Amazing & Extraordinary Facts About Great Britain (18 page)

Britain has produced an amazing number of extraordinary people, not all of them pleasant individuals. Some of them deserve to be better-known.

I
n the grounds of Kirklees Priory near Mirfield in Yorkshire is a grave which bears the name Robin Hood. Across the border in Derbyshire in St Michael’s churchyard, Hathersage, is the grave of Little John from which, in 1780, a thigh bone was removed which would have belonged to a man about 8 feet tall. ‘Robin Hood’s’ grave is empty but the gravestone has been moved more than once and bits of an earlier one were chewed as a supposed remedy for toothache! A medieval document records that in 1225 a fugitive called Robert Hood had goods confiscated to the value of 32 shillings and sixpence (£1.62.5p) for failing to appear in a Yorkshire court. In 1262 a similar forfeit was paid by a fugitive called Robehod in Berkshire, again for non-appearance in court. The legends of Robin Hood gathered pace in the 15th century. The best researched – that of the Scotsman John Mair, written in 1521 — claimed that Robin Hood was outlawed in 1193, the time with which the legends traditionally associate him. The early accounts recorded the presence of Little John with Robin Hood, operating in Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire and coming into conflict with a Eustace of Lowdham who was, in reality, at various times sheriff of Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire. Robin Hood plays emerged, usually performed in the springtime, at which the Robin Hood character collected money from wealthy churchgoers for the benefit of the poor. The most authentic of all the Robin Hood characters was a renegade clergyman called Robert Stafford of Lindfield, near Haywards Heath in Sussex. Between 1417 and 1429 he led a band of robbers and, at some point, started to call himself Friar Tuck. Maid Marion first appeared in a French play of 1283 and, like Friar Tuck, became attached to the Robin Hood legend, perhaps to give what Hollywood would later call ‘love interest’. Despite the persistent Nottingham connection Robin Hood has been annexed by Yorkshire tourist and transport board which has named an airport after him just outside Doncaster.

L
ittle is known for sure about William Shakespeare’s life as a young man. He was born in 1564, married Anne Hathaway in 1582, saw the birth of a daughter, Susanna, six months after the marriage and of twins, Judith and Hamnet, in 1585. In about 1616, the year of Shakespeare’s death, a clergyman called Richard Davies claimed that Shakespeare, as a young man, had poached rabbits and deer from the Charlecote estate of Sir Thomas Lucy who had Shakespeare whipped and gaoled, prompting him to leave Stratford. Charlecote did have a rabbit warren on which deer could well have been grazing. This contemporary account was picked up by a later tradition which held that Shakespeare took his revenge by portraying Lucy as Justice Shallow in
The Merry Wives of Windsor
and lampooned Lucy’s coat of arms by referring to louses (lucys). Later in the 17th century John Aubrey, in his Brief Lives, quoted the son of one of Shakespeare’s fellow actors, Christopher Beeston, as claiming that Shakespeare had been a ‘schoolmaster in the country’. Beeston would have had no reason to lie about this. This account is supported by a persistent tradition which links Shakespeare with the Lancashire-based Hoghton family at their home near Preston, the connection with the family being a schoolmaster called John Cottom who taught in Stratford during Shakespeare’s schooldays and whose family home was near that of the Hoghtons. A Hoghton will of the time mentions ‘William Shakeshaft now dwelling with me’. The Hoghtons were Catholics and a document of 1592 records Shakespeare’s father as a recusant (refusing to take Anglican communion) while another of 1606 lists the poet’s daughter, Susanna, in the same vein. Some scholars have detected Catholic sympathies in Shakespeare’s plays (but then Hitler found things in Shakespeare’s works that he liked so perhaps that doesn’t mean too much). In 1608, while living in Stratford, Shakespeare took out a writ against John Addenbrooke for a debt. The name is unusual and a later John Addenbrooke (1681–1719) left money which founded the famous hospital which bears his name in Cambridge. This John Addenbrooke was descended from a family who lived in the West Midlands, not far from Shakespeare’s home. So perhaps Shakespeare touched the family fortunes of this benefactor.

T
he WC was invented by Sir John Harington in 1596 but he only made two: one for himself and another for his godmother, Queen Elizabeth I. In 1778 Joseph Bramah (1748–1814), a Yorkshire carpenter and serial inventor, registered a patent which incorporated improvements to the design and made it possible to mass produce it from standard components. This he began to do in a workshop in Denmark Street, close to the present site of Tottenham Court Road underground station. The device was quickly adopted by prosperous citizens and made Bramah’s fortune. Its invention is sometimes wrongly attributed to Thomas Crapper. Crapper was a Victorian businessman who in 1861 opened a plumbing business in Chelsea. His only real contribution to the development of the WC was a memorable advertising slogan: ‘a certain flush with every pull’! Joseph Bramah has many other inventions to his credit: a hydraulic press, a propelling pencil, a machine for numbering banknotes and a screw mechanism (as distinct from a paddle) for propelling ships. He also invented an ‘unpickable lock’ and offered a prize of £200 to anyone who could overcome its ingenious mechanism. The prize was eventually claimed by an American called Alfred Hobbs who managed the feat over a period of 16 days at the Great Exhibition of 1851, 37 years after Bramah’s death and 60 years after the challenge was issued.

F
rancis Bacon (1561–1626) carried out one of the earliest experiments in food preservation. Bacon was a corrupt Lord Chancellor but is remembered as one of the fathers of modern science because of his insistence that theories should be tested by experiment. His last experiment occurred in 1626 when he stuffed a chicken carcass with snow in the belief that this would prevent it from decomposing. Unfortunately he did not find out, since he died shortly afterwards of pneumonia, probably contracted during the experiment. The lesson was not lost, however, since in 1663 Samuel Pepys recorded a conversation in a London coffee house: ‘Fowl killed in December (Alderman Barker said) he did buy and, putting them into the box under his sledge, did forget to take them out to eat ‘til April next and were through the frost as sweet and fresh to eat as at first killed’. Clarence Birdseye did not come along with anything better until 1930.

I
saac Newton (1642–1727) was acknowledged by Albert Einstein as the greatest scientist who ever lived. His
Laws of Motion
are used to launch spacecraft and his exposition of the composition of white light still underpins the subject. His curiosity knew no limits. While he was developing his theory of colours he slipped a bodkin (a large needle) behind his eyeball to alter the curvature of the retina and discover its effect on the perception of colour. After this experiment he shut himself in the dark for several days to avoid the blindness that might have been expected. He later devoted much of his life to the study of the false science of Alchemy which attempted to turn base metals into gold and in support of this work developed a theory that ‘metalls vegetate’. He was not an easy man. At various points in his life he pursued feuds with his fellow scientist Robert Hooke (1635–1703) who felt that he had not received sufficient credit for information that had led Newton to formulate his Laws of Motion; and also with the Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed (1646–1719) who believed, with some reason, that Newton planned to take for himself much of the credit for the publication of Flamsteed’s
Catalogue of Fixed Stars
. His greatest dispute was with the German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) who had had the temerity to devise the calculus at the same time as Newton himself. Newton set up a committee of the Royal Society to examine the rival claims, packed it with his friends and proceeded to write the committee’s report himself. In 1696 Newton was appointed Warden of the Royal Mint with the task of reissuing the coinage which had been debased by ‘clipping’ by ‘coiners’ (snipping off bits of gold and silver and using the clippings to make more coins). He approached the task with his customary zeal and in less than three years produced twice as many new coins as had been produced in the previous thirty. He had himself made a magistrate, apprehended 28 ‘coiners’ and had many of them hanged. In 1705 he became the first scientist to receive a knighthood. Many legends attached to his name are true. In 1697 the Swiss mathematician Johann Bernouilli set two problems to the mathematicians of Europe. Six months passed without a response. He then reissued the challenge. Newton returned to his rooms after a day at the Mint, read the problem, wrote out the solutions and went to bed. The following day he posted the solutions to Bernouilli, omitting to sign the document. Bernouilli stated that he recognized Newton’s hand ‘as the lion is recognized by its paw’. The story of the apple falling from the tree was told by Newton himself in his lifetime and passed by Newton’s niece to the French writer Voltaire who, on observing the elaborate funeral for Newton in Westminster Abbey, commented that ‘the English honour a mathematician as other nations honour a king’. When he died Alexander Pope composed an appropriate epitaph: