In Search of Robert Millar: Unravelling the Mystery Surrounding Britain’s Most Successful Tour de France Cyclist. Richard Moore
there he travelled to England for the Sealink International, a five-day stage race, where he finished eighth, with third-placed Des Fretwell the only other British rider in the top ten. His run of good form continued a couple of weeks later when he was fifth behind Fretwell in Llangollen-Wolverhampton, a counting event towards the Pernod series – effectively the national road race series. It was a result that earned Millar a quote in Cycling, and an unusual one at that, since it found him in confident, cocky mood. ‘Call me the flying Scotsman,’ Millar instructed the reporter, adding of the season that stretched ahead of him, ‘I’ll be riding the Milk Race and the Scottish Milk Race and I hope to ride the Commonwealth Games.’
The Milk Race represented a huge step up for Millar and some of his other young Scottish team-mates, including McGahan. Curiously, they had come in for some criticism in the midst of a tug-of-love between the Scotland and Great Britain teams over Sandy Gilchrist. The experienced Gilchrist, noted Cycling, would ‘do better in the GB squad than when “supported” by young Scots who lack stage-race experience’. How those inverted commas, dripping with sarcasm, wounded the young Scots’ pride! Who were those people at Cycling, mocking their aspirations to support a team leader such as Gilchrist in the Milk Race? A fortnight before the Milk Race started in Brighton, Bobby Melrose placed second in another Pernod event, the Lincoln GP, with Millar fifth. ‘Significantly, in every break there was a Scot,’ reported Cycling. ‘Such was their determination to answer detractors of their ability with actions as eloquent as a thumbed nose.’
The manager of the Scotland team for the Milk Race was that stalwart of the Scottish scene Jimmy Dorward. He had also managed Millar at the Girvan stage race, which provided him with an introduction to some of the teenager’s more curious behaviour, and his unwillingness to conform. When they left the guesthouse to go for a meal, Dorward and his riders walked down one side of the road, while Millar, alone, opted for the other. ‘The other side was more interesting, I suppose,’ Dorward, who presumably thought he had seen it all, remarks with a shrug.
But that was nothing. Before the Milk Race, Dorward encountered Millar’s stubbornly independent streak again, though this time he found it difficult to laugh off. The team had assembled in Glasgow for the flight to London. ‘I gave them a wee talk,’ explains Dorward. ‘The Milk Race was a major international race, fourteen days long, and they were a young team, so I was telling them what I was expecting and what I wasn’t expecting. I told them they weren’t going to win the race. I didn’t want them going up the road with the Czechs and Poles only to get an absolute hammering that would take two days to recover from. I suppose I was trying to calm them down, so they wouldn’t be overawed by the situation. But after I’d said my piece, Robert spoke up: “You’re talking a lot of fucking nonsense.”’ Dorward says that he was close to telling the 19-year-old to pack his bags. ‘But I thought I’d give him another chance, particularly since we hadn’t actually started the race yet.’
It turned out to be a wise decision. It was to prove an eventful Milk Race for the Scottish team and for Dorward, but, ironically, Robert Millar was the least of his problems.
By the time of the Milk Race, in late May, Millar’s working arrangements had changed radically. Having been little more than a virtual employee of Weir’s Pumps for some months, on account of his cat naps in the toilets and mysterious afternoon disappearances, he finally made the arrangement official and permanent by resigning. And, in keeping with the increasingly professional approach he was adopting towards cycling, this was no reckless decision financially. In an interview with Cycling later in the season, Millar said that he’d received £500 from Lorimer’s Brewery, which supported several Scottish athletes though, in Millar, only one cyclist. Given that his £26 a week from Weir’s was no longer coming in, it was his only significant income, prize money in races being modest. The money, he said, had come in handy in the light of his decision to leave work – which hadn’t been taken lightly, he added. But, as the 19-year-old explained, ‘You’ve got to commit yourself some time in your life.’
Millar did in fact have one influential ally among the senior members of the factory staff in Peter Johnstone, the union convenor. In just about every respect, Johnstone, who had previously worked in the Clyde shipyards, fitted the bill of the west of Scotland working-class male. A big, gruff, garrulous man, Johnstone’s accent leaves absolutely no doubt in your mind as to where he is from. He speaks as if he has nails in his mouth. He is a stereotypical Glaswegian, too, in being a good talker and a natural story teller. Crucially for Millar, Johnstone was also a cyclist, and as the convenor at Weir’s his role was to represent and fight for the interests of the workers. He admits that, because of their shared interest in cycling, he was perhaps more sympathetic to Millar’s quirks and foibles than he might otherwise have been – though only to a point. ‘I never really got to know him because he wasn’t a great communicator,’ he says. ‘Why would I bother talking to him? I had better things to do! I had everyone’s problems to deal with at that time.’
In the early months of 1978 Millar approached Johnstone with a request: he wanted time off for training. Which, in its own way, was almost as audacious as his stated ambition to win the British championship. ‘Nobody ever had time off at Weir’s for anything,’ states Johnstone, though he went nevertheless to try to negotiate some time off for Millar and Whitehall, both of whom were targeting selection for the Commonwealth Games in Edmonton, Canada. ‘I got them two and a half days a week,’ says Johnstone, a note of triumph still detectable. ‘Davie was tickled to death with that, but Robert came back and said he wasnae happy at all. I said, “Well, Robert, I cannae dae any better than that.” And he said, “Well, I think I’m gonnae have to leave.” I advised him against it. His apprenticeship finished in August – he only had aboot three months left.’
Arthur Campbell, by now taking an increasing interest in Millar, and beginning to play the role of mentor, also advised him against leaving. ‘Robert didn’t know it, but Peter Johnstone was keeping an eye on him on my behalf,’ he reveals. ‘When he told me he was thinking about leaving I told him to do his time and get his apprenticeship. Get your papers, I told him, and then you can go to France and try to be a cyclist. I told him to speak to his parents, at least, but he shook his head and said, “It’s my decision.”’
Ian Thomson, the Scotland team manager, remembers when Millar packed in his apprenticeship at Weir’s. ‘We were on a Sunday training run in early April and he was talking to me about it. I said, “You’ve not got long to go, do your time, make the effort, then you’ve got something behind you and you can do what you want.” And then he went in the next day and resigned. I thought, “So much for my powers of persuasion …”’
It is revealing to note that the language of working in the factory so closely resembles that of being in prison. But Millar didn’t care much for doing his time, or finishing his sentence, which was how he probably regarded the apprenticeship. He might even have derived some satisfaction from completing two years, eight months of a three-year apprenticeship – another gesture ‘as eloquent as a thumbed nose’. But a deeper reason was surely his unhappiness at Weir’s, and, more than that, the thought that working there might inhibit his cycling ambitions over a crucial period, starting with the Milk Race, continuing with the British championship and the Commonwealth Games, and concluding, if he could gain selection to the British team, with the world championship in West Germany. He knew that success in any of these events could be his passport to Europe, and that Europe, in turn, could be his passport to a way of living, and a way of earning a living, infinitely preferable to working in a factory.
In the background, partly offering a counter-voice to the pleas of caution from Campbell, Johnstone and Thomson, was the calm reassurance of Billy Bilsland. He was the one man, after all, who had done what Millar wanted to do: he had ridden as a professional on the continent. Wittingly or not, Bilsland provided tangible evidence that it could be done. ‘Back then there was a mentality that you needed a trade,’ says Bilsland. ‘I said to him, “You’ll be out of cycling a lot longer than you’re in it, so you have to think of the future. But at the same time, it’s a short time in your life and you’ve got to make the most of it.”’
Peter Johnstone certainly recognized that Millar was unhappy at Weir’s.