Croggy on facts

I WRITE in my capacity as an alternative cyclist – I catch the bus. To continue, have any readers ever had a croggy or given one?

It’s not a word that inhabits a dictionary near me, although it was an oft-encountered expression and experience in my boyhood. It’s slang for a precarious and potential painful lift, balanced on the crossbar of a boy’s bicycle.

Indeed, the word may be derived from crossbar.

This horizontal section of the bike frame would be offered to a prospective passenger as an uncomfortable seat for a ride of modest duration.

So a croggy is a wobbly lift on a bike, or was. How well I remember that plaintive plea of my distant childhood “give us a croggy”.

Although boys croggied boys, generally the preferred passengers were girls. Do any readers have any printable memories or stories to share – tales of romance, perhaps, or medical emergency?

How fitting if croggying and that other noble art on two wheels, slow bicycle racing, or the even more challenging three-legged slow bicycle racing, were to be revived and reintroduced in York next year as a spin-off attraction during the Tour de France.

Derek Reed, Middlethorpe Drive, York.