Sid Standard, 1931–2003
A draughtsman who bought a bike shop and took dozens of children out riding every Sunday
The frames are the reason this site exists, but they were eight years into the shop and never the whole of it. Beeston remembers the Sunday rides.
Sid was born in Liverpool in 1931 and came to Nottingham for the work: he was a draughtsman at Raleigh’s headquarters in the city, which is a detail worth holding onto, because a man who drew for a living was later going to fill three hundred specification sheets by hand without ever quite tidying his handwriting.
He rode long before he sold bicycles. He was president of the local Cyclists’ Touring Club branch, held a certificate of merit for his work with its junior section, and later became president of Beeston Road Club, whose red, white and green he is wearing in half the photographs here.
He bought the shop on Chilwell Road in 1973 and ran it until he retired in 2000, twenty-seven years. Frame building came later and lasted a shorter time than most people assume: the first Superbe sheet is dated 1981, and by the time the last one was written there were 287 of them.
Most of the frames were brazed by Pete Riches rather than by Sid himself, in the room behind the shop. How the frames were built is its own page, and the register is every sheet that survives.
Through the late 1970s and early 80s Sid led the CTC junior section rides out of Beeston, and it is these, more than the shop and more than the frames, that people write to say they remember. Seamus Kelly, who rode them, described dozens of children turning out every Sunday to learn “not just how to ride their bikes properly, but about nature, mates, laughter, love, naughtiness and sheer lust for life”. They rode in trainers and tracksuit bottoms. Sid detoured them past the village stocks at Grimston and told them what they were.
Helen Gutteridge, who was one of very few girls on those rides, put it more plainly: he was “practising diversity and inclusion long before it became all the rage”. Simon Burney was fourteen when he started going out with them, and reckons Sid gave a whole group of them “a once in a lifetime learning about something we ended up doing for the rest of our lives”.
Several of those children went a long way with it.
- Simon Burney
- professional cyclocross rider, later a UCI consultant
- Bryan Steel
- Olympic team pursuit medallist, bronze in 2000 and silver in 2004
- Theresa Dark
- GB team, 1988 Women's Tour de France
- Helen Gutteridge
- national circuit race champion, 2003
- Paul Wain
- team pursuit squad, 1986 Commonwealth Games and the 1988 Olympics
- Seamus Kelly
- twice winner of the Monsal hill climb
Bryan Steel, who won his Olympic medals on the track, is the one who says the point was never the racing: Sid “wasn’t about racing or winning, he was about just riding your bike, the great outdoors, finding little cafes, falling in love with the sport”. Sid’s own three children rode too; his son David raced for Great Britain as a junior, against Lance Armstrong among others, at the 1989 world championships.
“It’s nicer on the bike”
Sid died in 2003, three years after retiring, in a collision with a tractor and trailer while he was out on his bike.
Beeston has not been quiet about him since. There is a blue plaque on the pillar between the shop windows, carrying the other line everybody quotes at each other. One of Nottingham’s trams runs under his name. In 2022, nineteen years after his death, a mural went up on a gable wall in the town, opening the brickwork onto a Derbyshire dale with two riders in Beeston Road Club colours heading up into it.
Almost everything on this page about the Sunday rides comes from Trevor Ward’s article for Cyclist, published in February 2023, which found the riders and asked them what they remembered. It is worth reading in full.