Great British Eccentrics: Part 2 Quiz

Answer: A.D. Wintle

He was only caught because he attended women only dance for the nurses before escaping.

You could fill a book with the eccentricities of Alfred Daniel Wintle (1897-1966), which is what he did in 'The Last Englishman'. For a start the wound he thought too trivial to keep himself in hospital had cost him a kneecap, three fingers, one eye and most of the use of another.

He was born in Russia to a diplomatic family and was fluent in French and German. He served in the Royal Dragoons in the Great War, winning the Military Cross and being twice mentioned in despatches. He then declared 'a private war on Germany' the day after the war ended. However, he regarded the interwar years as 'intensely boring'.

He was imprisoned in the Tower of London in WW2 for threatening a senior RAF officer with a pistol; the reason why is too complicated to go into but I recommend looking it up. Released, he resigned his commission and, crippled and functionally blind as he was, was accepted by the Secret Service on the strength of his excellent French. Captured under ludicrous circumstances (again, please look it up, I can't do it justice in a paragraph) he was imprisoned in a Vichy French jail. He made the lives of the garrison guarding him such hell that in the end they defected to the Free French en masse.

He ruthlessly pursued a crooked solicitor - one Nye - after the war, going to prison again when he removed the man's trousers in public and had him photographed. Like the bulldog, however, his bite was relentless, and Wintle became the first non-lawyer to receive a unanimous verdict in his favour in the House of Lords, causing Nye to be struck off the Legal Roll.

He notably carried a rolled umbrella with him at all times, because 'no true gentleman would ever unfurl one'.

Answer: Sea mist rolled over the course and the jockeys lost sight of each other

Not the first time one of Bottomley's get-rich-quick schemes went horribly wrong, sea fog rolled over the track and the jockeys got lost. They came in in completely the wrong order and Bottomley lost a fortune. This only came out at his 1922 fraud trial - neither race officials nor jockeys had any idea that such an enormous fix had been put in.

Horatio Bottomley, not so much eccentric as crooked with a smile, was one of the (admittedly very unpleasant) characters of British early twentieth century politics. Lawyer, financier, jingoistic journalist and fraudster, he went from an orphanage to the Houses of Parliament to, well, prison, and is probably worth a quiz on his own. He died in poverty in 1929, but not before he had lived a very full life.

Summing up well is this comment from British journalist Matthew Engel, retrieved from Wikipedia:
"...he was irredeemably, utterly, psychotically corrupt. He built a string of other businesses on nothing more than fresh air: but there were always useful and distinguished idiots on the board, so he could tell the shareholders' meeting: "I would love to pay you a dividend, but my directors won't let me." (Guardian, 30/11/99)

Answer: He disguised himself as a tree

Thomas Birch (1705-1766) is a bit of a disappointment as an eccentric, being a fairly normal clergyman with a taste for history, who wrote on a number of subjects and was at the time seen as one of Britain's most prominent scholars. His blind spot, if it can be called that, was his hobby of angling, which he enjoyed doing but does not seem to have been much of a success at.

His answer was a suit that disguised him as a tree, so he could stand at the water's edge without frightening the fish. His arms fitted through the branches and there were holes in the bark for his eyes. Needless to say, it didn't work very well; what was worse was that for a joke friends started to take picnics at his feet when he was 'treed up'.

Answer: He was drunk while giving it

Lt.-Commander Woodruffe was to give the commentary from his old ship, the battleship HMS Nelson. Unfortunately, he was snagged by some of his old crewmates and had a little too much to drink in the wardroom before he was due to give the broadcast. You can hear the result here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hYIGte7fBs

He gave the English language the phrase 'lit up' for drunk, as in the 1942 hit 'I'm going to get lit up when the lights go on in London'.

After the war, and retired from the Navy, he was working as football commentator at an FA Cup match when he announced in the last minute of extra time that if the home team scored now he would eat his hat - seconds before they did just that. The local paper gave him a hat made of cake, which he duly ate.

Answer: The Protein Man

For twenty five years this retired storeman paraded the busy London thoroughfare carrying a board that read (Capitals intended): 'LESS LUST BY LESS PROTEIN: MEAT FISH BIRD: EGG CHEESE PEAS BEANS' (and tacked onto the bottom of the board as if it had come to him as an afterthought) '- AND SITTING'

The thrust of his argument was that protein caused a build up of lust that could cause marital discord if left unchecked, and by avoiding the foods he named (and presumably sitting, too) we would have more time to concentrate on our hobbies, which in his case was walking up and down a busy London shopping street dressed in green overalls to absorb the ready quantities of spit he attracted, holding a signboard and selling copies of his imaginatively punctuated pamphlet, 'Eight Passion Proteins - With Care'. I bought a copy from him myself in 1988 when I was working in London and curse the day I lost it moving home. (In my defence I would just say that it was quite easy to mistake it for waste paper). He may not have meant his beliefs to be funny, but by George they were.

Answer: Spike Milligan

The late, great Spike Milligan was born in Poona, India, where his father was a senior NCO. he grew up in various places in south east London before serving in the Royal Artillery in WWII. He was wounded and suffered shell shock during the battles around Monte Cassino. Assigned to rear area duties, he wandered into show business, entertaining the troops as part of a comedy jazz trio, and on return to the UK, met up with ex-RAF clerk Peter Sellers and another ex-Gunner, Harry Secombe, to write the legendary Goon Show, which had influence on every British comedy form from Monty Python to the Alternatives of the Eighties. His 'Q5' series is often overshadowed by its contemporary, Monty Python, but in my opinion had as much of a legacy as well as being a lot more down to earth.

All through his life, Spike suffered from severe bipolar disorder, which blighted his first marriage and was responsible for several stays in mental hospitals. For all this, he was a loving father, a committed environmentalist and peace campaigner and a comedian of rare talent, a man who could probably have reduced a crowd to laughter reading bus timetables.

He died in 2002, leaving the world a less funny place. A clown to the end, his gravestone reads 'Duirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite', Irish for 'I told you I was sick'. RIP Spike.

Answer: In pitch darkness with axes neither man could lift

When I first read of this as a teenager (in Stephen Pile's 'Book of Heroic Failures' - do yourself a favour and get a copy) I thought it must be made up. Finding the completed works of Dr Petty in my local university library many years later, it turned out to not only true but stranger even than Pile made out.

Petty was a retiring, somewhat donnish character who fell foul over a point of religion and politics - the same thing in Civil War-era London - some time in the Commonwealth. Sir Heirome was a serving soldier, what we would now think of as a jock or bonehead, who had a reputation as a killing gentleman. Having backed Petty into a corner over their argument, Petty employed his wits to have the duel take place in a large and pitch black cellar, the weapons felling axes almost too heavy for a man to lift. The exact course of the combat is lost to history (well, it was dark) but Sankey walked out of the duel in disgust, conceding the field of honour and thus the point to Petty.

Answer: Dug large tunnels

William Lyttle (1931-2010) or 'The Moleman of Hackney' was a well-known character in De Beauvoir Town on the borders of Hackney and Islington. In an interesting echo of the 5th Duke of Portland in the last quiz, he spent his days digging, eventually burrowing over twenty one-metre wide tunnels from his basement outwards, causing an estimated £350,000 worth of damage to his and his neighbour's properties (it later cost Hackney Borough Council over £1,000,000 to fill the holes with concrete). The council solved the tunnelling outbreak by rehousing him in an upper story flat. Ingenious, I'm sure you'll agree.

Asked why he had carried on his hobby for over 40 years, he answered 'I planned to tunnel under a bank and raid the vault, but by the time I got there - they'd turned it into a wine bar'.

Answer: Immense cheeses

James McIntyre (1827-1906)'The Great Canadian Cheese Poet' was a man whose love of dairy products was as huge as his actual talent was small. There is no doubting his sincerity; not with titles to his poems like 'Father Ranney, the Cheese Pioneer', 'Fertile Lands and Mammoth Cheese' and 'Prophecy of a Ten Ton Cheese'. Alas, his skill as a poet was only slightly greater than that of William Topaz MacGonagall (see previous quiz), and the poems were, even in his own lifetime, seen as laughably bad.

More interesting still, he was neither a dairy farmer nor a cheesemaker - he earned his living as a furniture salesman in Ingersoll, Ontario. He just really, really liked cheese.

(By the way, he was born in Forres in Scotland and didn't emigrate to Canada until he was fifteen, so I can stretch a point and call him British. It's my quiz anyway.) :)

Answer: Mole

As well as being one of the pioneers of modern geology, the Very Rev. Dr William Buckland DD FRS was an English eccentric of the finest kind. He had a driving ambition to eat one of every kind of animal; mole was his worst failure, as he found the taste 'repellent in extreme'. He ate the other three kinds of meat mentioned, finding crocodile 'disappointing', bear 'strong' and hedgehog 'good and very tender'.

He conducted his field research while wearing an academic gown at all times, and usually rode a black mare that had become so accustomed to Buckland's manner that it stopped automatically at quarries and waited for him to dismount and carry out his inspections. This became awkward as sometimes Buckland just wanted to get from place to place; the horse would stop nevertheless.

He caused uproar by pointing out while visiting Italy on honeymoon that the bones in the shrine of St.Rosalia in Palermo were actually those of a goat. That he was correct did not prevent him being almost lynched by an angry mob.