Gyani Sundar Singh Sagar

Gyani Sundar Singh Sagar was a Sikh scholar and community leader in Manchester who campaigned for the right of turbaned Sikhs to work on the city's buses and later to ride motorcycles without crash helmets. Wikipedia, the main source found for his life, says he was born on 3 June 1917 at Ghalotian Kalan in Sialkot district, graduated in Punjabi language and literature from what it calls “Punjab University in Amritsar” (no other source confirms the place, and the University of the Punjab, founded in 1882, is at Lahore), and gained the title Gyani through his religious studies. His family fled to India in 1947, and he settled in Manchester in 1948.

Key moments

• 1953: Wikipedia says he helped set up one of the first gurdwaras in Europe, in Manchester.
• 1959 to 1966: a seven-year campaign for Sikh bus conductors to be allowed to wear turbans. Wikipedia, citing David Beetham's Transport and Turbans (1970), says Manchester's Transport Committee voted by 71 to 23 in October 1966 to allow them, and that the first turbaned conductor started work in early 1970.
• Early 1970s: in a passage that cites no source, Wikipedia says the National Turban Action Committee, led by Baldev Singh Chahal, asked him to lead its campaign after police stopped two Sikh men at Gravesend for riding in turbans instead of crash helmets.
• 1976: Wikipedia says he bought a moped and rode it round Manchester in a turban, was stopped and fined, and refused to pay. The Lord Mayor of Manchester paid the fines, so he did not serve a seven-day sentence.
• 15 November 1976: Parliament passed the exemption, chapter 62 of 1976. Wikipedia credits him as instrumental in the Motor-Cycle Crash Helmets (Religious Exemption) Act 1976.
• 25 December 1996: he died in Manchester.

Remembered for: the turban campaigns that opened bus work to turbaned Sikhs in Manchester and won the helmet exemption. Wikipedia says that in 2016 Manchester Central Library showed his moped in an exhibition on the turban campaigns.