It's All About the Bike (23 page)

‘What's a B 17?' I asked. ‘It sounds like a cocktail.' He pointed to the saddle on the bike behind me.

‘That's what my Granddad rode on,' I said.

‘Precisely.'

Brooks make B 17 saddles. John Boultbee Brooks founded the company in Birmingham in 1866, to make horse harnesses and other leather goods. Twelve years later, so the story goes, the horse Brooks rode to work went off to the great steeplechase in the sky. Unable to afford a new horse, Brooks borrowed a bicycle to commute. Like many gentlemen of his age, he presumably found this iron horse something of a revelation, not least because he didn't have to feed it a bucket of oats each day. He certainly found the wooden saddle a revelation: it was so uncomfortable Brooks swore he'd do something about it.

In October 1882, he applied for his first saddle patent. It read: ‘My invention has for its object the construction of saddles for Bicycles and Tricycles so that they shall be more comfortable and easy especially when in continual use.' The company has been devoted to relieving the problems of cyclists' posteriors ever since. Mr Brooks, on behalf of bike riders the world over, and through the ages, I salute you, you beautiful man.

Brooks introduced the B 17 in 1896. It's been in continuous production ever since. I suspect this makes it the oldest extant component model in the history of the bicycle. Such longevity is the result of several things: a new B 17 is an object of beauty; the succinct name is memorable in many languages; the simple
design has hardly changed; and traditional manufacturing techniques have been passed down from generation to generation of craftsmen who all honour the company's heritage. Above all, though, the saddles are comfortable and they are built to last.

During the twentieth century Brooks diversified into saddlebags, toolbags, panniers, bicycle-mounted cigar trays (what gentleman would ride without one?) and even furniture. The company changed hands a couple of times — it was briefly part of Raleigh — but Brooks never stopped making B 17s to the most exacting standards. For almost fifty years, until the 1970s, the B 17 was the saddle of choice for the majority of professional racers including those from France, Italy and the Netherlands, who were presumably under pressure to ride on saddles made in their home countries. The vast majority of serious cyclists followed the pros' lead.

Moulded plastic, vinyl, titanium, Kevlar, spray adhesives and gel (a type of durable, non-absorbent foam) were introduced to saddles from the mid-1970s onwards. It was a fundamental change. Saddles became lighter and cheaper to make. Leather faded from fashion. When my round-the-world bike was being built in 1995, the B 17 was serving only a niche market — long-distance tourers. Of these, there were two types: young men and women setting off to cross continents, and the dying breed of British cyclists setting off to a youth hostel with a neatly folded map and a thermos of soup. In 1995, Brooks saddles were not the height of cool (though they are again now: sales have trebled in seven years since 2002).

The frame-builder's assistant inked ‘B 17' on to my order form without a moment's hesitation, as the manager of the Brazilian football team at the 1970 World Cup Finals would have inked in ‘Pelé' at number 10. That saddle lasted me for 25,000 miles. I'm not saying it didn't cause any pain — pain is inevitable, remember — but I didn't suffer.

By the time I got back to the UK, I'd all but pounded the poor saddle to death with my buttocks. The leather had slipped away from the rivets at the rear, and torn at the side. The rails — the steel under-carriage that connects the saddle to the seat post — had a small crack. But my B 17 saw me home.

Spending so much time on one saddle does carry a risk, if you believe Sergeant Pluck in Flann O'Brien's bizarre, satirical tale of a tender but unrequited love affair between a man and a bicycle,
The Third Policeman.
Pluck's ‘Atomic Theory' says prolonged contact with a bicycle saddle can result in ‘molecular exchange':

The gross and net result of it is that people who spend most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycles as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who are nearly half people and half bicycle.

The Brooks factory is down a side street in Smethwick, near the Birmingham Canal Navigations. Smethwick was a rural hamlet before the industrial revolution turned it into a nineteenth-century boomtown and global centre of metalworking expertise. Today, Brooks is the only bicycle-related manufacturing business left, not just in Smethwick but in the whole of the greater Birmingham area. They make saddles and a small range of leather bicycle accessories.

The Brooks factory has been on the same site in Downing Street since 1950, when the company made cables, handlebars, brakes and, briefly, complete bicycles. It requires a great leap of imagination to picture Birmingham then. Known as the ‘City of a thousand trades', nearly every non-domestic building would have been a factory or workshop making nails, guns, tools,
cutlery, bedsteads, castings, toys, locks and bicycle parts. The city's growth and prosperity depended upon metalworking industries, and at the heart of this was the bicycle.

With Coventry to the south-east and Nottingham to the north-east, Birmingham made up a triangle that contained the largest concentration of bicycle and bicycle component manufacturers on the planet. It was home to Hercules, the world's largest bicycle manufacturer in the 1930s, plus hundreds of businesses that made everything from bearings to steel tubes. My Dad grew up between Birmingham and Coventry. One of his earliest memories is watching the night sky flame orange as the bicycle factories and car plants in Coventry burned, during the Blitz. When I told him I was writing a book about the bike, he was delighted. His generation of Midlanders still have a sense of ownership of the bicycle.

Steven Green, the office manager or ‘gaffer' to his thirty employees, met me at the factory door. ‘Welcome to Brooks,' he said loudly over the noise of the ‘press shop'. Blanking, bending and riveting machines were hammering, shaping, coiling and cutting steel. The sound-track of the factory — once the sound-track of the whole City — can hardly have changed in a century, I suggested.

‘That's right,' Steven said with a twinkling eye. ‘Some of the employees have been here almost as long too. Meet Bob.'

Bob, an avuncular figure with kind eyes and worn hands, was operating a blanking machine making coil springs for the suspension in Brooks' legendary range of heavy-duty saddles. He smiled broadly. ‘Aye, I've been working here for fifty years. It's just with a gaffer like him it feels longer. Now, the only thing here even older than me is this here machine. It's from the 1940s. Fortunately we can still get spare parts for it. I wish I could say the same for me.'

Next I met Keith. He'd worked at Brooks for forty years. Then Stephen — over thirty years; Alan — nineteen years; and Beverley — ‘not telling'.

‘We're really like a family, a second family,' Steven said, straightening his tie again. Clearly he took pride in this. ‘Everyone gets on with everyone else. We have a good social life. There's a lot of training involved. And there's so much pride taken in what we do that people want to stay. Customers bring in saddles that are thirty or forty years old, for an overhaul. That's very nice.'

Putting a hand on my shoulder as we walked across the press shop to the leather-working room, Bob said, ‘Think of a Brooks saddle like a pair of leather shoes. They may be uncomfortable when you first put them on. They'll pinch a bit here and nip a bit there. But after a while they fit beautifully and they'll be the most comfortable shoes you have for twenty years. I always say bike riders use plastic saddles; cyclists use leather.'

New Brooks saddles are notoriously hard compared to modern gel-padded saddles. Like Bob's leather shoes or a baseball glove, they need ‘breaking in'. Aficionados clash on how best to do this. Some hurry the process by applying lanoline leather dressing. Brooks suggest their own ‘Proofide' ointment. In the end, to break in a Brooks saddle, you have to ride it.

After 1,000 miles there will be shallow indentations where your sit bones are and the leather will have moulded to fit your backside. My B 17 took a little longer. The first leg of my round-the-world journey was from New York to San Francisco. I recall thinking the saddle was finally comfortable somewhere in South Dakota. Thereafter, I had no problems. If you take the trouble to keep the leather taut using the tensioning bolt (a defining feature of Brooks saddles), the saddle will only continue getting more comfortable.

You have then a product that improves with use. This is an
anomaly. We live in a dystopian age when almost everything we buy begins to deteriorate the moment it comes out of the box.
Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse
as the French say — everything changes, everything breaks, everything wears out. Obsolescence is ubiquitous. We've come to accept it as the norm. Buy it, use it, bury it in the ground. A Brooks saddle, with its legendary lifespan, could be one of the first products of a utopian economy: the sort of economy dissident intellectuals were dreaming up in the 1970s, wherein goods are expensive, built to last and repairable. Ideally the people who made them would be well paid and share in the wealth.

It was difficult to see Steven and Bob as the advance guard of the greatest economical (and ecological) transition the world has known since the beginning of the industrial revolution. And to be perfectly honest, when I suggested it to them, they didn't know what I was talking about.

The leather for the saddles comes from British and Irish cattle, via a tannery in Belgium. It has to be 5.5—6 mm thick, ‘for proper support, and to last. Only the section of the hide from the shoulder blade to the butt is thick enough,' Steven explained, handing me a black sheet of it. I watched the leather being cut into saddle shapes, like pastry cases. Any blemished sections were discarded. It was then soaked in tepid water and pressed on to a brass saddle mould, before being dried and shaped again. Beverley smoothed the edges of the leather on a huge belt sander. The trademark was branded on with a heating element. The company badge was fixed to the rear and the leather was hung on a rack with hundreds of other part-prepared saddles and run on a trolley to the assembly stations.

The whole process of making a saddle takes three days. Each job requires a high level of hand—eye co-ordination, manual dexterity and concentration. ‘Experience and a good eye are
important,' Steven said. ‘You'd have a good chance of losing a hand if you had a go at any of these jobs.' I did look to see if anyone was short a finger or two, but no. Even Sonia, who was punching rivets through leather to mount it on the metal cantle plates, with only experience and a good eye to guide her, had the full complement.

‘On the rivet' is an old cycling expression. It dates from the era when all saddles were made of leather and secured to the frame with metal rivets. It describes a rider scrunched tight and low on his bike, hands clamped to the drops and backside perched precariously on the nose of the saddle, trying to lever maximum power into the machine with every pedal stroke, going at it for all he's worth. ‘On the gel' somehow doesn't convey the same intensity.

The models with large brass rivets are hammered and chamfered by hand — jobs no machine can do — to finish them off. Chamfering is a medieval carpentry term for fluting the edge of something. At Brooks, Eric shaves the edge of the leather away with a razor-sharp tool in a continuous motion. A momentary loss of concentration causing a slip of the tool and that saddle is heading for the bin. The ‘Team Professional' model is chamfered. When pro cyclists rode Brooks saddles, they used to complain that the edge of the saddle rubbed their thighs. Today, the process is more for decoration but it illustrates better than anything else the care and the precision of the handwork that goes into every saddle. It reveals why Brooks has become a byword for good craftsmanship.

‘We make over forty models. Each one requires different workmanship. And if you're chamfering or even riveting, you have to get a feel for each batch of leather as they're all different,' Steven said. We walked back across the factory to the end of the production line where the saddles were being inspected one last time, polished and boxed.

‘Now,' he said. ‘You've seen the manufacturing process from start to finish. I presume it's a B 17 you want to buy. What colour?'

‘Actually, I'm going for a Team Professional instead. I've fallen for the hand-hammered copper rivets and the chamfering. I'd like a black one with a chrome frame.' The Team Professional was introduced in 1963. At 46 years old, it's the whippersnapper in the Brooks range. Based on the B 17, it is constructed from a single piece of leather shaped over a steel frame of two rails and the curved cantle plate. The tensioning bolt is fixed underneath the nose and the leather is secured with copper rivets front and rear. ‘Team Professional' is branded on both sides and a ‘Brooks' plate is fixed to the rear. It is simple and beautiful, a blend of strength and grace. I could see the warm approval in Steven's eyes.

‘Good choice,' he said. ‘It should serve you well for many years to come. And I hope you'll bring it back in twenty-five years for an overhaul. Some of us will no doubt still be working here then.'