Tuesday, 10 June 2008

Dead Eccentric No. 2

Geoffrey Pyke 1893-1948

Is one of my all-time favourite English eccentrics. As well as being a journalist, spy and investor, Pyke was a military inventor of fantastic ability and imagination. According to his biographer, David Lampe, ‘any single one of his major projects could be expanded to fill a large book. His aphorisms, his vital ideas about ideas, would fill still more books.’

In 1939, with war against Germany imminent, Pyke hatched a plan – to avert conflict by showing Hitler an opinion poll suggesting that most Germans were against the idea of war. Pyke recruited a team of students, dressed them up as golfers, and packed them off to Germany to conduct the survey. As he guessed, what they gathered showed that most Germans were indeed against the war, but before the students could finish their survey and present it to the Fuhrer Hitler invaded Poland.

Soon after, in trademark straggly beard, shabby suit with a bootlace for a tie, no socks and instead brightly coloured spats (as he put it spats obviated the need for socks), he volunteered his services to Lord Mountbatten, informing the general, ‘Lord Mountbatten, you need me on your staff because I’m a man who thinks. But my services will not come cheap.’

Mountbatten later described him as, ‘the most unusual and provocative man I have ever met.’ Lord Zuckerman, on the staff of Lord Mountbatten at the time, described him as ‘not a scientist, but a man of a vivid and uncontrollable imagination, and a totally uninhibited tongue’.

I like the fact that he was taken on and later defended by Mountbatten and his staff. It seems indicative of a hard-won toleration of eccentricity at this time (in contrast to the attitudes of English generals during the First World War, or indeed the US Military in the Second World War who were so disgusted by the sight of Pyke that his idea for a motorised sled, for example, was ignored until Allied military operations had moved on from snowy climes).

Pyke’s motorised attack-sleds, never realised, were designed to carry torpedoes and leave a trail of insect-eggs as they motored along. The eggs would hatch later, so obscuring the trail. As they were to be used in German-occupied Scandinavia Pyke decided that the sleds should be hidden in sheds marked (in German) ‘Officer’s Latrine. For Colonels Only.’

His most impressive design was an aircraft carrier made from ice reinforced with wood shavings, a composite he called ‘pykrete’. Brilliantly, Pyke had realised that the molecular structure of ice was similar to that of concrete yet ice had a lower tensile strength. Pykrete was indestructible compared to more conventional shipbuilding materials: during trials it was bombed, torpedoed, shot at, set fire to but nothing could make a real impression.

Lord Mountbatten, then Chief of Combined Operations, was so excited about it that he went to see Churchill and, so the story goes, dropped a lump of it into Churchill’s bath (with Churchill in it) to demonstrate that it did not melt. Churchill repeated this trick more or less on President Roosevelt by placing lumps of the stuff in near-boiling water. Again, it retained its shape and did not melt.

Pyke named his putative aircraft carrier Habbakuk – it was meant to be Habakkuk, in honour of a Hebrew prophet from the Old Testament who prophesied about the eventual coming of, ‘a work which you will not believe though it be told to you.’ An Admiralty clerk mis-spelt it. Battleship Habbakuk would have been 2000 feet long and weighed 2.2 million tons, however the Normandy landings removed the need for a ship of this size and the plans were shelved.

To destroy Romanian oil fields, he suggested sending in teams of carefully drilled St. Bernard’s dogs, each with a mini-barrel of brandy round their neck. The German guards would see the dogs, want to give them a cuddle, at which point they’d notice the brandy and get drunk leaving the British commandos free to attack. Or, they could send in scantily clad women to distract the guards. Failing that Pyke suggested dressing British commandos up as Romanian firefighters and getting them to rush in immediately after British bombers had set fire to the oilwells.

Prior to all this, Pyke had a brief and for some time successful career as a financial investor. At one point he controlled a third of the global supply of tin.

A non-practising Jew, he also founded his own school. It contained Britain’s first ‘jungle gym’ and was designed to be the exact antithesis of Wellington School, where he was miserable as a child. In Pyke’s school pupils were never reprimanded nor forced to learn any particular subjects. Instead, in true eccentric fashion, they were encouraged to find out things for themselves. Unfortunately in 1928 his investments went awry and the school was forced to close.

In the winter of 1948 his depression defeated him. Sitting in bed – he often worked from bed so as not to waste time getting up and dressing and was known to hold conferences with military chiefs from his bed – and writing non-stop – Pyke is said to have suffered from hypergraphia – he took an overdose of sleeping pills. As they kicked in he continued to write. On the last page he would write the words stream, with each line becoming less legible, until at last they trail off.

On his death, The Times described him as, ‘One of the most original, if unrecognized, figures of the present [20th] century.’ The Guardian wrote, ‘Britain has lost one of the greatest and certainly the most unrecognized geniuses of all time.’

At his request no gravestone was erected.

Thursday, 5 June 2008

King Arthur was NEVER a Hell's Angel

It's annoying to have to admit you're wrong - in an argument that is. More annoying is realising you've made a basic factual error, based on a series of different sources which I thought, at the time, represented journalistic triangulation, and then to have that mistake printed however many thousand times the first print run of In Search of the English Eccentric has gone to.

This is where I find myself. There are a handful of websites that describe Arthur Uther Pendragon, star of my book, as a former Hell's Angel. He is no such thing. I repeat, Arthur Uther Pendragon, formerly John Rothwell, was a biker, yes, but never a Hell's Angel. (Above is a picture of a Hell's Angel).

Sorry Arthur. It will be corrected in all future editions of the book.

Wednesday, 4 June 2008

good news


For the first time in what seems like ages Pete Doherty, one of the stars of In Search of the English Eccentric, was in the tabloids without being portrayed as the drug-addled unwashed Son of Sam that some red tops like to make him out as. The story was about the fact that he had to bury one of his cats before going onstage.

Tuesday, 3 June 2008

Gin the dog

This made me happy when I read it. it's from a longer piece in praise of 'Britain's Got Talent' by Kira Cochrane, and is in fact the first time I've read or heard someone else say point out what I seemed to find throughout researching In Search of the English Eccentric:

'In Britain, it is usually only upper-class eccentricity that is celebrated and recognised, but Britain's Got Talent shows that eccentricity lurks in all corners of the land, and that it is entertaining, shameless, and often hilarious. While it might seem strange that a 74-year-old cleaner would want to dress up in a leotard and lie on a bed of nails, for instance, Joan Gallagher seemed to enjoy every minute in the spotlight. The programme offers up the weirdest acts - people who dance with illuminated hula hoops, in superhero costumes; who perform the Star Wars theme tune on a keyboard - re-arranged to make it more "spacey"; who whistle Nessun Dorma; who bring ferrets on stage to dance, and then have to hurry them off when they start trying to mate. Most respond well to the adversity of the judges; when Simon Cowell dubbed 20-year-old student Donald Bell-Gam "the worst singer we have had on Britain's Got Talent - completely and utterly horrific", Bell-Gam simply paused before responding with a screeching version of I Will Always Love You. If he was fazed, it didn't show.'

And following hard on her heels, here's Melanie Reid in the Times:

'Britain's Got Talent is a model for a competitive, compassionate, cohesive, colour-blind society that the politicians haven't quite managed to deliver. Telly got there before them. The show taps straight into some wellspring of happy ordinariness. It is endearing because it's an snapshot of British life: unpredictable; inspiring; sentimental; humorous: a celebration of national eccentricity. '

Monday, 2 June 2008

More eccentric summer games

If you liked the Cheese-rolling at Cooper's Hill, near Gloucester, then you'll want to know about the nearby Olimpick Games, a little to the west in Chipping Camden. They took place this weekend.

Here's a report of this year's games, but much better is this clip from last year's games showing the highlight of the Cotswold Olimpicks, shin-kicking..

Sunday, 1 June 2008

Dead Eccentric no. 1

I thought I'd start with an eccentric who's in the news right now. Even if he never existed. He's an imaginary eccentric Victorian inventor - constructed by artist Paul St George as part of his Telectroscope installation that opened recently on the banks of the Thames.

The fact that he never was makes him doubly interesting for me, as he becomes an amalgam of the different things we want an English eccentric to be.

Alexander Stanhope St George 1848-1917

...was a little-known eccentric Victorian engineer. The first of seven children (it's interesting how eccentrics are almost always the first of their siblings) he was born to a British father and a Sierra Leonian mother. Aged nine, he went to see the attempted launch of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Great Eastern steamship. This is where this photograph was taken. Although he was cropped out of the image we routinely associate with this great inventor, St George never forgot this moment and would claim Brunel as his greatest inspiration.

After university St George went to work with some of the great engineers of the time, including Joseph Bazalgette (Chelsea Embankment), John Wolfe-Barry (man behind the the District Line) and Sir John Hawkshaw (Severn Tunnel).

In 1884 he went to New York to see the newly completed Brooklyn Bridge. Again, he was wowed. On his way back there was an unscheduled stop at a mid-Atlantic island. This would go on to provide the inspiration for his greatest invention: the telectroscope. It was to be a transatlantic tunnel in which you could travel without moving. His contraption would be a “device for the suppression of absence”: an optical machine which allowed you to see from one end of the tunnel to the other.

So he returned to the mid-Atlantic island and had a shaft sunk. Teams of men dug in opposite directions, one lot heading to London, the rest to New York.

But the project was bedeviled with delays and accidents. Meanwhile St George began to lose his mind.

Four years after it began his workforce mutinied and forced St George to take them back to England.

He never recovered from the sense of disappointment that followed. His mental health continued to deteriorate and in 1917, resident in a Bethnal Green asylum, he died. His family tried to suppress his papers and pretend that he didn’t exist until recently when his great-grandson, Paul St. George, found them.

Where? In an attic of course.

Here’s the Brooklyn end of the telectroscope he was able to build having got his hands on Alexander Stanhope St George’s designs.



I really wish he had existed. He feels at least half-real.