In September 1895, a 20-something American mother-of-three named Annie Londonderry became the first woman to ride a bicycle around the world. Except her name was not Londonderry and she hadn’t pedalled nearly so far as she’d led everyone to suppose. She was a brilliant – and unabashed – self-publicist, who briefly turned herself into one of the first ersatz celebrities of modern times. Returning to her family in Boston after 15 months in the saddle, she soon faded into obscurity and would have remained there had her great-grandnephew – Massachusetts-based Peter Zheutlin – not decided to investigate her epic story. “Annie was an outstanding achiever, but she had a rather casual relationship with the truth,” says Zheutlin, who published Around the World on Two Wheels – Annie Londonderry’s Extraordinary Ride in 2007, three years after embarking on his quest. “Her accounts of her odyssey were often wildly inconsistent. In a single day she told one reporter she had cycled overland to China from India, and another that she’d gone by steamer. She variously claimed to be an orphan, a lawyer, a medical student, an accountant and an heiress – and she didn’t always own up to being married either.” Born in Latvia (then part of the Russian Empire) in 1870, Londonderry emigrated to the United States with her parents five years later. Her real name was Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, but she changed it at the start of her cycling trip, after brokering a sponsorship deal with the New Hampshire-based Londonderry Lithia Spring Water Company. Londonderry gave it out that two wealthy businessmen had wagered US$10,000 that no woman could cycle round the world, as Briton Thomas Stevens had done the previous decade. What’s more, she had to complete the trip in 15 months, and earn US$5,000 along the way. “It’s virtually certain that she made up the story about the wager to sensationalise her trip,” writes Zheutlin. “She was in search of personal fame and fortune, but she also unconsciously took up the mantle of women’s equality.” Setting out from Boston, Londonderry made her way to New York via a circuitous route before sailing for France. She swapped her 19kg Columbia bicycle for a Sterling that weighed half as much, and sensibly exchanged the voluminous skirts that women were accustomed to for bloomers (loose-fitting trousers, gathered at the knee), which were deemed rather daring and guaranteed her a rapturous reception from those she encountered on her journey from Le Havre to Marseilles. Londonderry was hired to promote a bicycle exhibition in Paris and she delivered lectures, despite speaking only a few words of French. She later wrote, in an article for the New York World , “Not one in a hundred could understand me, but every few minutes I would shout, ‘ Vive La France ’. Then how they did cheer. I found out what they liked and gave them plenty of it.” Zheutlin adds a wry comment to his bestselling biography: “This would be Annie’s modus operandi throughout her trip – she knew how to win over both a crowd and a single reporter, and this type of showmanship contributed to her livelihood on the road.” For much of the rest of her circumnavigation – heading east via Aden, Ceylon (as Sri Lanka was then known), Singapore, Vietnam and Japan – Londonderry sailed rather than cycled, buttonholing newspaper reporters for a dollop of publicity whenever the opportunity arose and exhibiting herself to raise some cash. Bicycles were relatively new, and lady riders provoked astonishment, so there was no shortage of spectators, especially in Colombo, where she set out for an extended spin, as reported by an admiring Ceylon Examiner . The Singapore Free Press was less enthralled, pouring scorn on Londonderry’s claim that she would like to cycle from Singapore to Hong Kong, while The Straits Times added tartly: “We fancy she exaggerates. Some women do.” Londonderry scored her biggest success in Asia in the then French colonial city of Saigon, where an awestruck journalist for Le Courrier penned an acrostic poem of praise and she brazenly collected US$85 from a theatre audience after making a cameo appearance with her bike halfway through a performance. The adventurer landed in Hong Kong in February 1895, prompting a slightly perplexed commentary from an anonymous diarist at the Hong Kong Daily Press : “On venturing to express our disapproval of people travelling around the world without money, the young lady asked what was the good of travelling around the world with money. [She said] that with money you could do anything, but her object was to show what could be done without money. We did not try to argue the point with her.” She embarked on a similar ploy in Shanghai the following week, instructing the editor of The Celestial Empire to call at her hotel. Then, with an eye on what journalists call “good copy”, Londonderry turned her attention to the ongoing war between China and Japan, later filing a searing account of a battle around Weihaiwei (now Weihai, in Shandong province) – which she claimed to have witnessed first-hand – to the New York World. If the newspaper employed any fact checkers at the time, they must have decided that details of butchery, maiming and cannibalism – as well as of their lady correspondent being wounded and incarcerated in a freezing cell for three days – would be good for sales. “Very little of it can have been true,” says Zheutlin, pointing to shipping schedules that show it would have been impossible for Londonderry to reach the war zone before sailing to San Francisco in early March. Although Londonderry had taken some short cuts around the globe, her timing could not have been better. Primitive bicycles had made their appearance in the 1820s but by the final decades of the 19th century, improvements in safety, comfort and efficiency meant bikes had progressed from being a dangerous novelty to an inexpensive, fun way of getting about. As one of the foremost women’s rights activists of the time, Susan B. Anthony, commented, “Bicycling has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.” Rather than haring for home once she had landed in the US, Londonderry took her time. The reason appears to have been a cyclist from the San Francisco Olympic Club called Mark Johnson, who offered to accompany her. Quite why it took the couple five weeks to ride the 650km to Los Angeles has never been fully explained, although Zheutlin offers a circumspect conclusion: “The point doesn’t need to be laboured, but these were two young athletic people cycling through some of the world’s most spectacular scenery at the height of the lush and sensuous California spring.” Londonderry cycled on from LA alone, occasionally hopping on trains, spending the rest of the spring and the summer winding across the country, rarely missing a chance to deliver a fundraising lecture nor an opportunity to stretch the facts if she thought it worthwhile. In California, she had staged a photo of herself being held up by bandits, which gullible audiences lapped up as a further exploit of the adventuress gracing their humdrum community with her sparkling presence. While Londonderry’s return to Boston generated headlines around the world, there is no record of her reception by her husband and children. She dabbled in journalism for a while, before seguing back into the role of a devout Jewish wife and mother, and died in November 1947, only returning to the public eye thanks to Zheutlin’s painstaking work combing through libraries and old newspapers. “The story has since travelled far and wide and I had always expected that once the book came out I would hear from people who had some additional information or photos, but none materialised,” says Zheutlin, whose fictionalised account of his intrepid relation’s travels, Spin: A Novel Based on a (Mostly) True Story , is due to be published in June. “But the original biography has been translated into German, Italian, Korean and Czech, The New York Times ran an obituary as part of its ‘Overlooked No More’ series in 2019, and it has inspired museum exhibitions, musicals and films.” Washington-based documentary maker Gillian Willman came across Londonderry’s tale by chance, and immediately realised she had a potential short film on her hands. “Annie was innovative, entrepreneurial and way ahead of her time, so she scored a victory for the ‘new woman’ of her era as an independent person with her own dreams and aspirations,” says Willman, who released The New Woman: Annie “Londonderry” Kopchovsky in 2013. “She sold advertising space on her body to finance her ride – that’s normal now but back then there was no precedent. That’s what hooked me.” With few surviving photos of her subject, Willman had to use animated sequences and newspaper headlines for her documentary, but she was able to interview Mary Goldiner, Londonderry’s septuagenarian granddaughter. “The issue of idolising my grandmother was so deep in my family that I still feel guilty saying that at one time she was a terrible mother,” Goldiner admitted in the film. “Her immediate family saw her in two ways – they very much admired her but they very much disapproved of a lot of what she had done.” Willman adds: “Annie’s story is a very American story – she completely reinvented herself. Even today, what she achieved would be regarded as spectacular.”