Sartor Cycling Jacket 1950’s

A friend recently found this beautiful Sartor cycling jacket for me.

The Manchester based company used to advertise in the Cyclist’s Touring Club (CTC) magazine back in the 1950’s. The jacket is their top of the range M65 ‘Alpine’ in very good quality lovat coloured lined gaberdine cloth, costing £4.9.0d in 1954, as in the advert from the October 1954 CTC Gazette below. If you were a CTC member you could give Sartor your details and they would send you a jacket, without pre-payment. If you were happy with it you paid by cheque within 3 days, or you could return it….Things were different then!

It’s a nice alternative to the more usually seen Bertram Dudley Greenspot jacket.

It has raglan sleeves, 4 pockets, 2 with zips, and a drawstring waist. The standard of construction and finish is high, and the jacket pressed very easily after washing.

I added the beautiful and very rare original National Clarion Cycling Club badge which is quite appropriate for the period. The Clarion, linked to Robert Blatchford’s ‘The Clarion’ socialist newspaper, is a most interesting club, founded in 1895 and spread countrywide, it was a for cyclists who had socialist ideals. Regrettably the club recently removed reference to the word ‘socialism’ from their club constitution…to make it more ‘inclusive’… presumably. A similar travesty to the re-branding of the Cyclist’s Touring Club as Cycling UK. You can read about the history of the Clarion here.