In 2016, sixty plus Isleworth residents aged between five and eighty two, came together to perform the third Isleworth Community Play entitled, Isleworth: The Rock & Roll Years. We had spent the previous year researching Isleworth in the 1950s and workshopping our findings over 5 monthly sessions. This is how we discovered the wonderful Eileen Sheridan, who had been a resident of Old Isleworth since 1952, the year she turned professional as a cyclist. 

It was my and my partner, Paul Dalton's absolute pleasure to interview Eileen, and we were gobsmacked by the stories she told us of her cycling prowess from her amateur beginnings to her professional record-breaking years. Alongside these stories was how she found and fell in love with her riverside home in Old Isleworth that she lived in for the rest of her life. She told us about regular visitor, Sammy the Seal, who went on to feature as a narrator/guide in our play, and her son Clive's love of the river and invitations onto the huge cargo boats that would dock at the bottom of their garden. This gave rise to the Captain's Tall Tales song.

Most thrilling and moving of all was Eileen's first hand account of arguably her greatest cycling achievement, the End to End - John O'Groats to Land's End. In Scene 10 of our play, Eileen Sheridan: The Record-Breaking Years, the company recreated this incredible feat, chanting every significant place along the route as Emma Geraghty, who played Eileen, forged ahead on a static bike, as the company became her coach, her support team, bystanders, record keepers, and the hallucinatory demons that dogged her extraordinary final push to achieve the 1000 mile distance record, having clocked the End to End at a record-breaking 2 days, 11 hours and 17 minutes to go down in cycling history as the fastest woman on two wheels. It is only in recent years that these records were broken. 

What a thrill and honour it was for the company to have Eileen and her daughter Louise attend the matinee performance of our community play. Eileen Sheridan was and continues to be an inspiration to us all as a champion cyclist and extraordinary woman.

Madeleine Casey