Lydia Benjamin

LYDIA BENJAMIN came to Nottingham in 1969. After working at Players for a short period, she moved to Raleigh in the 1970s and stayed until Raleigh closed in 2002. Her work was hard and involved lifting bicycles off the conveyor belt and working with toxic chemicals. “Sometimes I had to mix my own glue as

Iona Walker

IONA WALKER, although not a Raleigh worker herself, recalls that three members of her family worked at Raleigh: her mother Vivianna Walker, her father David Walker and her sister Yvonne Walker. “My mother worked there the longest. I think she did about twenty years and my dad did a spell there, but he didn’t stay

Rosalind Jordan

ROSALIND JORDAN, from St Kitts, arrived in Nottingham at the age of nine in 1961. She initially found employment at Boots and then went onto Raleigh in 1972. She remembers the solidarity amongst Black women from different parts of the Caribbean who worked on the assembly line at Sturmey-Archer as they assembled the gears for

Phyllis Mighten

PHYLLIS MIGHTEN, born in St James Jamaica, arrived in England on October 15, 1961. During her ten years of employment at Raleigh she worked first in the tyre fitting department, known as the ‘wheel shop’, and then Sturmey-Archer’s export and import department.  Sturmey-Archer was a subsidiary of the Raleigh company, primarily producing bicycle hub gears,

Milton Fitzroy Cosdale

MILTON FITZROY CROSDALE worked at Raleigh for four years as a Production Controller until he left to work for the Race Relations Board in 1979. Crosdale’s work involved ensuring that all of the components needed were in place for the production of between 10-12 different models of prams being built by Raleigh. “After the 1958

Fay Osbourne

FAY OSBOURNE was an experienced typist when she joined Raleigh in the 1970s in the export department, which exported significant numbers of mountain bikes to Africa. She was one of three Black women that worked in the typing pool. While she may have been highly visible at work, her position as a typist in the

Bettina Wallace

BETTINA WALLACE began working at Raleigh in February 1974 and stayed for five years. She worked in the tyre department, ensuring orders were typed up and sent to the shipping division. “I liked the secretarial work. I didn’t like the fact that I was the only Black person working in the office. So, when I

Lloyd Dunwell

LLOYD DUNWELL was part of a team of young Black men aged between 16-17 years old working in the rim shop assembling wheels at Raleigh in 1961. We were getting more work done than our white colleagues and we were being paid less for the piece work.  Nothing was done about it and there was

Nottingham Black Archive

Nottingham Black Archive is dedicated to documenting Black history, heritage and culture in Nottingham from the earliest time possible to the present day. It has a growing collection of oral history testimonies, photographs, books, political letters, organisational documents and ephemera relating to the Black community in Nottingham. When We Worked at Raleigh is one of