Offered for sale by Adam Langlands of 'Shadowrock Rare Books' - for more information please contact him via email at adamlanglands@gmail.com 

[CYCLING, International Road Racing]. - Milk Marketing Board (sponsors) - Bill NICKSON (winner). - [Associated Press (photography?)]. An album of photographs recording the 'Milk Race May 30 - June 12 1976 ... International Cycle Race', part of the 'Dairy Foods Festival'.  [U.K.: 1976]. Oblong folio (12 x 16in; 304 x 406mm), containing 52 thin card leaves, mounted with over 600 original photographs (8 in color, the rest black and white), most photos. 4 ¾ x 3 ¼, but thirteen are 11 x 14 inches. Original leatherette, a ‘Milk Race’ sticker mounted on the upper cover.

A spectacular record of not only an important UK sporting event, but also of UK society in the mid-70s. The 12-stage race began in Brighton, Sussex, toured England and Wales before ending in Blackpool, Lancashire. It was, as 1976 winner Bill Nickson said “The one race that people in the street know about”. This album looks to have been assembled as a way of marketing both the race and the individual images: most of which are identified on the backing sheet by penciled inventory/negative numbers. The photos seem to have been issued under the umbrella of the Associated Press with no individual photographers credited.

‘The Milk Race was more than just a way of getting 16-year-old lads hooked on the glamour of cycling of course. I knew about its tradition from reading my hero Geoffrey Nicholson. “I came upon the Tour de France by way of Whitley Bay and Morecambe,” he wrote at the start of The Great Bike Race. “’Another gruelling 125 miles today’, said the announcer. ‘And do you know what the riders have in their gruel? Milk, ladies and gentlemen. They have milk.”

The Milk Race had its roots in the BLRC’s Brighton-Glasgow in 1945 and became the focal point of the UK calendar from the early 1960s thanks to a sponsorship match made in heaven with the now-defunct Milk Marketing Board. It became the event that all aspiring top British amateur cyclists aimed to compete in. It bred riders like Bill Bradley and later Joe Waugh, who never enjoyed high profile professional careers but were a force to be reckoned with when Milk Race time came. …

Much of the tradition went back to the early organiser Chas Messenger, whose missions “over the brown” – his personal codeword for moorland – led to some true epics, such as the 155-mile leg in 1962 from Rhyl to Cheltenham. Bill Bradley, the winner in 1959 and 1960, recalled stages where riders started at 10 in the morning and finished in the dark after getting lost. “We were going from Skegness to Manchester and all went off course at least twice, we rode round Lincoln trying to find our way, I got [to the finish] at dusk, but there were riders finishing hours after me.”

Bradley recalled immense distances – “hardly ever anything less than 100 miles” – and one stage where the riders were routed off a lane and across a ploughed field, not to mention constant arguments between the riders and Messenger over the toughness of the route. “A real killer,” said the 1966 winner Arthur Metcalfe, “up round north Yorkshire and Westmoreland… gated roads only five or six feet wide, really steep hills.” A year after his victory, Metcalfe started and finished the Tour de France.

Les West, one of the dominant riders of his time and another double winner, recalled that it wasn’t all grind. “It was bedlam. We were up all hours, getting to bed at 12, riding around in taxis heaven knows how late, out all hours. Everything you shouldn’t do, we did it – eating fish and chips, it was that much fun it was like a holiday. I was getting tired and sleeping well at night.”

“The one race that people in the street know about,” said the 1976 winner Bill Nickson a few years later. Nickson was a rare British victor in an era dominated by the grim-faced “professional amateur” Russians and Poles, to the extent that there were questions over whether the East Europeans should be allowed to ride.

The Milk Race’s nationwide reach meant that by the 1980s, it was better known to Britain’s armchair sports fans than the Tour de France. ‘ (https://www.prendas.co.uk/blogs/news/forgotten-races-the-milk-race).