English Eccentrics & Their Bizarre Behaviour

Introduction

CONSIDERATE FELLOW that he was, Lord Berners finished building a 140-ft folly in 1935 and put up a sign warning that anyone committing suicide by leaping from the top did so at his own risk. James Burnett, a senior Eighteenth Century judge sitting as Lord Monboddo, believed that men were born with tails – a fact he said was concealed by a conspiracy of midwives who cut them all off at birth. Sir Francis Galton, using a system only he could understand, spent years compiling a map of the country showing where the most beautiful and the very ugliest women could be found. And in 1976, a former schoolmaster called Ernest Digweed who was confident of the second coming, left £26,000 which the Public Trustee ‘upon obtaining proof which shall satisfy them of His identity, shall pay to Lord Jesus Christ’.

Ostentatious or absurdly secretive, over-ambitious, daft or just utterly, utterly hopeless, eccentrics are loved by the English – which have a special fondness for their own. To us they are characters not crackpots, potty but in a good way (rather than merely mad) and whilst we might, if pressed to do so, grudgingly acknowledge that other countries produce eccentrics of their own – the French motor-car manufacturer Ettore Bugatti, for example, who insisted on special shoes being made with separate compartments for his big toes – theirs we tend to think somewhat silly, whereas our own we celebrate as the very spirit of our isles’ character and individuality.

In part this is because there is nothing more boring than being ordinary; but another reason we like them so much is that the best of them are multi-faceted rather than being simply obsessive or monomaniacs whose habits were allowed to get out of hand. The aforementioned 14th Baron Berners, for example, was also a diplomat, a painter and a noted composer of ballet scores and opera. Sir Francis Galton, besides being an exceptionally well-educated cousin of Charles Darwin’s, was the first man to explain the complexities of anticyclones and later went on to fund his own academic chair at London University. And ‘Mad Jack’ Fuller was a popular and well-regarded Parliamentarian even if these days he is remembered (if at all) for building a 40-ft steeple in a field after realising that he’d made a mistake wagering a friend that he could see the village church from his dining room window.

ECCENTRIC ENGLISH CUSTOMS

• Did you know that each spring, ignoring modernising dictats from the Eurocrats and standing at makeshift pulpit aboard a lifeboat, the vicar of Hastings traditionally blesses the sea which divides us? Or that along the coast at Rye the locals celebrate May Day by throwing hot pennies into the drink?

• The most elaborate spring ritual is that held at Dunmow, namely the famous Flitch Trials which have been held in the pretty little Essex town for the last 900 years. In these mock-judicial proceedings, complete with wigs and gowns and with a flitch or side of bacon for the winners, married couples in the parish try to convince a jury of six maids and six bachelors that they have neither been unfaithful nor exchanged a single cross word.

• Unsurprisingly the historic City of London is rich with such quirky behaviour too – for example the annual Swan-Upping Ceremony on the Thames which sees liveried members of the Vintners Company nicking the birds’ beaks to show whether they belong to the Queen or to the Company. Then there is the Doggett’s Coats and Badge Race in which, every August since 1721, newly-qualified Thames Watermen race from London Bridge to Chelsea in the hope of winning the princely sum of a fiver, a scarlet coat, some breeches, a pair of shoes and an enormous silver badge.

• Similarly on Christmas Day in Hyde Park, swimmers compete on the chilly Serpentine for the Peter Pan Cup, inaugurated by Sir J.M. Barrie in 1864 and which sometimes requires the competitors to break the ice first.

• The High Almoner, traditionally a senior bishop, still wears a towel at his waist as a reminder to Christian kings to follow the example of Christ and to echo His humility in washing the feet of others at the Last Supper. (Elizabeth I was a great fan of this, but concerns over the generally low standard of hygiene displayed by the masses meant that actual foot-washing came to an end with a more fastidious King George I in 1730.)

• Barges no longer provide the quickest way to travel from the palace at Hampton Court to Westminster or to Greenwich – although the way things are going with traffic in London that could change – but when the Crown Jewels travel by carriage they traditionally do so in the company of the Queen’s Barge Master and her Royal Watermen.

Among eccentrics, builders such as Fuller and Berners are perhaps the best known, probably because they leave behind such concrete evidence of their exploits. But eccentricity can take many other forms as well – although these days most observers recognise that to be a real eccentric requires more than just a single isolated act, however loony the act appears; Gordon East and Julie Fillipeto marrying each other in a lion’s cage, for example, or Chris and Sue Glazier from Kent who spent their wedding night driving round the M25 in a luxury coach equipped with a suitably well-appointed honeymoon suite.

The real heroes of this book (and they’re mostly English, although the Scots, Irish and Welsh do get a look-in along the way) demonstrate a lifetime’s commitment to the cause of being definitely, decidedly and irredeemably odd.

These include chaps such as Lt. Colonel Alfred D. Wintle, who sincerely held the belief that time spent anywhere but on the back of a horse was time wasted. Sir George Reresby Sitwell, who banned electricity from his household until well into the 1940s, tried to pay for his son’s Eton College education with pigs and potatoes, and attempted to stencil Chinese willow patterns on his herd of cows. A favourite of the author’s, William Buckland, Oxford’s first Professor of Geology, famously claimed – and was able to demonstrate – that he could tell wherever he was in the country simply by tasting the local topsoil.

This book is dedicated to them and to others like them – and to my children Hugo and Ivo in the heartfelt hope that they don’t end up the same way.

CHAPTER ONE

Builders

GERALD HUGH TYRWHITT-WILSON (1883–1950)

Monochrome meals and a towering genius

MAINTAINING the aristocracy’s record of rampant eccentricity until well into the Twentieth Century, the 14th Baron Berners knowingly invited a horse to afternoon tea. Called Moti, it was owned by the future Lady Betjeman, the poet laureate’s wife, and was photographed taking tea from her saucer. The Baron famously dyed the pigeons at his Oxfordshire home a variety of bright colours, taking care to use a dye that did them no harm. He did have an occasional penchant for monochromatic meals, but his fellow composer Stravinsky reported that, ‘If his mood was pink, lunch might consist of beet soup, lobster, tomatoes and strawberries.’ (Berners would have his unfortunate birds carefully re-dyed to match what he was eating when the need arose.) His lordship also went to the trouble of having a piano keyboard installed in the back of his Rolls-Royce, in order that his music could accompany him wherever he went. A lifelong bachelor, he equipped his whippets with diamond-studded collars.

Despite such exertions on his part – not to mention a busy professional life as a diplomat, composer and writer – it was Berners’ passion for building which really put him on the map, particularly when a distant but vociferous neighbour objected at length to his plans to build an isolated 140-ft folly tower of his own design on a corner of his Farringdon estate.

The gentleman in question, a certain Admiral Clifton-Browne, objected to it on the grounds that the proposed tower would spoil the view from his own house. When Berners, conducting his own defence, suggested that Clifton-Browne would be able to see his tower only with the aid of a telescope, the old sea-dog indignantly pointed out that being a retired admiral he naturally never looked at the world through anything else. Capt. Salty went to court to prove his point too, but in 1935 Berners finally won the day – despite defending his tower on the grounds that ‘it will be entirely useless’. When his pride and joy was at last completed, he put up a sign warning that Members Of The Public Committing Suicide From This Tower Do So At Their Own Risk.

Around the estate he erected numerous equally idiosyncratic signs including some advising trespassers that stray dogs would be shot and that cats would be whipped. And whilst far from reclusive, he was known to go to very great lengths indeed to secure a private compartment when travelling by train.

Apparently his most successful ruse was dressing up with dark glasses and a black skullcap before leaning out of the window and beckoning passers-by to join him. If this didn’t work – and presumably it did most of the time – he would pull a giant thermometer out of an inside pocket and, with an increasingly distressed expression on his face, proceed every few minutes to take his temperature. Understandably unnerved by the likely implications of his behaviour, most fellow travellers found somewhere else to sit pretty soon – which of course was his Lordship’s intention all along.

WACKY TOWN PLANS WHICH NEVER QUITE MADE IT

• Many of the country’s best-known landmarks were conceived to be quite different from how we see them today. It was originally proposed, for example, that Lord Nelson stand not at the top but at the foot of his column, as once he had stood before the mast. One of Wren’s initial sketches for St Paul’s Cathedral had a huge pineapple on top of the stately dome. (The exotic fruit was all the rage at the time, having just been introduced from the West Indies.) In 1918, the American shopping magnate Gordon Selfridge envisaged a square tower to crown his famous Oxford Street store that was so massive it would have caused the entire edifice to collapse under its weight.

• An Irish MP, Colonel (later Sir) Frederick Trench, spent decades lobbying for a number of completely barmy schemes including one to build a giant pyramid covering the whole of Trafalgar Square and another for an immense new royal palace. Approached along an avenue several hundred feet wide, and stretching from the City to Hyde Park, the latter would have required the demolition along the way of Covent Garden, the Crusaders’ ancient Temple Church and much of the West End. Oddly enough the planners weren’t having any of it.

• Equally, it could surely have been only fantasy for the Greater London Council in 1967 to consider running twin overhead passenger monorails to run down the middle of Regent Street. Or indeed for Charles Glover in 1931 to propose the construction of his novel King’s Cross Aerodrome, a giant six-spoked wheel half a mile in diameter and balanced on top of the existing railway station. Glover’s idea was for aircraft to land on the three runways made up by the six spokes, although what happened to them if they overshot hardly bears thinking about.

• Nor was the aforementioned Trench alone in having designs on the very Heart of Empire. John Goldicutt, having failed to oust Nelson’s likeness from Trafalgar Square in favour of his own immense statue of William IV, proposed filling the square with a replica Roman colosseum which rose four or five storeys high. Goldicutt claimed this vast eliptical warren would provide a suitably grand home for the Royal Academy as well as various learned societies of literature, science, astronomy and geology. Happily, and as he had at Trafalgar, Nelson prevailed and stands there still.

• In the 1880s, a chap called John Leighton seriously suggested redrawing the boundaries of every London borough so that each one would be hexagonal. The idea was to stop cabbies overcharging. A century earlier, a House of Commons Committee spent several days considering a barely credible plan to straighten the River Thames. This scheme’s sponsor, one Willey Reveley, proposed to dig a new channel nearly a mile long in order to save ships wasting time sailing round the Isle of Dogs.

• And still on the river, that most respected engineer Robert Stephenson approved plans for the Thames Viaduct Railway, a giant latticework of steel enabling trains to run down the centre of the river. Then an architect called Harry Newton suggested building a pair of massive mid-stream islands there instead to accommodate new government offices, the central law courts and some private luxury apartments. He quickly abandoned the scheme, however, after being asked how much it would cost.

• Perhaps the most extraordinary scheme, however, if only because construction work on it actually began, was Wembley’s copy of the Eiffel Tower. In 1891, the entrepreneur Sir Edward Watkin set out to ‘out-Eiffel’ the French on 280 acres of grassy north-west London he’d acquired expressly for this purpose. More than 100,000 people came to see the work in progress but the money soon ran out and for a dozen years or so the folly quietly rusted away, its scrap value estimated to be unequal to the cost of demolition. Eventually, in 1907, fewer than a dozen people turned up to see bolts of dynamite put beneath the tower’s four steel legs and the whole ensemble blown to bits. By then Watkin was long dead and today Wembley Stadium occupies the site.

• Similarly barmy schemes continue to appear. As recently as 1959 another favourite spot came close to annihilation when a Birmingham developer actually managed to secure planning permission to plonk a vast, faceless 20-storey block right on top of Piccadilly Circus. Blank and almost windowless on the one side, his squat, square tower’s only distinguishing feature was a 93-ft wide rooftop propeller – actually a revolving crane to be used for replacing the area’s traditionally garish neon advertisements. Fortunately public opinion did for it in the end, though only after a long and bitter battle.

JOHN FULLER (1757–1834)

By a bet inspired

Down in East Sussex, ‘Mad Jack’ Fuller was a more prolific builder than Berners; a substantial larger-than-life Parliamentarian who despite being rudely described by the Speaker as ‘an insignificant little fellow in a wig’ (he actually weighed 22 st) and physically ejected from the House by the Serjeant-at-Arms, was later offered a peerage – although this was immediately declined. Today in Brightling, where the pub still bears his name and arms, he is best remembered for building a gigantic 40-ft steeple in a field simply to win a wager made with a group of friends.

An admirable three-bottles-a-day man, the port-drinking Fuller made the bet after one evening insisting that he could see the spire of St Giles at Dallington from his windows at Brightling Park. On discovering the following morning that he could not, he took prompt steps to remedy the situation – and thus to win the bet – by having a replica of the spire built on a spot where it could indeed be seen from his dining room.

As it happens, this was to be just one of