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