unknown for teenagers to be unpleasant towards their parents, after all. Millar was perhaps no worse, or better, than Harry Enfield’s horrific adolescent creation Kevin the Teenager. Nonetheless, in the few words Millar ever uttered about his family, when he was well into his twenties, he could be disarmingly frank about his poor relationship with his father. In 1984, in an interview with Jean-Marie Leblanc, then a journalist but the future director of the Tour de France, he was asked if he’d had the support of his family when he left Scotland for France. ‘More or less,’ Millar replied. ‘In fact, I have never got on very well with my father and I decided to live my life as I wanted. I only go back to Scotland for a few days each year since my mother died. Eventually, I won’t go back at all. I will live in Australia or Canada, or I may stay in France, where the standard of living is better than in Britain.’
Speaking in 1985, four years after the death of his mother, he told a film crew that her loss had come as ‘a bit of a let down’. The High Life was a documentary about Millar made by Granada TV and broadcast on the eve of the 1986 Tour de France, and in a sequence filmed so late that it almost didn’t make the final cut, Millar finally opened up about his family. ‘I was a lot closer to my mother than I was – than I am – to my father,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if that’s natural, or what. In our family it was like that.’ He looked down and quietly added, ‘Kind of a disappointment.’ Then the heavily furrowed brow was replaced by a nervous smile. ‘I don’t really miss my family much.’
‘So your mother never saw you reaching the heights?’ asked the film’s director, Peter Carr.
‘Nuh … nuh,’ Millar responded. ‘I saw my father when I went home to race but I might only see him twice a year if I go home again in the winter. I don’t really … I don’t really miss him that much. I have my life here and it’s like a different thing. It’s like going home to something else. It’s like being on holiday.’
The camera lingered on Millar as he stared silently at the ground. A smile flickered across his face but the heavy furrow and the frown quickly returned. Today, Carr, who spent the best part of a year making The High Life, remembers Millar as ‘enigmatic, mysterious, laconic … I thought he was troubled’.
As for Millar’s brother, Ian, and sister, Elizabeth, only scraps are known. Ian worked with Robert at Weir’s Pumps, David Whitehall recalls, though he found this out quite by chance. ‘His brother was the opposite personality, and I knew him, but I didn’t know he was Robert’s brother. Robert never told me; he never spoke about his family at all. One day someone said, “You know that’s Robert’s brother?” He was quite open and outgoing, quite friendly.’ Several of Millar’s cycling friends met his sister, to whom he was closer in age and, according to Gibb, virtually identical in appearance. Elizabeth trained as a nurse and got married. ‘I remember when his sister got married,’ says Whitehall. ‘Robert didn’t go to the wedding because he was doing his weight training that night. There was only me and one other guy who he spoke to at work, and it was this other lad who told me. The wedding was in January, I remember that, so it wasn’t even during the season. I mean, you could understand if it was in June or something … But there was more to it than him snubbing his sister’s wedding. It was an excuse not to go, I think. He didn’t relish social situations. Even cycling club prize presentation dinners. He was just very shy.’
Following the death of Millar’s 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’,
