Introduced in the 1880s, the safety bicycle permitted women who dared use it considerable freedom, no longer constrained by how far they could walk.103 Flora Thompson extolled the
exhilaration of ‘defying space and time by putting what had been a day’s journey on foot behind one in a couple of hours!’ With just a tinkling bell and a wave, young women sped past gossip-prone acquaintances by whom, on foot, they would otherwise have been ensnared.104
In 1915, Richard le Gallienne spelled out the debt women owed to the bicycle: ‘That
apparently innocent machine’ allowed a woman to ‘go where she pleased’ and, significantly, ‘with whom she pleased’, ending the ‘old system of courtship’, exchanging the ‘chill drawing- room’ for the ‘open road’ and the (enticing-sounding) ‘whispering woodland’.105
Between the wars, youth hostels, cheaper bicycles and more practical dress codes for women fostered the popularity of cycling. WW2 petrol restrictions and crowded public transport further encouraged cycling as a universal means of transport. In 1941 few fourteen- to seventeen-year-old working-class girls considered cycling as a leisure pursuit, compared with
101 Margaret J.; Joyce W., BW30; BW31; June K. 102 June K., interview.
103 Marilyn Bonnell, ‘The Power of the Pedal: The Bicycle and the Turn-of-the-Century Woman’,
Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 14, ii (1990), 215-39.
104 Flora Thompson, Candleford Green, Lark Rise to Candleford: a trilogy (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1943; London: Penguin Books edn, 1973), pp. 477-78.
164 the cinema or dancing, but by the late 1940s, Jephcott noted a ‘cycling craze’ among a large proportion of girls.106
Cycling facilitated attending social events, avoiding reliance on public transport or parents.107 A
1949 survey cited cycling as a liberating force in terms of picking up men: ‘a cycle was regarded as essential for making street encounters, since it is quite in order to pick up boys if one is on a bike – an altogether different matter from going after them on foot.’108 This
comment is difficult to comprehend unless the encounter is visualised, the bicycle affording the opportunity to slow down without actually stopping, conferring a greater measure of autonomy than walking.
Cycling offered an excuse to pause, dally and exchange a few innocent but possibly flirtatious words while showing off one’s figure, one leg stretched to tiptoe on the ground, the other bent with the foot still on the pedal, affording the option of escape. Pedalling off might be envisaged should the appeal of the encounter wane, should the object of interest attempt an over-familiarity, or in the event of the appearance of a third party who might witness – and judge – the encounter. Nora R. demonstrated this technique in April 1947, out cycling with a girlfriend: ‘Felix and another POW were walking along the pavement and we stopped cycling and it just started from there.’ They were subsequently able to meet secretly because, as she put it, ‘I had a bicycle (who didn’t then!)’.109 Cycling home one summer evening in 1947,
Margaret S. was stopped by a young man who asked for a light. She realized he was foreign, but not that he was a German POW. ‘We got talking […]. It was like love at first sight.’ They
106 Jephcott, Girls, p. 115; Jephcott, Rising, p.56; Pearl Jephcott, Some Young People (London: Allen and
Unwin, 1954), p. 58.
107 BW11, correspondence. 108 Jephcott, Some, p. 58. 109 Nora R., correspondence.
165 were both twenty-two. ‘I did not tell my family at the time, but we saw quite a lot of each other until he was transferred to another camp.’110
June K. and her sister were cycling on the wet Easter Monday 1947 to collect their father’s newspaper. June’s bicycle transformed in a matter of moments from a means of escape from the enemy to that of pro-actively flirting with one. The bicycle chain had come off after passing two German POWs. In a panic,
I’d got the chain back on and we cycled on and then I thought, oh gosh, he was gorgeous, I wish I hadn’t done that! So I hooked it off with my foot and of course they caught up with us and he said, ‘Oh, can we help?’ They couldn’t speak very much English! But [we] walked up the road together and he asked, would I meet him?
At her village youth club, another teenager encountered an attractive German POW, on his knees teaching enthusiastic small boys to box. She described how – fortunately – the lights on her bike were not working, so he pushed it home for her. 111
Bicycles offered opportunities to make distant assignations with prisoners, free from neighbourhood constraints. One source described how she and a friend borrowed bikes for two German POWs they had met, to go off for picnics, unknown to their parents. In February 1947, when sixteen-year-old Jillian R.’s RAF boyfriend had just been posted to Iraq for two years, she met a German POW at a dance. He was billeted ten miles away, but she cycled to meet him once a week. Constrained in the street to only exchanging a few words with the German POW who had retrieved her purse, Joyce S. started cycling on Saturday afternoons in spring 1947 to fields about a mile from his camp. ‘He walked there and for about half an hour we could talk and I took fruit and chocs (my ration), and cakes.’ BW11 cycled to local dances with her friend, then on to secret dates with the German POW she met working on a farm.112
110 Margaret S., correspondence. 111 BW04, correspondence.
112 Dorothy H., correspondence; Jillian R., correspondence; Joyce S., correspondence; BW11,
166