Another massive influence on my life has left us. I’ve just found out that Greg Fuquay passed away this weekend.
Greg was a bike frame builder, based near Ipswich, when I first met him in 1991. His US Airforce career had given him some razor sharp welding skills and he put that, and his love of cycling (plus an apprenticeship under Ben Serotta) together to make bike frames under his own name.
In those nascent days of British mountain biking, Fuquay Cycles were the first custom bikes to feature TIG welding in a time when everything else was fillet-brazed. Greg’s bikes quickly gained a following for their light weight and sharp handling. Greg, too, was a popular character. He loved a chat and was often seen at mountain bike races in Thetford Forest, then one of the hubs of English mountain biking.
I liked Greg and his bikes so much that, in 1993, I suggested that we go into partnership together. He would build frames and I would answer the phone, handle the post, the marketing and everything else as, given the amount of time he spent on the phone every day, I figured that he could easily double his production. I duly gave notice at my job at a bike bits importer and started planning on my new career move.
Greg, meanwhile, had done the sums and reluctantly reckoned that the sums wouldn’t add up. He couldn’t just double the size of his business, so he invited me up to a bike event in Thetford to talk it over. It was there that I bumped into John Stevenson, the Deputy Editor of MBUK who told me that there was a new vacancy in the office of MTB Pro magazine and suggested that I apply for the job, given that I was going to need one. That meeting literally changed my life and wouldn’t have happened without Greg Fuquay.
Greg built a lovely bike for me in 1994, which I still have, and he then built a singlespeed mountain bike the following year – something else that he was also pretty pioneering in. He continued building bikes thoughout the nineties, but as the decade ended, the influence of newer materials, suspension and actually decent production bikes slowed the demand for custom bikes. Eventually, Greg, his wife Diana and his children left for his native Alabama in America and that was it for his framebuilding.
We kept in touch, though, messaging often, and he was asking me bike buying advice only a year or so ago. More recently, though, and unknown to me, Greg developed cancer and it caught up with him this year.
Farewell Greg. You’ll never appreciate the influence you had on the early British mountain bike world, and on a young would-be mountain bike journalist.
Chipps
The photo is by Geoff Waugh, who shot this lovely portrait in the low winter sun on a visit to Greg’s (unheated) Suffolk workshop.
