Percy Stallard

Percy Stallard joined Wolverhampton Wheelers and rode his first race on 8 May 1927, when he was 17.[3] The competition was a 10-mile individual time trial on a course described as "the Cannock road". By the end of the season he progressed to riding 50-mile (80 km) events and the following year to a 12-hour endurance race

He rode only time-trials until 1932, when his papers suggest he may have ridden in local grass-track meetings or perhaps on a hard velodrome. He could also have tried cyclo-cross because that year he also took part in a race between cyclists and runners, traditionally held on cross-country courses. Track races became more common from 1933.

When the Second World War began later that year, the roads emptied because of petrol rationing. Stallard insisted that if there were few or no other road-users, massed racing on the road was unlikely to bring objections. He wrote in December 1941 to A. P. Chamberlin of the NCU:

It is amazing to think that this is the only country in Europe where this form of sport is not permitted... There seems to be the mistaken idea that it would be necessary to close the roads. This, of course, is entirely wrong... There would be no better time than now to introduce this form of racing to the roads, what with the decreased amount of motor traffic and the important part that the cycle is playing in wartime transport.

— Percy Stallard, 1941[8]

Chamberlin was not impressed. 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. On Easter Monday 1942 he called a meeting at the foot of Long Mynd, a hill in Shropshire that was popular with cyclists, and announced his plan for a 59-mile race from Llangollen to Wolverhampton on 7 June.

I just explained to the police what I was doing and told them that things like that were normal on the Continent, and they said they were happy and that they'd try to help

— Percy Stallard, 1989.[5]

He obtained sponsorship from the Wolverhampton Express and Star newspaper, offered any profits to the newspaper's Forces Comfort Fund, and recruited 40 riders to take part.

With nowhere to go but insistent that massed racing was the future, Stallard was instrumental in creating a breakaway organisation, the British League of Racing Cyclists. It was formed in November that year, bringing together regional groups already forming in the Midlands and the North. Stallard won the 1944 BLRC championship,[13] and served as events organiser for a time, before being expelled for criticising the standard of events. He was also a moving force behind organisation of the fledgling Tour of Britain.

Stallard remained bitter about the NCU and even his own invention, the BLRC, for the rest of his life.

I have often sat back and thought just how nice it would be if you could relive your life based on the experience gained. For myself, I would never again try to achieve the impossible by trying to change things. On the two occasions I have tried to do this [he tried to introduce age-related racing for riders older than 40], I have failed, not because I lack followers, or because of the opposition of opposing bodies, but because of the activities of anarchists and those who are envious of your success and popularity.

— Percy Stallard, 1989.[14]

His criticism of the BLRC and its standards of race organisation led to his being briefly suspended from the organisation he had helped to found.[1]

In 1959, the NCU and the BLRC agreed to merge, by which time both had become mentally and financially exhausted by their civil war. Stallard saw the merger as treason by "just three people [who] were allowed the freedom to destroy the BLRC"[14] and until his death saw the new British Cycling Federation (BCF) as a reincarnation of the NCU.

His assistant at his cycle shop, Ralph Jones, was the BLRC delegate at an international meeting in Spain which recognised the BCF as Britain's national body. Stallard sacked him the next day he came into work.[1] Jones had finished sixth in Stallard's race from Llangollen to Wolverhampton.[15]

Stallard rode his last race when he was 56, in Doncaster. Racing as he grew older became difficult because the British Cycling Federation's rules classed all riders as veterans when they passed 40. Stallard argued that veterans' races should be organised in age-groups and he clashed again with cycling authorities by forming an organisation to make that possible.

He drew up the rules from a hospital bed in 1985, when he was having a hip replaced, and the League of Veteran Racing Cyclists (LVRC) began in 1986. This time, the rest of cycling left him to it.

Stallard fell out with the organisation he had founded, saying in his private papers that the LVRC was not "up to expectation" and adding:

It is little wonder that it was three years before an executive committee was convened, and even then neither the chairman or secretary were able to attend. The fact that no copies of the regulations have been made available since I printed and distributed the original in 1986 does not appear to worry anyone.

— Percy Stallard, Private papers,

In June 1989 he wrote to the journalist Les Woodland: "I regret very much my endeavour on behalf of age-related [racing]. While there is a definite call for this type of riding, a big majority of the LVRC membership look upon the organisation as a means of providing them with a few extra races, nothing more, and have no allegiance to it whatever."

In 1988, the BCF offered Stallard its gold medal for services to the sport. The magazine Cycling wrote: "Are we being over-optimistic in believing that the bitterness caused by the rift of the Forties and Fifties has now faded away?"[18] Cycling was indeed being overoptimistic: Stallard refused the medal. Cycling reported:

"His initial response was favourable, but now he has written to federation secretary Len Unwin, declining the nomination and an invitation to the annual dinner in December. He [Stallard] wrote: 'Whatever the award is intended for, whether it is my activities of 48 years ago, or my present struggle on behalf of age-related racing, the significance of the award is nil as it does not open the locked doors of the BCF to me or to anyone else with progressive ideas.'"

Stallard believed that he had never been asked to manage a British team or take a national position in the sport because former NCU officials ran the BCF and resented what he had done.[14] Just before his death on 11 August 2001, Stallard wrote:

The life suspension inflicted upon me by the NCU is still very much in evidence, whatever the BCF may say. If this is not so, why did they never ask me to manage a British team abroad? After all, I am the only person to have led a British team to individual and team success in the Warsaw-Berlin-Prague Peace Race, then again as the only official accompanying and directing four riders against a team of 117 Mexicans (Tour of Mexico 1952]; our third individual and third team was equal to our WBP achievement.

— Percy Stallard, 1 August 2001.[14]

Stallard continued cycling into his eighties. In 1965, he rode alone over the Theodul Pass between Zermatt in Switzerland and Italy. The Rough Stuff Fellowship, an organisation for enthusiasts of cross-country cycling, acknowledged that it was probably the first time a cyclist had done it. The pass is 10,976 feet high and Stallard made it in less than 15 hours, sometimes through deep snow.

He also walked over Mount Whitney, at 14,496 feet, in the US, but came close to dying after running out of water while walking down into the Grand Canyon and back out again along mule tracks. He also crossed the Sierra Nevada in four days of 1973.[19]

He travelled 25,000 miles across America by Greyhound bus and organised more than 100 coach trips for fellow walking enthusiasts.

His life ended riddled with regret. He wrote:

Probably the best six months of my life were looking after the wife of a cycling friend who had died of cancer. She asked me to see her through the ordeal, and though she had stated on a number of occasions that she did not know how she would have managed without my support, immediately she returned to normality, without ceremony she flapped her wings and flew away to greener fields! This episode in my life, even at this late stage, has taught me that one should never expect appreciation for their efforts whatever they may be.

— Percy Stallard,[20]

He died leaving three children, Mick, Yvonne and Olwyn. He divorced in the 1960s.[1] His brother Dennis, lived in Perth, Western Australia.[21]

The journalist William Fotheringham remembered: "He never lost his cantankerousness or gained any respect for authority. While walking up Scafell Pike one day, he and his group were told by a warden to turn back due to thick mist; the group returned, and later met Stallard at the bus, only to be told, 'I came to climb the bloody mountain, so I went to the top.'"[1]

Percy 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. 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.

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.

— Percy Stallard.[4]

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, there was no further point in rival cycling administrations. Peter Bryan, editor of The Bicycle, associate of Sporting Cyclist and managing editor of Cycling, 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."[4] 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."[6]

Stallard's actions cast British cycling into a civil war that lasted longer than World War II. They created a division in the sport that outlasted the foundation of the British Cycling Federation and they established an organisation, the BLRC, which is still fondly remembered by the few cyclists old enough to have competed with it.

Stallard reintroduced massed racing to British roads for the first time since the 19th century. To 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.

"The NCU and the RTTC were never friends. The RTTC were particular bastards and they had so many clever men in the top echelon, many more than the NCU. They were steeped in the tradition of time-trialling and what it stood for and they wouldn't budge a jot or tickle."[4]

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.[4]

The League of Veteran Racing Cyclists (LVRC) holds a competition named in Stallard's memory.