The 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.
Background
The 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. 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." "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." 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. He also asked the NCU and the Road Time Trials Council (RTTC) not to suspend those who took part "as this was liable to raise controversy detrimental to the sport." 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. 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."
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." and until his death saw the new British Cycling Federation (BCF) as a reincarnation of the NCU. In 1989 he wrote: