Percy Stallard

Percy Thornley Stallard (19 July 1909 – 11 August 2001) was an English racing cyclist who reintroduced massed-start road racing on British roads in the 1940s.

Born in Wolverhampton, at his father's boarding house in Broad Street which later became his bike shop, Stallard became a member of the Wolverhampton Wheelers Cycling club and a keen competitor in cycle races, competing for Great Britain in international races during the 1930s, including three consecutive world championships (1933–1935). He was also a successful cycling coach and team captain.

Racing career Percy Stallard joined Wolverhampton Wheelers and rode his first race on 8 May 1927, when he was 17. 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.

Brooklands and the world championship Lone racing against the clock was a British speciality and in 1932 Frank Southall came sixth in the Olympic Games cycling road race in Los Angeles when it was run that way. Shortly after came an announcement that henceforth the Olympics would be run as a massed-start event, a form of racing which (see below) the British cycling authorities had banned since the 19th century and at which British riders therefore had no experience.

The magazine Cycling wrote:

"The strongest possible protest ought to be made by the English delegates both to the UCI (Union Cycliste Internationale) and the Olympic committees against the recent decision by the UCI that the Olympic road-race for 1936 is to be a massed-start affair. The Olympic Games were the last stronghold of the genuine international trial of road-riding, free from tactics or bunching.

Confronted by a decision it could not get reversed, the British governing body, the National Cyclists' Union (NCU), allowed the Charlotteville Cycling Club in Guildford, Surrey, to organise a series of races on the Brooklands car circuit. The largest, on 17 June 1933, was billed as the 100-Kilometre Massed-Start World Cycling Championship Trial and the NCU said it would choose its next team for the world championship based on the outcome. The organiser was Vic Jenner and the business manager Bill Mills, two international riders. Mills went on to start the weekly magazine The Bicycle as a rival to Cycling. A crowd put at 10,000 watched a "race like kick-and-rush football, tactics limited to random and eccentric attacking by the best, hanging on for the rest." that you had to go up five times was that steep that on the first lap I pulled my foot out of my toe clips and I ran up. I was in the lead then and several other riders passed me. Well, I couldn't get back on my bike at that steep angle, so I ran past these other riders and won the prime [intermediate prize] at the top, running!|Percy Stallard, "Up the League, Winning magazine"

Stallard was chosen for the 1933 UCI Road World Championships team and finished 11th, the best of the British entry. The British favourite had been Frank Southall, but although his speed got him into the group of 38 leading riders, his inability to change pace on the shallow rises of the Autodrome de Linas-Montlhéry near Montlhéry, gave him difficulties. The writer and race organiser, Chas Messenger, wrote:

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. The police, he said, had approved his race and would help on the day. The NCU, on the other hand, pointed out that Stallard's letters to chief constables had referred not to a massed-start race but to a "cycling event."

Stallard went ahead with the event on 7 June 1942 and it finished, without incident, in front of a crowd at West Park. Cycling reported: "More than a thousand people watched the finish of the massed-start race organised by Percy Stalland, from Llangollen to Wolverhampton, on Sunday afternoon. The Chief Constable of Wolverhampton, an inspector, a sergeant and 15 uniformed policemen kept the crowd back. Police cars and police motorcyclists patrolled portions of the course. A police motorcyclist led the racing men through the streets to the finish. E. A. Price, of Wolverhampton, won the sprint from his clubmate, C. J. Anslow"

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 by the time-trialling body, the Road Time Trials Council, 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 suspended by the NCU. Stallard was banned indefinitely for refusing to account for himself to the NCU's management. The suspension, often referred to as "for life" was in fact sine die, meaning without defined end but allowing Stallard to appeal. The weekly magazine, The Bicycle, apologised to the NCU on 20 May 1942 for misreporting the penalty as a life suspension, although the consequence proved the same because Stallard did not appeal and the ban was never lifted.

British League of Racing Cyclists 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, 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.

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.

London-Holyhead Percy Stallard believed not only that Britain could have racing and a race like the Tour de France but he was inspired by the distance of events such as Bordeaux–Paris and on Saturday 9 June 1951 organised a race from London to Holyhead. Thirty-five riders were listed at the start, all professionals or semi-professionals (known as independents – the BLRC, contrary to the other cycling bodies in Britain, had promoted the idea of independent riders, who were intended to be trying their hand in professional racing while not yet committing themselves to leaving the amateur class). The BLRC official and historian Chas Messenger wrote:

Twenty-eight started out of the 35 listed at the crack of dawn from Marble Arch, sent on their way by Lord Donegal, who was later to become president of the League [BLRC]. In a sea of mist, they wafted up the Edgware Road and on the other side of Dunstable came the first attack which split the field in three..." – and international limits on race distances.

League of Veteran Racing Cyclists 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:

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."

Refusal of honour 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?" 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.

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:

He died leaving three children, Mick, Yvonne and Olwyn. He divorced in the 1960s.

Personality

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.'"

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.

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." 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."

Legacy 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."

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.

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