Book Excerpt: 'Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary' by Anita Anand

A prominent article in the Hackney Express and Shoreditch Observer noted in October 1895: ‘Cycling is certainly the fashion of the hour and it is generally annexing the royalty and nobility of Europe. It is patronised by Czar and Kaiser, the King of Greece and the King of Portugal, the King of the Belgians and the Grand Duke Cyril the Crown Prince of Sweden. . . The Maharanee Duleep Singh has just been completing a series of lessons in Battersea Park.’  The newspaper may have incorrectly promoted Sophia to the title of Maharani, but they were right about one of her growing obsessions. From the moment she took ownership of her shiny new ‘Columbia Model 41 Ladies Safety Bicycle’ from the American Columbia bi - cycle shop in London’s Baker Street, Sophia was hooked; and without knowing it, she was throwing in her lot with the burgeoning women’s suffrage movement.

The year after Sophia purchased her Columbia bicycle, in America the suffragette, Susan B. Anthony, was so inspired by the growing cycling craze there that she was moved to state that the bicycle had ‘done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel. . . the picture of free, untrammelled womanhood.’

Not everybody was as enthusiastic. Physicians Thomas Lothrop and William Porter argued that the practice of sitting astride a bike would damage women’s reproductive organs, and male undergraduates in Cambridge hung an effi gy of a woman on a bicycle in the city’s main square. Sophia either did not know or did not care about the controversy. She equipped her own bike with the very latest accessories, including a ‘Vigor and Co. pneumatic anatomical cycle saddle’, which claimed never to get hot, due to its V-shaped ventilated design. It was the saddle favoured by Victorian ladies of distinction since it promised to deliver ‘no vibration, no shock’, and presumably nor would it cause unnecessary excitement.

Soon Sophia became a poster girl for a growing and evangelical cycling movement. She was photographed with her Columbia 41 in Richmond Park, and in Battersea, where the most fashionable ‘wheel people’ tended to congregate. Publications such as The Sketch featured photographs of her posing stiffl y but proudly with her bicycle, declaring that she was very fond of the outdoor life ‘and simple amusements which are felt to be the birth right of every happy, healthy girl, be she Princess or peasant’.  The article went on to describe Sophia as a ‘first-rate cyclist’.

Excerpted with permission from Bloomsbury.

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