A formerrefrigerator salesman,
Floggitt had come to the attention
of Sir Carruthers Spagforth after
the former sold an ex-Crimean
war naval barge, loaded with 80
dozen ex-army ice chests, to the
Inuit inhabitants of Sir Carruthers’
fur seal farm in Svalbard in the
North Atlantic Ocean. Upon taking
up his new post in Giggleswick,
Floggitt dispatched the sales
force far and wide in search of
markets for mechanised cycles.
One such identified was the
highly specialised area of Motor
Pacing, where the stakes were
sky high and those in charge of
purchasing not adverse to
financial inducement.
In short order, a prototype
Spagopacer was prepared, and corpulent Spagforth
test rider Hugo Jessop (fourth cousin to works rider
Edgar and an experienced wind breaker) was duly
sent to Lilliput Velodrome for a series of trials.
However as the inhabitants of Lilliput rarely reached
beyond 50cm fully grown, the vacuum created by
Jessop and the Spagopacer repeatedly sucked theJawa 350s
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Edgar Jessop
Breaking wind
cyclist up the exhaust pipe and the trials were
abandoned with no sales agreement concluded.
Somewhat abashed, Floggitt tried another tactic
closer to home. Realising the penchant male athletes
possess for the fairer sex, Floggitt engaged the
services of his daughter Loda (known as ‘Front End’
to her work mates) who was the chief taster at the
neighbouring Giggleswick Sausage Roll factory,
which was conveniently another brand in the
sprawling Spagforth empire. Loda was an
accomplished motorcyclist herself, riding to work
on her Spagforth LM (Ladies’ Model) which was
somewhat unsuccessfully marketed in fetching
pastel hues with a lace cover for the saddle. At
the Giggleswick Velodrome she quickly became
an accomplished wind breaker, but the Spagopacer
proved as slow as a wet week and was constantly
caught and passed by the cyclists, thereby
negating its purpose.
Disillusioned and dejected at his repeated
failures to capture new sales horizons for
Spagforth, Floggitt accepted a redundancy
package and took up a post selling rafts to
shipwrecks around Bluff, New Zealand.When it came to tapping previously untapped markets, Spagforth Director of Sales, Francis Floggitt,
left no stone unturned.ABOVE Hugo Jessop with the prototype Spagopacer at
Lilliput Velodrome. The cyclist is 26-times National
Champion of Blefuscu, Gaston Gulliver.LEFT Loda Floggitt arriving for
work at the Giggleswick
Sausage Roll factory.