‘People just see the cyclist. I don’t. I see the girl that she was. I see the woman that she became’
A short walk through the Morrisons car park, past Morley Town Hall, a right turn up the now pedestrianised Queen Street and there, on your right, is the entrance: Beryl Burton Gardens. A steel archway sign hangs over the walkway and on the wall to the left sits a round, blue plaque. ‘Beryl Burton OBE was a cycling phenomenon,’ says the opening sentence.
Jeffrey Charnock is Burton’s younger brother by nine years and is accompanying me on what becomes an emotional tour through their early life. He pauses to re-read the plaque before ushering us around the corner to the back wall of the Yorkshire Bank and what is a quite stunning 60 foot-wide mural. Morley is three miles south of Leeds city centre and, following her death in 1996, Burton was depicted by local artists just as most people will remember her: alone, crouched over the handlebars, resplendent in her pale blue and white Morley Cycling Club kit, and time-trialling along at an unfathomable speed. Even the idiosyncratic kink in her riding style – right hand always slightly higher than her left – is captured.
Some of the passers-by glance up at the depiction of a woman whose achievements, in cycling circles, gave this market town of 44,000 people a proud global resonance.
