A film which filtered through the fourth wall of Le Club Musculation and brought the weightlifting session to a halt was Jean Genet's The Balcony. The bull-necked crew-cutted butcher's shop owner who ran the gym said the film represented a bid at "penetrating the mythologies that cloak every regime of power." It was certainly a change from the Jerry Lewis comedies and repeats of the The Dambusters which were the usual film-going fare of the time. We ended up hanging up our dumb-bells and going into the Arty Little Cinema next door to watch the second half. We realised that the cinema screen was directly behind the wall mirror on to which some club members would cast the occasional narcissistic glance.
After the semi-professional weightlifters of Le Club Musculation had finished their bone-crushing work-outs an entire glass of milk (laced with a drop of brandy) and mixed with a couple of raw eggs would be knocked back in a couple of gulps. The squad would then head for home and polish off an under-done steak.
The Arty Little Cinema thrives even to this day, but sadly Le Club Musculation and the
celebrated paper-thin fourth wall are no more. In its place stands a newly-built block of luxury mock neo-Georgian apartments which serve as pied-a'-terres for former hedge fund managers who are lying low. What has not vanished is the distinctive Le Club Musculation demeanour and style, the eye-catching combination of shades, tee-shirts, jeans, light brown ultra-flexible shoes, and crew-cut hair styles that an still be seen in the finest training venues. These are the surface appearances of those who have ventured on to The Balcony of life and penetrates the secrets that lie beyond the Fourth Wall.

When you have one hundred and forty pounds of weights dangling over your head the sounds of hot embraces, husky voices, sighs, panting, thrusts and counter-thrusts can sometimes be a shade distracting. This was Le Club Musculation's big drawback. The elite gym could well have been the only one in England (although maybe not in Wales) where the sound of bodices and silken under-garments being ripped off with great gusto was par for the course when it came to the routine performance of squats, bench presses, and dumb-bell exercises.
Three of the walls of Le Club Musculation were formidable constructions built out of the finest Bath stone. However the fourth wall did not quote fit the bill. The fourth wall was constructed in the classic 1940s' paper-thin prefab tradition. And it was the fourth wall which had the Herculean task of separating Le Club Musculation from the small auditorium of the cinema next door.
Only a handful of risque films were publicly screened in sleepy Somerset towns in the early post-war decades. Managers of the mainstream Beau Nash, Scala, and Odeon cinemas could be relied on to give a thumbs-down to any films which gave off a hint on avante-garde sensibility. Only the Arty Little Cinema was different. And it was the Arty Little Cinema which was the other side of Le Club Musculations' fourth wall.
This meant that just a few slivers of cardboard and crumbling plaster stood between the deep breathing passionate weightlifters who were stretching out their physiques out on Le Club Musculation's sweaty benches and the deep breathing passionate actresses who were stretching out their somewhat more lithe physiques on sweaty Parisian and Stockholm bedsteads on the screen of the Arty Little Cinema. The weightlifters of Le Club Musculation did not have anything against Erotic Sound Effects per se. ("Au contraire!" as the slick salesman who lived in prefab number forty-six in Woodhedge Road would have been the first to say.) What ruffled the weightlifters' feathers was what they called "unexpected trajectories." (i.e. the sudden intersection of a burst of Erotic Sound Effects with a highly-exacting and potentially life-threatening heavy object weight movement.) First-aid records show that hardly a month went by in 1962/1963 without a hyper-ventilating weightlifter losing himself in a world of nubile fantasy and dropping a fifty-pound dumb-bell on another weightlifter's foot. (And on one tragic occasion on another weightlifter's delicate protruding body part.)

Every prefab estate in 1950s' Britain had its Renaissance figure and Pete O' Clarke's old man in prefab number twelve was ours. He cut a dashing figure as he roared off on his motor bike (and side-car) for another gruelling shift at Bath Cabinet Makers. Some other so-called Renaissance figures are little more than image and surface glamour. Pete O' Clarke's old man xould have been taken fom the pages of Marx's The German Ideology. This was the non-alienated man who would sometimes be seen fishing in the afternoon, rearing cattle in the evening, and engaging in literary criticism after dinner. His cousin - a factory worker in Swindon - managed to teach himself Greek and Latin by chalking up the grammar on his workplace lathe! Should History take one of its ugly backward turns - if things started getting rough - you can count on the likes of Pete O'Clarke's old man and his cousin in Swindon to put themselves into the right place at the right time and do the right thing.
It was in 1958 that Pete O'Clarke's old man decided to build a metal scaffold bar in his back yard, and kids have been doing pull-ups and acrobatic curls on it ever since. In 1959 he converted the garden shed into a weightlifting gym, and nowadays a squad of aspiring Charles Atlas types turn up to do work-outs there most evenings every week. Once a month they board
the 5A bus into town and make their way to Le Club Musculation to train with the semi-professionals - "the creme-de-la-creme of raw muscle" as Ann Brown-Sloane admiringly calls them - in an equipment packed gym in an alley near the Co-operative Store in the centre of town.
The elite gym's manager is a cousin of Pete O'Clarke's old man's Swindon cousin. (He has a butcher's shop on the edge of Kingsmead Square.) With his bull-like neck of steel and razor-edged crew-cut you can spot him a mile off. Do a two hour training session at Le Club Musculation, breathe in its pulsating ethos, and your arm, leg and chest muscles and sense of self-belief can be felt bulging out into the biosphere! No wonder Precious McKenzie - the Bristol-based weightlifter and holder of a Commonwealth Games gold medal - told the sports editor of the Bath & Wilting that Le Club Musculation "is destined to become a legend in another lifetime!" Yet the kids from the prefabs would never have stepped into Le Club Musculation without first stepping into the garden shed gym in Pete O'Clarke's back yard. This Renaissance figure showed Prefab Land youth what dedication and self-discipline can achieve. Hardly anyone remembers Pete O'Clarke's old man today, yet he lit a flame which was to shine through the rest of our days.
The prefab gym built and inspired by Pete O'Clarke's own imagination had no drawbacks at all. However we cannot deny that La Club Musculation had one drawback, one awry ingredient, which in retropspect was the defining mark of the experience of all who sweated on its benches and limped out of its illustrious portal.

'Monty' Porter was not just a big admirer of Walter Bagehot. He was an admirer of 'Ernie' Bevin as well. Bevin was the Bristol drayman and trade unionist who was Foreign Secretary in Attlee's Labour Government.
In 1947 when he was working on a farm in Winsford - the village in Somerset where Bevin had been born - 'Monty' was told of Bevin's decision to order the Exodus - a ship packed with Jewish refugees - to return to the very country which had strained every muscle to slaughter them. (It was said locally that Bevin thought his father - who he had never known - had been Jewish and he was taking the opportunity of settling an old score.)
'Monty' thought Bevin's Exodus decision was badly mistaken. However in 1951 his estimation of Bevin went up a few notches. This was after he read a newspaper article in which Bevin stated
he should "be able to buy a ticket at Victoria Station to go anywhere I damn well please!" This made quite an impact on 'Monty' who had a hunger for travel (despite having only been out of Somerset twice.)
Another phrase from Bevin played a part in one of the big life-changing events in 'Monty's life. Tit-Bits magazine had carried a full page advertisement for a "Save A Fortune Cut Your Own Hair Clipper!" After taking the bait 'Monty' discovered that the "Save A Fortune Cut Your Own Hair Clipper!" was not content with just cutting his hair. It wanted to cut pieces of skin and flesh as well! It was when 'Monty' Porter was still in a state of heavily bandaged shock he came across a quotation from Ernie Bevin which really hit home. The man from Winsford had declared that the big problem with the British Working-Class was its "poverty of aspirations." It dawned on 'Monty' that his own poverty of aspirations had been the direct cause of his own bloodied head. The days of his trying to cut his own hair were gone for ever.
A few days later 'Monty' Porter was seen storming into the Winter Palace of the new semi-skyscraper department store in Bristol city centre. Within less than an hour he had sprayed a dazzling "live now, pay later!" signature on the dotted line of a five hire-purchase (HP) agreements. Buying goods on the 'never never' became second-nature for the smartly turned out 'Monty'. Some prefab residents were soon following his well coiffured lead. Those who signed 1950s' 'HP' agreements were also signing execution warrants for the old low aspirations social order.

'Monty' Porter once bought a second-hand tweed jacket which had a copy of Walter Bagehot's The English Constitution (1867) in one of its side pockets. 'Monty' noticed that as soon as his fellow drinkers spotted his Walter Bagehot they would start giving far more careful consideration to the weight and bulk of his arguments than had previously been the case. The book's title triggered much debate. Welshmen, Scotsmen, and Ulstermen wondered how on earth a book on the United Kingdom's constitution could be called have the English Constitution. Dapper types with Queen Anne furniture in Queen's Square apartments never saw this as a problem. Soon the once solitary 'Monty' Porter was seen as the King's Arm's pre-eminent authority on constitutional issues. He would never dream of entering a public house without having Bagehot's elegantly written text somewhere on his person. The combined impact of a top-notch tweed jacket and Bagehot's The English Constitution transformed a bloke who had grown up in Peasedown with a gammy eye into a force to be reckoned with.
In his youth 'Monty' Porter had been fascinated by Oliver Cromwell and took a republican stance in public bar debates. The royalist and aristocratic lexiography of public house names in Bath became a source of irritation. He would compalin that "after a couple of pints in the Duke of Cambridge, or the Duke of York, or the Duke of Cumberland, or the King's Head, or the King of Wessex, or the King Bladud, or the Queen Charlotte, or the Queen's Head, or the Queen Adelaidey, you did not know which crowned lord to give a salutation to!"
Constant reading of The English Constitution led 'Monty' to take a different stance. Bagehot's line about the country being "a disguised republic" was taken to heart. He now saw the aristocratic and monarchical pub signs as performing a vital stabilising role in sustaining the political order. "Without them the political system would shatter into a million shards of glass, and Thomas Hobbes' war of all against all would tear the country apart." The transformation of the Peasedown champion of republicanism into a conservative who only drank in public houses which had royalist-affiliated names became the talk of his old village.
If 'Monty' had never bought his second-hand jacket with a copy of The English Constitution in one of its side-pockets he would have just been a solitary bloke with a gammy eye reading the Daily Mirror in a corner of the saloon bar. Thanks to his Walter Bagehot he had become someone with something to say.
In the 1950s almost a quarter of public houses had royalist or aristocratic names. What kind of ideological impact this had is hard to say. As for the old man he was always on the look out for a public house called The 'Smokey' White.