Edgar Jessop
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A former refrigerator 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 the 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.