Last year I was contacted by Stephen Harvey, who wrote:
“My brief friendship with Ted Planas
It was 1952. I was an Assistant Stage Manager (ASM – the lowest form of theatrical life) ) with the Penguin Players, the resident professional repertory company in Bexhill-on-Sea. I was 17, in my first job.
I was mad about lightweight bicycles, and I had started to see one that I didn’t usually see around the town. A superbly equipped machine, always immaculate, flamboyant deep red if memory serves me right. No frame maker’s name that I recall. Not a local bike, because I knew all the local bikes worth admiring. In particular, it had a slightly unusual drop handlebar that I admired and I wanted to know which ‘bend’ it was. So one day I contrived to speak to the bike’s owner – Ted. It turned out he was playing clarinet with the orchestra that accompanied the summer variety show ‘Starlight Rendezvous’, whose star was Freddie Frinton.
Ted couldn’t have been friendlier, and we got together several times at his digs, where he taught me various technical things about bikes, in particular how to dismantle a multiple freewheel using women’s hair clips, bent into a particular shape to hold the pawl springs down. I was very pleased with myself about that and subsequently dismantled my own freewheel at home, even successfully reassembling it.
So Ted is engraved on my memory. I think I knew his name because he gave me his business card. And those handlebars? Coppi long-reach, though I never did find a pair. But the memory of it all, and Ted, has stayed with me all my life (I am now 86).
Stephen Harvey”
I’d like to thank Stephen for sending this in. I knew that Ted was a bike expert, as he always had two ready to ride (one as a spare!) and, being carless, often cycled to venues to play. I know he cycled from Iver Heath to Richmond and back, at least 35 miles round trip, with instrument cases on his back, in the dark… When he died, we found two fully assembled bikes and two spare Claud Butler aluminium frames, plus many spare gears, etc.
The title picture is of the Bexhill Orchestra in September 1951. Ted is 2nd from left, almost in front of the dome.
