May 12, 1937
Beryl Burton, who became a prominent racing cyclist, was born Beryl Charnock in the Halton district of the English city of Leeds. She would spend most of her life in Morley, a market town and civil parish within Leeds.
It was her husband Charles Burton who introduced her to the world of cycling. “Slowly she got better,” he later recounted.” By the second year, she was ‘one of the lads’ and could ride with us. By the third year, she was going out in front and leading them all.”
Beryl Burton’s competitive activities in the sport included racing for cycling clubs in both Morley and – also in that region of England – the market town of Knaresborough. In 1957, Burton earned a silver medal in a nationwide 100-mile (161-kilometer) individual time trial championship.
Within the next couple of years, Burton began competing internationally as well. In both 1960 and 1967, she won the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) Road World Championships – Elite Women’s Road Race. (This one-day annual event has been held since 1958.) Burton proved to be equally formidable in the UCI Track Cycling World Championships for individual pursuit, an event in which two cyclists begin the race on opposite sides of a track and then set off to finish the race in the fastest time.
Burton won the gold medal in individual pursuit in 1959, 1960, 1962, 1963, and 1966. She earned silver medals in 1961, 1964, and 1968, and bronze medals in 1967, 1970, and 1973 in that racing category.
Throughout this period, and several years beyond it, Burton was also a force to be reckoned with in the Road Time Trials Council’s British Best All-Rounder (BBAR) competition. In this longstanding annual series of cycling races, riders are ranked by the average of their speeds in individual time trials.
Burton, racing for the Morley Cycling Club each time, was the winner in the BBAR women’s competition every year between 1959 and 1983. She specifically won a total of 72 of those BBAR individual time trials — four in the 10-mile (16.1-kilometer) event; 26 in the 25-mile (40.2-kilometer) event; 24 in the 50-mile (80.5-kilometer) event; and 18 in the 100-mile (161-kilometer) event.
One of Burton’s more notable record-breaking achievements in these individual time trials took place in 1963, when she became the first woman to complete the 25-mile (40.2-kilometer) event in less than an hour. When Burton covered 277.3 miles (446.3 kilometers) in 12 hours during the BBAR competition in 1967, she broke the men’s record in this category by 0.73 miles (1.2 kilometers). Her record would be broken by a man a couple of years later and by a woman in 2017.
Burton’s pedaling accomplishments also involved winning 24 titles altogether in women’s events at the annual British National Track Championships. A dozen of these titles were for road races and the other dozen were for individual pursuit competitions. In 1982, Burton set a record with her daughter and fellow racing cyclist Denise when they completed a 10-mile (16.2-kilometer) ride on a tandem bicycle in only 21 minutes and 25 seconds.
Even though Beryl Burton received numerous offers from sponsors to become a professional cyclist, she remained an amateur. When she was not riding a bicycle, Burton spent much of her time working on a farm in the region where she lived.
Burton had to deal with a serious case of heart arrhythmia throughout her life. Just a week before her 59th birthday in 1996, she died of heart failure while riding a bicycle. At the time, Burton was hand-delivering invitations for her planned birthday party.
Burton received several high-level honors for her cycling career. She was named a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 1964, for example, and an Officer of the Order of the British Empire four years later. She was also the recipient of the Bidlake Memorial Prize, one of the United Kingdom’s major awards for cycling, in 1959, 1960, and 1967.
In the time since her death, Burton has continued to be formally recognized for her sports legacy. She was inducted into the British Cycling Hall of Fame in 2018. One of the other major tributes to her has been the 2012 folk song “Beryl,” which was composed and performed by Belinda O’Hooley and her wife Heidi Tidow.
Photo Credit: Public Domain
For more information on Beryl Burton, please check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beryl_Burton
Transportation History 
Leave a comment