it, a unique style of writing about cycling that Wadley was to maintain, to a greater or lesser extent, for more than 20 years. When not required for race-reporting duties in England, he would load the panniers of his bicycle – spare clothes and maps in one, a portable typewriter in the other – and take to the roads of France, Belgium Holland. Whatever the route, it was of his choosing. And back would come the reports – of major Tours, French classics, frenetic kermesses over the Belgian pavé, or six-day dramas on the steep banking of indoor velodromes – or interviews with current riders or with those whose exploits had once made cycling history, or simply touring features that depicted the appealing variety of the terrain through which he travelled. During one two-month tour in the spring of 1954, he submitted 3,000 words a week; there was simply nothing like it in the English cycling press.

Wadley left the magazine two years later and joined the press department of the bicycle maker, Hercules, which was sponsoring prominent British riders to break long-distance records. From there he was conscripted into the services at the start of the Second World War.
With the return of peace, he became one of three press officers for the sport's governing body, the Union Cycliste Internationale when the Olympic Games were held in London in 1948. He then rejoined The Bicycle and stayed until it closed in 1955. That year he started work on a monthly magazine, initially called Coureur but then, because a magazine with a similar title already existed, Sporting Cyclist.

''Sporting Cyclist''

Wadley recalled of his redundancy: "I saw more cycling... than in four far-from-dull years on The Bicycle. As the programme included my first all-the-way Tour de France, I had enough material in hand to write a book... The dream, however, was to bring out a continental-style all-cycling magazine."
In late 1956, Wadley secured the backing of the publisher Charles Buchan, former football captain of Arsenal and England, who wanted a companion to his magazine, Football Monthly. Wadley told Buchan that he had a proposal which would never make him rich but wouldn't disgrace him, an approach so novel that Buchan was interested from the start. Issue number one was written by Wadley, who had also taken most of the photographs. It was produced at the home of Peter Bryan, Wadley's editor at The Bicycle, with help from a photographer, Bill Lovelace, and a designer, Glenn Steward. They too had worked at The Bicycle.
Sporting Cyclist introduced Continental racing through the Franco-American writer, René de Latour. His role was "friend of the stars", providing insights into Continental racing at a time when Cycling concentrated on domestic issues.
The cycle parts importer and advertiser, Ron Kitching, wrote:

This was a real innovation and an instant success. It was filled with exciting stories of both home and overseas events, written not only by Jock himself but also by the top cycling writers of the day – like René de Latour, Harry Aspden, Charles Ruys and Dick Snowden, Geoffrey Nicholson and David Saunders.

The last edition was in April 1968, volume 12, number 4. Sporting Cyclist was by then owned by Longacre Press, which had bought Buchan's publications. Longacre also published Cycling and the two merged. The assistant editor, Roy Green, who had joined in 1960, left Sporting Cyclist to join Amateur Photographer.
Wadley set up another magazine, International Cycle Sport, which after 199 issues in 17 years also failed, by which time Wadley's contract as editor had long since not been renewed.

''International Cycle Sport''

International Cycle Sport was the idea of Kennedy Brothers, a printing company in Keighley, Yorkshire owned by three brothers. It was the first English-language cycling magazine printed in colour, with a colour cover and several colour pages inside. The contents were those which would have appeared in the next Sporting Cyclist. Wadley's assistant editor, John Wilcockson, said: "We were thrilled with the first issue that came off the presses, even though the colour reproduction was pretty awful." One of the pictures, of the Belgian rider Patrick Sercu was printed the wrong way round.
Wadley wrote in his first leading article:

I had launched because I knew the cycling world wanted it. There was never any suggestion that it would make a lot of money for anybody. Yet within a few years, after a series of mergers and takeovers, Sporting Cyclist found itself under the control of a giant publishing organisation whose business, understandably, was to make money. A small monthly magazine supported by what it considered to be a "dying industry" was obviously of little interest to such a concern, and its eventual merger with Cycling was simply a matter of time. When the decision was taken I and my most able assistant Roy Green were given the chance of carrying on with the combined publication, but neither accepted the offer.

The magazine was produced in a basement office in Kingston upon Thames Surrey, rented from Maurice Cumberworth, race director of the Milk Race. Kennedy Brothers, however, failed and a receiver passed its assets to another Yorkshire printer, Peter Fretwell. The magazine was among the assets. Fretwell's company was also struggling and the receiver hoped to make one strong company out of two weak ones.
Wilcockson said:

Peter Fretwell was a tough-minded businessman, the antithesis of the mild-mannered Wadley. The two men didn't get on... The arrangement worked for a while, but Fretwell soon decided that he could do without Wadley. I was prepared to go too, but my 'father' said no... Well, within a year, I was fired too.

Adrian Bell wrote:

So the saying goes, you can never walk the same road twice. ICS was not Sporting Cyclist in full-colour guise. In the first place it never had the same breadth of coverage. Secondly, not only was it more narrowly focused, it contained fewer articles, and they were mainly written by professional journalists. In its text and the use of full-page colour photography, it was closer to a contemporary monthly cycling journal; it was never a diary written by clubmen for clubmen.

Tour de France

Jock Wadley covered 18 Tours de France not only for his magazine but for the London Daily Telegraph. The paper then decided to send its specialist cycling reporter, David Saunders. Until then Saunders had not wanted to spend a month of each summer away from home.
The new arrangement ended Wadley's newspaper career and halted the occasional contributions he made to BBC Radio, where he reported on noisy short-wave and telephone links from races such as the world championship and Bordeaux–Paris, a race from which he reported the victory of the British rider, Tom Simpson.
It also ended Wadley's habit of following the Tour in the car of French journalist colleagues and he covered his 19th Tour by bike and wrote a book called My Nineteenth Tour de France.
His years at the Tour de France earned him the race's medal. He received it from the organisers Jacques Goddet and Félix Lévitan at Carpentras in 1970. For many years he had been the only permanent English-speaking reporter on the Tour and the race press officer, Louis Lapeyre, who for many years refused to speak to any anglophone journalists let alone do it in English, finally negotiated with them through Wadley.