April 6, 2020 • 37 mins
Annie Londonderry gained fame for being the first woman cyclist to circumnavigate the globe. Sort of. In the 1890s, she DID circle the globe, but there are a LOT of inconsistencies in the details of her story, including why she did it in the first place.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. Uh. Since
we are all still theoretically in isolation, which means if
you're not doing it and you're not considered an essential
(00:24):
person who has to do their job to keep society running,
please get into isolation. Uh. But since we are all
theoretically in isolation, I thought it might be nice to
talk about somebody who traveled the world, which is Annie
London Dairy. She gained fame for being the first woman
cyclist to circumnavigate the globe on her bike sort of,
(00:44):
which is also why I think it's a fun one
for this time where a lot of serious things are happening,
because her trip is a little uh you'll hear specious
it is, and it's it's fun. It's a fun episode,
which I think is always good. Everybody needs a break. Uh.
So in the eighteen nineties, she set off from Boston
(01:04):
on a trip to do exactly that, to travel the world, uh,
circumnavigate the globe on a bike, and she did circle
the globe. But there are a lot of inconsistencies in
the details of her story, including why she did it
in the first place. So she was born in eighteen
seventy or eighteen seventy one in Latvia, and her name
(01:25):
when she was born was Annie Cohen. Her parents, Levy
and Beatrice Cohen, moved to the US when Annie was
still very young, that was in eighteen seventy five. They
also brought her siblings, Sarah and Bennett, and the family
lived pretty modestly in a tenement in Boston's West End,
which at the time was one of the most ethnically
mixed neighborhoods in the country. Annie's father, Levy died when
(01:48):
she was just a teenager in eighteen eighty seven, and
her mother, Beatrice died two months after that, and this
left Annie and her brother Bennett to care for the
two siblings that had been born after the family moved
to the United States, Acob and Rosa. Annie's sister Sarah
had already married and moved to Maine and was starting
a family of her own. Annie married a young peddler
(02:09):
named Max Katchovsky one year later. In the first four
years of their marriage were really productive. They had three children,
Bertha Malki who they called Molly, Libby and Simon. Annie
also works. She sold advertising space for several of the
papers around Boston, and she was really good at this job.
She had a gift for conversation, so she was really
(02:32):
able to build relationships and rapport with advertisers and sell
all this ad space. Yeah, keep in mind, this is
not a time where it would have been that out
of character for an immigrant family to have both parents working.
Annie was not that unusual in being a mother that
also worked. Annie claimed in the two businessmen had made
(02:56):
a huge wager involving twenty dollars that a woman couldn't
bicycle around the globe in fifteen months, and that she
was chosen as the one to attempt it, and if
she did manage to do this, she would also get
ten thousand dollars, and in addition to that requirement that
she had to circle the globe on a bike in
(03:16):
fifteen months, she also had to make a living for
herself along the way, with a target total of five
thousand dollars. On June fifteenth, and he was ready to
set out on this journey. She had a big send
off in Boston. People who knew her personally were on
hand to say goodbye, but so were a lot of
curious onlookers, as well as a number of suffragettes. They
(03:37):
were all there to see what seemed like it would
be history in the making. The head of Pope Manufacturing,
which produced Columbia brand bicycles, was on hand as well,
and he had the bicycle that the company was giving
her for this journey. A woman taking on a challenge
like this was of course big news, so this really
was a huge event. There were speeches given, it was
(04:00):
covered by the press. These farewell speeches marked what a
momentous thing they were all witnessing, which would be a
huge help in the fight for equality for women. And
Annie made her own speech, explaining the whole story that
the trip was the result of a wager and declaring
that quote, I am to go around the Earth in
fifteen months, returning with five thousand dollars and starting only
(04:23):
with the clothes on my back. I cannot accept anything
gratuitously from anyone. One of her friends offered her a
penny for luck, which Annie said she could not take,
and then the woman Mrs Tubbs told her that she
could take it as payment for wearing the white ribbon
of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, which Mrs Tubbs placed
on Annie's lapo. In a similarly ceremonious act, she was
(04:47):
given a hundred dollars from the London Dairy Lithia Spring
Water Company. Having made that investment, the company got to
put a sign on the rear wheel skirt guard on
this Columbia bike and Annie would take on the name
London Dairy for this journey. So this is like a
very interesting ad deal on her own bike. In person, Yes,
(05:09):
when you look at for example, like professional race cars
now and they have stuff all over their cars and
all over their persons, like their jumpsuits. Annie was a
big starting point of all of this. That name change
that she made to London Dairy offered her some pretty
key additional benefits. For one, it meant that she was
(05:29):
not going to be a woman traveling alone with a
Jewish last name. That was something that would have added
a significant layer of danger in the eighteen nineties. Additionally,
for this excursion, Annie had made the decision to keep
her personal life very private. She never mentioned that she
was a married woman with children, and that was something
that allowed her to sort of craft her own narrative
(05:51):
around her identity as she went, and finally, it was
just easier for most English speaking people and particularly the
US covering this, to say and remember the name London Dairy,
then Katchovsky and Annie was nothing if not savvy about
public image and the power of word of mouth. She
also never seemed to have any difficult feelings about leaving
(06:14):
her family behind while she made this trip. She was
later quoted on several different occasions saying, quote, I didn't
want to spend my life at home with a baby
under my apron every year. Max's feelings on his wife's
trip are not really known, although reportedly he really adored
his wife probably wanted her to do whatever would make
her happy. Annie told the papers that Max was quote
(06:37):
perfectly willing that she go, or that she wouldn't have
done it. Incidentally, Max, who was also an immigrant, was
petitioning to become a US citizen, and he was actually
sworn in while she was on the road. Yeah there was.
In the main biography I read of her, Max has
described as basically worshiping her. And incidentally, Annie did not
(06:58):
leave Boston on the day of that big send off event.
She stayed there for two more days, getting photos taken
of her with her bike to be printed in bulk
so that she could sell them as souvenirs along the way,
and she also printed out handbills that told her whole
story and that she could kind of let people circulate
throughout town so they need to look for her. On June,
(07:19):
she said her true goodbyes to a much more intimate
gathering of close friends and family, and then she finally
left and headed to New York. So she was starting
this trip in the summer of four and that was
around the same time that our previous podcast subject, Frank Lens,
disappeared on his cycling trip around the world. If you
(07:40):
may recall if you've heard that episode or if you haven't,
Lens was really eager to finish this journey as quickly
as possible, and he decided to take a more dangerous
route through Turkey to get to Europe instead of taking
the safer but longer route through Russia. He vanished along
the way. Annie, as you'll see, did not uh do
things like that now, unlike Lens and other cyclists who
(08:04):
had tried and some succeeded to circumnavigate the globe Annie
was not really experienced at riding bicycles, and the bike
that she had to start with wasn't actually great for
what lay ahead. It was quite heavy, and it was lumbering,
and on sandy surfaces or rocky substrate, she often just
had to get off and push it rather than ride it.
(08:24):
So the first leg of her trip from Boston to
New York was really arduous, and maybe because of that,
Annie stayed in New York for several weeks afterward. That
made some people worried she was never going to be
able to make her deadline. One of the ways that
she spent those weeks was revising her outfit. She'd initially
started with a day suit that included full skirts, but
(08:46):
she decided by the time she got to New York
that that was just not practical. I can't imagine the
difficulty of trying to just ride a bike a long
way in full skirts all the time. Here's my thing,
as a modern person who is very accustomed to the
benefit of a lot of textile advancements and who has
(09:08):
run a lot, I am whimpy if I get the
mildest chafe on, like a twenty mile run, which I
haven't done in a long time, Like, I can't imagine
how chafy and uncomfortable a suit that was not made
for sporting. There's a lot layers of difficulty with this, yes,
(09:30):
so she adopted instead. While she was in New York,
she switched it out for a suit with a pair
of bloomers. She still wore a skirt over it, but
it was a little bit shorter. It was only ankle length,
and that new skirt could be pinned up if she
needed to. While writing. She abandoned corsets at this point,
(09:50):
which I think is a wise move, and wore rubber
sold boots for added comfort. And she also started carrying
a revolver in case she was going to need to
defend herself. Though she also, just as she had no
bicycling experience, didn't really have any firearms experience either. Just
in case folks are visualizing this. When we say bloomers,
we're talking about the like blousy divided pants or you know,
(10:14):
bifurcated pant where that was advocated by dress reformers. We're
not talking about underwear, just in case. After all that
time in New York, Annie continued with her journey, and
we will talk about that after we pause for a
sponsor break. So when Annie London Darry finally left New
(10:39):
York at the end of July, a crowd of several
hundred people waved her goodbye. Justice had been the case
in Boston. En route to Chicago. From there, Annie quickly
learned that the road was just not going to be
kind to her. She rarely found places to wash her clothes,
which became oppressively smelly in the summer heat as she
(11:00):
was sweating. And when she did manage to stay in
a hotel or a boarding house and wash her clothes
in the sink, they were never dry by the time
she left in the morning. So off she went in
wet clothes, which sounds miserable. That also means that if
it rained, she just had to gut it out in
sopping wet layers. And even without corsets and without her
full length skirt layers, this became very heavy and very arduous,
(11:23):
because remember this was all wool. This all sounds just
so incredibly stinky and chafy and awful. She made her
way to Rochester and then Buffalo, and then slowly on
to Cleveland before trying to make up the time by
hurrying to Chicago, where she finally arrived on September twenty four,
That was a full three months after she had left Boston.
(11:45):
She weighed twenty pounds less than she had at the
start of the trip. She was still really struggling with
issues regarding her clothing just being too cumbersome, and at
this point she was very well aware that she only
had twelve months left on her claim that she could
go around the entire world in fifteen months not not
(12:06):
divided very evenly at this point. No, it's it seems
like she maybe made some foolish time management decisions right
out of the gate. So the intent had been that
she would continue to travel in a westerly direction, but
because of her rough start, owing to her lack of
experience and maybe a little bit of doddling, by the
time she arrived in Chicago, it was too late in
(12:28):
the year to keep going west. She tried to continue
in the direction that she was going, starting that late
in the year, she was going to have to cross
North America in the winter. It was not realistic. She
publicly said she was done at this point. The New
York Times ran a piece on October eleven that Annie
wasn't going to complete her trip. She turned around headed
(12:49):
to New York, retracing her route in reverse, but this
time she was going for a speed record. But before
she even started that um and though she had announced
that she was turning her on a going to New York,
while she was still in Chicago, recovering from those three
months on the road and planning for this speed run
to New York, Annie visited the Sterling Cycle works and
(13:11):
they offered her a new bicycle that was about twenty
to twenty one pounds that was less than half of
the weight of the bike that she had been riding
up to that point. And they also offered her a
sponsorship deal if she would put their sign on her
bicycle instead of riding the Columbia and having them as
a sponsor. Morgan and Right tire company, which also worked
(13:32):
with Sterling, also joined on as a sponsor. So this
whole change really lifted her spirits and she changed her
mind again. She thought she could actually circle the globe.
The new plan was to go to New York as
planned and then go east from there. In addition to
the new bicycle, her choice of clothing changed again. This
(13:52):
was sort of a double necessity. Even though her starting
skirt had been switched out to something more practical. The
new was sterling was a men's bike that was built differently.
She just couldn't ride it with her skirt fabric bunching
up in front of her was pretty hazardous. So she
finally did the thing that she had been too demure
to do when her trips started, and that was to
(14:13):
get rid of that skirt and to just use the Bloomers. Yeah.
Uh yeah. The men's bicycle was built with a segment
that went directly from the handlebars back to the seat,
whereas the ladies bike she had been riding before that
did not have that. It kind of had a dip,
like a curved metal section where like her skirts could
(14:35):
settle in front of her instead of wadding up. And
so that was what caused that change. And well, this
was all very freeing to switch to Bloomers, only there
were definitely people who found this whole idea utterly scandalous. Uh. Fortunately,
some of her sponsors sent her additional outfits so that
she would have a change of clothes and she could
(14:55):
wear comfortable gear while riding, but also dressed appropriately for
appearing his or social engagements on the road. So with
this new clothing and a much lighter bike, it was
a lot easier for Annie to go back to New York.
She continued to be a draw for the press. The
Buffalo Express ran a piece on her on November one,
four that noted that she had many sponsorships. Quote, the
(15:18):
young woman is a sort of writing advertising agency. She
wears ribbons advertising various goods, and we'll receive four hundred
dollars for one firm's ad that graces her left breast
on her right bloomer leg. She carries a hundred dollars
worth of advertisements, and she has just closed a contract
to cover her left arm. She says her back is
(15:39):
for rent yet, and she hopes to get three hundred
dollars for it. She must not beg a cent, and
she makes enough money to pay for her board by
selling little souvenir brownie pins and other souvenirs of the trip.
That same article incidentally includes some other fascinating tidbits about
Annie that were total fabrications, including saying that she had
(16:01):
attended Harvard and studied medicine. Yeah, she u she had
started ambellishing her story at that point. Uh, that article
with embellishments included was no outlier, and it actually gets
a little bit tricky to separate the actual events of
her ride from the stories that she told at her
various speaking engagements and two reporters. Annie was a spectacular
(16:24):
storyteller and she was very, very comfortable adding a little
bit of flourish to her story to wow crowds. So
while some elements of her story and what happened on
this trip are documented through the papers of the day,
even those are not always trustworthy. Obviously, she couldn't just
bike across the ocean, so she took a steamer to
(16:44):
Europe France, specifically sailing to have and on a steamer
called Latraine. That steamer trip was not to be her last,
not by a long shot. But that's all well before
she reached the Pacific Ocean, where she need to take
a boat by necessity. Yeah. Uh, there's a lot of
steamer travel coming up. So once she got to France,
(17:05):
she biked from Paris to Marseilles, and that was a
well publicized trip and it was followed by both the
French and the global papers. She was escorted the whole
way by guides that have been arranged by France's various
cycling clubs. French journalists tended to criticize her appearance. The
nicest thing that they said about her was that she
seemed energetic. One paper in Lyon described her as a
(17:27):
neutered being because they couldn't describe her as having feminine
or masculine traits. Uh, And that was definitely in a
derogatory way. They weren't saying, oh, she's androgynou, isn't cool.
They were like, we don't know what to do with her.
But the public was fascinated by her and completely embraced her.
So it seems like once Annie was outside the US,
(17:48):
she felt totally free to tell all kinds of lies
about her background. She told France's reporters that she was
an orphan, a medical student, a law student, and an heiress,
among a lot of other things. It's unclear whether she
was just kind of having some fun goating reporters into
filing false stories, or if she maybe just wanted to
(18:11):
play fast and loose with the truth. While in Valanche, France,
her achilles tendon in one leg became in flame, so
she rested there, and while she was doing that, her
bike was put on display in a shop window so
she could have time to convalesce and I think also
make a little money from that placement. By the time
she reached Marseilles, after she recovered she continued on, she
(18:31):
was quite enjoying herself, despite feeling that her initial reception
in France had kind of treated her poorly. At Marseilles,
she boarded the steamer Sydney on January and then the
story gets really fuzzy because just seven weeks later, on
March nine, she boarded another ship that was leaving Japan.
(18:52):
That means that the same woman who spent three entire
months getting from Boston to Chicago somehow covered the entire
Asian continent, where she did not speak any of the languages,
in half that time. That seems real fishy. Yeah, that
seems like when, uh, like when the marathon is happening
(19:13):
and somebody crosses the starting line with the marathon and
then like like they get in a cab. It's exactly
like that. Uh So, if you heard Annie Londonderry speak
of her travels or read her account, it was a
very full seven weeks. According to her, that time was
filled with bike rides through Jerusalem and tiger hunts and
(19:33):
visits with royalty, and being mistaken for an evil spirit
in some lands, and having to disguise herself in local
garb to not be chased, and even traveling to the
front lines of the First Sino Japanese War. We're gonna
talk about that part in a minute. But none of
this was true. Uh. The slides that she would later
(19:53):
show during lectures of her travels were professional photographs that
have been taken of those places and that she had purchased.
They were not photos she had taken herself. So what
it seems really happened was she got on the Sydney
and then it made port in Alexandria, and then port
said in Egypt, and then Colombo and Sri Lanka. Annie
and two other lady cyclists from the ship raised some
(20:16):
eyebrows when they went out for a ride at that stop.
And then after that quick stop in Sri Lanka, the
Sydney sailed on to Singapore with Annie Londonderry's still on board. Yeah,
just for the historical record, Sri Lanka would have been
called Ceylon at this time. Uh. Annie's arrival in Singapore
did not go exactly as she might have hoped, and
(20:37):
we're going to talk about that after we have a
word from our sponsors. So when Annie arrived in Singapore,
the press there noticed that she had made shockingly good
time crossing Asia and actually called her out on it.
(20:58):
On February fourteen, article in the Singapore Straits ran that
was titled a Woman on Wheels fifty thousand Fools at Marseille,
which made the case that Annie was a charlatan on
a trip to gain money and fame, and that she
had duped the French. It pointed out how the French
public had fallen over her and bought her photographs and
(21:19):
paid her to endorse their products, and then cheered her
as she left port, and then it compared her journey
to that of French mail, sailing safely aboard the steamships Adney.
The next stop was Saigon, and things were a little
better there, in part because a French periodical called Courier
was eagerly awaiting her with some pre arranged appearances. But
(21:40):
even as this reception was an improvement her write ups
back home, we're starting to sour a little bit. Uh
The U. S press was wondering how Annie had made
such good time crossing Asia. She next hit Hong Kong
for a couple of days, and then Shanghai, where she
invited the editor of the newspaper Celestial m Player to
(22:01):
call on her at her hotel so that she could
do an interview and give him a full account of
her travels. But what she actually did was explained to
him how well she had been greeted in other cities.
A lot of that was lies that she made up,
and to make clear to him that she expected the
same in Shanghai, kind of hinting that he should help
arrange that that editor left the hotel. It was from
(22:24):
Shanghai that she said she had traveled to the front
of the Sino Japanese War, later writing quote, I was
warned to get out of the country as quickly as possible,
But my American spirit was up and I was determined
to see the fun. So I determined to go to
the front, and I went. I knew that I could
fill any hall in the United States with the announcement
that I was an eyewitness to the battles in China.
(22:47):
She continues a paragraph later, I was an eyewitness to
the Battle of Ghassan. It was the first I had
seen and I don't want to see another. All of
that again not true, No, totally made it up. Annie
arrived in Yokohoma, Japan in early March. There she had
some conflict with the American consule, John McLean, because she
(23:07):
asked him if he could help her raise funds for
her passage across the Pacific. He was not particularly interested
in assisting her in this way. She actually kind of
had him smeared in the press for it as not
caring about any American citizens. She did manage to wrangle
some assistance and some cash from the French console, however,
and booked passage aboard the Beljik which took her to
(23:28):
San Francisco, and he arrived in California ready to start
booking speaking engagements and telling her tales of life abroad
on her bicycle, and she did. She also met with
a lot of suspicion and criticism. One of the big
issues right out of the gate was the psychometer on
her bicycle, which indicated that the bike had been ridden
(23:50):
a total of about seven thousand, two hundred eighty miles.
That did not add up to what one should have
expected on a trip around the world, even including the
necessary segments that had to be covered by ship, like
across the entire Pacific Ocean. Additionally, the amount of money
that she earned along the way did not quite add up.
While Annie claimed that she would have to make about
(24:12):
three thousand, five hundred dollars of the five thousand dollars
required by that bet on her way from San Francisco
across the USA on her final leg, people that were
kind of keeping track of her her travels and keeping
a tally noted that she had already earned a lot
more than she was reporting, and her war stories from
China did not really line up with the calendar timeline
(24:35):
of what had been playing out in that conflict, so
more and more of her story seemed shady as people
started to compare notes. A newspaper editor from Indiana met
with Annie in California and wrote rather scathingly of her quote,
Miss Londonderry's trip has been a remarkable one. From the
fact that she went entirely around the world on steamboats,
(24:57):
according to her own story, excepting ride from Have to Marseilles,
France on her wheel. Miss Anna is a hustler for sure.
Andy's story had been refined as she tried to adjust
to accommodate that psychometer reading and to include the fact
that a lot of her travel was by steamer and
a lot of segments in the press. She quickly went
(25:18):
from being lauded as the epitome of the new Woman
to being criticized as a fraud and huckster. Yeah, it
was kind of one of those things where I was like, oh, no, well,
I did take the steamer from here to there, but
then I got off and I ran up here and
I did this, and it was like, then there was
calendar math that just didn't add up. It's like, you
couldn't have done that in that period of time before
the Sydney took off at the next port for a
(25:39):
lot of problems. But after spending almost two months in California,
during which she managed to stage a photo of herself
being robbed by alleged bandits, which she then used that
photo on her lecture tour, she finally continued east to
finish her trip. And if that seems like a long
time to stay there when the clock was ticking on
this bet it she was there is the possibility that
(26:02):
she may have had a romance during this time with
a fellow cyclist, a gentleman named Mark Johnson from San
Francisco's Olympic Cycling Club, who insisted on making the ride
from San Francisco to Los Angeles with her. That ride
took five weeks, so it meant that they averaged less
than ten miles a day on their bikes, even accounting
for an accident that happened early on. This seemed pretty
(26:25):
slow to a lot of people, and some folks started
pointing out that they actually might have done better on foot.
People were even dubious about her trip across North America.
There were rumors that if you asked railroad men if
they had seen her, they would say nothing but kind
of give you a knowing wink. Finally, after lecturing and
riding her way across the continent, she made her way
home and then the following brief article appeared in the
(26:48):
New York Times on September. It was titled Miss London
Dairy's Trip ended, and it is tag Boston, Massachusetts. Miss
Annie London Dairy arrived in the city this morning after
a trip around the world on a bicycle. Miss Londonderry
is nursing a broken arm, the result of a bad
fall sustained in one of the western towns. On June
(27:12):
she started her trip around the world. She was given
a good send off by several hundred friends who were
at the State House where the start was made. Her trip,
she says, was made upon a wager she was to
receive ten thousand dollars if she finished the journey in
fifteen months, and she feels proud of the record she
has made. On Thursday, September twelve, the journey came to
(27:32):
an end in Chicago, fourteen days ahead of the time allowed.
In addition to the purse of ten thousand dollars, which
she says was handed over by the parties making the wager,
Miss Londonderry also accumulated five thousand dollars from lectures given
in the several countries and also by participating in exhibitions
of bicycle riding. This announcement was featured in The New
(27:53):
York Times over an article collecting more general cycling news
the day, including in the announcement that previous podcast subject
Heavy Green, the richest woman in America, had also started
riding a bicycle. So we've already said a lot of
this is is FIBs on her part. Outright lies. So
how much of Annie's story was true probably not much
(28:17):
of it at all. Uh. In fact, it's entirely possible
that even the wager that was supposed to have set
this whole trip in motion never existed. The story of
the wager between two men, the ten thousand prize to
her if she accomplished this goal, and the five thousand
dollar earnings requirement was one that Annie told everywhere she went,
(28:38):
and it seemed to shift and grow and change along
the way. At some stops she told people that she
was forbidden, as part of this bet, from speaking any
language but English, and in other places she claimed that
she had to forego taking any work as a journalist,
since that was already her profession, and that using that
to make the five thousand dollar requirement would be considered cheating.
(28:59):
The first appearance of the story in a newspaper was
in February of eight nine four, with the headline that
read a woman to rival Paul Jones. Paul Jones was
a fake name adopted by a young man named E. C.
Peiffer was someone who had claimed that just a couple
of weeks earlier, that on a wager he would walk
(29:19):
around the world in a year. That enterprise had already
fallen apart and had been revealed as fake when this
second story hit the news. The article in the Boston
Daily Globe didn't mention Annie by name, but described a
young woman who, like her, was in her twenties, worked
for the papers, and was going to make a trip
by bicycle around the world in fifteen months on a wager. Yeah,
(29:41):
it's one of those things where because she did work
in the newspaper industry, it's entirely possible that she finagled
some connections to have this story place. The two businessmen
that were allegedly backing this wager were never clearly identified.
Sheep spat out a couple of names here and there,
and sometimes names appeared in various a articles, but no
one ever took responsibility for this huge bet, And even
(30:04):
when the story was breaking and Annie was wildly popular,
there were already articles that questioned the veracity of this
whole thing. Still, Annie ignored all of this and carried
on with her plan, although it seems like it was
maybe a plan entirely her own and no one else
was ever involved. She never, for example, gave any proof
of receipt of that ten thousand dollar payment, she just
(30:27):
stated to the press that she had received it in
the payment had been made. Also, Annie Kopchovsky had been
living a pretty mundane life at the time this whole
thing started. With plenty of high profile members of the
women's movement at hand in Boston at the time. It
would have been really random for Annie, who wasn't particularly
active in that movement in any sort of official capacity,
(30:48):
to somehow find herself at the middle of this high
stakes wager over the matter of women's equality. But all
the various aspects of her story were really enticing to
the press and to the readers. The wager, the additional
earnings requirement, the time limit, and everything suggests that this
was really very carefully crafted. In October, so after her
(31:11):
trip was over, a story ran in the New York
Sunday World detailing Annie's entire adventure, and the byeline read
Nellie Blig Jr. Borrowing the name of the real journalist
Nellie Bligh, who became famous for her asylum expos a
Ten Days in a Madhouse in the eighteen eighties, and
who also had taken a trip around the world, But
(31:32):
in this case, Nellie Bly Jr. Was Annie, further stoking
the fires of her own story. When Annie's trip around
the world ended and the press about it died down,
she settled into a less adventurous life again sort of.
She had a brief foray in the fall of eighteen
where she helped to capture a so called wild man
(31:54):
who had been terrorizing the town of Royalston, Massachusetts. Her
work on the case was, of course, very embellished in
her own telling, and then she moved her family to
New York, where she started writing under the nomda plume
the New Woman for a while for the papers there.
She and Max added to their family with another baby
(32:14):
in eight but Annie had a hard time adjusting to
her post travel life. She was most likely restless, and
she was the frequent recipient of correspondents from friends and
family who, believing that she had come into this great
sum of money at the end of her journey, wanted
financial help. Eventually, Annie left her family again for a while.
(32:36):
She traveled to northern California to work as a saleswoman
in a town called Yukaiah. The details of what led
her there are pretty mysterious, but in the early nineteen
hundreds she went back home to Max, and the family
opened a retail clothing store in the Bronx. Yeah, she
kind of settled into this retail life. After that. There
was a fire in the nineteen twenties that destroyed the
(32:57):
family business, so it really went on for quite some time.
But even after that, soon Annie opened another retail business.
This time she used the insurance money from that fire.
But she also had a business partner. Uh. This was
a gentleman whose name was Feldman, and apparently it was
just a stranger that she had struck up a conversation
with in a restaurant, and the two of them hit
it off and decided to go into business together. Annie's husband,
(33:20):
Max died in nineteen forty six. They've been married for
fifty eight years. Annie continued on with life and work
for the next year, and then she died after a
stroke on November eleven nine. Even today, Annie's true motivations
for what seemed like a stunt remain a matter of speculation.
She does seem to have been interested in clothing reform
(33:42):
for women, but as we said just a moment ago,
she hadn't been active in the women's movement in general.
Even taking into account her easier travels by boat and train,
Traveling the world alone was a difficult undertaking, so she
may have had myriad other reasons to go out into
the world and leave her family. Be mind, it could
have been just as simple as wanting to shake off
(34:04):
her expected role of wife and mother and have an adventure,
which she surely did, and some people still categorize her
as you know, making this incredibly feminist move in doing so,
even if this whole thing was a force in terms
of setup, and there is no doubt that she was
searching for notoriety and money as part of her drive
(34:24):
in all of this. It is one of those things
where unfortunately her correspondence does not survive, Like she was
writing letters home, but none of it has been found.
Any letters that she received on the road do not
seem to have been maintained in any sort of way.
So there are a lot of elements of guesswork in
(34:45):
terms of of what was really going on in her
head during all of this. Oh Annie, Yeah, she's sort
of a marvelous fiber um. It's a fun story, but
only part of it happened, Very little of it actually happened.
I mean, she went on a cruise around the world,
(35:05):
which sounds pretty great, but yeah, she didn't. She didn't
do all the things she claimed to do. There is
you can find online, and there is a book written
about her, which is written by I believe her What
would be her Great Nephew, which is a pretty fabulous
biography and and one of my primary sources for this.
And you can see that photograph that she staged of
(35:27):
being robbed five bandits, and there's the whole moment of like,
here's this woman. There are two men holding her at gunpoint,
like one has a shotgun, I think, and it's like, well,
who's taking the picture instead of helping you, I'm just
gonna take this photograph. This lady looks like she's in
(35:48):
peril um but she's certainly she's a little bit of
you know, a Baron Munchausen in that way in the
in the film thing not related to the disease after
or the syndrome. Rather, uh yeah, who wouldn't want to
have a fun adventure. You don't have to fib about it.
Cruise around the world sounds great. Um. I have listener
(36:12):
mail that actually just came in while we were recording.
But it's so perfectly dovetails on this that I thought
we might as well use it. It's from our listener Jessica,
and she says, how do you ladies just listen to
your trans Atlantic cruising podcasts? See it ties In and
Herd a mention of my current company, hot Bag. I
hear we are still offering cruises specifically in Europe, but
(36:32):
I work in the shipping cargo portion now called hapag Lloyd.
I wanted to send a quick note and say thanks
for making my drives to see clients always interesting and
keep up the great work. Um. That was just too
good in terms of fortuitous timing to have a company
that we have talked about related to cruising on the
show at the time when we were talking about Annie
Steamer cruise around the world, and also by total coincidence
(36:55):
at a time when many of the major I don't
know if it's all of them at this point, but
like all the major cruise lines operating from US ports
have stopped and we will see when when we are
back to cruising. If you would like to write to us,
you can do so in History Podcast at I Heart
radio dot com. You can also find us on social
media as missed in History. If you'd like to subscribe
(37:17):
to the podcast that sounds Grant, you can do that
on the I heart Radio app, at Apple podcast or
wherever it is you listen. Stuff you missed in History
Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more
podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. Uh. Since
we are all still theoretically in isolation, which means if
you're not doing it and you're not considered an essential
(00:24):
person who has to do their job to keep society running,
please get into isolation. Uh. But since we are all
theoretically in isolation, I thought it might be nice to
talk about somebody who traveled the world, which is Annie
London Dairy. She gained fame for being the first woman
cyclist to circumnavigate the globe on her bike sort of,
(00:44):
which is also why I think it's a fun one
for this time where a lot of serious things are happening,
because her trip is a little uh you'll hear specious
it is, and it's it's fun. It's a fun episode,
which I think is always good. Everybody needs a break. Uh.
So in the eighteen nineties, she set off from Boston
(01:04):
on a trip to do exactly that, to travel the world, uh,
circumnavigate the globe on a bike, and she did circle
the globe. But there are a lot of inconsistencies in
the details of her story, including why she did it
in the first place. So she was born in eighteen
seventy or eighteen seventy one in Latvia, and her name
(01:25):
when she was born was Annie Cohen. Her parents, Levy
and Beatrice Cohen, moved to the US when Annie was
still very young, that was in eighteen seventy five. They
also brought her siblings, Sarah and Bennett, and the family
lived pretty modestly in a tenement in Boston's West End,
which at the time was one of the most ethnically
mixed neighborhoods in the country. Annie's father, Levy died when
(01:48):
she was just a teenager in eighteen eighty seven, and
her mother, Beatrice died two months after that, and this
left Annie and her brother Bennett to care for the
two siblings that had been born after the family moved
to the United States, Acob and Rosa. Annie's sister Sarah
had already married and moved to Maine and was starting
a family of her own. Annie married a young peddler
(02:09):
named Max Katchovsky one year later. In the first four
years of their marriage were really productive. They had three children,
Bertha Malki who they called Molly, Libby and Simon. Annie
also works. She sold advertising space for several of the
papers around Boston, and she was really good at this job.
She had a gift for conversation, so she was really
(02:32):
able to build relationships and rapport with advertisers and sell
all this ad space. Yeah, keep in mind, this is
not a time where it would have been that out
of character for an immigrant family to have both parents working.
Annie was not that unusual in being a mother that
also worked. Annie claimed in the two businessmen had made
(02:56):
a huge wager involving twenty dollars that a woman couldn't
bicycle around the globe in fifteen months, and that she
was chosen as the one to attempt it, and if
she did manage to do this, she would also get
ten thousand dollars, and in addition to that requirement that
she had to circle the globe on a bike in
(03:16):
fifteen months, she also had to make a living for
herself along the way, with a target total of five
thousand dollars. On June fifteenth, and he was ready to
set out on this journey. She had a big send
off in Boston. People who knew her personally were on
hand to say goodbye, but so were a lot of
curious onlookers, as well as a number of suffragettes. They
(03:37):
were all there to see what seemed like it would
be history in the making. The head of Pope Manufacturing,
which produced Columbia brand bicycles, was on hand as well,
and he had the bicycle that the company was giving
her for this journey. A woman taking on a challenge
like this was of course big news, so this really
was a huge event. There were speeches given, it was
(04:00):
covered by the press. These farewell speeches marked what a
momentous thing they were all witnessing, which would be a
huge help in the fight for equality for women. And
Annie made her own speech, explaining the whole story that
the trip was the result of a wager and declaring
that quote, I am to go around the Earth in
fifteen months, returning with five thousand dollars and starting only
(04:23):
with the clothes on my back. I cannot accept anything
gratuitously from anyone. One of her friends offered her a
penny for luck, which Annie said she could not take,
and then the woman Mrs Tubbs told her that she
could take it as payment for wearing the white ribbon
of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, which Mrs Tubbs placed
on Annie's lapo. In a similarly ceremonious act, she was
(04:47):
given a hundred dollars from the London Dairy Lithia Spring
Water Company. Having made that investment, the company got to
put a sign on the rear wheel skirt guard on
this Columbia bike and Annie would take on the name
London Dairy for this journey. So this is like a
very interesting ad deal on her own bike. In person, Yes,
(05:09):
when you look at for example, like professional race cars
now and they have stuff all over their cars and
all over their persons, like their jumpsuits. Annie was a
big starting point of all of this. That name change
that she made to London Dairy offered her some pretty
key additional benefits. For one, it meant that she was
(05:29):
not going to be a woman traveling alone with a
Jewish last name. That was something that would have added
a significant layer of danger in the eighteen nineties. Additionally,
for this excursion, Annie had made the decision to keep
her personal life very private. She never mentioned that she
was a married woman with children, and that was something
that allowed her to sort of craft her own narrative
(05:51):
around her identity as she went, and finally, it was
just easier for most English speaking people and particularly the
US covering this, to say and remember the name London Dairy,
then Katchovsky and Annie was nothing if not savvy about
public image and the power of word of mouth. She
also never seemed to have any difficult feelings about leaving
(06:14):
her family behind while she made this trip. She was
later quoted on several different occasions saying, quote, I didn't
want to spend my life at home with a baby
under my apron every year. Max's feelings on his wife's
trip are not really known, although reportedly he really adored
his wife probably wanted her to do whatever would make
her happy. Annie told the papers that Max was quote
(06:37):
perfectly willing that she go, or that she wouldn't have
done it. Incidentally, Max, who was also an immigrant, was
petitioning to become a US citizen, and he was actually
sworn in while she was on the road. Yeah there was.
In the main biography I read of her, Max has
described as basically worshiping her. And incidentally, Annie did not
(06:58):
leave Boston on the day of that big send off event.
She stayed there for two more days, getting photos taken
of her with her bike to be printed in bulk
so that she could sell them as souvenirs along the way,
and she also printed out handbills that told her whole
story and that she could kind of let people circulate
throughout town so they need to look for her. On June,
(07:19):
she said her true goodbyes to a much more intimate
gathering of close friends and family, and then she finally
left and headed to New York. So she was starting
this trip in the summer of four and that was
around the same time that our previous podcast subject, Frank Lens,
disappeared on his cycling trip around the world. If you
(07:40):
may recall if you've heard that episode or if you haven't,
Lens was really eager to finish this journey as quickly
as possible, and he decided to take a more dangerous
route through Turkey to get to Europe instead of taking
the safer but longer route through Russia. He vanished along
the way. Annie, as you'll see, did not uh do
things like that now, unlike Lens and other cyclists who
(08:04):
had tried and some succeeded to circumnavigate the globe Annie
was not really experienced at riding bicycles, and the bike
that she had to start with wasn't actually great for
what lay ahead. It was quite heavy, and it was lumbering,
and on sandy surfaces or rocky substrate, she often just
had to get off and push it rather than ride it.
(08:24):
So the first leg of her trip from Boston to
New York was really arduous, and maybe because of that,
Annie stayed in New York for several weeks afterward. That
made some people worried she was never going to be
able to make her deadline. One of the ways that
she spent those weeks was revising her outfit. She'd initially
started with a day suit that included full skirts, but
(08:46):
she decided by the time she got to New York
that that was just not practical. I can't imagine the
difficulty of trying to just ride a bike a long
way in full skirts all the time. Here's my thing,
as a modern person who is very accustomed to the
benefit of a lot of textile advancements and who has
(09:08):
run a lot, I am whimpy if I get the
mildest chafe on, like a twenty mile run, which I
haven't done in a long time, Like, I can't imagine
how chafy and uncomfortable a suit that was not made
for sporting. There's a lot layers of difficulty with this, yes,
(09:30):
so she adopted instead. While she was in New York,
she switched it out for a suit with a pair
of bloomers. She still wore a skirt over it, but
it was a little bit shorter. It was only ankle length,
and that new skirt could be pinned up if she
needed to. While writing. She abandoned corsets at this point,
(09:50):
which I think is a wise move, and wore rubber
sold boots for added comfort. And she also started carrying
a revolver in case she was going to need to
defend herself. Though she also, just as she had no
bicycling experience, didn't really have any firearms experience either. Just
in case folks are visualizing this. When we say bloomers,
we're talking about the like blousy divided pants or you know,
(10:14):
bifurcated pant where that was advocated by dress reformers. We're
not talking about underwear, just in case. After all that
time in New York, Annie continued with her journey, and
we will talk about that after we pause for a
sponsor break. So when Annie London Darry finally left New
(10:39):
York at the end of July, a crowd of several
hundred people waved her goodbye. Justice had been the case
in Boston. En route to Chicago. From there, Annie quickly
learned that the road was just not going to be
kind to her. She rarely found places to wash her clothes,
which became oppressively smelly in the summer heat as she
(11:00):
was sweating. And when she did manage to stay in
a hotel or a boarding house and wash her clothes
in the sink, they were never dry by the time
she left in the morning. So off she went in
wet clothes, which sounds miserable. That also means that if
it rained, she just had to gut it out in
sopping wet layers. And even without corsets and without her
full length skirt layers, this became very heavy and very arduous,
(11:23):
because remember this was all wool. This all sounds just
so incredibly stinky and chafy and awful. She made her
way to Rochester and then Buffalo, and then slowly on
to Cleveland before trying to make up the time by
hurrying to Chicago, where she finally arrived on September twenty four,
That was a full three months after she had left Boston.
(11:45):
She weighed twenty pounds less than she had at the
start of the trip. She was still really struggling with
issues regarding her clothing just being too cumbersome, and at
this point she was very well aware that she only
had twelve months left on her claim that she could
go around the entire world in fifteen months not not
(12:06):
divided very evenly at this point. No, it's it seems
like she maybe made some foolish time management decisions right
out of the gate. So the intent had been that
she would continue to travel in a westerly direction, but
because of her rough start, owing to her lack of
experience and maybe a little bit of doddling, by the
time she arrived in Chicago, it was too late in
(12:28):
the year to keep going west. She tried to continue
in the direction that she was going, starting that late
in the year, she was going to have to cross
North America in the winter. It was not realistic. She
publicly said she was done at this point. The New
York Times ran a piece on October eleven that Annie
wasn't going to complete her trip. She turned around headed
(12:49):
to New York, retracing her route in reverse, but this
time she was going for a speed record. But before
she even started that um and though she had announced
that she was turning her on a going to New York,
while she was still in Chicago, recovering from those three
months on the road and planning for this speed run
to New York, Annie visited the Sterling Cycle works and
(13:11):
they offered her a new bicycle that was about twenty
to twenty one pounds that was less than half of
the weight of the bike that she had been riding
up to that point. And they also offered her a
sponsorship deal if she would put their sign on her
bicycle instead of riding the Columbia and having them as
a sponsor. Morgan and Right tire company, which also worked
(13:32):
with Sterling, also joined on as a sponsor. So this
whole change really lifted her spirits and she changed her
mind again. She thought she could actually circle the globe.
The new plan was to go to New York as
planned and then go east from there. In addition to
the new bicycle, her choice of clothing changed again. This
(13:52):
was sort of a double necessity. Even though her starting
skirt had been switched out to something more practical. The
new was sterling was a men's bike that was built differently.
She just couldn't ride it with her skirt fabric bunching
up in front of her was pretty hazardous. So she
finally did the thing that she had been too demure
to do when her trips started, and that was to
(14:13):
get rid of that skirt and to just use the Bloomers. Yeah.
Uh yeah. The men's bicycle was built with a segment
that went directly from the handlebars back to the seat,
whereas the ladies bike she had been riding before that
did not have that. It kind of had a dip,
like a curved metal section where like her skirts could
(14:35):
settle in front of her instead of wadding up. And
so that was what caused that change. And well, this
was all very freeing to switch to Bloomers, only there
were definitely people who found this whole idea utterly scandalous. Uh. Fortunately,
some of her sponsors sent her additional outfits so that
she would have a change of clothes and she could
(14:55):
wear comfortable gear while riding, but also dressed appropriately for
appearing his or social engagements on the road. So with
this new clothing and a much lighter bike, it was
a lot easier for Annie to go back to New York.
She continued to be a draw for the press. The
Buffalo Express ran a piece on her on November one,
four that noted that she had many sponsorships. Quote, the
(15:18):
young woman is a sort of writing advertising agency. She
wears ribbons advertising various goods, and we'll receive four hundred
dollars for one firm's ad that graces her left breast
on her right bloomer leg. She carries a hundred dollars
worth of advertisements, and she has just closed a contract
to cover her left arm. She says her back is
(15:39):
for rent yet, and she hopes to get three hundred
dollars for it. She must not beg a cent, and
she makes enough money to pay for her board by
selling little souvenir brownie pins and other souvenirs of the trip.
That same article incidentally includes some other fascinating tidbits about
Annie that were total fabrications, including saying that she had
(16:01):
attended Harvard and studied medicine. Yeah, she u she had
started ambellishing her story at that point. Uh, that article
with embellishments included was no outlier, and it actually gets
a little bit tricky to separate the actual events of
her ride from the stories that she told at her
various speaking engagements and two reporters. Annie was a spectacular
(16:24):
storyteller and she was very, very comfortable adding a little
bit of flourish to her story to wow crowds. So
while some elements of her story and what happened on
this trip are documented through the papers of the day,
even those are not always trustworthy. Obviously, she couldn't just
bike across the ocean, so she took a steamer to
(16:44):
Europe France, specifically sailing to have and on a steamer
called Latraine. That steamer trip was not to be her last,
not by a long shot. But that's all well before
she reached the Pacific Ocean, where she need to take
a boat by necessity. Yeah. Uh, there's a lot of
steamer travel coming up. So once she got to France,
(17:05):
she biked from Paris to Marseilles, and that was a
well publicized trip and it was followed by both the
French and the global papers. She was escorted the whole
way by guides that have been arranged by France's various
cycling clubs. French journalists tended to criticize her appearance. The
nicest thing that they said about her was that she
seemed energetic. One paper in Lyon described her as a
(17:27):
neutered being because they couldn't describe her as having feminine
or masculine traits. Uh, And that was definitely in a
derogatory way. They weren't saying, oh, she's androgynou, isn't cool.
They were like, we don't know what to do with her.
But the public was fascinated by her and completely embraced her.
So it seems like once Annie was outside the US,
(17:48):
she felt totally free to tell all kinds of lies
about her background. She told France's reporters that she was
an orphan, a medical student, a law student, and an heiress,
among a lot of other things. It's unclear whether she
was just kind of having some fun goating reporters into
filing false stories, or if she maybe just wanted to
(18:11):
play fast and loose with the truth. While in Valanche, France,
her achilles tendon in one leg became in flame, so
she rested there, and while she was doing that, her
bike was put on display in a shop window so
she could have time to convalesce and I think also
make a little money from that placement. By the time
she reached Marseilles, after she recovered she continued on, she
(18:31):
was quite enjoying herself, despite feeling that her initial reception
in France had kind of treated her poorly. At Marseilles,
she boarded the steamer Sydney on January and then the
story gets really fuzzy because just seven weeks later, on
March nine, she boarded another ship that was leaving Japan.
(18:52):
That means that the same woman who spent three entire
months getting from Boston to Chicago somehow covered the entire
Asian continent, where she did not speak any of the languages,
in half that time. That seems real fishy. Yeah, that
seems like when, uh, like when the marathon is happening
(19:13):
and somebody crosses the starting line with the marathon and
then like like they get in a cab. It's exactly
like that. Uh So, if you heard Annie Londonderry speak
of her travels or read her account, it was a
very full seven weeks. According to her, that time was
filled with bike rides through Jerusalem and tiger hunts and
(19:33):
visits with royalty, and being mistaken for an evil spirit
in some lands, and having to disguise herself in local
garb to not be chased, and even traveling to the
front lines of the First Sino Japanese War. We're gonna
talk about that part in a minute. But none of
this was true. Uh. The slides that she would later
(19:53):
show during lectures of her travels were professional photographs that
have been taken of those places and that she had purchased.
They were not photos she had taken herself. So what
it seems really happened was she got on the Sydney
and then it made port in Alexandria, and then port
said in Egypt, and then Colombo and Sri Lanka. Annie
and two other lady cyclists from the ship raised some
(20:16):
eyebrows when they went out for a ride at that stop.
And then after that quick stop in Sri Lanka, the
Sydney sailed on to Singapore with Annie Londonderry's still on board. Yeah,
just for the historical record, Sri Lanka would have been
called Ceylon at this time. Uh. Annie's arrival in Singapore
did not go exactly as she might have hoped, and
(20:37):
we're going to talk about that after we have a
word from our sponsors. So when Annie arrived in Singapore,
the press there noticed that she had made shockingly good
time crossing Asia and actually called her out on it.
(20:58):
On February fourteen, article in the Singapore Straits ran that
was titled a Woman on Wheels fifty thousand Fools at Marseille,
which made the case that Annie was a charlatan on
a trip to gain money and fame, and that she
had duped the French. It pointed out how the French
public had fallen over her and bought her photographs and
(21:19):
paid her to endorse their products, and then cheered her
as she left port, and then it compared her journey
to that of French mail, sailing safely aboard the steamships Adney.
The next stop was Saigon, and things were a little
better there, in part because a French periodical called Courier
was eagerly awaiting her with some pre arranged appearances. But
(21:40):
even as this reception was an improvement her write ups
back home, we're starting to sour a little bit. Uh
The U. S press was wondering how Annie had made
such good time crossing Asia. She next hit Hong Kong
for a couple of days, and then Shanghai, where she
invited the editor of the newspaper Celestial m Player to
(22:01):
call on her at her hotel so that she could
do an interview and give him a full account of
her travels. But what she actually did was explained to
him how well she had been greeted in other cities.
A lot of that was lies that she made up,
and to make clear to him that she expected the
same in Shanghai, kind of hinting that he should help
arrange that that editor left the hotel. It was from
(22:24):
Shanghai that she said she had traveled to the front
of the Sino Japanese War, later writing quote, I was
warned to get out of the country as quickly as possible,
But my American spirit was up and I was determined
to see the fun. So I determined to go to
the front, and I went. I knew that I could
fill any hall in the United States with the announcement
that I was an eyewitness to the battles in China.
(22:47):
She continues a paragraph later, I was an eyewitness to
the Battle of Ghassan. It was the first I had
seen and I don't want to see another. All of
that again not true, No, totally made it up. Annie
arrived in Yokohoma, Japan in early March. There she had
some conflict with the American consule, John McLean, because she
(23:07):
asked him if he could help her raise funds for
her passage across the Pacific. He was not particularly interested
in assisting her in this way. She actually kind of
had him smeared in the press for it as not
caring about any American citizens. She did manage to wrangle
some assistance and some cash from the French console, however,
and booked passage aboard the Beljik which took her to
(23:28):
San Francisco, and he arrived in California ready to start
booking speaking engagements and telling her tales of life abroad
on her bicycle, and she did. She also met with
a lot of suspicion and criticism. One of the big
issues right out of the gate was the psychometer on
her bicycle, which indicated that the bike had been ridden
(23:50):
a total of about seven thousand, two hundred eighty miles.
That did not add up to what one should have
expected on a trip around the world, even including the
necessary segments that had to be covered by ship, like
across the entire Pacific Ocean. Additionally, the amount of money
that she earned along the way did not quite add up.
While Annie claimed that she would have to make about
(24:12):
three thousand, five hundred dollars of the five thousand dollars
required by that bet on her way from San Francisco
across the USA on her final leg, people that were
kind of keeping track of her her travels and keeping
a tally noted that she had already earned a lot
more than she was reporting, and her war stories from
China did not really line up with the calendar timeline
(24:35):
of what had been playing out in that conflict, so
more and more of her story seemed shady as people
started to compare notes. A newspaper editor from Indiana met
with Annie in California and wrote rather scathingly of her quote,
Miss Londonderry's trip has been a remarkable one. From the
fact that she went entirely around the world on steamboats,
(24:57):
according to her own story, excepting ride from Have to Marseilles,
France on her wheel. Miss Anna is a hustler for sure.
Andy's story had been refined as she tried to adjust
to accommodate that psychometer reading and to include the fact
that a lot of her travel was by steamer and
a lot of segments in the press. She quickly went
(25:18):
from being lauded as the epitome of the new Woman
to being criticized as a fraud and huckster. Yeah, it
was kind of one of those things where I was like, oh, no, well,
I did take the steamer from here to there, but
then I got off and I ran up here and
I did this, and it was like, then there was
calendar math that just didn't add up. It's like, you
couldn't have done that in that period of time before
the Sydney took off at the next port for a
(25:39):
lot of problems. But after spending almost two months in California,
during which she managed to stage a photo of herself
being robbed by alleged bandits, which she then used that
photo on her lecture tour, she finally continued east to
finish her trip. And if that seems like a long
time to stay there when the clock was ticking on
this bet it she was there is the possibility that
(26:02):
she may have had a romance during this time with
a fellow cyclist, a gentleman named Mark Johnson from San
Francisco's Olympic Cycling Club, who insisted on making the ride
from San Francisco to Los Angeles with her. That ride
took five weeks, so it meant that they averaged less
than ten miles a day on their bikes, even accounting
for an accident that happened early on. This seemed pretty
(26:25):
slow to a lot of people, and some folks started
pointing out that they actually might have done better on foot.
People were even dubious about her trip across North America.
There were rumors that if you asked railroad men if
they had seen her, they would say nothing but kind
of give you a knowing wink. Finally, after lecturing and
riding her way across the continent, she made her way
home and then the following brief article appeared in the
(26:48):
New York Times on September. It was titled Miss London
Dairy's Trip ended, and it is tag Boston, Massachusetts. Miss
Annie London Dairy arrived in the city this morning after
a trip around the world on a bicycle. Miss Londonderry
is nursing a broken arm, the result of a bad
fall sustained in one of the western towns. On June
(27:12):
she started her trip around the world. She was given
a good send off by several hundred friends who were
at the State House where the start was made. Her trip,
she says, was made upon a wager she was to
receive ten thousand dollars if she finished the journey in
fifteen months, and she feels proud of the record she
has made. On Thursday, September twelve, the journey came to
(27:32):
an end in Chicago, fourteen days ahead of the time allowed.
In addition to the purse of ten thousand dollars, which
she says was handed over by the parties making the wager,
Miss Londonderry also accumulated five thousand dollars from lectures given
in the several countries and also by participating in exhibitions
of bicycle riding. This announcement was featured in The New
(27:53):
York Times over an article collecting more general cycling news
the day, including in the announcement that previous podcast subject
Heavy Green, the richest woman in America, had also started
riding a bicycle. So we've already said a lot of
this is is FIBs on her part. Outright lies. So
how much of Annie's story was true probably not much
(28:17):
of it at all. Uh. In fact, it's entirely possible
that even the wager that was supposed to have set
this whole trip in motion never existed. The story of
the wager between two men, the ten thousand prize to
her if she accomplished this goal, and the five thousand
dollar earnings requirement was one that Annie told everywhere she went,
(28:38):
and it seemed to shift and grow and change along
the way. At some stops she told people that she
was forbidden, as part of this bet, from speaking any
language but English, and in other places she claimed that
she had to forego taking any work as a journalist,
since that was already her profession, and that using that
to make the five thousand dollar requirement would be considered cheating.
(28:59):
The first appearance of the story in a newspaper was
in February of eight nine four, with the headline that
read a woman to rival Paul Jones. Paul Jones was
a fake name adopted by a young man named E. C.
Peiffer was someone who had claimed that just a couple
of weeks earlier, that on a wager he would walk
(29:19):
around the world in a year. That enterprise had already
fallen apart and had been revealed as fake when this
second story hit the news. The article in the Boston
Daily Globe didn't mention Annie by name, but described a
young woman who, like her, was in her twenties, worked
for the papers, and was going to make a trip
by bicycle around the world in fifteen months on a wager. Yeah,
(29:41):
it's one of those things where because she did work
in the newspaper industry, it's entirely possible that she finagled
some connections to have this story place. The two businessmen
that were allegedly backing this wager were never clearly identified.
Sheep spat out a couple of names here and there,
and sometimes names appeared in various a articles, but no
one ever took responsibility for this huge bet, And even
(30:04):
when the story was breaking and Annie was wildly popular,
there were already articles that questioned the veracity of this
whole thing. Still, Annie ignored all of this and carried
on with her plan, although it seems like it was
maybe a plan entirely her own and no one else
was ever involved. She never, for example, gave any proof
of receipt of that ten thousand dollar payment, she just
(30:27):
stated to the press that she had received it in
the payment had been made. Also, Annie Kopchovsky had been
living a pretty mundane life at the time this whole
thing started. With plenty of high profile members of the
women's movement at hand in Boston at the time. It
would have been really random for Annie, who wasn't particularly
active in that movement in any sort of official capacity,
(30:48):
to somehow find herself at the middle of this high
stakes wager over the matter of women's equality. But all
the various aspects of her story were really enticing to
the press and to the readers. The wager, the additional
earnings requirement, the time limit, and everything suggests that this
was really very carefully crafted. In October, so after her
(31:11):
trip was over, a story ran in the New York
Sunday World detailing Annie's entire adventure, and the byeline read
Nellie Blig Jr. Borrowing the name of the real journalist
Nellie Bligh, who became famous for her asylum expos a
Ten Days in a Madhouse in the eighteen eighties, and
who also had taken a trip around the world, But
(31:32):
in this case, Nellie Bly Jr. Was Annie, further stoking
the fires of her own story. When Annie's trip around
the world ended and the press about it died down,
she settled into a less adventurous life again sort of.
She had a brief foray in the fall of eighteen
where she helped to capture a so called wild man
(31:54):
who had been terrorizing the town of Royalston, Massachusetts. Her
work on the case was, of course, very embellished in
her own telling, and then she moved her family to
New York, where she started writing under the nomda plume
the New Woman for a while for the papers there.
She and Max added to their family with another baby
(32:14):
in eight but Annie had a hard time adjusting to
her post travel life. She was most likely restless, and
she was the frequent recipient of correspondents from friends and
family who, believing that she had come into this great
sum of money at the end of her journey, wanted
financial help. Eventually, Annie left her family again for a while.
(32:36):
She traveled to northern California to work as a saleswoman
in a town called Yukaiah. The details of what led
her there are pretty mysterious, but in the early nineteen
hundreds she went back home to Max, and the family
opened a retail clothing store in the Bronx. Yeah, she
kind of settled into this retail life. After that. There
was a fire in the nineteen twenties that destroyed the
(32:57):
family business, so it really went on for quite some time.
But even after that, soon Annie opened another retail business.
This time she used the insurance money from that fire.
But she also had a business partner. Uh. This was
a gentleman whose name was Feldman, and apparently it was
just a stranger that she had struck up a conversation
with in a restaurant, and the two of them hit
it off and decided to go into business together. Annie's husband,
(33:20):
Max died in nineteen forty six. They've been married for
fifty eight years. Annie continued on with life and work
for the next year, and then she died after a
stroke on November eleven nine. Even today, Annie's true motivations
for what seemed like a stunt remain a matter of speculation.
She does seem to have been interested in clothing reform
(33:42):
for women, but as we said just a moment ago,
she hadn't been active in the women's movement in general.
Even taking into account her easier travels by boat and train,
Traveling the world alone was a difficult undertaking, so she
may have had myriad other reasons to go out into
the world and leave her family. Be mind, it could
have been just as simple as wanting to shake off
(34:04):
her expected role of wife and mother and have an adventure,
which she surely did, and some people still categorize her
as you know, making this incredibly feminist move in doing so,
even if this whole thing was a force in terms
of setup, and there is no doubt that she was
searching for notoriety and money as part of her drive
(34:24):
in all of this. It is one of those things
where unfortunately her correspondence does not survive, Like she was
writing letters home, but none of it has been found.
Any letters that she received on the road do not
seem to have been maintained in any sort of way.
So there are a lot of elements of guesswork in
(34:45):
terms of of what was really going on in her
head during all of this. Oh Annie, Yeah, she's sort
of a marvelous fiber um. It's a fun story, but
only part of it happened, Very little of it actually happened.
I mean, she went on a cruise around the world,
(35:05):
which sounds pretty great, but yeah, she didn't. She didn't
do all the things she claimed to do. There is
you can find online, and there is a book written
about her, which is written by I believe her What
would be her Great Nephew, which is a pretty fabulous
biography and and one of my primary sources for this.
And you can see that photograph that she staged of
(35:27):
being robbed five bandits, and there's the whole moment of like,
here's this woman. There are two men holding her at gunpoint,
like one has a shotgun, I think, and it's like, well,
who's taking the picture instead of helping you, I'm just
gonna take this photograph. This lady looks like she's in
(35:48):
peril um but she's certainly she's a little bit of
you know, a Baron Munchausen in that way in the
in the film thing not related to the disease after
or the syndrome. Rather, uh yeah, who wouldn't want to
have a fun adventure. You don't have to fib about it.
Cruise around the world sounds great. Um. I have listener
(36:12):
mail that actually just came in while we were recording.
But it's so perfectly dovetails on this that I thought
we might as well use it. It's from our listener Jessica,
and she says, how do you ladies just listen to
your trans Atlantic cruising podcasts? See it ties In and
Herd a mention of my current company, hot Bag. I
hear we are still offering cruises specifically in Europe, but
(36:32):
I work in the shipping cargo portion now called hapag Lloyd.
I wanted to send a quick note and say thanks
for making my drives to see clients always interesting and
keep up the great work. Um. That was just too
good in terms of fortuitous timing to have a company
that we have talked about related to cruising on the
show at the time when we were talking about Annie
Steamer cruise around the world, and also by total coincidence
(36:55):
at a time when many of the major I don't
know if it's all of them at this point, but
like all the major cruise lines operating from US ports
have stopped and we will see when when we are
back to cruising. If you would like to write to us,
you can do so in History Podcast at I Heart
radio dot com. You can also find us on social
media as missed in History. If you'd like to subscribe
(37:17):
to the podcast that sounds Grant, you can do that
on the I heart Radio app, at Apple podcast or
wherever it is you listen. Stuff you missed in History
Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more
podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
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