THIS week, I have been considering women’s underwear. It started on a visit to the bakery in Bedale where they were selling “Bedale bloomers” – round loaves of crusty bread that looked nothing women’s flappy pants.

Then, in preparation for tomorrow’s magnificent Memories, I discovered that it was the sudden popularity of cycling among women in the late 1890s that led to “bloomers” entering the English language.

In April 1899, as active women jettisoned their petticoats and long skirts , there was a lovely letter in The Northern Echo from the Rev JM Mangles, a Methodist minister from Knaresborough who had encountered an outbreak of bloomerism the previous Sunday. He passed three young ladies cycling. Two were wearing bloomers and were going well.

“They were followed by another young woman who did not wear ‘bloomers’,” he wrote. “She was coasting down the hill. There was a head wind. I need say no more… If women are to coast, they must please wear knickerbockers.”

But he added: “At the same time, I think they will do well not to cycle on Sundays for the time is not yet for ‘bloomers’ to be tolerated at church.”

Wise words indeed, but I didn’t realise that like the cardigan, the wellington, the stetson and the mackintosh, the bloomers bear the name of the person who popularised them: Amelia Jenks Bloomer.

Her surname means “ironworker” – it is from an old word “blome”, meaning iron ingot – and so it is appropriate that Steve Bloomer, an England international footballer, was signed by Middlesbrough for £750 in March 1906 and became the Ironopolis club’s leading scorer for the next two seasons.

Anyhow, Mrs Bloomer was a pioneering American journalist who, from 1849, edited The Lily, the first newspaper for women. Originally, it was a temperance paper because she believed drink was tearing families apart, but it developed into early women’s rights, including a promotion of less restrictive clothing – women were then squeezing their bodies into tiny corsets.

She wrote an article about the “Turkish trousers” being worn by similarly outspoken women, like the actress Fanny Kemble. Fanny was the niece of the famous Durham actor Stephen Kemble, who is buried in the cathedral alongside his friend, the Polish dwarf, Count Jozef Boruwlaski. Stephen had radical views – he was opposed to the slave trade – which were passed onto Fanny, who married an American plantation owner. Fanny was outraged when she discovered the conditions her husband’s slaves lived in and so added slavery to her concerns.

When Mrs Bloomer wrote about Fanny, she was inundated with requests from readers for patterns for the new trousers, which became known as “bloomers”, and they became a symbol of women’s desire for freedom and equality. This caused some men, threatened by the sight of a woman in trousers, to abuse the bloomerist wearers. This harassment caused Mrs Bloomer to stop wearing bloomers after a few years, and they fell out of fashion.

The 1890s great cycling boom proved a boon for bloomers, and their usefulness, as the Rev Mangles noted, caused their revival and brought the word back into use.

In his letter, the reverend also used the word “knickerbockers”. This was a nickname for Dutch settlers in New York who wore knee-britches, which they couldn’t pronounce properly. From knickerbockers we get “knickers”, and from Bedale I get my bread.

In bread terms, a bloomer starts as a dollop of dough free-standing in the oven. As it is not constrained by a tin, it can bloom into a nice, round shape which has nothing to do with women’s underwear, so you could say I’ve got my knickers in