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Considerate fellow that he was, when Lord Berners finished building a 140-foot folly he put up a sign warning that that anyone committing suicide by leaping from the top did so at his own risk. James Burnett, a senior 18th 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. And 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 people could be found.
Ostentatious or absurdly secretive, over-ambitious, daft or just utterly, utterly hopeless, England loves eccentrics and none more than its own. We might if pressed grudgingly acknowledge that other countries produce eccentrics of a sort – like the French motor manufacturer Ettore Bugatti who insisted on special shoes with separate compartments for his big toes – but theirs we tend to think somewhat silly whereas our own demonstrate the spirit of our islands’ character and individuality.
In part this is because there is nothing more boring than being ordinary; also we like them because the best multi-faceted rather than simple obsessives or monomaniacs. 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 successfully explain the complexities of anticyclones and funded 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 for building a 40’ 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.
Now, examining scores of different lives less ordinary, this hilarious new book celebrates the likes of Lt. Colonel Alfred D. Wintle, who sincerely held that time spent anywhere but the back of a horse was time wasted, of Sir George Reresby Sitwell, who banned electricity from his household until well into the 1940s and tried to pay for his sons' Eton College education with pigs and potatoes, and William Buckland, Oxford’s first Professor of Geology, who famously claimed – and was able to demonstrate - that he could tell wherever he was simply by tasting the local topsoil.