In Search of Robert Millar: Unravelling the Mystery Surrounding Britain’s Most Successful Tour de France Cyclist. Richard Moore
Читать онлайн книгу.
mother, Mary, in 1981, Bill Millar remarried and moved out of Glasgow, to the small town of Kirkintilloch, a few miles north of the city, by the Campsie Hills, where he died in the early 1990s. Several people told me that Elizabeth still lives in Glasgow, working as a nurse. Billy Bilsland said that she called into his shop a couple of years ago, but he had no idea how to find her. She was married – though the marriage ended – and possibly no longer uses the Millar name. My efforts to find Elizabeth and Ian included dispatching more than two hundred emails through the Friends Reunited website, which drew many replies but only one positive response. ‘You were fortunate to find me,’ read the email. ‘I knew the Millars very well. Elizabeth was a close friend of mine for a long time and Ian was best man at my wedding in 1981 … We all stayed in Wellcroft Place in the Gorbals and [attended] Abbotsford Primary … Ian now lives in the Aberdeenshire area and I keep in touch with a Christmas card every year. I have his address if you need it. I think Elizabeth still stays in Glasgow, but as I said, I don’t know where Robert is now.’
I wrote to Ian Millar on two occasions, but he didn’t respond. Had I managed to speak to either Ian or Elizabeth, I would have asked them about Millar’s paradoxical relationship with his father, who, by most accounts, was a pleasant, gentle, even docile man. Yet he was also his father, and therefore a figure of authority. And, given that Millar seemed predisposed from an early age to dislike and distrust authority figures, Bill might not have needed to be especially strict, or very much of a disciplinarian, to earn his younger son’s disapproval. The question is, was Millar’s personality forged through his difficult relationship with his father, or did his relationship with his father become strained because of his attitude towards authority figures? It might be revealing, in this context, to note that those who knew something of the three siblings report that neither Ian nor Elizabeth shared Robert’s hostility towards authority figures, or, for that matter, towards their father. They were, in the words of one, ‘pretty normal and easy-going in comparison with Robert’.
I do not know whether there was any specific cause for the rift in Millar’s relationship with his father, and those who knew him – Bilsland, Campbell, Gibb, Whitehall – are confident there wasn’t. My inclination is to agree, and to conclude that Millar’s indifference towards his father was simply Robert Millar being Robert Millar. He was fiercely independent, and he wanted to be seen as being independent, so what better way to assert your independence, especially at a young age, than to alienate your father?
It was towards the end of the 1976 season, Millar’s first with the Glasgow Wheelers and his first under the tutelage of Billy Bilsland, that he started to produce the results that would gain him wider attention. It was one thing to win the junior road race title, quite another to finish second in a field containing the best senior riders in the country in one of the classic time trials held at the tail end of the season. On 9 October, in torrential rain and heavy mist, the Tour of the Trossachs, a twenty-seven-mile hilly time trial that climbed the Duke’s Pass by Aberfoyle, was won by Sandy Gilchrist, one of the stars of the British amateur scene. Millar, who had turned 18 the previous month, was second. This and other results earned him a call-up to the Scottish senior squad for the following season. Also in that squad were Gilchrist and Bobby Melrose, another young rider, who became Millar’s regular training partner.
Melrose and Millar were drawn together by circumstance as much as anything else. Melrose was pursuing a career as a professional cyclist, and he made frequent forays to Belgium, sometimes visiting Bilsland. He only worked occasional part-time hours and was therefore able to train during the day. Millar, meanwhile, was also able to train most days. In his case, that was because he was spending less time at work than he should have done.
Weir’s Pumps of Cathcart, the factory that employed around eighteen hundred workers in the late 1970s, was the natural first step on the career ladder for hordes of school leavers in Glasgow. More importantly, it was the only place that could provide many of them with a pay packet. As a first-year apprentice doing an ONC in mechanical engineering as part of his employment, Millar was paid £26 a week. It was enough to keep many 18-year-olds off the streets during the day and in the pub in the evening, but Millar was miserable there. It soon became clear that he was unsuited to work, and, perhaps just as significantly, to the working environment.
By coincidence, one of his contemporaries at Weir’s, starting out on the same engineering apprenticeship, was his main rival in the Scottish junior races, David Whitehall. Whitehall was a year younger, but he and Millar had much in common. First and foremost, both were cyclists. Both were reserved and quiet, too; neither really fitted the stereotype of the garrulous ‘west of Scotland male’, as Whitehall puts it. But there was one crucial difference: Whitehall was conscientious and serious about gaining his apprenticeship at Weir’s, Millar was not. Some days he didn’t turn up; other days he went missing in the afternoon. Even when he was there, it was in body rather than mind, spirit or application. He appeared to relish the challenge of devising ingenious new ways of skiving, of getting one over on the management, or anyone, for that matter, who told him what to do and when. ‘There was a pipe room,’ explains Whitehall. ‘Robert had a very black sense of humour, and he’d say he went in there for a sleep, so he’d be well rested for training. He’d also come out with things like, “I’ve perfected a new way of sleeping in the toilets”, then he’d demonstrate how he could lie, with his head resting on the cistern. Sometimes I wouldn’t know if he was serious. I’d think, “Are you having a laugh?” But he was serious.’
The first twelve months of the three-year apprenticeship included basic skills, using drilling machines and fitting machines, all geared towards the manufacture of water pumps. After the first year the apprentices were ‘let loose’ in the factory, working in castings or assembly. ‘You tended to get moved around every six months,’ continues Whitehall. ‘As a technician apprentice, which is what Robert and I were, you were seen as being a potential manager in years to come. So there was a bit of an “us and them” divide between the apprentices and the workers on the shop floor.’ Whitehall describes the atmosphere on the shop floor as ‘male-dominated, typical west of Scotland’, in the sense that there were two preoccupations among most of the workers, ‘ragging and shagging’. ‘There was a lot of smut, and I think Robert felt ill at ease among all of that, especially among lads his own age. “What did you do at the weekend?” they’d ask, really goading him. “Did you get a burd?”’
Apart from drinking, football and girls, Glasgow’s religious divide was another preoccupation, and it manifested itself at Weir’s in strange ways. The Protestant–Catholic schism was not overt, says Whitehall, ‘but it seemed more than a coincidence that in one particular office everyone would either be a nonbeliever or a Protestant, while next door it would be the other way round. It seemed to be arranged like that. I don’t think it was an accident.’ Although Millar came from a Protestant family, he showed no religious leanings, says Whitehall. ‘Cycling was his religion.’ Interestingly, one of Millar’s teammates from his days riding professionally in France, Ronan Pensec, makes a similar observation: ‘He was almost religious in his dedication to training.’
It was another of the unwritten rules of Glasgow life – in fact, it must be written in the city charter – that in places of work nicknames are compulsory, even if it is only, and most commonly, ‘Big Man’ or ‘Wee Man’. Often one will be used as a prefix to someone’s name – hence ‘Big Davie’ or ‘Wee Rab’. But inevitably there was cruelty in the nickname assigned to ‘Wee Rab’ Millar. He was known in the factory as ‘Eagle Beak’, Whitehall reveals, ‘because of his large nose’.
It would appear that every Billy Connolly-inspired caricature of the Glasgow working-class male was reinforced on the shop floor at Weir’s. Connolly told tales of the shipyards, but by the seventies many of these had closed and factories like Weir’s developed a similar culture, with rigidly applied rules concerning what was acceptable for young males. Working hard, going to the football and the pub, and ‘pulling burds’ was not only standard but required behaviour; falling asleep in the toilets while dreaming of riding the Tour de France was not. ‘Weir’s was Robert’s worst nightmare,’ says Whitehall. ‘It was just like a Billy Connolly sketch – there were these dominant characters, people you’d be a bit afraid of. And Robert was different, not because