She Gave Him A Sound Thrashing
A hundred and fifteen years ago, a drunken lout tried to pull a woman off her bicycle. She instead jumped off and administered a short and presumably unexpected tutorial on the merits of Llap-Goch scientific pugilism:
This has recently been all over Twitter and Tumblr, where of course it was without attribution. However I was able to find an abridged version of the story (sans illustration and some of the details, see center column “News And Notes” about nine items down) in the August 12, 1899 supplement to the Evening Post of Wellington, New Zealand. It remains unclear whether the “insulting remarks” that triggered the incident were of the general sort that women endure all too often, or whether they were specific to the quaint but once-common notion that women on bicycles were scandalous.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=12114
Bob Nicholson does eventually give the source,the Illustrated Police News, though not the date of publication. I can’t help feeling that a “Victorianist” should be more meticulous.
In a similar vein the BBC had this yesterday:
http://www.bbc....62808
“Then,” said the Gloucester Citizen, “in a manner unmentionable to ears polite, these Amazonian women administered the punishment so familiar to English boys, and in no respect less severe or mortifying in its character.”
Should the place of the Evening Post‘s be Wellington, New Zealand?
The placenames in the article make it clear that this incident took place somewhere in the general area of Manchester (England, that is). What a news-disseminating wonder the electric telegraph was!
Whoops, what a typing flail. I’ll fix it in the article. New Zealand, indeed, was the place of publication for the article I found; and as for the place names, they are meaningless to me without further research that I didn’t do.
Eee, lad, Tyldesley is jest t’north and west of Manchester and best part of 20 miles from Bolton if tha’s goin ba Little Hulton. I thought it too obvious to mention.
I wasn’t born here but I have been in (the) Manchester for 30 years.
A young cyclist, named Maggie McConner,
ended up defending her honor.
(She took pokes at some lad,
who was acting the cad),
Then went back to “massaging” her “yawner”…