In the sculpture court of the Edinburgh College of Art, Ned Boulting was at his most lucid. The holder of a Perspex trophy in recognition of twenty years covering the Tour de France, he sat comfortably in conversation with Emily Chappell reflecting on his latest book (1923: the mystery of Lot 212 and a Tour de France obsession) and what insight it has given him on the sport he continues to love today.
During the coronavirus-plagued winter of 2020, Boulting dove into two and a half minutes of nitrate film, poring over its every detail, researching every possible individual featured for their stories, attempting to write their places in a history becoming all but forgotten – discarded by the pathé news organisations and cinemas that told these stories, forgotten by the memories of that lost generation. The grainy flickers of open roads, horse-drawn carriages, and an iron bridge, are also a procession of gentlemen fuelled on the dastardliest concoctions, individuals bereaved or traumatised by the Great War and Spanish Flu, and a lone attacker leading the peloton with nearly 200 kilometres of the stage left to race.
In this conversation, Boulting not only reinvigorated the livelihood of this iconic race but also placed it within a broader socio-economic history, casting these post-war Tours in a definitive turn towards the modernity of today’s racing against the Corinthian puritanism of the race’s founder Henri Desgrange. 1923 was a year of German hyperinflation, tensions in the Ruhr Valley, and the eventual establishment of a fragile post-war consensus that wouldn’t even survive twenty years. The writing and research process for such a book required cracking the ice of regurgitated presumed truth on the internet, dismantling the wide-eyed storylines manufactured by an all-powerful print media.
For a non-historian (Boulting snorted at the moniker), his research is exhaustive and succinctly balanced by the narrative storytelling the sport uniquely enables. The 1923 Tour de France catapulted the race into the lives of ordinary people recovering from a devastating pandemic that left people yearning for an understanding of the new world around them. Boulting’s 1923 arrives at a time when many of his readers may be compelled by the same ideas and, based on the response received in the hall and elsewhere, many are taking comfort in the repeating history that Boulting has made accessible. Forgotten history has been enlivened once again.
Image via Callum Devereux