In Search of Robert Millar: Unravelling the Mystery Surrounding Britain’s Most Successful Tour de France Cyclist

I met people, and spoke to them about Millar. Many said the same things. Yes, he was a bit strange, eccentric, stubborn, likeable when you got to know him – and special, that was the word that kept being repeated. I lost count of the number of times a former team-mate said ‘Robert’s special’ with a knowing, enigmatic smile. Naturally, this only made me more curious, but also slightly wary. It was a euphemism, but for what?

Then I travelled to Ninove, in Belgium, to see Allan Peiper, one of the more thoughtful and articulate of Millar’s former team-mates. Initially Peiper didn’t adjust well to retirement, as he explains in his autobiography. But after staring into the void of life after cycling and eventually finding a new sense of purpose, it was clear that he had been thinking quite a bit about Millar too. ‘Rob was very intellectual compared to most cyclists,’ said Peiper. ‘He thought about life and had it figured out, to some extent, but that didn’t make him any less complicated. There was anger inside him. It’s the same with a lot of top sportsmen, especially top cyclists. They have some emotional chinks that create the drive to want to be good. Whether it’s Lance Armstrong growing up in a trailer park, or Robert Millar growing up in Glasgow, I think for a lot of us there was a definite cause there, something that caused them to be angry. Something that made them need to succeed and prove themselves. Or just be accepted.’

For some reason, Peiper’s words, and his obvious enthusiasm for the task of trying to decipher the character of his old team-mate, fired my own enthusiasm. Somehow, talking to Peiper also made me less wary, less scared of the task of trying to unravel the Robert Millar enigma. I returned to my hotel room and wrote a second email, hoping that he would reply to this one directly.

Hi Robert,

I wanted to finally email you directly rather than going through [the third party] – hope you don’t mind. As you know, I’m planning to write a book about you to coincide with the Tour starting in London next year; it seems the right time given your status as Britain’s best ever Tour rider.

Over the last few months I’ve met with quite a few people who knew you growing up in Glasgow, and others who raced with you later. I’ve been putting off contacting you directly, to be honest, because, although I followed your career very closely at the time, I still felt there were gaps in my knowledge. Basically, I didn’t want to ask daft questions. However, now I feel that I’m getting there, and that I am less likely to ask daft questions. I really wanted to establish contact to see how – or indeed if – you would like to answer my questions. Of course I’m aware that you may have some questions for me as well, and I’d be pleased to answer them.

For your interest I am in Belgium just now and met with Allan Peiper, who spoke with great fondness of you and sends his best.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Best wishes,

Richard.

1

It’s the Grit that Makes the Oyster

Glasgow is all grey. It’s not that I’m ashamed of being a Glaswegian, I most certainly am not, but abroad you find out what you have been missing.

Robert Millar put Scotland on an international stage it had never previously graced, but as an ambassador for the country, and in particular for his home city of Glasgow, he could not have done a worse job. At times it could seem, especially to some of those he’d left behind, that he derived some perverse satisfaction from sticking a knife into the city of his birth, or applying a kick to its head – both appropriate metaphors for a city that is not unfamiliar with violence.

Millar spent twenty years in Glasgow before leaving – or, as he would have seen it, escaping. After disappearing to the continent he rarely returned for more than a few weeks at a time. Initially he came back to his parents’ home for the winter, training with the same group of cyclists he’d trained with in previous years, selling some of the season’s racing kit, telling stories of continental racing and its stars, against whom he was now racing, and speaking in a French/American-tinged accent that was markedly different to a guttural Glasgow brogue. But after the death of his mother, Mary, in 1981, Robert’s visits home became fewer and further between.

Millar left nobody in any doubt as to why his trips home became shorter, and less frequent, until they stopped altogether. The impression of Glasgow that he shared with the wider world – ‘abroad, where you find out what you have been missing’ – was unequivocal, even if his own feelings towards Glasgow, and Scotland, have at times appeared ambiguous. In an interview in 1987 he blamed the weather, declaring it ‘disgusting’ and continuing, ‘Know any place else where it rains during the day, but not at night? I like the people, not the place: grey, grey, grey. But remember, I spent the first few years of my life in the Gorbals before moving to the city outskirts – a modern housing estate built on a razed slum and fast turning back into one.’ In the city where he grew up, said Millar, the first lesson learned was that ‘Fellow who can’t climb tree fast enough gets eaten.’

It was too much for some Glaswegians. That same year, 1987, a letter appeared in Cycling magazine: ‘Well done, Robert, you’ve done it again. You have just put off many would-be visitors from coming to Glasgow. I’ve been listening to you moaning and whining for years now, it’s pathetic. Glasgow is no worse than any other big city in Britain, and a lot better than some. Can you possibly think of anything worse to say? No – I think you’ve said it all. On your bike, Robert.’ And when an extract of a chapter on Millar in Robin Magowan’s Kings of the Road appeared in Cycling, it provoked this response from a Scottish reader: ‘The suggestion that Millar was a “dead end kid” who was lucky not to be “behind bars, if not dead at 15” is amazing. Robert Millar was raised in Pollok. Unlike the Gorbals this is a very average housing estate just like any other city around the globe, and is not particularly unpleasant … Strange indeed that the son of an engineer, raised in an average area and educated to a high standard should be described in this way … I am suspicious of the seemingly verbatim quotes of Millar’s, such as “I had the A-and O-levels to have gone to university.” In Scotland we do not sit A-levels.’

And yet, and yet … ‘I don’t feel Scottish,’ he told a journalist in 1998, ‘I am Scottish.’ A sense of resignation is perhaps detectable here, but also some pride – and, typically of Millar, defiance. There are other examples of his paradoxical attitude towards Scotland. In 1992, during a Tour de France that visited all the member countries of the European Union that bordered France, the riders’ daily race numbers were adorned with the blue EU flag with its twelve small stars; each morning, Millar painstakingly coloured in the stars with a blue biro before scratching a cross – thus creating a Saltire, Scotland’s national flag. Yet it is clear that Millar felt oppressed and held back by Glasgow and its people. Being small in height and build, in a city renowned for its proliferation of ‘hard men’ and its admiration for the ‘big man’, he might also have felt that he didn’t fit in. But ‘grey’ was the word he seemed to prefer, using it repeatedly to describe the city. In stark contrast was Europe, colourful and alive with possibilities.

It was to Europe that he travelled, as soon as he could. When Millar arrived in that promised land, he bumped into an Australian cyclist whose ambitions, if not his middle-class upbringing, mirrored his own. Phil Anderson would later go on to become the first non-European ever to wear the yellow jersey of the Tour de France leader. But four years before that he was, like Millar, lost and alone in Paris. At the airport, Millar looked in vain for the representative from the Athlétique Club de Boulogne-Billancourt (ACBB) who had (or so he understood) been sent to meet him. When it became clear that there was no such person, Millar got a taxi to Boulogne-Billancourt, the Paris suburb where he, Anderson and four other exiles were to be barracked in apartment blocks. These were Spartan, and hardly glamorous. For Millar, the contrast with Glasgow can’t have been as stark as he might have anticipated, or hoped for.

Though Millar was quiet and reserved, Anderson, who arrived in Paris from Melbourne within hours of Millar, soon learned about his new club-mate’s upbringing in Glasgow. ‘I remember him saying to me, early on, that he saw cycling as a way out,’ says Anderson. ‘For him, I think it was a way of getting out of a depressed situation. I don’t think he had a very good home life or family life, and he saw cycling not so much as a way to make wealth, but a way to get out. He spoke a little bit about Glasgow and he didn’t paint a very good picture; he came from the rough side of town, I think. I certainly understood, from what he told me, that he came from the wrong side of the tracks.’

There was some truth in Millar’s description of Glasgow and of his upbringing. But it wasn’t the whole truth. Willie Gibb, who attended secondary school with Millar, began cycling with him, and also went on to become one of Scotland’s leading cyclists, winces at some of Anderson’s comments. ‘I wouldn’t have said that he came from the wrong side of the tracks,’ he says. ‘Robert came from a working-class background, but it wasn’t impoverished. His parents had originally lived in the Gorbals, which was a rough area of Glasgow, but they moved to Pollokshaws. It was Pollokshaws where I was born and bred. I knew his parents, I knew his sister, and I would say he probably had a similar upbringing to me. My parents were the same as his. They didn’t have a lot of money, but most people lived like that then.’

The Gorbals, until parts of it were demolished and families like the Millars were moved into suburbs or out of Glasgow altogether, was notorious as one of Europe’s worst slums. Millar was born there, and began primary school there, but he moved out to the suburbs – another promised land – when he was 8.

Gibb wonders if the myth of growing up in the Gorbals might have suited his old friend, then comes up with a more plausible explanation. ‘I don’t think he’d have gone out of his way to correct people if they had the wrong impression of his upbringing. Not because he wanted people to think that he grew up in a slum. I think it was more likely that he just didn’t care what people thought.

‘Another thing that I noticed was that when he did start to do really well, and he’d be interviewed on the telly, he wouldn’t promote himself or Scotland. He’d say Glasgow was this grey place where it never stopped raining. That switched a lot of people off, including my father. And he started talking in this strange accent. My dad used to say, “He’s been in France a year and he’s got this stupid Anglo-American-French accent.” God knows where that came from.’

As much as Millar tried to dismiss the city and its people, and as much as he tried to move on, it is impossible to untangle Millar and Glasgow. The more he disparaged the place with his put-downs, the more obvious it became that his relationship with it was more complex than it might appear. To begin to understand Millar, then, it is necessary to understand Glasgow, and then to ponder the question: how might a small, introverted boy, a rebellious maverick and, to use his own description, ‘an individualist’, have experienced growing up in such a place? Apart from learning, very early on, how to climb metaphorical trees.

If a city’s character is reflected by the books that are written about it, then the image of Glasgow is unambiguous: it has a reputation as a tough, macho, often violent city dominated by the hard men of the factories, shipyards and pubs. Even today, this is the Glasgow that is depicted in many of the books displayed prominently on promotional stands in the city’s airport: Gangland Glasgow, Glasgow’s Hard Men, Glasgow Crimefighter, Glasgow’s Godfather. Then there is the poverty, which tends to be reinforced by films (Red Road, My Name is Joe, Small Faces), and the reality of which is not in doubt. In Glasgow there are, and there certainly were in the 1950s and 1960s, pockets of serious deprivation, some of them among the worst in Europe. A report in 2005 claimed that men living in some parts of Glasgow have the lowest life expectancy of anywhere in Europe. Castlemilk, Possilpark, Ruchill, the Gorbals: even for people only vaguely familiar with the city, these are names evocative of poverty, of social problems, and of violence.

Yet it is also a place renowned for the humour of its people, and for the outgoing, friendly, ‘gallus’ Glaswegian. On one of my visits a taxi driver gave me a running commentary as we travelled through the city. It was an alternative tourists’ guide, and it was delivered in a thick, almost impenetrable accent, accompanied by resigned shakes of the head and expressive shrugs of the shoulders. If my guide’s body language was anything to go by – it wasn’t so easy to make out what he was actually saying – as we left one housing scheme and entered another, the city got progressively worse the further we travelled from the centre. Then we drove into a particularly bleak housing scheme, with no shops or even pubs, only high-rise flats packed tightly against one another – a ‘desert with windows’ as Billy Connolly, who perfectly sums up the love/hate relationship many Glaswegians have with their city, once referred to some of Glasgow’s housing schemes. Here, however, there was sheet metal where many of the windows should have been. We picked up speed after narrowly avoiding a bucket of water – at least I think it was water – that appeared to have been thrown in the direction of the taxi. The driver shrugged again, scowled, and commented, ‘Ah widnae let a dog oot here.’ Which was funny, of course. Much Glasgow humour is delivered with a self-consciously casual attitude towards some of the uglier aspects of life there, and it is rarely accompanied by a smile. As a consequence, not everybody gets it.

This is the Glasgow that Millar professed to despise and which he was desperate to escape, but which clearly shaped his dry, often dark sense of humour, among other things. And perhaps in Millar too there was a perverse sense of pride, of kudos, in coming from and surviving such a place – from the wrong side of the tracks, as he allowed Phil Anderson to believe. The Scottish playwright John Byrne, who came from another estate, in nearby Paisley, with ‘aspirations’ to the title of ‘worst slum in Europe’, has expressed this well: ‘I felt vastly superior, smugly superior, to everyone who went to art school because I came from the worst slum in Europe! We were in the thick of it.’ The notion may not be far removed from another frequently levelled accusation, that there is a tendency in cities such as Glasgow to romanticize poverty and violence. But Byrne is hardly alone in suggesting that great art can flourish and that great artists can thrive in such conditions – because of, rather than despite, the environment. ‘It’s the grit that makes the oyster,’ Byrne remarked, and so it is with sports people. You needed to be tough to survive in such a place. And as Millar quickly realized, you needed to be tough – and to be seen as tough – to make it as a cyclist, too.

Robert Millar was born to William and Mary Millar in the family home, 4 Wellcroft Place in the Gorbals area of Glasgow, at 6.15 a.m. on 13 September 1958. Mary and Bill, as he was known, already had a son, Ian, born on 29 December 1955, nine months after they were married. A daughter, Elizabeth, would follow in January 1962.

The Gorbals had once been a village on the south side of the River Clyde, separate from the sprawling city. In medieval times it was designated as Glasgow’s leper colony: the leper hospital was opened in 1350, five years after the building of a first bridge to connect the village to the city. The Gorbals was annexed by Glasgow in 1846. By then its composition and character were already changing, thousands of Ireland’s poor having settled there from around 1840. It wasn’t yet the slum it would become, but neither was it the place it had once been. The population of the Gorbals swelled with the arrival of these immigrants, from Eastern Europe as well as Ireland, then from the 1930s by Jews fleeing the Nazis, though the influx of Jewish immigrants predated Hitler. By 1885, over half of the Gorbals’ primary school population was Jewish. The Gorbals even had its own Jewish newspaper.

The Gorbals in which Millar spent the first few years of his life was bursting at the seams, its population having mushroomed to some fifty thousand by 1950. It had been fictionalized in the 1930s in an iconic Glasgow novel, No Mean City. As the title suggests … actually, it’s not altogether clear what the title suggests. The subject matter was less ambiguous: it was all violence and gangs and knives, with a main character known as the ‘Razor King’. Less well known but also evocative of the area is A Gorbals Tale, billed as ‘a nostalgic and light-hearted story of post-war Gorbals’, starring a policeman whose beat includes ‘razorcarrying thugs, illicit bookies, drunks and prostitutes’. Our hero is thus immersed ‘in the violent culture of the Gorbals – an area of grim tenement buildings with a foreboding culture of violence. Angus [the policeman] meets his first challenge when a local prostitute, Laughing Mary, is murdered. Later, when he rescues young Lilly Grant from the grip of evil shebeeners [who ran unlicensed drinking establishments], he is ambushed and savagely beaten in an act of revenge.’ And this, remember, is a nostalgic and light-hearted story of the Gorbals. It is difficult to imagine what might feature in a tale of gritty reality.

But it is too easy to caricature the area; it was not so unremittingly grim. The Millars’ home was typical of the area: a four-storey sandstone tenement with one large living room, a kitchen, a bedroom, and a toilet, but no bath. Many praised the elegance and grandeur of the grid-iron pattern of these four-storey tenements, and, rather than violence, the community spirit that was always so evident in the Gorbals, particularly, and despite the overcrowding, in the inter-war period. Certainly the primary school attended by Robert Millar, just around the corner and a couple of hundred metres from his front door in Wellcroft Place, was (still is) a strikingly impressive building. Abbotsford Primary School is the oldest surviving school building in the Gorbals, though it ceased to be a school in 1996. Built in 1879, the classrooms – now offices – were organized around an open central hall, above the doors the sculpted heads of eminent Scots including the Church reformer John Knox and the explorer David Livingstone. Fellow pupils at Abbotsford describe the young Robert Millar as a ‘smart, funny but occasionally intense kid’. It was there that he acquired his first nickname, ‘Eskimo’, on account of his playground trick of pulling his blue anorak over his head while running around making a prolonged ‘Wheeeeeeeee!’ noise. There are few signs here of the introverted, shy persona Millar adopted later.

Millar attended Abbotsford for four years, until the family found itself subject to Glasgow Corporation’s policy of ‘displacement’. Notwithstanding the overcrowding, and the decay that became particularly acute between the wars, it was as much because of the Gorbals’ reputation as one of Europe’s worst slums that it was chosen as the first area in Glasgow to be redeveloped – i.e. demolished. As far as the Corporation was concerned, the solution to the population explosion crisis – by the early 1950s an estimated six hundred thousand of the city’s 1.08 million people required rehousing – was to create new housing schemes on the periphery of the city. Communities were broken up, and some were shunted out to the new towns of East Kilbride, Cumbernauld or Irvine. For others, the only way was up. High-rise flats were, the Corporation decided, the future. They were certainly futuristic, especially in the artists’ impressions – no less inaccurate, or idealistic, in the 1960s than they are now. The flats were known as ‘vertical streets’, which, probably intentionally, lent an air of glamour and excitement. It was to one such high-rise, in Pollokshaws, no more than a couple of miles to the south of the Gorbals, that the Millars moved in the summer of 1967 when the Wellcroft Place tenements fell victim to the wrecking ball.

I visited the ‘vertical street’ where Millar lived – on Shawbridge Street, in Pollokshaws – and found a twenty-two-storey tower block surrounded by quiet residential streets, and beyond them, acres of green parkland: Pollok Park. Other than the tower blocks – there are a dozen of them, jutting into the sky like sore thumbs – it is a leafy, pleasant place. And it was a pleasant place when the Millars moved there, the tower blocks modern, shiny and new. For a young child in particular it would no doubt have been an exciting place to live. The Millars occupied a flat on the eleventh floor, with views across Glasgow, the green expanse of Pollok Park and, to the west, out across rural Renfrewshire.

Many of Glasgow’s tower blocks have now been knocked down, but those in Pollokshaws survive – just. Decay has set in, just as it had taken hold of the Gorbals by the 1950s, and today the blocks seem to remain standing solely to provide people seeking emergency housing with a temporary place to stay. I met a young Asian boy in the stairwell and, a little naively, asked whether anyone had lived there for any length of time. I had imagined that neighbours of the Millars might still be living there; they might even remember young Robert squeezing his bike into the metal-doored lift to take it up to his bedroom, which was where, according to neighbours, he kept it.

‘Yes, there are some people who’ve been here a long time,’ said the boy.

‘Really?’ I replied. ‘Would anyone have been here for thirty, forty years?’

The boy smiled – out of pity, I think. ‘No way! No one stays here that long. When I said long, I meant about a year.’

When the Millars moved from the Gorbals to Pollokshaws, Robert was transferred to the Sir John Maxwell Primary School, spending three years there before moving into one of the city’s more famous secondary schools, Shawlands Academy. The academy is an old sandstone building which, even today, has none of the trappings of so many other large inner-city secondary schools, some of which can be quite forbidding. There are no coils of barbed wire or broken glass encrusting the tops of the walls; no graffiti scarring the walls; no outward signs of violence, or means of deterring it. Rather, the impression is of nothing less than respectability. In fact, Shawlands is now considered one of Glasgow’s most up-and-coming suburbs. The school has one dark secret, though. Robert Millar is not the only former pupil who went on to achieve fame – or, in the case of one individual, infamy.

John Martyn, the celebrated folk musician, was Millar’s elder by ten years and two days. Although there is no reason other than the fact that they attended the same school to draw any comparisons between Martyn and Millar, it is impossible to resist the temptation. Martyn, like Millar, displayed a healthy disregard, verging on contempt, for authority. The future musician walked barefoot to school; the future cyclist – by now known to many of his fellow pupils as Bobby – went to war with his teachers over his insistence on wearing a denim jacket instead of the school blazer. Martyn railed against the city’s obsession with football; and so, in a more subtle way, did Millar, by virtue of his preference for cycling. Like Millar, Martyn didn’t really fit the Glasgow stereotype of the hard man; he was really too Bohemian and cerebral for violence. Plus, fighting might have been difficult with bare feet. He did once claim, however, that ‘You went out and kicked a few heads or you were looked on as a pansy.’ A more infamous ex-pupil of Shawlands Academy, to whom an especially virulent form of violence became familiar, is someone the school and the city would rather keep a secret: the Moors murderer Ian Brady. With Myra Hindley, Brady abducted and murdered five children in the 1960s, burying four of them on the moors surrounding Manchester. He also spent his early years in the Gorbals before moving out to the suburbs.