Tour of Britain stage winner John Brackstone has died in hospital aged 82. He was born in Essex but the family moved to Acton, West London when he was a boy. After leaving school he was an an apprentice craft engineer at  Hoover on Western Avenue. By this time he was in to cycling and his first club was the Westwelve Road Club unsurprisingly based at London W12. John says he struggled to finish in early races but he soon got the hang of it and with a fast sprint in his legs by 1952 he had some good wins under his belt. That year he rode the Tour of Britain and on the first stage from Hastings to Southsea he got in the break and outsprinted Ken Russell to win the stage.
On finishing his apprenticeship aged 21 John served his National Service in the RAF but unlike many of his contemporaries who treated it as a two year training camp John did little racing. He claimed that his C.O. didn't like him and made things difficult. John was poached by Vic Humphrey for the West London Road Club and he raced through the fifties all over the country. In 1956 John rode for GB at the Tour of Austria.  At some stage John's father, who was a driver, had started pig farming and John left the factory to help out. Among John's many duties was to collect the "swill" from central London hotels. I recall having a meal at John's home when the knife was marked The Dorchester and the fork was marked The Ritz!! Obviously they had come out of the swill bin.
John was also a race organiser of the Lady Margaret Grand Prix. He was, it is claimed, in charge of routing on the Tour of Britain the year of the infamous stage finish in the dark at Belle Vue dog track, Manchester when due to missing arrows the field covered more than 160 miles.
When John returned to cycling he took up Audax riding and in 1988 and 1989 he was Audax UK veteran (over 40) champion. He joined the Middlesex Road Club and went on their TDF trips while at the same time decrying them as "a bunch of testers"! For some years he was a regular at the Gent Six and was also an avid race follower at the Tour of Flanders.
In his sixties John achieved his ambition of signing a Pro contract with the E.U.  He agreed not to farm and just ride his bike and they agreed to pay him Set Aside grant. It was an agreement that apparently suited both parties. For about the last ten years, possibly longer, John got his cycling fix from Eurosport watching every moment of broadcast bike racing. John never married and he leaves three sisters, a younger brother having pre-deceased him.