1923: The Mystery of Lot 212 and a Tour de France Obsession

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I didn’t know this at the time but for five years after the end of the First World War the Tour de France route was identical – of course now it changes every year. I am not a historian but I started to behave like a historian and tentatively started to reach a loose conclusion that actually that summer was the ‘end’ of the First World War, the afterglow of that conflict. When cycling commentator Ned Boulting bought a length of Pathe news film featuring a stage of the Tour de France from 1923 he set about learning everything he could about it - taking him on an intriguing journey that encompasses travelogue, history and detective story. On the left, one of the Agence Rol images that can be found on Gallica, on the right a similar image from the pages of Le Miroir des Sports in August 1923. But 1923 isn’t the type of book that seeks to build on the work of others (needless to say, none of those authors appear in Boulting’s bibliography … but three books by Hemingway do).

A rare survivor in itself given that most such reels would have been chucked in bin, the film needed tender care of a different kind: the need to be digitised. World War I was fresh in mind in 1923 and its effects are felt in the landscape but also in politics as the French and Belgians have occupied the Ruhr industrial region of Germany, with consequences both on June 30 and to follow.I was very concerned they would look in their archives and say it turns out we’ve got five copies of this film already so don’t worry, but not a bit of it, this is definitely the only copy,” says an obviously relieved Boulting. For all the slight contrivances, Bradley builds a poignant, quiet and affecting novel full of love as well as loss. He coalesces this disparate content into a lovely meditation on the passing of time and the echoes of history. Here, the alienated translator from The Cat and the City finds a book on the subway, leading her on a quest not just to understand the traumas and relationships between a strict old woman and her grandson in rural Japan – but the motivations of the book’s author, too. minutes sparked an obsession and inspired his new book, 1923: The Mystery of Lot 212 and a Tour de France Obsession.

Ned set about learning everything he could about the sequence - studying each frame, face and building - until he had squeezed the meaning from it. 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. The book covers a single day – June 30, 1923 – that marked a single stage in the arduous cycling marathon that is the Tour. The first thing you face is a very rudimentary map of the stage you are about to see, with starting and finishing point and distance, but it doesn’t say a year, just stage 4, 412km from Brest to Les Sables D’Olonne.There are mini biographies of Tour riders, who would be made immortal for a few moments because of their Tour participation and then vanish from history. Since then, he has done some long distance riding in Europe, including the Camino de Santiago (which apparently entitles him to reduced time in Purgatory), dragged himself over major climbs in the Alps, Pyrenees, Dolomites, Vosges and Appalachians, and even done some racing. Boulting was also in a strange situation of possessing what turned out to be the only copy of this news reel in existence but with intellectual rights belonging to Pathé Cinema France. It’s only 2 and a half minutes long, but it contains enough material for to fill not just one book, but many. He chatted to ATG about his ‘lockdown project’ just before heading off to commentate for ITV’s coverage of this year’s Tour, which started on July 1 (100 years and a day after the stage featured in this new book, his seventh overall).

But at this stage I’m so used to the blind leading the blind in books like this that I didn’t really consider how limiting this might be. 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. Bradley struck gold with his debut, The Cat and the City; stories of loneliness in Tokyo connected by a strange, recurring cat. Henri Pélissier and his hulking brother Francis are there, and off to the left side one can make out Ottavio Bottechia as the riders on the road to Vannes wave away the camera car, which is blowing up dust. There is in part real-world, real-time sleuthing, as I drag my project into the light of the day, a century later.There is the unsettling background of the covid pandemic distorting our sense of distance and connection. From the off he’s told us he knew little of the history of the Tour in this era, how he had only vaguely heard of Henri Pélissier, who won the 1923 race. 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. Beeckman fell into Boulting’s life when the ITV commentator-come author – How I Won the Yellow Jumper (2011), How Cav Won the Green Jersey (2012), 101 Damnations (2014), On the Road Bike (2014) , Boulting’s Velosaurus (2016), Heart of Dart-ness (2018), Square Peg, Round Ball (2022) – acquired at auction a portion of a Pathé newsreel from the 1923 Tour and then set about turning its two-and-a-half-minutes of celluloid into a book and a TV programme.