THE BOOK OF FAMOUS ODDBALLS
Bizarre, hilarious and amazing truths about famous folk
By Dave Dutton
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 Dave Dutton. All rights reserved worldwide.
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Contents
4. Kings and Queens of England and Britain
How much do you know about famous people? Here is a questionnaire relating to the famous folk in this book. You shouldn’t know the answers to more than a couple of them. If you do, congratulations: you have a laudatory taste for the uncommon or you’re Stephen Fry.
PS The answers are towards the end but don’t look until you’ve read the book.
1 Who shocked Queen Victoria by jumping out from under a table in the nude?
2 Which English king was used as a salt-cellar?
3 Which so-called sex expert married a lesbian?
4 Which famous British prime minister had Red Indian blood in his veins and wore pink silk underwear?
5 Who was the king who discussed politics with a tree?
6 What sad end did Judy Garland have in common with King George II?
7 Which Roman ruler brought out a law sanctioning farting at the dinner table?
8 Who was the French wit who ate the contents of his chamber-pot?
9 Which famous English queen was a flasher?
10 Which great French emperor had his penis stolen?
11 Which romantic poet thought he had elephantiasis?
12 Which eminent Victorian artist tried to suffocate an old woman by sitting on her chest?
13 Which famous English poet had sex with a monkey then ate it?
14 Which American president is now an angel in the Vatican?
15 Which famous explorer died of piles?
16 Who was the German ruler who bit his uncles’ legs?
17 Which author of one of the world’s most famous children’s stories enjoyed taking photographs of young naked girls as his hobby?
18 Which British prime minister whipped himself before and after visiting brothels?
19 Which British monarch had his wife’s lover murdered and stuffed under her floorboards?
20 Which birth control pioneer thought all men should wear kilts and didn’t know what masturbation was until she was twenty-nine?
They are shot at, spat at, slandered, preyed upon by cadgers and thieves; punched, poked, prodded, pawed and pestered in public; hounded, told lies about, live in fear of having their offspring kidnapped; are the subject of envy and jealousy; have eggs and custard pies thrown at them; are accosted frequently by people they’ve never seen before; have their private lives paraded in the newspapers; get asked to open church bazaars and have people they’d rather forget fling their arms round them and tell embarrassing tales about them on Twitter. Who are these poor beleaguered individuals?
The famous
What is fame?
‘The advantage of being known by people of whom you yourself know nothing and care even less’, said Stanislas Leszinski. Who he? A King of Poland who lived from 1677 to 1766. (See, you’ve forgotten him already).
Harassed on all sides, yet striving for a wider affection, some go through all manner of hell and humiliation to achieve that state known as being famous.
Some would even kill for that dubious honour. In the wake of the assassination attempt on President Reagan and the tragic gunning-down of John Lennon, people took to wearing tee-shirts with the impassioned plea ‘DON’T SHOOT ME - I’M NOT FAMOUS’.
Incidentally, if you think that shooting a head of state to gain fame is a modern phenomenon, it’s not. A twenty-year-old Saxon by the name of Von der Sulhn was arrested in Paris and confessed that it was his intention to kill Napoleon: thus immortalizing his own name by linking it forever with that of the illustrious French emperor. The fact that they are too pathetic to become famous by more creative or worthier schemes seem to escape them. They end up as objects of scorn and derision.
Once achieved, what is this fame? ‘Men’s fame is like their hair which grows after they are dead — and with just as little use to them’, opined George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham (1628—1687). Surely you’ve heard of him?
For Alexander Pope and other successful poets before and after I should imagine, it meant mounds of poems sent to his home by hundreds of poetasters seeking his advice. It drove him to distraction as did the unwanted manuscripts received by Sir Walter Scott (see text) who was plagued by rubbernecking sightseers, including stacks of American tourists, at his home. On one day alone no less than sixteen parties of visitors asked to be shown round his house.
Even Wordsworth had a constant flow of uninvited pests at his Rydal Mount home. No wonder he did most of his composing alfresco (also see text).
When asked by a visitor to be shown to Wordsworth’s study, a servant took him to the library and said: ‘This is the master’s library but he studies in the fields.’
Oh yes, it’s all very well being famous for them as wants to be, but how many of us would like, when we die, to have hairs snatched from our beards as souvenirs or be used as a salt-cellar, as befell one poor soul in this book?
Within the covers of this book, I guarantee that you will find some amazing, amusing and shocking facts about famous folk: facts your history teacher never taught you.
I’ve sleuthed beneath the public façade to find out what the golden lads and lasses were really like: their bizarre behaviour, their tastes in sex, their oddball habits and their strange little ways. For instance, Tennyson’s poems I can take or leave but the fact that he used to do impressions of a man on the lavatory fascinates me, both in the imagery that it conjures up in my mind’s eye and the little insight it provides into Tennyson’s lighter side.
You too need never be stuck for an answer in conversational one-upmanship. You may not know a great deal about the social and national ramifications of the English Civil War, but I guarantee you’ll knock ‘em dead when you sally forth with: ‘Ah yes, but did you know that Charles the First had rickets?
I’ve had a lot of fun researching this book and I hope that you will have as much fun in reading it and finding out about the little frailties and foibles of the famous.
Henry Thoreau said that ‘Our admiration of a famous man lessens upon our nearer acquaintance with him; and we seldom hear of a celebrated person without a catalogue of some of his weaknesses and infirmities.’
This could be the catalogue he was talking about. Dip into it and laugh but before you laugh too loudly, just ask yourself this: would you like your little imperfections and idiosyncrasies made known to a wider public?
No? Then the chances are that if they aren’t, it’s only because you’re not famous.
Dave Dutton
Boets and Bainters (and Penmen in General)
Wherein we meet…Dylan the dog…Charles Kingsley and his postponed honeymoon…Dr Johnson under the lash…Wordsworth sans teeth…Swinburne and his monkey lover…Mrs Whistler’s son…Tennyson and his odd impersonations…Voltaire’s shocking repast…and so to bed with Sam Pepys and what he got up to while he was there.
‘I hate all Boets and Bainters.’ King George I of England
Dylan Thomas, Welsh poet
was frequently to be found crawling around on his hands and knees, barking loudly — under the impression that he was a dog. Once, claiming he’d got rabies, he terrorized a crowded hotel with his canine capers, which ended when he scampered outside and chipped a tooth while biting a lamp-post. He performed the same doggy antics in public houses, often biting people on the legs and bottom.
In America for a lecture tour, a woman who asked him to read to her from a book of his poems screamed when he promptly dropped to his knees and stuck his head up her skirt.
At Cambridge University, he was once seen doing his impression of a dog under a table and was kept happy by the occasional pat on the head.
His imagination tended towards the bizarre. He often wondered what it would be like to eat a dried eyeball sandwich or one with a filling of honey and mouse.
He contemplated what it would feel like to lie naked in a bath while white mice crawled all over him.
The first poem that he ever sold to a newspaper :‘His Requiem’, wasn’t written by him at all even though he had claimed the authorship. He had copied it from a comic called The Boys’ Own Paper and sent it off in his own name.
The plagiarism only came to light in 1971 when The Sunday Times published it as Thomas’s and an eagle-eyed reader pointed out that it had in fact been written by a lady named Lillian Gard, who specialized in writing for children’s magazines.
Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies author and Queen Victoria’s chaplain
was a theologian, canon of Westminster and a racist. He described blacks as ‘ant-eating apes’ and Irishmen as ‘white chimpanzees’. He also felt that the wrong side had won the American Civil War.
A visit to a prostitute while a student seems to have filled him with long-lasting feelings of guilt about sex. While working as a curate in Hampshire, he was separated from his bride-to-be, Fanny. In penitence for impure thoughts he went into a wood, took off all his clothes and lay naked on a bed of thorns: which tore his flesh from head to foot. He also fasted and slept on the floor.
He asked Fanny to refrain from intercourse for a month after they were married in 1844 on the basis that by so doing, they would be giving their lovemaking such sanctity that they would be able to make love without interruption when they eventually reached Heaven.
Instead of making love, they learned German. Their daughter, Rose Georgiana, was born ten months exactly after the wedding.
For his book on Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, he drew his own illustrations, which consisted mainly of nude women being tortured.
He suffered from a very bad stammer.
He thought that blood sports should be encouraged and that killing animals was ‘delightful’.
Honoré de Balzac, French novelist
was a short, fat glutton. Once, at a single sitting, he ate 100 oysters, 12 cutlets, 2 partridges, a duck, a sole, 12 pears and several puddings for good measure.
Lewis Carroll, author
was obsessed with little girls and enjoyed taking photographs of them with no clothes on (the girls, that is). The artist E. Gertrude Thomson, who used naked child models, provided him with the children who posed in the nude for him. Most were below the age of puberty.
On returning from his holidays, he always made a careful note of all the young girls he had met there.
His most famous book was originally entitled: Alice’s Adventures Underground, then Alice’s Hour in Efland and Adventures in Wonderland before Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was settled upon.
When he took up first-aid, he went to watch a man having his leg amputated to reassure himself that, in an emergency, he wouldn’t faint at the sight of blood.
The Dean of Christ Church’s daughter, Alice Liddell, for whom the book was written, unsentimentally sold the original manuscript which had been given to her by Carroll. It raised £15,000 at Sotheby’s in 1928, when Alice was seventy-six years old.
Edward Lear, nonsense-verse writer
was subject to epileptic fits, which he believed to be caused by his inability to stop masturbating.
He gave drawing lessons to Queen Victoria.
He caught syphilis as a young man in London and this seems to have put him off women for life. He later became a homosexual.
Doctor Samuel Johnson, dictionary-compiler
was, incredible though it may seem, into flagellation and bondage. The old boy had a set of padlocks and fetters in which he allowed himself to be confined while his good friend Mrs Hester Thrale, a brewer’s widow, applied the rod. As with so many who delight in the kiss of the whip, he had been thrashed as a boy: in his case, by a sadistic head master at Lichfield Grammar School.
Mrs Thrale may have been an unwilling partner in the bondage sessions. She wrote him a letter ending with the words: ‘Do not quarrel with your Governess for not using the rod enough.’ A letter from him to her contained the following: ‘I want you to hold me in that slavery which you know so well how to render pleasant’ Whew! (He also liked to kneel down and kiss her foot.)
All this from an overweight, gout-ridden old chap who was blind in one eye and deaf in one ear. He had suffered from scrofula as a child and had been taken to London to receive the royal touch from Queen Anne in an attempt to cure it.
He also had a passion for cups of tea and once drank twenty-five cups, one after the other, in a house to which he had been invited.
He was nothing if not experimental. He shaved all the hairs off his arms and chest to see how long it would take for them to grow back again.
He was immensely strong. When he found a man sitting in his seat at the theatre, and the interloper refused to budge, he picked up man and chair and hurled them into the pit.
At the age of sixty, he climbed a tree which he had once climbed as a child, just to prove that he could still do it.
William Wordsworth, Lakeland poet
ironically, for one who wrote so much about flowers, had no sense of smell.
He was so depressed about his career at one time in his life that he seriously considered becoming a tramp.
On a holiday to Paris just after the French Revolution, he stole a piece of the Bastille as a souvenir.
He left a souvenir of his own behind in the shape of an illegitimate baby daughter called Caroline:the result of an affair between himself and a French girl named Annette Vallon.
The act of writing poems caused him physical pain in his side.
He terrified many a rambler and unsuspecting passer by on the moors and fells of the Lake District by his habit of composing his poems as he walked along, then booming them out loudly at the top of his voice.
Some authorities think that he may have had more than just a brotherly love for his sister Dorothy, with whom he lived for many years and who continued to be part of the household even when the poet married.
When Dorothy and he went on holiday in the West Country, the locals, on account of their strange northern accent and their habit of taking nocturnal rambles, thought they were French spies and alerted the Home Office as to their presence. This resulted in their being followed by a secret agent, who reported their every move and conversation.
He was once highly critical of the Lakes. He wrote: ‘I begin to wish much to be in town. Cataracts and mountains are good occasional society, but they will not do for constant companions.’
He was in the habit of taking his false teeth out in the evening, causing his family and visitors to have great difficulty in understanding what he was saying.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, poet
was addicted to sailing paper boats on ponds and large puddles. Whenever he came to a suitable stretch of water, he would fold up pieces of paper in the shape of a boat and float them lovingly round and round. If he couldn’t find a piece of paper, he would take a large banknote out of his pocket and use that.
While on holiday at Lynmouth, he devised eccentric methods of disseminating his radical broadsheet Declaration of Rights. He popped copies into bottles and threw them into the sea. He also sent them out in little miniature boats and small hot-air balloons made out of silk globes with a little wick underneath.
He was extremely clumsy. He was always tripping up and falling over carpets, lawns and down stairs. Climbing up the stairs, he would frequently slip and bruise his nose and lips against the upper steps.
He delighted in terrorizing small children by telling them scary stories or pretending to be a monster.
During his schooldays at Eton, he tried to raise the Devil with the aid of a skull and he gave his housemaster an electric shock by wiring his doorknob up to a machine that generated electricity.
He once fled from a room in which Lord Byron was reciting poetry after seeing a vision of a woman with eyes instead of nipples.
He was a lifelong hypochondriac and sleepwalker. In 1813, he fancied he had caught elephantiasis (a disease in which parts of the body become extremely large and swollen). He compared his skin with other people to see how far the condition had advanced. At a country dance, he went so far as to walk along a line of young girls feeling their breasts to see (so he said) if they had contracted it too.
Algernon Charles Swinburne, poet
enjoyed being whipped by prostitutes in St John’s Wood, London. His taste for such pleasures was first aroused by the numerous bare-bottomed floggings he received at Eton.
His poetry is full of flagellatory themes. One of his longest poems is entitled ‘The Flogging Block’ by Rufus Rodworthy, with annotations by Barebum Birchingham.
Whilst living on the Isle of Wight, he had sexual relations with a monkey, which he dressed as a woman. When it became jealous of a young man friend and tried to bite him, he had it grilled and served for lunch.
When he lived with the painter Rossetti at his house in Chelsea, he caused his host great embarrassment by sliding down the banister stark naked into a room full of people and walking round the house on several occasions in a similar state of undress.
He once had an epileptic fit in the artist Whistler’s studio and had to be revived by none other than Whistler’s mother.
When agitated, he displayed some strange mannerisms, such as holding his arms stiffly by his side and waggling his fingers, or jerking his legs wildly in all directions.
Rossetti, worried that Algernon had never slept with a member of the opposite sex, bribed the five-times wed actress Adah Menken £10 to seduce the poet. After spending the night with Swinburne, she gave Rossetti the money back saying: ‘I can’t make him understand that biting’s no use.’
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, pre-Raphaelite painter
liked animals: not just the odd Towser or Tabby, but a whole menagerie, which he kept in his backyard at Chelsea. It consisted of squirrels, hedgehogs, peacocks, owls, a raccoon, wallabies, kangaroos, mice, marmots and an armadillo, which burrowed underground to surface in the kitchen of the house next door. This caused a great affright among the servants, who screamed and ran out thinking that the Devil was rising out of the bowels of hell.
He once owned a wombat which regularly ate at the dinner table but suddenly went missing. It was later found dead in a cigar-box.
He was strongly attracted to girls with red or blonde hair and would pounce on them in the street and ask them to sit for him. He painted his red-haired wife Lizzie as the drowned Ophelia while she was lying in a water-filled tin bath.
When Lizzie died in 1862, probably by her own hand, as a romantic gesture he placed all his poems under her hair in the coffin. Seven years later, after being urged to have them published, he found he could not remember the words. Consequently, he had his wife’s corpse exhumed from its grave in Highgate Cemetery, and the poems were retrieved and disinfected.
Leonardo da Vinci, painter and all-round genius
was fascinated by ugly people and would follow them around all day.
He was a homosexual who, at the age of twenty-three, had been brought before the court in Florence accused of sodomy.
To further his knowledge of anatomy, he dissected patients who had died at his local hospital, sometimes only hours after talking to them on their deathbed.
James Abbott McNeil Whistler, American artist
was a racial bigot — he hated blacks and Jews. On a ship bound for England from South America, he took exception to a black man on the grounds of his colour and for no reason kicked him across the deck of the ship and down some stairs. The captain confined him to his cabin for the rest of the voyage.
He was highly affected in his dress. He carried two umbrellas, one black, one white, and had pink bows on his shoes.
When invited out to dinner, he was prone to fall asleep at the table.
Fond of brawling, he once knocked his brother-in-law through a plate-glass window.
When he got into serious debt in London, he worked his charm on the bailiffs who called at his house in Tite Street to serve writs. Instead, they found themselves serving Sunday breakfast to him on promise of future payment for their services.
As old age advanced, he lied about his age and wore make-up. He also wore black velvet pantaloons and diamond buckles on his shoes, and was fond of white suits topped with a white stove-pipe hat. He sported a monocle, which he dropped from his eye to emphasize a witty remark.
As he grew even more impoverished, after bailiffs took his furniture, he would paint a picture of the missing item of furniture on the floor in its place.
The correct title of his most famous portrait, known universally as ‘Whistler’s Mother’ is ‘Arrangement in Grey and Black No 1: The Artist’s Mother’.
Alfred Tennyson, Poet Laureate
started composing lines of poetry at five years old.
As a child, he had the disquieting habit of lying flat out among the graves outside the church where his father was rector and wishing he were dead. He also fell into mysterious trances.
He had a fear of insanity and epilepsy, which ran in the family, and sometimes contemplated suicide because of it.
He was extremely short-sighted and would thrust his face into other people’s faces in order to scrutinize them closely.
He had a talent for odd pieces of mimicry, and among his various party pieces were impersonations of a man sitting on the lavatory and a bird sitting in a tree.