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