Dartington

Here's an entry from Sam Leith's blog at the recent Ways with Words festival down at Dartington, in Devon, which mentions the talk I gave there.

Carla Bruni loves British eccentrics

According to a recent interview..

Shropshire's finest

Hew Kennedy, builder of the trebuchet, in the Shropshire Star..

Hoaxers

One of the most interesting reactions to the book has been to do with crop-circles. Geoff Ward, of the West Country Western Daily Press, is interested in these mysterious formations. I think he has been for some time judging by the circle he has printed on the banner at the top of his column. Having read In Search of the English Eccentric he turned detective, beginning his weekly newsletter with the following:

SOMEWHERE in Wiltshire, in a wheatfield under a brilliant full moon, author Henry Hemming found himself helping to make a crop circle. Silhouetted against the crop, seven men with stomping boards and measuring tapes went about their business in earnest. Several hours later, the job was done, and the group could relax and speculate on how the crop-circle community would react when daylight came. Henry, researching his book In Search of the English Eccentric, just out, had encountered Britain ’s leading crop-circle maker John Lundberg, who allowed the writer to join his party on condition that he never revealed the location of the formation created that night. Lundberg never reveals the locations of any crop circles he makes, which undermines his claims somewhat.

Now, the universe may be infinite, but my Mysterious West page in the Western Daily Press unfortunately is not. So I am including in this new sletter a little piece of detective work which I have carried out - I believe I can identify the Hemming/Lundberg crop formation. In his book, Hemming describes a visit by himself and Lundberg to the Crop Circle Connector get-together in the Coronation Hall at Alton Barnes on August 1 last year. Henry tells his readers that he helped to make the crop circle some weeks before - under that full moon, which he describes as being so bright it was "like a floodlight". Now, in this case, the only relevant full moons were on June 1 and June 30 - a “blue moon” month, having two full moons in it. The full moon on July 30 was obviously too close to the Crop Circle Connector event. I rule out June 30 as no crop circles appeared in Wiltshire immediately after the date. But, referring to Steve and Karen Alexander’s Crop Circle Year Book for 2007, I see that a formation did appear on June 3 in the famous East Field at Alton Barnes. This was a three-armed propeller-like pattern with five circles on each arm. As crop circles go, it was not a particularly elaborate design. The Hemming/Lundberg team could therefore have created this formation overnight on June 1 or June 2, when the full moon was at its peak. I rest my case.

Ward's rationale was sound, but as one of the few conditions for joining Lundberg that night was to keep the location a secret. So to either confirm or dispel this hypothesis would of course fly in the face of that. I wrote back to Geoff explaining this. Several days later he published the following:

ON THE TRAIL OF THE HOAXERS
27 June 2008

Reading between the lines, it seems I was right about the location of the crop circle created a year ago by author Henry Hemming and John Lundberg, who is regarded as Britain's leading crop-circle creator.

From unwitting clues in Henry's new book, In Search of the English Eccentric, featured on this page last week, I deduced that the formation was the one found in the East Field, Alton Barnes, on June 3 last year.

I was interested to pursue this because Lundberg never reveals the locations of any crop circles he makes, apart from those done purely for commercial concerns.

My piece of sleuthing went out on my Mysterious West email newsletter to regular readers last week.

Henry's response was: "That was very interesting what you put together. It's extremely frustrating not being able to say yes or no to your hypothesis, but I'm fascinated by what you've put together."

Enough said.

In researching his book, Henry was allowed to join Lundberg's party on condition he never revealed the location of the formation he helped to create.

And I never will. But all is not as it seems in the mysterious west. Nor the mysterious east. When writing Misdaventure in the Middle East time and again I was compelled to change not just the identity of a man or woman who had said something politically subversive, but also parts of their physical appearance, or the location of where we met. It's rarely enough to omit details. Often it's necessary to alter certain descriptive elements in order to create an effective mask.

Latest

Apologies for the month-long hiatus. It's been a busy few weeks, but a happy few weeks as well, in the sense that it's a huge relief to have the book out and be able to watch it make its way in the world, even if there are few stumbles along the way.

Most of the people I've spoken to over the last month will, at some point, ask how the book's going, to which I don't always know what to say. The publishers don't really give you a daily update on sales as they don't have one themselves - though you can check your amazon sales ranking. Obsessively. This can only end in tears. No matter how high you soar there comes a point, even if your first initials are J. K. and you have a thing about wizards, that your rating begins to drop, and the unbearable helplessness of knowing there's sweet fa you can do to try and turn the tide, short of buying the book yourself, makes Amazon sales-ranking-checking a Bad Thing To Get Hooked On. And yes, I've been there.

There have been a handful of reviews so far, including one by Tina Jackson in Metro, and the nicest one yet in the TLS, by Josh Raymond. Sadly I can't find it online. The pull-out quote was: 'an intelligent and encouraging piece of writing.' Thelondonpaper did a Q and A, Gay Times liked it, so did Vogue, Tatler, Traveller Magazine and the Western Daily Press. However, Harry Mount in the Literary Review did not. More on that and how some (often more conservative) reviewers can turn against it later.

Articles I've done concerning the book - there's one about hermits, most of all Sue Woodcock and Tom Leppard that appeared yesterday in the Independent on Sunday. Several to follow in the coming weeks.

People in the book - Chris Eubank has just put his kids up for adoption. King Arthur started a protest outside Stone Henge, after performing a ceremony to make sure there was no rain during Glastonbury (which seems to have worked). Vivienne Westwood walked out of the Sex and the City premiere, saying there was nothing remotely memorable or interesting about what she saw. I love her for that. The film is apparently one long product placement for a number of different labels, including hers. Sebastian Horsley's book Dandy in the Underworld got an excellent and sympathetic review in the Guardian which, as he has since explained, means his life is essentially over. 'It's now one long descent into respectability.' We're doing our talk together at Camp Bestival at 8.40, Friday 18 July. In the Comedy Tent. Help.

More later in the week I think



Also here's a snap of Pete Doherty I took last year. He played a great set at Glastonbury, apparently. Even the Sun liked it..

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.

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.