Amazing & Extraordinary Facts About Great Britain (21 page)

A
lexander Graham Bell (1847–1922) was born in Edinburgh, the son of a professor who was an authority on speech disorders and a mother who suffered from growing deafness. His early interest centred on means by which speech could be made comprehensible to the deaf, and it was research into this which led to the invention of the telephone. In 1870 the family migrated to Canada and the young man attracted the patronage of a wealthy man called Gardiner Hubbard who hoped that Bell would be able to help his young daughter Mabel who had been rendered deaf by scarlet fever. Having familiarized himself with the technology of the early telegraphic systems which were beginning to cross America, in March 1876 Bell was awarded an American patent for ‘the method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically’. In August of that year he made the first telephone call over a distance of two miles from Cambridge to Boston, Massachusetts, and two years later he demonstrated the apparatus to Queen Victoria, making the first long distance telephone calls from her home at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. The Queen’s verdict: ‘Most extraordinary’. A serial inventor, he later obtained 18 further patents in such diverse fields as alternative fuels and the phonograph (gramophone). He has the possibly unique distinction of being claimed by four nations, being numbered amongst the 10 greatest Scottish scientists; the 10 greatest Canadians; the 100 greatest Americans; and the 100 greatest Britons.

E
lizabeth Garrett Anderson (1836–1917) was the first woman to qualify as a female doctor in Britain. Prior to this, Margaret Ann Bulkley (c.1795–1865) had succeeded in working as a doctor in the army by living as a man named James Barry, though there is no consensus on this person’s true status; and Elizabeth Blackwell (1821–1910) was born in Bristol but qualified as a doctor in New York before returning to Britain. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the daughter of an Aldeburgh corn merchant, could not gain entry to a medical school but trained as a nurse at Middlesex Hospital and was allowed to attend lectures with male medical students until they asked for her to be removed because she proved much better than they were at answering questions. She learned that the Society of Apothecaries did not exclude women from their examinations which she duly sat and passed (at which point the Society changed its rules to prevent other women from following her). She obtained a medical degree in Paris (taking the examinations in French) and established a dispensary for women in London which became the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital. In 1876 the General Medical Council finally agreed to admit women to the profession. In the 21st century the majority of students entering medical schools are young women. Elizabeth’s sister, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, was a campaigner for women’s causes, notably for the right to vote. The Fawcett Society is named in her memory.

R
obert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) is best remembered as the author of one of the most enduring adventure stories, Treasure Island, but he should have been a civil engineer. His family were known as Lighthouse Stevensons because of their achievements in building lighthouses in some of the world’s most dangerous seas. The author’s grandfather, also called Robert Stevenson (1772–1850), was responsible for one of the most extraordinary achievements in civil engineering when, in 1807–10, he built the Bell Rock Lighthouse, 12 miles off the east coast of Scotland, at a site where 70 ships had been wrecked in one storm alone. Such were the challenges of the task that in 2003 it was featured in a BBC series called
Seven Wonders of the Industrial World
. Built of Aberdeen granite, the structure has survived unscathed for over 200 years. The author’s father and two uncles continued the family business and built lighthouses around the coasts of India, China, Japan, New Zealand and Singapore as well as Britain. Robert Louis Stevenson was spared entry into the family business because of his poor health which obliged him to live in warmer climes and enabled him to follow his chosen career of author. He died at his home at Vailima, Samoa, in the Pacific where he had sought refuge from the lung conditions that had plagued him from childhood, though the cause of his death was probably a cerebral haemorrhage.

T
he founder of the Scout movement was the son of a clergyman who died when he was three and a socially ambitious mother who falsely claimed descent from Nelson, added the name Baden to the family name Powell and adopted, without reason, the coat of arms of the Dukes of Baden in Germany. Her son Robert Baden-Powell (1857–1941) failed the entrance examinations to both Balliol College and Christchurch Oxford (at a time when such examinations made few intellectual demands) and joined the army. He served initially with the Indian Army in Quetta (now Pakistan) where he became an accomplished map maker and made his first contribution to literature with a volume called
Pig Sticking and Hog Hunting
, which told of his exploits in hunting wild boar. Faced with criticism that this was a cruel sport he wrote ‘See how the horse enjoys it, see how the boar himself, mad with rage, rushes wholeheartedly into the scrap, see how you, with your temper thoroughly roused, enjoy the opportunity of wreaking it to the full. Yes, hog-hunting is a brutal sport – and yet I loved it.’ He became a national figure during the Boer War when he organized the 219-day defence of Mafeking, a small town of little military value whose relief in May 1900 was the cause of national rejoicing. During the siege he used children to carry messages and this experience led to the formation of the Scout movement. In 1907 a camp for 22 boys including public schoolboys and the local Boys’ Brigade (an innovation for the time) took place on Brownsea Island in Poole Harbour and was followed by
Scouting for Boys
, published in fortnightly instalments in 1908. By 1910 there were 100,000 scouts and in 1912, following an approach from some girls, Baden-Powell wrote
How Girls can Help Build up the Empire
. The Girl Guides were run by his formidable wife Olave, 32 years his junior, whom he married in the same year. There are at present almost 40 million scouts and guides in 216 countries. In 1929 he was made Baron Baden-Powell. Some of his ideas about the Empire now seem dated and he did have some idiosyncratic views on other matters. He recommended breathing through the nose, for example, thinking mouth breathing rather vulgar. But he founded what remains by far the largest youth movement in the world which received the double accolade of being banned by both Hitler and Stalin.

W
inston Churchill (1874–1965) has been voted the greatest ever Briton, though he was half-American through his mother, Jennie Jerome, who married his father, Randolph Churchill, the younger son of the Duke of Marlborough, in 1874. Churchill took part in the last cavalry charge of the British army at the battle of Omdurman in 1898 and ended his political career as Prime Minister in 1955 with authority over nuclear weapons. His career was by any standard an epic but before his ‘finest hour’ in 1940 he was often wrong or in the margins. In 1924, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he returned Britain’s currency to the gold standard at a rate of $4.86 to the pound which was too high for the economy to bear. It made British products (including coal) uncompetitive in the export market, helped lead to the General Strike of 1926 and made the collapse in the economy of the late 1920s worse than it needed to be. It was the memory of this phase of Churchill’s career that helped to expel him from office in the election of 1945. In 1936 he attempted to rally support for King Edward VIII in his desire to marry Wallis Simpson and two days before the abdication he was shouted down in the House of Commons as he made a final, forlorn attempt to generate sympathy for the king’s deservedly lost cause. And he resolutely opposed the granting of independence to India long after it had become inevitable, describing Mahatma Gandhi as ‘a seditious middle temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half-naked up the steps of the viceregal palace’. But on the one thing that really mattered he was gloriously correct. When Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941 Churchill described him as a ‘bloodthirsty guttersnipe’ and, when questioned on his opposition to Communism, replied that ‘If Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons’.

T
homas Edward Lawrence (1888–1935) was born in Tremadog, Caernarvonshire (now Gwynedd) in North Wales, one of five sons of Thomas Chapman and his mistress, Sarah Junner, for whom Chapman had deserted his wife. Sarah, who had been governess to the daughters of Chapman and his wife, was herself the illegitimate daughter of a man called Lawrence, and the couple adopted this name. The family was frequently on the move but eventually settled in Oxford. Sarah was profoundly religious and frequently at odds with young Thomas but in 1908 a modus vivendi was reached when Thomas was given a bungalow at the bottom of the family garden where he could live apart from the family and indulge his interests which included medieval churches, castles and brass-rubbing. In 1907 he entered Jesus College Oxford and after graduating he worked from 1911–14 as an archaeologist in Syria. Here he acquired his knowledge of Arabic and his respect for the Arab peoples which, in 1916, led to his being assigned to the forces of Emir Faisal to lead the Arab revolt against the Turkish allies of the Germans in World War I. He was undoubtedly effective in harassing the Turkish troops by leading Arab forces to blow up railway lines and in capturing the port of Aqaba. The legend of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ was promoted by an American journalist called Lowell Thomas in a slide show at Covent Garden after the war. At the war’s end Lawrence attended the Versailles Conference, in Arab dress, as an adviser to Lloyd George, but failed to obtain a greater degree of independence for the Arab peoples. Lowell Thomas’s version of his career was faithfully reproduced in David Lean’s epic film of 1962. Lawrence’s own works, notably
Revolt in the Desert
, did nothing to discourage the legend. Others have expressed some reservations. His famous scars appear to have been inflicted by beatings to which he subjected himself at the hands of young men from 1923, not at the hands of the Turks. After the war he was admitted to the RAF by Captain W E Johns (author of the
Biggles
stories) and worked on air-sea rescue seaplanes, one of the designers involved being R J Mitchell of Supermarine who went on to design the legendary Spitfire. In 1935 Lawrence died of head injuries following a motorcycle accident which led the doctor who examined him to recommend the universal adoption of crash helmets.