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British League of Racing CyclistsThe British League of Racing Cyclists (BLRC) was an association formed in 1942 to promote road bicycle racing in Great Britain. It operated in competition with the National Cyclists' Union, a rivalry which lasted until the two merged in 1959 to form the British Cycling Federation. BackgroundThe National Cyclists' Union (NCU) had, since the end of the 19th century, banned racing on the roads, fearing the police would ban all cycling as a result.[1] A call for a ban "evoked hardly any opposition because road conditions were such that the possibility of massed racing on the highway was never even envisaged."[2] "The position of cyclists on the roads of England and Wales had not been established and police forces had objected to cyclists racing. Matters came to a head on 21 July 1894 during a timed race on the North Road, then the main road north out of London, in which 50 riders competed with the help of other riders to pace them. A group of riders passed a woman and her horse and carriage at a point about 57 miles from the capital. The horse panicked, the riders fell off and the woman complained to the local police. They in turn banned cycle-racing on their roads."[1] The NCU administered not only road racing but track racing and ruled that its clubs were to move their races off the road and on to tracks, the forerunners of modern velodromes. Some clubs did but most were too far from any track and so a rebel movement began to organise not massed, paced races but individual competitions against the clock, over standard distances and held out in the countryside, in the early hours and in secret to avoid antagonising the police. The NCU and what became the Road Time Trials Council eventually became colleagues, each administering its own section of the sport, neither allowing massed racing. The war and Percy StallardThe National Cyclists Union was the international body for cycling in England and Wales and sent teams to the Olympic Games and to world championships. It also licensed riders to compete abroad in races such as Bordeaux–Paris. But teams had to be selected not in races akin to which they were being entered but in competitions held on private roads such as airfields and car-racing courses. One of the riders to be selected was an enthusiast from Wolverhampton, Percy Stallard. The experience of massed racing stimulated him and he believed that the NCU's objection to it on grounds that it would disrupt traffic and give cycling a bad name was pointless in wartime when petrol rationing had largely cleared the roads of vehicles. He wrote in December 1941 to A. P. Chamberlin of the NCU:
Stallard protested that the airfields and car circuits which were the only place that the NCU would allow massed racing had been taken by the Army and RAF. Chamberlin was not impressed and replied at the end of January to say that the NCU had considered the question but considered it unwise. The breakaway raceIn the first week of April Stallard sent letters on the notepaper of the bicycle shop that he ran to announce his plan for a 59-mile race from Llangollen to Wolverhampton on 7 June.
Stallard's plan brought strong opposition not just from the NCU and RTTC but from the cycling establishment, particularly from the veteran administrator and writer George Herbert Stancer. His fear, and that of the NCU, was that asking the police for permission to hold a race ended the freedom of cyclists to hold races, or at any rate lone races against the clock, without interference. Under the headline A hopeless revolt, he wrote:
Stancer's words influenced the NCU and it banned Stallard before the race had started. An agreement with the Road Time Trials Council meant that it too banned him. Stallard went ahead and his race finished, without incident, in front of a crowd at West Park. There were 34 riders, including two Dutchmen serving in the army in Britain. The programme, priced 2d, urged: "Onlookers are earnestly requested to remain on the pavements at all times during the race." It also said that "The event is run with the kind permission of the Chief Constables of Denbighshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire and Wolverhampton." Cycling reported:
The report – in which the frequent mention of the police reflected the magazine's concerns as expressed by Stancer – went on to explain that the race had been banned by the NCU and the RTTC but that there had been no incidents other than a lorry backing on to the course. Fifteen riders finished and all those involved in the race were expelled from the NCU. Stallard was banned for life for refusing to account for himself to the NCU's management. The race result:
British League of Racing Cyclists"When I ran the race," Stallard said in Winning, "I didn't think anything of it. I just thought it was something that would be taken up by others. I thought that, when the point had been proved, the NCU would be only too pleased to find that they'd got a bit of activity. It had all been above board. The police had never seen one, of course, but I just told them it was in conformity with international practice and races of this type were organised in all different countries and they had no queries at all." Further races were held elsewhere in the country and the clubs that organised them formed regional groups. The first was in the Midlands in July 1942, called by the Wolverhampton RCC.[4] With nowhere to go but insistent that massed racing was the future, Stallard encouraged the groups to merge to form the British League of Racing Cyclists. The founding meeting was of 24 people at the Sherebrook Lodge Hotel, Buxton, Derbyshire on Sunday 14 November 1942. The founding members - they were listed by their initials rather than their names - were M. J. Gibson, S. A. Padwick, P. T. Stallard, E. F. Angrave, J. E. Finn, R.Jones, E. R. Hickman, G. Anstee, L. Plume, G. Truelove, C. J. Fox, L. Merrills, W. W. Greaves. E. Reddish, E. Thompson, R. Hartley, K. Swaby, Chas J. Fox, S. Copley, S. Cooper, K. Pattinson, G. Clark, Mrs W. W. Greaves and Miss G. A. Stiff. Other riders and then whole clubs joined the BLRC. British cycle racing became polarised, frequently bitterly so. Clubs could not affiliate to both the NCU and the BLRC; riders who raced in BLRC races were banned from NCU events and from time trials run by the Road Time Trials Council. The magazine Cycling at first refused to report BLRC events. According to John Dennis, at the time racing editor of the rival paper, The Bicycle:
The BLRC itself wasn't that certain of its acceptance by the police. A sticker added to its membership licence read:
In 1943, the League promoted the first British national road race championship, in Harrogate and later the Brighton-Glasgow stage race – a forerunner to the Daily Express Tour of Britain first run in 1951. The BLRC also organised representative teams to races in other countries, although not through the international body, the Union Cycliste Internationale, by whom it wasn't recognised but through private arrangements with individuals, other breakaway organisations and sometimes through communist sports clubs which operated outside their own country's framework. From 1948 the BLRC sent a team to the Peace Race, Warsaw-Berlin-Prague, considered then the world's international amateur stage race. In 1952, Ian Steel won and Britain took the team prize. That led the UCI to recognise at least the existence of the BLRC.[6] For the moment it said it would have to cooperate through the NCU but enthusiasts believed they had achieved international power. Representatives of the NCU walked out of the meeting before the vote, saying the UCI's proposal was unconstitutional. One of its delegates, H. S. Anderson said: "There is no provision in the statute of the UCI for provisional or temporary affiliation of a national federation. The committee resolution is invalid because it violates several statutes of the UCI."[6] Had they voted, the resolution would have failed.[6] The Tour de FranceWith the BLRC now halfway through the door, Britain sent a team to the Tour de France in 1955. It was the first team ever sent since the previous riders, Bill Burl and Charles Holland had competed as private entrants before the war. To turn down the Tour was something the NCU wouldn't do and yet it couldn't select riders who were BLRC members. To leave out BLRC members, however, would be to send a weakened team and antagonise a wavering UCI. Yet the BLRC could not select a team because the Union Cycliste Internationale didn't formally recognise it. The conundrum was solved by asking a panel of newspaper reporters to do the job instead. The beginning of the endRunning the BLRC was never easy and there were frequent rows within its administration.[1] The organiser of the first big stage race, Jimmy Kain, wrote to Stallard after the BLRC had merged with the BCF of the "two years of nervous and physical breakdown that followed the six years of BLRC office."[7] Stallard was a bright and energetic man with a vision for his sport. But he was not a man to tolerate argument or those with other views. Peter Bryan, editor of The Bicycle, later an associate of Sporting Cyclist and managing editor of Cycling said:
Having achieved what he wanted, with the NCU's final acceptance of massed racing on the road, Stallard placed the continuity of the BLRC over the end of the civil war that the BLRC and the NCU had conducted. He said: "The NCU were running road races and we were running road races and there wasn't any need for amalgamation [of the NCU and the BLRC, to form the British Cycling Federation] at all."[8] Critics said Stallard had lost sight of the intention of the BLRC, which had been to bring racing to the open road and that, once achieved, that there was no further point in rival cycling administrations. Peter Bryan said: "The BLRC was originally a gang of enthusiasts. Then along came what I'd call the parliamentarians of pedal power, men who saw a runaway organisation and decided they'd take it over."[8] Stallard was influenced by those who agreed with him but in the end he and others became too much for the BLRC's other administrators and the BLRC magazine, The Leaguer, reported in 1954: "There is a malignant ulcer prevalent in the cycling world common to all three racing bodies in this country. It is the taint of vanity and culminates in the clash of personality."[1] With both the BLRC and the NCU physically and financially reeling from a civil war that had long outlasted the war with Germany, the two merged in 1959 to form the British Cycling Federation, now known as British Cycling. The January 1959 edition of the BLRC magazine, The Leaguer, reported formally:
The text accompanying the announcement said:
It also said that "those who are predisposed to live in the past, and even the progressive League is old enough now to number several such in its ranks", would greet the news with surprise. Stallard saw the merger as treason by "just three people [who] were allowed the freedom to destroy the BLRC"[9] and until his death saw the new British Cycling Federation (BCF) as a reincarnation of the NCU. In 1989 he wrote:
InheritanceTo the question of whether Britain would have moved to massed racing anyway, without the BLRC, Peter Bryan says not, saying that the established cycling authorities had become entrenched in their positions, their own rivalry overshadowed by their joint fears and interests.
Stallard's success was that he alerted the UCI to a problem in British cycling which led the UCI to threaten Britain with exclusion from world cycling unless it sorted out the conflict between the NCU and the BLRC. Seeing the BLRC as closer to the UCI's interests, it suggested it would recognise the BLRC and not the NCU as the representative body. It was because of that that the NCU relented and agreed to license the massed races it had hitherto opposed. "You can never say that if it didn't happen then this wouldn't have happened, but I can't see what else [other than the BLRC] would have brought it [massed racing] about," said Peter Bryan.[8] References
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