(Some years ago my workplace hosted The Cycling Podcast on its visit to Edinburgh, and I’d wondered if my paths had crossed with Ned Boulting’s that evening. He was heading up his one man show “Tour de Ned” however and hadn’t been with us then. But it turns out that Ned went through his teens at the same time and in the same town as I did. Did we attend the same inter-school debating society 1985-1987? Anyway, there it is).
Ned Boulting’s the most prominent of a great generation of cycling writers, journalists and broadcasters, and 1923: the Mystery of Lot 212 and a Tour de France Obsession came out two years ago. The drama and history of the Tour de France had always been a central pillar in Ned’s professional and creative life, so when a friend pointed him towards an auction lot described as A Rare Film Reel from the Tour de France in the 1930s? he felt driven to bid. The small jiffy bag of nitrate film stock that fell through his door not long after started him on a series of journeys of the body and mind through and around the places, circumstances and people on the reel. 1923 is built around Ned’s efforts over the months and years that followed to restore and explain the film, and to take it home (he presents the reel to Pathé in Paris, the company who’d shot the footage, not in the 1930s as it turned out but in 1923 on the French Atlantic coast).
Ned had the reel digitized. It’s not long – two and a half minutes precisely – and you can watch the clip online. The film starts with a map, which is followed by a scene of riders leaving a Tour de France control point at L’Orient, one of the peoloton making progress out of Vannes, and three shots of a rider (that turns out to be one Theo Beeckman) at the front of the race. From this snippet Ned has built an extraordinary historic panorama taking in not just the heroic early decades of the Tour or of the war-shattered, unstable, tragedy-haunted Europe of the early 1920s through which the race ran but also the decades either side, running on into the present day (and the Covid epidemic through which Ned is forced to conduct the bulk of his research).
The clip being so short means that this is a book about photographic history as much as the history of cinema or film: Ned works much of the time with individual stills that enable the identification of a place – the Cafe Gloux in L’Orient – or a person – the dusty, beaming Gars Jean as he gestures to the camera a century ago. I think there are models here for photographic history to follow, not the least being just this kind of zoom-in, zoom-out pattern, moving in close to a single element or an individual figure to make the identification and then panning back out into the history of a place or the life and career and personality of that individual, before bringing it all back into the image itself. You do see this of course in modern historical writing about photography – we know the identities of all of the boys in Jimmy Sime’s 1937 “Toffs and Toughs” picture taken outside Lords for the News Chronicle – but too often marred by the personal political certainties that photography people are prone to give way to. Boulting’s nuance and sensitivity is something to be aspired to.
The presenter’s-journey format of the book (and a writer with an extensive TV background might be forgiven for using a routine familiar from factual television) is less borrowable, really, but it works here. Although some of the book’s heroes are the historic ones – the mysterious Theo Beeckman, Henri Pelissier, Gars Jean – others are the people Ned meets in the course of his research and travel, like Beeckman’s granddaughter Therese and the poet Willie Verhegghe. The journey structure opens up space moreover for reflections on the sheer isolation and loneliness that follow alongside the prevailing imperative that drives obsessional research – if there is another worthwhile kind – and it’s all here: the emails and calls that go unanswered, the bewildered staff of Pathé Paris out on the pavement in their Covid masks, and the arc follows onwards to Ned’s meeting with the passionate, singleminded historian of La Roche Bernard, Michel Chatal, the only other individual in the book whose interest in the film is a match for Ned’s own.
Then there is memory, or there isn’t. Ned encounters the silence and forgetting (terrible for being so banal) that falls onto the heroes of the early Tour, especially onto Theo Beeckman where hints arise that the forgetting and erasure might have been deliberate, that people didn’t want to remember. The Cafe Gloux stood for decades on a prominent corner in L’Orient, a familiar daily sight to thousands, but survives now only in the barest archival traces, all human memory gone. There’s Bouet’s cafe and wine shop, cries Michel Chatal, watching the film for the first time, which burned to the ground in 1944..
The survival of human memory and the deliberate erasure of human memory are themes that run through the book, because this is also a Covid memoir relating Ned’s own experiences and emotional journey through the pandemic. That these sections of the book read so uncomfortably is interesting. I found I resented them. As the pandemic got underway in early 2020, writers and artists, conscious that they were about to live through history, set out to record it, with libraries and galleries worldwide creating repositories to capture what they could of what was to come. At the same time, historians looked back to the catastrophic 1918 influenza outbreak that poured so much additional horror and misery onto a world that had already gorged itself on those things in the Great War and found to their surprise that it had left practically no literature of its own. We don’t know why, but at any rate, in March 2025 when the fifth anniversary of the start of the Covid outbreak came around, attempts to revisit the whole affair were met with a mix of refusal, deflection and bad temper.
Is it in the nature of a great sickness, or is there something about a universally-shared experience that beats off memory or makes it disreputable? Take all those demobilised men of 1918 and 1945 who went home and “never mentioned it again”, but set beside them the brilliant French sunlight of 1923 and Ned Boulting’s strip of film new again and running its two and half minutes through the camera in a town near the French Atlantic coast. A showing or two in cinema newsreels follows, and then nearly a century of – what? stillness and quiet, somewhere, its handlers and processors and projectionists all gone off into the dark, and at the end of it all the quick, simple drop onto Ned’s doormat in England. Play the clip a century later and – there they all are, the crowds in the street, Gars Jean, Theo Beeckmann, Henri Pelissier – as though they’ve come back from somewhere, carrying with them a sense of return rather than one of rediscovery.