Where did ‘push-bike’ come from?

Books that one often used to see in secondhand bookshops, when there were such things, were the World’s Classics editions of the novels of Constance Holme. Humphrey Milford, publisher to the University of Oxford 1913-45, put all of them into the handy blue-bound format. The Spectator gave her second novel, The Lonely Plough (1914), a short but respectful review, declaring the book to be about Lancashire farmers, even though it repeatedly makes clear that the setting is Westmorland, the county where the author lived all her life. The anonymous reviewer also said that ‘she contrives to use admirable English’.

I found it interesting that Holme used aquascutum, as people did (John Buchan for one) to mean ‘raincoat’, but she spelt it aquascutem, and then abbreviated it as ’scutem. It was surprising that OUP, or her original publishers Mills & Boon, perfectly respectable in those days, didn’t correct it. She also pictures two of her characters when ‘strenuous figures with bare knees and flapping overcoats push-biked past them’. This immediately reminded me of Orwell’s ‘old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn mornings’. John Major, when quoting the remark, had them bicycling, but biking it was.

As a verb, bike was first noticed in 1885 by Notes & Queries, the periodical that from its first issue in 1849 bore on its first page the motto: ‘When found, make a note of. – Captain Cuttle’ (a reference to Dombey and Son, published the year before). Biking is hardly used today, and push-biking never. The noun push-bike remains. I bridled when I heard it on a BBC item about that escaped prisoner from Wandsworth. It sounds demotic. If bike had been thought ambiguous, since it might mean ‘motorbike’ (as it has since 1903), then why not bicycle? At least we have not adopted the Australian pushie.