In October 1895, the Globe reported on the extraordinary exploits of a little-known lady cyclist:

“In France she was robbed by highwaymen; while witnessing the battle between the Japs and Chinese in Gasan she was shot in the arm; a cyclist ran over her in California, and a five-weeks’ stay in hospital was the result; while another occasion, through a bad fall, she was compelled to ride 175 miles with a broken arm.”

The report could have come straight from a work of fiction, but the reality was even more bizarre. It was a ‘bare outline’, the Globe was keen to point out, ‘of the experiences of Miss Annie Londonderry, who left Boston in June 1894’ to ride ‘28,000 miles on a bicycle in “orthodox knickers”.’ Quite apart from her shocking choice of legwear, the idea that Annie Londonderry, a 25-year-old Jewish Latvian immigrant to the United States, would attempt to cycle around the world in the first place was enough to set tongues wagging.

Born Annie Cohen in 1870, Londonderry’s notoriety as the first female to bicycle around the world coincided with the cycling craze of the late 19th century. Annie was an unlikely candidate for such a feat. In her version of events – which seemed to change depending on who she was speaking to – two wealthy Bostonians wagered that no woman could travel around the world by bicycle in 15 months and earn $5,000. Hearing of the wager, Annie was confident she was the woman to prove them wrong, and decided to, quite literally, ‘spin’ her way around the world. The wager marked the beginning of not only Annie’s adventures, but some very tall tales.

There was one small problem – Annie had never ridden a bike before. She was also married with three small children. But Annie was a modern woman with modern goals and wasn’t about to let that stand in her way. ‘I didn’t want to spend my life at home with a baby under my apron every year,’ she stated, unapologetically. When The World suggested to Annie as she was leaving Boston in 1894 that ‘she might carry her children along with her on a bicycle built for four’, she answered that she had ‘enough troubles of her own’ without dragging them along too.

Annie left her working class life in the Boston tenements in June 1894 to the enthusiastic cheers of 500 suffragists, as well as her friends, family and well-wishers. She quickly fashioned herself as a one-woman cycling extravaganza. The idea was more than a little preposterous, given Annie’s utter lack of preparation, but Annie was nothing if not plucky – and pluck was something she had in abundance. Her 15-month journey around the world became a thing of legend. Annie didn’t just spin the wheels of her bicycle on her globetrotting mission, she also managed to spin an entire adventure around her sensational feat.

The origins of why and how her cycling marathon came about was the first in a long line of slightly dubious claims Annie made. These included the size of the ‘prize’ money (anywhere from $1,000 to $30,000 depending on who she was speaking to); the fact the wager prohibited her from getting married during the trip (she was already married); that she had studied medicine for two years and specialised in the ‘cultivation of physical beauty’ and made money ‘dissecting cadavers’ (she was a newspaper advertising solicitor); that she a wealthy heiress who had inherited a ‘substantial fortune’ (not as far as records show); that she was made ‘an orphan at a very young age’ (untrue); and perhaps the most grandiose of all, the she was the cousin of a United States congressman and the niece of a United States senator.

Even her name wasn’t real. The surname ‘Londonderry’ was borrowed from New Hampshire’s Londonderry Lithia Spring Water company, who asked her to adopt the name as part of a $100 sponsorship deal. Her name change served a dual purpose; not only would it promote her sponsors, but it also concealed her Jewish origins, therefore easing her journey across different regions and countries.

By 13 January 1895, Annie had made it as far as Marseille, at which she was greeted to a hero’s welcome and loud cheering from the assembled crowds – particularly as she was (allegedly) pedalling with one foot as the other was injured and propped on the handlebars. After being (allegedly) held up by French bandits, she departed Marseille on 20 January, and over the next seven weeks rode her Sterling bicycle across northern Africa and the Holy Land, India, China, the Korean peninsula and Siberia. She hunted Bengal tigers with German royalty in the India jungle; narrowly avoided being killed by the ‘Asiatics’ who thought she was an evil spirit; travelled to the front line of the Sino-Japanese War with two journalists and a missionary where she fell through a frozen river and was shot in the shoulder causing a four-week delay to her journey; and rode over fields littered with the war dead before being thrown into a Japanese prison where she witnessed a Japanese soldier execute a Chinese prisoner. She also managed to squeeze in a trip to Siberia, where she found time to study the Russian penal system, particularly how it dealt with its political prisoners. She then departed from Yokohama for the final sea-bound leg of her journey on 9 March 1895.

Considering the astonishing distance she covered on her bicycle, and the alleged month-long delay due to her bullet wound, Annie did exceedingly well to cram in so many miles and so many escapades on the seven-week stretch between France and Japan.

A little too well, in fact. Inevitably, Annie’s tall tales began to catch up with her. ‘A lady who aspires to the feat of girdling the globe on a bicycle must be the possessor of an unlimited supply of nerve and assurance,’ remarked the Penny Illustrated Paper in July 1895, ‘…up to the present, however, the bicycle hasn’t given her much trouble – sea trips seem more in her line.’ With her customary audacious approach to the business of cycling the globe, Annie had failed to mention that her liberal interpretation of the ‘rules’ stretched to hopping aboard a train for a stretch or taking a steamship around the coast. Any hunting of tigers, or injuries sustained in the war-torn regions of China, had only occurred in Annie’s head. She was, in fact, having a merry time onboard the French steam ship, the Sydney .

Annie may have travelled to some of the destinations she mentioned to the press. The steam ship Sydney made several stops, to take on board coal and other provisions and Annie would likely have disembarked and toured the port towns and cities to generate interest in her adventure and sell souvenirs. But that was all part of her modus operandi – she was the ultimate mistress of spin and thought nothing of blurring the lines between fiction and reality.

Nine months after she left on 12 September 1895, Annie arrived back in America. ‘For pluck and endurance such a ride cannot beaten this side of the herring pond,’ boasted the press. But for some, Annie had taken her flights of whimsy a little too far. Tom Winder, an American newspaper editor undertaking a similar cycling feat as Annie wrote that ‘Miss Anna [sic] is a hustler for sure… She intends to write a book, so I thus early put the public on its guard.’ And the criticism wasn’t confined to her homeland either: ‘She is not elevating either cycling or her sex,’ wrote one scathing British cycling magazine.

But Annie’s greatest coup went beyond pedalling her bike. She was smart enough to recognise what cycling represented to women at the end of the 19th century, and she was able to – quite literally – ride on the zeitgeist of women’s lib. During her nine-month absence from America, she was able to reframe herself as a ‘New Woman’ and become an outspoken and potent icon of female equality. During the final leg of her journey in 1895 she spoke expansively about the physical and mental benefits of cycling for women, as well as promoting riding without the constraints of corsets or ‘heavy, baggy bloomers that make the work a torture’. Instead, she advised ‘A heavy sweater, a neat pair of bloomers, leggings and a natty cap’.

Annie was flying in the face of convention with her wise words. Many women had already been put off the idea of cycling for fear of cultivating a ‘bicycle face’ – a false ‘medical’ condition dreamed up by a man called Dr Shadwell, ostensibly to stop women from getting on a bike and pedalling themselves away to freedom. The ‘condition’ manifested itself thus: ‘a peculiar strained, set look so often associated with this pastime… eyes fixed before them, and an expression either anxious, irritable, or at best stony, they pedal away.’ In what reads as a thinly veiled argument against women’s lib, the doctor asserts that ‘Some wear the “face” more and some less marked, but nearly all have it… Has anybody ever seen persons on bicycles talking and laughing and looking jolly, like persons engaged in any other amusement? Never, I swear.’ Fortunately, the eminently sensible Chicago doctor Sarah Hackett Stevenson finally put the matter to rest in 1897 by stating to the Phrenological Journal that ‘[Cycling] is not injurious to any part of the anatomy, as it improves the general health. I have been conscientiously recommending bicycling for the last five years.’ Well said, Dr Sarah.

That Londonderry would become part of a wider movement concerned with dress reform and gender equality is unsurprising. The bicycle was the ultimate symbol of female mobility; providing a means for women the world over to escape domesticity and go out on their own unchaperoned. This new sense of autonomy was the perfect partner for the women’s suffrage movement and cycling was eagerly taken up by its supporters.

‘To men, the bicycle in the beginning was merely a new toy,’ declared Munsey’s Magazine in 1896, ‘another machine added to the long list of devices they knew in their work and play. To women, it was a steed upon which they rode into a new world.’

After her trip Annie turned her attentions to journalism, writing with all the aplomb that had made her a celebrity, and with the byline ‘The New Woman’. ‘I am a journalist and a “new woman”,’ she wrote in her first article, ‘if that term means that I believe I can do anything that any man can do.’ Annie certainly did that, in her own unique, and at times utterly bizarre, way. {