Amazing & Extraordinary Facts About Great Britain (20 page)

When Kitty died in 1831 Wellington showed her memory some belated affection but his closest female friend was Harriet Arbuthnot. She was his friend but not his lover and when she died she was mourned equally by Wellington and her husband Charles, a Tory minister. Charles then moved to Wellington’s home, Apsley House, and lived there until his death in 1850.

M
ost people know of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–1859), engineer of the Great Western Railway, but few know of his equally ingenious father Sir Marc Brunel (1769–1849) who invented the Tunnelling Shield. It was a cast iron frame which was placed up against the area to be excavated, thereby protecting from falling debris the labourers who worked within it, excavating the surface ahead of them. It was used to create the world’s first tunnel beneath a river, the Thames Tunnel, between Wapping and Rotherhithe. It took 18 years to build (1825–43) and was dogged by problems. These included floods which drowned several workers and nearly killed Isambard; and bankruptcy from which it was rescued by a government loan. Originally dubbed The Eighth Wonder of the World it lost sackfuls of money. It was sold in 1865 to the East London Railway so that oft-forgotten corner of the underground railway system has the distinction of being carried beneath the Thames by the world’s oldest tunnel under a river. Tunnelling shields based on Marc Brunel’s design have been used for cutting the London tube railways, the Channel Tunnel and virtually every other tunnel of any size since.

I
n the autumn of 1828 Charles Darwin (1809–1882) arrived at Christ’s College, Cambridge. It was not a promising start. He had already attended Edinburgh University to study medicine but left because he could not bear to watch operations being carried out in the era before anaesthetics. He arrived in Cambridge three weeks late, was consequently put into rooms above a nearby shop (now Boots the chemist) and unpacked his new £20 shotgun and beetle collection before setting off on a round of card-playing, drinking, hunting and gambling. The plan was for him to become a clergyman but his father and tutors despaired of him. His father wrote that he would be good for nothing but rat-catching and, having witnessed with approval a student riot, Darwin acknowledged that he could have been sent down from the university. Instead of studying theology he devoted his energy to collecting insects and attending lectures on botany and geology. The professor of botany, John Henslow, must have seen some promise in him because when Henslow was offered the post of naturalist on board HMS
Beagle
during its five-year journey round the world, he turned down the opportunity and recommended Charles Darwin instead. The result was
On the Origin of Species
, perhaps the most controversial book ever published, since it overturned all that Victorians, especially clergymen, believed about the creation of the world. But the strength of his arguments was irresistible and he was soon forgiven. In 1877 Cambridge awarded him an honorary doctorate and in 1882 he was buried in Westminster Abbey.

C
harles Dickens’s eminence as a writer is assured but his novels often reflect experiences, especially in childhood, with which he could never come to terms. Those who loved him sometimes bore the consequences. His father John was a genial and improvident man whose bankruptcy and brief sojourn in a debtors’ prison was a source of shame that Dickens only ever mentioned to two people: his wife Catherine and one close friend. His father was a model for one of his most memorable characters. Mr Micawber in
David Copperfield
, a genial and impecunious optimist whom it is impossible to dislike, is certainly based on John Dickens and reflects the son’s affection for, and exasperation with, his father. A family connection enabled Dickens to obtain a poorly paid job as a journalist and his talent soon earned him promotion to better paid work but it was in his early, straitened years that he fell in love with Maria Beadnell, the daughter of a wealthy banker and failed to win her because of his lowly status. In 1836 success came with his first major work,
The Pickwick Papers
.
By this time he had lost Maria Beadnell to another man and he married Catherine Hogarth, possibly because of a physical resemblance to Maria. The marriage was not a happy one though it produced eight surviving children. By 1855 Dickens was writing that ‘the skeleton in my domestic closet is becoming a pretty big one’. He leaked false information to the effect that Catherine was a poor mother and mentally unstable and boarded up the door between their bedrooms. Catherine was portrayed in
David Copperfield
as the simple-minded Dora Spenlow. In the meantime he had met Maria Beadnell again after an interval of 10 years and, finding her married and unattractive, made her the subject of an unflattering portrait as Flora Finching in
Little Dorritt
.
In 1857, aged 45, he fell in love with a 17-year-old actress called Ellen (‘Nelly’) Ternan. He despatched Catherine to a separate home and wrote a short story about a man who willed to death a wife whose cloying devotion he found intolerable. His relationship with Nelly was probably not consummated and was carefully concealed in his lifetime – though he had a narrow escape, in two respects, when he was travelling with Nelly in a train which crashed at Staplehurst in Kent in 1865. Ten people died, Dickens was uninjured and Nelly was spirited away from the scene. The relationship did not become known until 1934. Dickens died in 1870, still loved by Catherine. When she died in 1879 she asked her daughter to bequeath his early love letters to the British Museum ‘that the world may know he loved me once’
.

T
he life of Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) as a nurse is well known. Less celebrated are her achievements as a mathematician, though these underpinned her work in public health campaigns. Karl Pearson (1857–1936), a professor at University College, London, declared, ‘Were I a man of wealth I would see that Florence Nightingale was commemorated not only as the “Lady of the Lamp” but by the activities of the “Passionate Statistician”,’ and Florence herself wrote that statistics were ‘the cipher by which we may read the thoughts of God’. Her precocious interest in the subject dismayed her father who considered the subject unfeminine. She was largely self-taught and used her grasp of statistics to draw attention to the connection between poor housing, poor sanitation and disease. She was frustrated by the ignorance of mathematics amongst public figures, and in 1891 she wrote that ‘though the great majority of Cabinet Ministers, of the Army, of the Executive, of both Houses of Parliament, have received a University Education, what has that University Education taught them of the practical application of statistics?’ In despair at the innumeracy which she encountered she devised a ‘coxcomb’ diagram ‘to affect through the Eyes what we may fail to convey through their word-proof ears’. It was an early and sophisticated pie chart. Her greatest allies in her campaigns were Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. After lengthy interviews with the royal couple at Balmoral, the queen wrote, ‘We have made Miss Nightingale’s acquaintance and are delighted and very much struck by her great gentleness and simplicity and wonderfully clear and comprehensive head. I wish we had her at the War Office.’ When Florence was dissatisfied with the reaction she received from politicians and officials to her reports, statistics, charts and diagrams she wrote to Victoria or Albert and received replies such as the one that greeted her analysis of the demographic consequences of the plan to move St Thomas’s Hospital from London Bridge to its new home on the Albert Embankment. Prince Albert assured her that the matter ‘has received the immediate attention any communication from you would be sure to command’. She was the first woman to be elected a Fellow of the (later Royal) Statistical Society, in 1858. In 1907 she was the first woman to be awarded the Order of Merit for her work in improving the health of the nation but without her grasp of statistics she wouldn’t have been able to identify so comprehensively the underlying causes of poor health.

T
he Royal Mail dates from 1516 when Henry VIII appointed a Master of the Posts but it owes its fortune to Sir Rowland Hill (1795–1879) who in 1840, against much opposition to his ‘wild and visionary scheme’ introduced the penny post. His novel idea was that postage should be paid by the sender, in advance, thereby eliminating the need for postage to be collected at its destination, this being time-consuming and expensive. The result was the world’s most famous postage stamp the Penny Black whose design, featuring the head of the young Queen Victoria, we owe to Sir Henry Cole (1808–1882). Since it was, at the time of its devising, the world’s only adhesive postage stamp it was not considered necessary to identify the nation to which it belonged. The Royal Mail’s stamps are still the only ones which do not bear the name of the nation that issues them. Henry Cole also devised the first commercial Christmas card and was the principal organizer of the Great Exhibition of 1851. The only remaining element to be devised was the pillar box – which was proposed by the novelist Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) who was in charge of the eastern postal district of England from 1859–66, and who realized that in rural areas there was much inconvenience involved in taking letters to a post office in a town.