EILEEN SHERIDAN     The Thousand-Mile Smile


Eileen Sheridan was an exceptional and wonderful person, a person whom you were thankful to know and proud to call your friend. But the reason that most of us – not all but most - are meeting here today is something more specific than that, namely that she was a phenomenal athlete, the outstanding female cyclist of her time, whose achievements would never be overtaken or even equalled. This is the aspect of Eileen’s life that I want to concentrate on, by recalling her cycling career and putting it in the context of its time. 
Eileen Shaw was born in Coventry in 1923, and she started cycling at around the age of 15. Then came the war which was so devastating for Coventry, but she continued to cycle whenever she could, and more important she met and married Ken Sheridan. Ken was a intelligent and creative man with a strong interest in endurance sports and how to train for them. Ken helped and encouraged Eileen throughout her cycling career, which began when the two of them joined the Coventry Cycling Club. On long club rides together Eileen demonstrated unusual stamina, so that Ken quickly realised that she was a better cyclist than he was. She wasn’t just good considering that she was a woman: she was good full stop, as good as all the men she was riding with, and better than most of them. When the war was over, Ken encouraged her to race in time-trials, and by the end of 1945 she was a national champion in her first season. 
In the following few years, helped throughout by Ken, she quickly established her position as the leading female cyclist of her day, to the point where she was rarely beaten, and in both 1949 and 1950 she won the Women’s British Best All-Rounder title, which is awarded each year for the best aggregate performance over 25 miles, 50 miles and 100 miles, and she also won individual championships and broke national records at all those distances. In 1951 “Cycling” magazine marked its diamond jubilee with a huge celebration in the Albert Hall, at which the guest of honour was the legendary Italian rider, Fausto Coppi, and to which all the biggest stars of British cycling were invited, including the world champion Reg Harris, and here Eileen was the only woman on the platform: she was 28 years old and unquestionably the first lady of British cycling.     
But later in that same year her career took a new and exciting turn when Hercules, one of the biggest bike manufacturers in Britain, offered her the chance to ride for them as a  professional. We have to remember that all her racing up to that date had been strictly amateur, and that since she had won so many time-trial championships already, there was really nothing more that she could achieve in the sport. There was however one other type of competitive cycling that was open to her, and that was long-distance solo record riding, over courses such as London to Brighton, London to Edinburgh, Land’s End to London, and so on. These records had been in existence for men since the 1880’s, and women had their own records since the 1930s. Rivalry between the leading bike manufacturers led them to contract the very best riders as professionals to attack these records for publicity purposes, and this is exactly what Eileen committed herself to. There were twenty-one such records, ranging from 25 miles to 1000 miles, and Hercules planned that Eileen should attack them all over a period of three years. For this she would be paid a monthly retaining fee, plus a bonus of one pound per mile for every record she broke. Since the total mileage involved was well over 3000, this contract, however mean it may sound to us today, was by 1951 standards, a great opportunity for Eileen to capitalise on her cycling strength. On these rides, she would have the backing of a professional team of helpers maintained by Hercules, including Frank Southall, the greatest British cyclist of the inter-war years. The only thing which made her pause, was that once she rode as a professional she would never again be able to take part in amateur racing; this was part of the strict sporting code of those days. She would be riding entirely alone, and she would no longer be able to enjoy the company of her old racing friends. Nevertheless, encouraged by Ken,  she accepted the challenge, and she never looked back. 
 This new phase of her life started in May 1952, when she raced from London to Portsmouth and back to London in 7 hours and 12 minutes, that’s 150 miles at an average speed of 21 mph. Her career culminated three years later in July 1954, when she rode 1000 miles in 73 hours, which included some 8 or 9 hours off the bike, so that her average riding speed was 15 mph. Now it’s very easy to state that Eileen broke all these place-to-place records, but just so that we understand all that that entailed, I am going to read off the records that she set during those three years with the distances.


London to Birmingham 125 miles
London to Oxford and back 120 miles
London to York 210 miles
London to Liverpool 220 miles
Liverpool to Edinburgh 220 miles
London to Bath and back 230 miles
London to Portsmouth and back 150 miles
Land’s End to London 310 miles
Edinburgh to Glasgow and back 90 miles
London to Brighton and back 110 miles
London to Edinburgh 400 miles
London to Yarmouth 140 miles
London to Holyhead 290 miles
Land’s End to John O’Groats 870 miles
12-hour record 250 miles
24 hour record 446 miles
25 mile and 50 mile records - the shortest of them all.


For the 1000 mile record which I mentioned, she rode the 870 miles from Land’s End to John O’Groats, then after a short rest, she went on for another 130 miles to make up the thousand. A number of these place-to-place records she rode twice, because she felt her first record was capable of being improved. After Eileen’s great campaign, these records were attacked less often, because of the changes in road and traffic conditions, but most of Eileen’s times were gradually up-dated, and now I think just about half a dozen are still standing; but no other rider ever dreamed of setting out to attack all these records as she did. Eileen was small in stature, but she had immense natural stamina and determination: one commentator described her as, “An amazing little bundle of female atomic energy.” For these rides of up to 400 miles, her average cruising speed was between 20 and 25 mph. London to York for example was 22 mph average, London to Edinburgh 20 mph. During these three years she only failed three times, and those failures occurred when she was battling a headwind so strong that she should never have started, but her manager insisted on it because he was under pressure from the company to get these records. About once a month, following these great rides, the front page of Cycling Weekly magazine would headline “New Record for Eileen Sheridan riding a Hercules, the best bike money can buy.” Finally at the end of the summer of 1954, she had completed her task; she had climbed her Everest, and she could retire from her chosen sport, and go on to other things in life, living in the house in Isleworth which she called “The house that Hercules bought me”, which they certainly did, and which she had undoubtedly earned.  
I think there is very important principle in life which is easy to overlook, but which is perfectly exemplified in Eileen’s cycling career, and that is that it’s not only what you do in your life that is important, but how you do it, because success alone is not everything. It’s vitally important how you conduct yourself, how you keep your control and keep your promises; how you behave towards the other people you interact with, and keep a sense of humility no matter who you are; how you try to show your best face, even though you may not be feeling at your best. It’s on all these counts and not only on her cycling speed that Eileen was a winner. She could reel off a hundred miles, two hundred, three hundred, four hundred and even more, and always finish fresh and smiling. In this respect she was a huge success for Hercules, a publicity man’s dream; because no bike company would want photographers at the end of these rides snapping their rider, especially a young woman, looking haggard and half-dead with exhaustion. In this sense Eileen was always the exceptional and wonderful person that I described at the beginning: she was the girl with the thousand mile smile, and she left a legacy that will never be forgotten. 

Peter Whitfield