Eileen Sheridan, who has died aged 99, was a multiple cycling champion who became a household name in Britain in the late 1940s and early 50s thanks to a series of spectacular record attempts. However, she retired relatively young because she had exhausted the meagre opportunities that the sport offered to women at the time.
As a professional cyclist racing for the Hercules bicycle company from 1951 to 1954, Sheridan captured the public imagination, “defining cycling as Roger Bannister defined athletics or Denis Compton cricket” according to the bike-racing historian Peter Whitfield. Records such as London-Holyhead or Edinburgh-London were easy for the man in the street to understand; Hercules marketed the diminutive Sheridan heavily as the “Pocket Rocket” – “no ordinary woman” said the Pathé newsreels, while she had an unerring ability to smile in every photograph.
Records such as London-Portsmouth-London and Land’s End-London were merely part of the build-up to the most prestigious one of all: Land’s End-John O’Groats, which Sheridan tackled in July 1954, accompanied by a large flatbed lorry carrying a caravan and a portable toilet. She went through a crisis after almost 48 hours in the saddle, suffering from sleep deprivation, debilitating cold and sore hands, but, wearing every stitch of clothing available, she smashed the previous record by almost 12 hours, with a time of 2 days, 11 hours and 45 minutes.
That was only the first part of the ordeal, as Sheridan’s manager Frank Southall was determined she would continue for the 1,000-mile record. She was permitted a couple of hours’ nap but the final 130 miles took 12 hours as she experienced hallucinatory visions of mermaids, giant glass tumblers and lines of people telling her to turn corners. Her End to End record would stand for 36 years, and the 1,000-mile time was not broken until 2002.
Sheridan was born in Coventry, to Percy Shaw, who worked at the Armstrong-Siddeley engineering firm, and Jeannie Morton, who was a skilled milliner. Her grandfather, Frederick Shaw, had been a bike builder and keen racing man in the 1890s. Eileen wanted to go to art school, but her family vetoed the idea, and she eventually became a secretary in a car showroom. She had begun cycling at 15, and was also a keen swimmer; she met her future husband, Ken Sheridan, at the open-air pool in Coventry. They were married in 1942, began cycling together, and Ken noticed that his wife was stronger than he was; the men in their cycling groups would wilt late in their marathon rides, while Eileen found new strength.
She began racing in 1945, and immediately won the National 25-mile time trial championship that summer. By the winter, she was pregnant with her son Clive, who was born in April 1946. It was a difficult birth, by caesarean, and she returned to racing in 1947. By the end of 1949 she had won everything the sport could offer in the UK, including setting a 12-hour record of 237 miles, smashing the previous record by 17 miles and beating all but five of the men in the field. There was disbelief among the men present that she could go so far, and she was asked if she had cut a corner or two; in fact, she should have registered an even greater distance as she had gone off course.
By 1950 she had won the British Best All Rounder – an aggregate of a rider’s best times at 25, 50 and 100 miles – two years running, setting competition records at 50 and 100 miles. There were no world championships for women – these were not inaugurated until 1958 – and the Olympics would not be open to female cyclists until 1984. The only challenge left lay in setting place-to-place records and Sheridan began with Birmingham-London and Oxford-London-Oxford. In mid-1951, Hercules made her an offer of a retainer solely to break records for the next three years, with a £1-a-mile bonus for every record set.
When her contract with Hercules ended in 1954, Sheridan held all 21 records on the Road Records Association’s books. She retired to the house she and Ken had bought in Isleworth, west London, partly using her earnings from Hercules, and had her daughter Louise in 1955. She embarked briefly on a second sporting career in canoeing, and won the national 500m double kayak championship in 1956. After that she studied glass engraving, and spent 40 years producing commissions from her studio-cum-workshop in the Isleworth house, in which there were book after book of her beautifully intricate designs.
With the benefit of over 60 years’ hindsight, Sheridan’s view of her career was a nuanced one. In 2019, she told me that she had “never felt like a champion”, because she had never had the opportunity to wear the rainbow jersey of world champion. She closed her autobiography, Wonder Wheels (1956), with these words: “Where is a woman’s place? Is it … in the home? Is it in industry or in sport? If I have shown in my life that it can be – and successfully so – in all three, then I am happy.”
Sheridan remained a life member and president of the Coventry Cycling Club; she was also a vice-president of the Road Records Association. In 2016 she was inducted into British Cycling’s Hall of Fame; in 2022 she was celebrated with a commemorative “portrait bench” steel statue on the Lias Line greenway in Warwickshire.
She is survived by Clive and Louise; Ken died in 2012.
• Eileen Sheridan, cyclist, born 18 October 1923; died 12 February 2023
