[3] He won a junior race in Warwickshire, near Birmingham in 1939 and the following year joined the Solihull Cycling Club.

He rode club events but also set a national tandem record for 50 miles (80 km) with Dick Bowes.

That same year, Maitland won a silver medal as a member of the British road race team at the 1948 Summer Olympics.

We had to sign on a day before the race and any other manager would have insisted the other teams go to the British camp, not the other way round.

Now, Frank was the strongest guy I've known and when the Dutchman hesitated, he grabbed him by the lapels, lifted him two feet in the air and dropped him on the floor.

The organisers of the Games reported: Maitland rode for Britain in the 1955 Tour de France - the race was then competed by national teams - in a team selected by cycling journalists because the civil war between the National Cyclists Union and the British League of Racing Cyclists made it impossible to leave the job to either.

The journalist Ken Bowden write in Cycling: "We cannot send a team to the Tour unless we are willing to gamble heavily with men's reputations, our future in the race, and Britain's sporting prestige.

It would fall far short of reality, for the Tour is unique in terrain, weather variation, racing technique and a hundred and one other things.

"[11] The writer, Tim Hilton, said: "None of the British cyclists had experienced one of the northern spring classics, so they had no idea that the Tour could be so much harder and faster than the races they had known.

"[12] The team were numbers 31 to 40 - Dave Bedwell, Tony Hoar, Stan Jones, Fred Krebs, Maitland, Ken Mitchell, Bernard Pusey, Brian Robinson, Ian Steel and Bev Wood.

And who can doubt that, so far as cycling is concerned, Bob Maitland, national mass start champion in 1949, is one of the shrewdest riders in the game?