Timeline of Sikhs in the United Kingdom

Who: Sikhs who settled in Britain, from Maharaja Duleep Singh to the families of the post-war migration, and the campaigners, councils, courts and Parliament that decided their rights.

What: The main dates, with the sources' differing figures where they differ.

• 1854: Maharaja Duleep Singh sails from India on 19 April and reaches England in May; Wikipedia calls him the first Sikh to settle permanently in Britain. His mother, Maharani Jind Kaur, later joins him and dies at Kensington on 1 August 1863 (Encyclopaedia of Sikhism).
• 1908 to 1911: the Khalsa Jatha is formed in 1908, and in 1911 the Sikh Dharamsala opens at Putney after the Maharaja of Patiala gives 1,000 pounds. South Asian Britain calls it the first Sikh gurdwara in Britain; it later moves to Sinclair Road in Shepherd's Bush.
• 1948 and 1953: Gyani Sundar Singh Sagar settles in Manchester in 1948 and helps set up a gurdwara there in 1953 (Wikipedia).
• 1959 to 1966: Sagar campaigns after being told a bus conductor must wear a peaked cap, and in October 1966 Manchester's transport council votes 71 to 23 to allow turbans, about seven years after the first proposal, according to Wikipedia, which cites David Beetham's Transport and Turbans (1970).
• 1972: about 27,200 Ugandan Asians come to the United Kingdom after Idi Amin orders them out (Wikipedia).
• 4 June 1976: Gurdip Singh Chaggar, 18, is stabbed to death in Southall. Two white teenagers are convicted of manslaughter in 1977 and jailed for four years, and the judge says there was no racial motivation, according to the researcher Benjamin Bland, who also reports that the Southall Youth Movement formed within days.
• November 1976: the Motor-Cycle Crash-Helmets (Religious Exemption) Act receives Royal Assent, after a bill brought by Sydney Bidwell MP passes its third reading on 16 July by 40 votes to 11 (Sikh Missionary Society).
• 23 April 1979: the Southall Youth Movement opposes a National Front election meeting at Southall Town Hall (Bland).
• 24 March 1983: the House of Lords holds in Mandla v Dowell Lee that Sikhs are an ethnic group under the Race Relations Act 1976; the Court of Appeal under Lord Denning had held the opposite. The case began when a Sikh boy was refused entry to Park Grove School in Birmingham because his father would not have him give up the dastar and cut his hair (Wikipedia).
• 1992 and 1999: Piara Singh Khabra is elected for Ealing Southall, the first Sikh MP, and Tarsem King becomes Baron King of West Bromwich, the first Sikh peer (Wikipedia).
• 2021: the Office for National Statistics counts 525,865 Sikhs in England and Wales, 0.9 percent of the population; Wikipedia gives 520,092 for England, 4,048 for Wales and 535,517 for the whole United Kingdom.

Where: England: London, including Putney, Shepherd's Bush and Southall, then Manchester and Birmingham, in the United Kingdom.

Why it mattered: In Britain the right to wear the turban was won in turn from a city transport council, from Parliament and from the House of Lords, and the Mandla ruling gave Sikhs the protection of the Race Relations Act.