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

Willie Gibb confirms that the description of Millar as a ‘quiet rebel’ was accurate. If he was asked something in class he’d offer a yes or a no, without elaboration, even – or especially – when the teacher was looking for a little more. ‘It was like he couldn’t be bothered,’ suggests Gibb. ‘But he didn’t go out his way to make trouble. I mean, he got up to mischief. There was one occasion at school when he brought a quarter bottle of Crawford’s Four Star whisky and he was drinking it in the school toilet. I know, because I found him.’ According to Gibb, it was not uncommon for some of the older pupils to ostentatiously display their bottles of beer at school. A delivery lorry would appear at the bowling club beside Shawlands Academy, usually loaded with crates of beer, some of which would inevitably find their way into the possession of the pupils. Fortified wine was another popular tipple. But whisky was not. In this respect, notes Gibb, ‘It was typical of Robert to up the ante a little bit.’ Gibb also recalls an incident that could have ended in more serious trouble. When he was 15, Millar and another friend, Tom Brodie, broke into a local joinery workshop, entering through the roof. ‘But they couldn’t get back out,’ says Gibb with a smile. ‘When the guys came and opened the shop the next day they found them and had them arrested. I think Brodie spent the night in Barlinnie [the Glasgow prison], but Robert, because he hadn’t turned 16 yet, got away with it.’

At a school like Shawlands, or any state school in Glasgow, football was a core, or compulsory, activity. Alongside poverty and violence, it was an aspect of Glasgow life that was, and is, difficult to escape. To say that Glasgow is obsessed by football is like observing that in Dublin they are partial to a pint or two of Guinness. The city is both defined and divided by football, more accurately by the Celtic–Rangers rivalry and the tribalism inherent in this. It is a rivalry that has its roots in religion – Celtic represent the Catholic community, Rangers represent the Protestant community – and inevitably, games between the two halves of the ‘Old Firm’ have tended, historically, to perpetuate the city’s violent reputation. Millar, Gibb told me, didn’t feature in the school football team, but not because he couldn’t play. ‘Although he was skinny and small, he was strong. You couldn’t knock him off the ball. He certainly wasn’t bad. But he didn’t seem to show a lot of interest in it.’

In fact, much like his father, whose big passion seems to have been ballroom dancing, at no stage in his life does Millar appear to have shown any interest in football, which more likely owed to a lack of interest, or rebelliousness, than to his small build. Indeed, some of the city’s finest footballers have been small – Jimmy ‘Jinky’ Johnstone, of Celtic’s 1967 European Cup-winning team, being, at 5ft 4ins, the most obvious example. Such players, though, tended to be fast as well as skilful. It is interesting that Gibb cites Millar’s strength as his main attribute. As a cyclist it would be this, along with his endurance, that allowed him to excel. Millar, according to Gibb, was a decent footballer rather than an outstanding one. He could hold his own but he didn’t dazzle. Moreover, he showed no interest in it – which would count as an act of rebellion in Glasgow, or at least as an example of not following the pack. When in 1985 he returned to Glasgow, having scaled the heights of the Tour de France, he was asked by the city’s paper, the Evening Times, whether he craved more recognition in his home country. ‘Football and rugby are the two main sports here so the top men must come from them,’ he acknowledged. ‘However, it’s nice to be appreciated.’

By the 1960s, however, there was an alternative weekend pursuit to watching football. In Glasgow, as in many working-class cities throughout Europe, the bicycle was becoming a reasonably popular, if marginal, pastime. Initially it was a handy and cheap mode of transport for the working man, getting him to the factory or the shipyard, and then home, often in wobbly fashion, from the pub. And for a few, perhaps those who weren’t wedded to the football culture, it also provided a means of escape at the weekends.

Surrounding Glasgow in all directions were more or less traffic-free roads that skirted spectacular lochs, climbed remote hills, hugged the coast, and delved into secluded parts of the country, all of which were perfect for cycling. Large groups of club cyclists began to meet on the outskirts of the city on Saturday and Sunday mornings to explore these roads, usually stopping for a ‘drum-up’ – a fire would be lit upon which soup could be heated and tea brewed – by the banks of Loch Lomond. Many of those who were drawn to cycling preferred solitude to crowds, such as football crowds. They also preferred green space to the urban environment. ‘Off to find some green bits,’ Millar would remark later of a 1980 photograph that showed him riding through Glasgow, heading out on a training ride. Cycling provided, literally and metaphorically, an escape for those such as Millar and another famous Glaswegian who eventually managed to move away from the city and his working-class roots, the comedian Billy Connolly.

For Connolly, humour was an effective way of surviving life as an apprentice welder in the Clyde shipyards, as well as eventually providing his means of escape. But cycling also provided him with more fleeting ‘escapes’. In an interview with The Independent in 2000, Connolly, agreeing with the description of himself as a ‘sociable loner’, explained, ‘I was never a joiner [of clubs or organizations]. Even when I cycled I never joined a cycling club, I just cycled around on my own and sometimes joined lines of other cyclists.’ He was referring to the club runs, which were organized and designed for socializing, down to the fact that riders went two abreast, as an aid to conversation. Indeed, contrary to the image of the cyclist as only a loner or escape artist, cycling, especially club cycling, was often a social activity that appealed to sociable types – or ‘sociable loners’, perhaps. The sport could therefore satisfy two apparently conflicting sides of a personality, the desire both for solitude and for mixing with others, especially those who were like-minded.

The proliferation of clubs reflected the interest in cycling in Glasgow at this time. There were touring clubs and racing clubs, men-only clubs and clubs for Christians, where Sunday rides would include a visit to church. The 1960s and 1970s constituted a peak period; the club scene has perhaps never been stronger. Jimmy Dorward, a leading light in this club scene for more than five decades, compares the clubs to clans. When, as a young boy, he showed an interest in joining a club he was told simply to ride up to Loch Lomond on a Sunday and find the spot where that club met. Each club had a different and clearly defined ‘drum-up’ spot by the banks of the loch. Dorward went in search of the Douglas club but couldn’t find them. ‘I found the Clarion instead and ended up joining them,’ he recalls. ‘The Douglas, which had been a very strong club, took a nosedive after that.’ Smiling, he adds: ‘But I don’t think that had anything to do with me not joining them.

‘Cycling was a way of life for a lot of people. It was more than a sport, and there was a tremendous social aspect. If you wanted to join a club you just turned up at the “drum” and someone would come and speak to you. If the newcomer got dropped [left behind] there was always someone who’d look out for them and go back for them. After the drum-up the scraps would start; in these big groups of thirty, forty or fifty, we’d race back to Glasgow and it would be every man for himself. But someone would still look out for the newcomer. You’d say, “Just stay with me, I’ll get you back.” And there was tremendous club loyalty. If you were even seen cycling with another club you’d be asked what you were doing. You’d be seen as a traitor.’

One of Robert Millar’s first cycling expeditions, before he became involved in the club scene, was when he was only 11, in the company of three friends, among them Willie Gibb, who had been inspired to take up cycling by the example of his racing father. The youngsters cycled away from Pollokshaws in the direction of East Kilbride, around ten miles away, though Gibb turned home early while the remaining trio of intrepid 11-year-olds continued in an easterly direction, with the benefit of a generous tailwind. It wasn’t just the stiff headwind that made things difficult on the way back. There was also the matter of taking the wrong road, which meant they came back into Glasgow through Rutherglen. To them, it might as well have been a different city. When they managed to stumble upon Bridgeton they were able to find their way home, late, but with their parents none the wiser.

It was with Gibb and Tom Brodie that Millar began to cycle on a more regular basis. ‘We used to run about on bikes that were like Raleigh Choppers,’ remembers Gibb. ‘We were on bikes all the time.’ The three young cyclists began to venture out of the city with greater frequency. They were beginning to enjoy going far and fast, and an element of competition was being introduced, not through racing one another but thanks to the buses that trundled up and down the main road to Ayr, a seaside town thirty miles south of Glasgow. ‘At that time the buses were pretty slow,’ explains Gibb, ‘so we used to tuck in behind them, sheltering in their slipstream. They could probably get up to about forty miles an hour, but they had no acceleration. So you could get in behind them as they left the bus stop and sit behind them all the way to Kilmarnock [twenty miles away] or even as far as Ayr, then turn around and catch another bus back to Glasgow.’

The bicycles were put to other uses as well, such as fishing. Illegal fishing, naturally. Gibb knew of a small loch owned by a syndicate comprising some of the movers and shakers of Glasgow society – ‘legal folk, judges, people like that’. ‘We’d go up and do all-nighters, especially during the school holidays,’ he recalls. ‘It would get light about three in the morning. We used to cycle there with our fishing rods strapped to the top tube of our bikes, and then hide the bikes in the long reeds. The loch was about eight or nine miles from where we lived. We caught loads of good-sized brown trout. There was an old folks’ home near where I lived and I’d keep a couple of fish myself then give the rest to the old folks. I don’t know what Robert did with his. The old folk never asked where they came from.’

One of the early stories that attached itself to Millar as he climbed the cycling ladder was the claim that he had become hooked on the sport of cycling after seeing the Tour de France on a television in a shop window. It’s a story that has been told and retold, but it isn’t true. In fact, Millar set the record straight as early as 1984. ‘That [story] upset me because it made it sound as if I lived in a cave,’ he said. ‘It made out that as I came from Glasgow I was poor and depressed.’ As Gibb confirms, it wasn’t by watching the Tour de France but simply through riding his bike with friends that Millar became interested in the sport. In the same interview in 1984, in Cycling, Millar described his first bike as ‘a wreck: it was made from plumber’s tubing. I used to paint it every six months or so.’

When they were 15, Millar, Gibb and Brodie enquired about joining a cycling club at Riddle Cycles, a shop situated in the shadows of Hampden Park, the national football stadium, that was owned by a couple of elderly brothers, always immaculately turned out in brown overalls. It was the Eagle Road Club the trio had their hearts set on; they were impatient to race, and the Eagle had a reputation as one of Glasgow’s top racing clubs. The Riddles put them in touch with Jim Paton, the Eagle Road Club’s treasurer, but when Paton met them they were left, according to Gibb, feeling ‘dismayed’. Paton told them that to go straight into a racing club would be too big a leap; to go from chasing buses up the Ayr road to mixing it with racing men would be sheer folly. But Paton wasn’t discouraging. He was also a member of the Cyclists’ Touring Club, and advised that the boys join another local club, the CTC-affiliated Glenmarnock Wheelers, instead. They might have felt disappointed and frustrated, but they took Paton’s advice.

The Glenmarnock club, which had been established in 1941, owed its popularity, especially among those just starting out in the sport, to John Storrie. Storrie had just turned 50 when he first encountered the 15-year-old Millar, but the small, skinny boy was one of many who received their first cycling lessons under Storrie’s tuition. Though the three boys came to the club via Jim Paton’s recommendation, Storrie favoured a direct approach to recruitment. While out cycling he would approach youngsters on their bikes, ask them if they enjoyed their cycling and whether they might be interested in joining a club. Then he would give them his business card. It is unlikely that such methods would be successful now, or even acceptable. As Storrie himself says: ‘That probably wouldn’t be allowed nowadays. Someone would complain. But I just wanted to introduce them to the bike.’

Most of the boys who joined the Glenmarnock, like Millar, Gibb and Brodie, wanted to race, and were impatient to do so. But for Storrie the club scene, and the ritual of the weekly club run, was just as important. It provided an informal education. It was where youngsters could learn how to cycle in a group, riding two abreast and sticking as close as possible to the back wheel of the rider in front in order to gain shelter and conserve energy for when it was their turn to take the pace at the front. When they stepped up to road racing, in large bunches of cyclists, the experience of training in a group would stand them in good stead.

The club runs were largely ordered, organized outings governed by an informal code of etiquette. To many newcomers to the sport the first club run can be quite intimidating, the experience of riding in such close proximity to other cyclists a nerve-shredding ordeal. And there had not so far been any obvious signs that Millar was blessed with a gift for cycling. Of the three friends, it was Tom Brodie who appeared to be the strongest, perhaps on account of his being a little older, and physically much bigger than the other two. Yet when all three joined the Glenmarnock Wheelers it became clear that it wasn’t just Brodie who had talent. Millar, his speed and bike-handling skills perhaps honed by chasing the rear bumpers of buses up and down the Ayr road, appeared to take to the club runs like a duck to water. ‘We quickly realized that we were as strong and fast as a lot of the guys who were racing quite regularly,’ said Gibb. ‘That came as a surprise to us.’

Gibb states that Millar, at this time, displayed none of the aloofness or the reluctance to engage with people that he showed later – at least not with him or Brodie. ‘It was a different kind of relationship he had with us than with most people. I’m not saying it was better or worse, but I think he was more relaxed in our company because we did so much cycling together. We did other things – going to the park, climbing into people’s gardens, stealing apples, all those kinds of things – but we just really enjoyed riding around on our bikes.’

Ten years after Millar’s induction to cycling, when he had already started to shine in the Tour de France, John Storrie wrote to Cycling magazine recalling his first impressions of Millar. ‘He was not a hooligan,’ he said, ‘but the best way to describe him at that age was that he was the “James Dean of cycling” – a bit of a rebel, but with one cause in mind: cycling. Like James Dean, he had a dislike for authority, probably stemming from his school days. He was not happy at work [Millar started an engineering apprenticeship after leaving school] but he could not take his mind off cycling. Cycling was in his thoughts night and day.’ Even so, when Jimmy Dorward came to give a lecture to the club, Storrie noted that ‘it was typical of Robert’s make-up that when it came to the technical part he became bored and had to be told off for reading Cycling in the middle of the lecture’. Storrie concluded his article by stating that the youngster was ‘quite a loner and conversation was confined to a few words’.

Storrie, now in his early eighties, suffered a stroke in 2002. While he struggles to recall some recent events his memories of the young Millar remain vivid. In particular he remembers some of the quirks of his personality. ‘When he first appeared he was a raw boy, a rough boy,’ he says. ‘He had shoulder-length hair, which no one else had at the time. He liked to be different. He was very quiet. He didn’t make friends easily. On the club runs we would have drum-ups by the side of Loch Lomond, so we’d all stop and make a fire and sit down together. But Robert would go away on his own, maybe fifty yards away, and light his own fire. He did that every time. I didn’t try to bring him into the group. I just let him get on with it. We joked about him wanting to be on his own but he never gave us an explanation. I don’t remember him not liking people; he was just a loner.’

Jimmy Dorward, who was running the Scotia club at the time and encountered Millar on occasional club runs, recalls a similar incident. ‘We stopped for the drum-up and the young lads arrived with Robert Millar,’ he explains. ‘We got the fire going, and after a while I realized Millar wasn’t there. “Where’s Millar?” I asked. “Oh, he’s away,” someone said. That was unheard of. If you went to a club’s drum-up you collected a few sticks and when you left you said, “Thanks for the drum.” But that was Millar’s nature. He just drifted off.’

Another strange episode that Storrie remembers was a club run that ended with a stop on a private beach by the banks of the Lake of Menteith, around twenty miles north of Glasgow. It was a glorious summer’s day and Storrie, having obtained the permission of the house owner, allowed his young charges to go swimming. The condition stipulated by the land owner was that they behaved themselves, and all complied, except one: the rebel. While everyone else stripped off and went swimming, Millar kept his racing clothing on and stepped into the water until it was up to his knees. ‘He was a devil,’ says Storrie, smiling now. ‘He collected a pile of stones, holding them in his jersey, and he started throwing them at the boats. He kept throwing stones into one boat; he had so many stones in his jersey that I thought he was going to sink it. I kept saying “Robert, stop that!” but he just laughed. I couldn’t get a word out of him. Eventually I paddled out to where he was and tipped him into the water. He wasn’t happy. He came out the water shouting, “They were my fucking good cycling shorts!” They were soaking wet.’

Storrie declares himself unsure whether Millar might have got into more serious trouble had cycling not provided an outlet for his energy, allowing him to channel his rebellious streak. But he does point out that Millar would not be unique had he been ‘saved’ by cycling. ‘That was the good thing about what I was doing. I was taking people away on the bike, getting them out of Glasgow, away from trouble. It was the ambition of a lot of kids to own a bike and I let them come along whatever bike they had. Some clubs would have said, “Away you go, that’s not suitable.” But if someone came out with us, as long as they could pedal, I’d let them come. I made allowances. I waited for them at the top of a hill. Others didn’t.’

The other thing Storrie remembers is Millar’s burgeoning ability as a cyclist, in particular his apparent fondness for hills. ‘When you hit a hill he loved to jump away and get up it first. He was competitive. He was naturally strong, really outstanding.’

Though he could be difficult, Storrie retains fond memories of the teenaged Millar, and even fonder ones of watching his career blossom on the biggest stage of all, the Tour de France. As he wrote in Cycling in 1984, ‘What a great thrill it was to see Robert on TV in 1983, winning the Pyrenean stage, then winning the same stage in 1984 against heavy odds … I am not ashamed to say that I shed tears of emotion as he danced away to victory, and even now, on the video re-run, I still get glassy-eyed. Knowing Millar, I can safely say, quoting Al Jolson, “We ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”’

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