Sohan Singh Jolly

Sohan Singh Jolly was an Akali Dal leader in Britain who led the 1969 campaign that won Sikh bus workers in Wolverhampton the right to wear turbans and beards. South Asian Britain says he was born in Punjab in 1903 and was a police inspector in Kenya before coming to Britain; the date of his move is not known. In 1968 he bid for the presidency of the Shiromani Akali Dal, and the Global Nonviolent Action Database calls him its president, aged 66, when he took up the campaign.

The campaign: The Wolverhampton Transport Committee banned turbans and beards for Sikh employees from July 1967, according to South Asian Britain, after the driver Tarsem Singh Sandhu was sent home for wearing both. Trade unions and Sikh community groups refused Sandhu's request for support, so he turned to Jolly and the Akali Dal, and together they organised a march in Wolverhampton. South Asian Britain puts the march at about 6,000 Sikhs. The database counts about 4,000 people walking silently through the town in March 1968, and says Jolly became a leader of the campaign. In January 1969 he announced that he would set himself on fire on the Sikh new year unless the ban was lifted, a date given as 30 April by South Asian Britain and as 13 April 1969 by the database. The database adds that fourteen other Sikhs pledged to do the same, and South Asian Britain says the threat made national and international headlines.

The result: After a last-minute intervention by the Department of Employment and Productivity, the eight-member committee agreed to allow turbans and beards, on 9 April 1969 in the database and 10 April in South Asian Britain. Jolly was at the two-hour meeting where he learned of the decision. The database says he was pleased, though he wished the committee had acted on moral grounds, and that he called the case "unique in injustice". He then resigned as Akali president and worked to lift similar bans at other transport companies in Britain. South Asian Britain says he lived in Hounslow with his wife Anand Kaur and six children, and died there in March 1988, aged 85.

Key moments

• 1968: bids for the Akali Dal presidency.
• January 1969: announces that he will burn himself alive on the Sikh new year if the ban stays.
• 9 or 10 April 1969: the Transport Committee gives way.
• March 1988: dies in Hounslow.

Remembered for: Leading, with Sandhu, the two-year campaign over the turban on Wolverhampton's buses, and for a threat of self-sacrifice that helped bring it to an end.