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1. Title Page

2. INTRODUCTION

3. CHAPTER 1: RELIGION

4. CHAPTER 2: THE LAW

5. CHAPTER 3: WARFARE AND CONFLICT

6. CHAPTER 4: CULTURE

7. CHAPTER 5: FINANCE

8. CHAPTER 6: SCIENCE

9. CHAPTER 7: NATION-BULIDING

10. CHAPTER 8: POLITICS

11. SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

12. Copyright

‘[History is] little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.’

EDWARD GIBBON, HISTORIAN

We see history through a distorted glass. School teaches us that the tide of events flows from the decisions of visionary leaders or the demands of the people. It doesn’t. Because for every wartime strategy by a Churchill or Napoleon, for every surge of bloody revolution, there has been another instance of a trivial mistake by a scientist, monarch or telephone operator that has also irrevocably changed the nation.

Few Britons know that Germany lost the First World War because a porter at a provincial English railway station misheard a word shouted from a train, or that the Black Death was (allegedly) the result of Pope Gregory IX believing cats were in league with the Devil. They are unaware of these facts because historians have traditionally neglected or deliberately ignored the extent to which Britain’s history has been defined by mistakes.

No matter how brilliant the mind, everyone will at some point make a judgement that turns out badly. That’s not really what this book is about. This is a study of minor oversights that would normally have resulted in nothing special, but due to exceptional circumstance they have left the nation forever changed.

Some such lapses were caused by human failings: German tailor Franz Muller started a fashion for a new type of hat because he lost his nerve after murdering a stranger in east London. Others were not: it would be unfair to criticise Harold Macmillan for resigning as Prime Minister after he had been diagnosed with cancer – only to discover later that the diagnosis had been a mistake. But in almost every case, the error would have amounted to nothing had it not been magnified by human flaw: as soon as Macmillan made his decision, his political rivals scrambled over each other to elbow him aside and take his place on the podium.

Tracing these events through history, you don’t just recognise patterns, you also notice individuals who crop up time and again. Sometimes you can see them change from Cassandra-like heralds of doom standing on the sidelines and warning of errors which they alone have noticed, to the perpetrators of just the same sort of blunder. For every Lord Cardigan, whose snobbery and obsession with regulations resulted in both the Charge of the Light Brigade and the Black Bottle affair, there is a Robert Walpole, who may have warned of the folly of the South Sea Bubble, but was more short-sighted when it came to the future of 10 Downing Street. Winston Churchill appears as much as anyone in this book because he was in government during the two great conflicts of the last 100 years – the perfect time and place for errors with monumental outcomes. It is notable, then, that his biggest blunder came during the campaign for the 1945 General Election. As a war commander he was solid as a rock, but during peacetime, and as a politician rather than a statesman, he could make a gaffe as serious as anyone.

This is a history of how a nation can veer off course when simple mistakes combine with human failing and extraordinary circumstances. It is a history of how Britain is as much a product of error as design.

Gareth Rubin, 2014

It is in the very nature of religion to demand that many ideas are taken on faith – and nothing is more likely to produce a mistake than the failure to check that what you have been told is true. No wonder, then, that religions have often been the cause of catastrophic errors. Nowadays, the pronouncements of religious leaders are held up to the harshest scrutiny, but the past, on the other hand, is another country.

THE GREAT CAT MASSACRE – SPREADING THE PLAGUE, 1232

In 1232 the Vatican, under the blatantly catist Pope Gregory IX, apparently made one of the most bacteria-friendly pronouncements of all time when it issued a papal circular suggesting every domestic cat was secretly in league with the Devil and should be massacred without a moment to lose. It became a very dangerous time to be furry and like fireplaces.

‘OK,’ replied the more impressionable souls of Europe, ‘this time tomorrow, Tiddles gets it.’

The cats, had they been able to speak, might have pointed out that they were only in league with people who liked to tickle their tummies. And – they may have gone on to say/miaow – somewhere around the middle of the fourteenth century when brown rats would be spreading a certain disease throughout the land, the cats’ two-legged former friends might be kicking themselves for having strung the first line of anti-rodent defences up by their tails. Oh yes, like a bowl full of cream, revenge would be a dish best served cold.

The Pope’s pronouncement was something of a reversal of fortunes for cats, who had been favoured by the Romans and even revered as divine in ancient Egypt for – yes – keeping away rats. To suddenly find that from London to Dundee it was every cat for himself must have been a bit of a shock.

The strain of Plague that hit Britain in 1348 came from Mongolia and China on merchant ships. Incredibly, it wiped out around half the population of Europe and the total extinction of the human species was not out of the question. Things weren’t quite so bad in England, though – only a third of the population of 4.2 million keeled over, with the peasantry bearing the brunt. One reason why the aristocrats of Britain fared a tiny bit better than the commoners is that many of them had considered Gregory’s animosity to anything that purred to be slightly weird. They had quite liked their cats and weren’t overly keen on turning them into pillowcases any time soon. As a result, in many of the richer houses Mr Fluffy lived to fight another day and to keep out the rats, their fleas and their little friends, the Yersinia pestis bacteria. So the nobs lived on but the peasants dropped by the field-full.

In fact, when the Black Death struck, if anyone should have guessed what was spreading the disease, it ought to have been the Pope – the illness was first recorded in the Bible (2 Samuel) as God’s revenge on the Philistines for stealing the Ark of the Covenant from Israel three thousand years ago and the text links it to an increase in the rodent population.

The disease also shocked the Vatican by killing members of religious communities as well as the common people who didn’t matter. The fifty-odd monks and friars of Meaux Abbey in Yorkshire seem to have had an especially bad time of it. On 12 August 1349 alone, the abbot and five monks died. In the end, just ten of the residents were left rattling about the place and wondering what on earth they were going to do now. Making matters worse, as the serfs keeled over, there was a decrease in supply of peasant labour so the landowners had to compete for workers for the first time, leading to payment of half-decent wages and liberation from indenture. As one of the monks of Meaux recorded in the abbey’s chronicle:

It should not be passed over in silence how our serfs at Wawne turned stubborn and refused their service which they owed to us. Those serfs, who were serfs by birth, being descended from unfree tenants of ours sought to lighten the yoke of servitude, under which they and their ancestors were subjugated. In order to turn them from their evil ways we imprisoned them.

Monks notwithstanding, the increased power and confidence on the part of the common folk resulting from the Plague thinning out their numbers led to The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Many economic historians say the necessary reorganisation of production also led to capitalism as we now know it, which replaced feudalism as the dominant structure of society.

THOU SHALT NOT SUFFER… – THE WITCH HUNTS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

While the doctrine of Papal infallibility was the ‘environmental’ factor transmuting a single foolish pronouncement of Gregory IX into a continent-wide pestilence, the slightly less infallible Protestantism was far from innocent when it came to pointless massacres. In the case of the British witch hunts, all it took was a single mistranslated word in the great King James Bible and any old ladies who lived in cottages and looked a little bit magical were being burned at the stake like it was going out of fashion.

The King James Version, the greatest legacy of a monarch who was obsessed with identifying demons walking the earth, was unambiguous. It stated in clear English: ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’, thus confirming beyond doubt the existence of such child-snatchers in the minds of simpletons up and down the country. But anyone who troubled himself to go back to the original Hebrew might just notice that the word interpreted as ‘witch’ actually meant something a bit different. It is closer to ‘diviners’, ‘magicians’ or ‘people who claim to have supernatural powers’. In the time of Moses, it seems many frauds wandered around Israel claiming to be able to do magic and interpret the stars or dreams, and Moses thought it best to have them closed down by the authorities. Little did he know that a few thousand years later, Britons would be running around burning their next-door neighbours as a result. It was bad news for anyone who could be described as ‘a bit cackly’.

To be fair to their accusers, a number of those sent to be drowned on the off-chance that they were witches didn’t help matters by telling everyone that they could do magic. Normally – like modern astrologers or homeopaths – they were either boasting or crazy.

Even before King James had taken the English throne and published his own Bible, he was reigning in Scotland and showing witches no mercy. In the eminently readable book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841), the Victorian journalist Charles Mackay relates the story of a coven of Scottish witches who had a tale tortured out of them by James’s authorities that would put Edgar Allan Poe to shame.

In 1591 one Dr Fian and his spooky accomplice, Gellie Duncan, were put on the rack after evidence – best described as ‘circumstantial’ – came to light that they were in league with the Devil. Mackay picks up the story, told to the court, after they have flown through the air to a church in North Berwick at night:

Arrived at the kirk they paced around it withershins, that is, in reverse of the apparent motion of the sun. Dr Fian then blew into the keyhole of the door, which opened immediately and all the witches entered. As it was pitch-dark, Fian blew with his mouth upon the candles which immediately lighted, and the Devil was seen occupying the pulpit. He was attired in a black gown and hat and the witches saluted him by crying ‘All hail master!’ His body was hard like iron; his face terrible, his nose like the beak of an eagle; he had great burning eyes; his hands and legs were hairy; and he had long claws upon his hands and feet and he spake with an exceedingly gruff voice. He commenced the preaching commanding them to be dutiful servants to him and do all the evil they could. [Two witches] asked him whether he had brought the image or picture of King James that they might, by pricking it, cause pains and diseases to fall upon him. ‘The father of lies’ spoke truth for once and confessed that he had forgotten it … When they had done scolding, he invited them all to a grand entertainment. A newly-buried corpse was dug up and divided among them, which was all they had in the way of edibles.

THEY’RE STILL HERE! – THE WITCH HUNTS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, 1940

King James may have gone to his grave feeling that his work battling the brides of Satan was done, but the Anglican Church in Britain disagrees and still has official exorcists for each diocese. Each one currently goes into battle with an average of ten demons, poltergeists or witches per year.

Prosecutions under the Witchcraft Act 1735 have also taken place much more recently than many would imagine. The thrust of the Act (which was finally repealed in 1951) was not, in fact, to outlaw witchcraft – our parliamentarians had, by then, generally accepted that magic was a load of bobbins. It was to outlaw those claiming to be witches or diviners and therefore spreading belief in supernatural powers; and this was why it was employed in London in the twentieth century.

During the early 1940s, the Luftwaffe was inflicting a terrible toll on British cities. The relatives of the dead were distraught. Then one woman said she could help ease their pain. She could put them in touch with the spirits of the dead – for a price. Helen Duncan would prove the point by spontaneously vomiting ectoplasm – which she accomplished by swallowing cheesecloth before a séance, then dramatically regurgitating it.

This odd trick seemed to pay off as hundreds of families from London contacted her for news of their loved ones who had been killed while away fighting or during the Blitz. Then, in 1941, one of her more unusual evenings supposedly included a ghostly sailor entering the room wearing a cap from the HMS Barnham – a striking occurrence given the fact that Barnham had just been sunk and the British government was keeping it a secret, so no civilians were aware that its crew were dead. Duncan’s impressionable followers declared she had ‘the gift’. The police said what she actually had was ‘classified information’ and arrested her. Since she refused to stop spreading rumours, there was only one thing left to do: prosecute her for claiming to be a witch.

Despite offering to conduct a séance in court to prove she really could speak to ghosts, Helen Duncan was found guilty of ‘pretending to raise the spirits of the dead’ and spent eight months inside. When not pretending to vomit ectoplasm, she worked in a bleach factory.

The law is the point of friction between the individual and the state – a set of restrictions on personal freedom. That is because there are many freedoms that no one should have, such as the freedom to push someone off a bus on an afternoon whim. Laws also demand that you keep others safe when those people reasonably expect you to. If the law had stated that the RMS Titanic’s look-out had to present his binoculars to the captain before the ship set sail, things might have turned out differently for more than 1,000 passengers who found they didn’t need the return halves of their tickets.

Often terrible outcomes have happened because keeping others safe would have cost time or money. But, in the first case we’re going to look at, the protagonist made his error because he believed he could mock the system, without taking into account the size of the beast he was taunting.

CURIOSITY KILLED THE LAWYER – THE DEATH OF ROBERT TRESILIAN, 1388

Government is traditionally split into three branches: legislative, executive and judicial. Those who enter the first two are frequently accused – often with very good reason – of only having done so to feather their own nests. Yet, for a long time, the third branch was every bit as riddled with corruption as the others. Corruption, however, breeds enemies: often the envious, rather than the outraged, and they will ensure any wrongdoing by an official on the take is brought to light, even if it is only so they can take his place.

Robert Tresilian, for example, quite liked making cash. As a thoroughly corrupt Chief Justice to the King’s Bench who was always ready to hang an enemy of Richard II, he had many ways of doing so. His downfall, however, was a result of his attempt to play both sides in the struggle between the King and the Lords Appellant, a group of nobles demanding a say over the royal spending patterns.

When these noblemen rose up against the King and ordered Tresilian’s arrest, Robert made himself scarce. It was rumoured that he had fled abroad – which would have been the sensible thing to do – and the heat died down. But Tresilian had not run away to the Continent, he had not even gone to Berkshire: he was still ensconced in London.

The very least he should have done was to keep his head down and stay indoors in order to continue evading justice. Instead, he decided to play detective and keep his enemies under his personal surveillance. Donning a fake beard, he took rooms in a house opposite Westminster Hall, where the Lords Appellant were meeting. In order to get a better view, he climbed onto the roof of an apothecary’s house, shinned down the gutter and hid, watching to see who came and went. Quite what he would do with the information and why he wanted to get it personally instead of asking someone else to keep watch, is unknown.

What is known is that the Lords in the hall were wishing they could get their hands on Tresilian and wondering where he was, when one of them pointed out that he was on the other side of the road. After a couple of seconds, it was decided that a party should be sent over to arrest the fugitive. They scoured the house outside of which he had been seen, but could not find where Tresilian had gone. After a few threats, the house owner informed them that he was hiding under the table.

Surprised by this stroke of luck, they marched their man back to the Hall, where the Lords ordered that he be taken to the Tower of London, whence he would be dragged by a horse to the execution ground. But as he was pushed towards the gallows, Tresilian scoffed at the Lords’ plan. For, he announced, he could not die. Then he dramatically tore open his clothes to reveal that he was covered in magic amulets that would protect him from death. The Lords quickly proved him wrong.

THE ACCIDENTAL ABOLITIONIST – LUKE COLLINGWOOD ENDS THE SLAVE TRADE, 1782

In 1782 Luke Collingwood put in a false insurance claim and accidentally ended the slave trade. It was a bit of a mistake for Collingwood, who was captain of a slave ship.

The trade was a truly international affair. West Africans would capture rival tribesmen, who would be sold to Arab slave dealers. These would take the slaves to the coast, where European ships would transport them to the West Indies and America to work on plantations.

Slaves were a valuable commodity, but the weak link in the chain from African villages to Jamaican sugar plantations was the sea voyage. The slaves were crammed into a tiny space below decks, often not much more 60cm high. The stench of the human waste and disease festering in these conditions meant that a slave ship could be identified just by its smell. Often the enslaved would throw themselves overboard through fear or misery. Many more simply died due to the appalling conditions.

Although the slave trade was lucrative – indeed, Bristol grew fat on it – slavery itself was not something most Britons would have been happy about. Britain itself had long been a free society, with legal rights enjoyed by all. Slavery itself was probably illegal in Britain itself and certainly rarely practised. The trade was tolerated because slavery either in its most brutal form or in the sense of indentured servitude was common throughout the world and because the Church of England didn’t seem to mind it – the Church itself owned slaves at a plantation in the West Indies that it possessed. But, most of all, Britons tolerated it because they simply didn’t hear about it all that much. Luke Collingwood, as captain of the slave ship Zong, was about to change all that.

In 1782 Collingwood was on his way from Africa to the Jamaican colonies, carrying 400 slaves. But he was an inexperienced trafficker and had overloaded his ship. Down in the hold, the cargo were dying so he decided to throw the ill slaves overboard. Of course, each one had a substantial monetary value, but he would be OK because they were all insured for £30 each – a few thousand pounds in today’s values. He would tell the insurers that he had had no choice because the ship was running out of water. The insurers might grumble, but they would pay out; 133 slaves were therefore thrown to their deaths.

When he reached port in England, after dropping off his surviving cargo in the Caribbean, his ship’s owners put in their insurance claim for the dead slaves. But things didn’t go entirely to plan. The insurers were suspicious and took the case to court. Of course, no one was really concerned about the fate of the slaves other than as commodities and, the court eventually found for the Zong’s owners against the insurers, who were ordered to pay up.

Like any other civil case, there was minor interest from the newspapers of the day, but it would soon have been forgotten had not one Olaudah Equiano caught sight of a report. Equiano was a freed slave, originally from modern-day Nigeria, where he had been captured at the age of 11. In 1783, he was 40 and working in London as a house servant when he spotted the news story about the Zong and had an idea. He took the report to Granville Sharp, a self-taught lawyer whom he thought would be the man to start a fire.

For two decades, Sharp had been involved in the Abolitionist cause. His interest had begun in 1765 when a young black slave had been brought to the home of his brother, William, a doctor who would later become surgeon to the King.[*]

The slave boy, Jonathan Strong, had been badly beaten and then abandoned by his owner. Once he was fit and well, Granville found him a job as footman to a pharmacist, but when Strong’s former master spotted him two years later he tried to kidnap his former possession. Granville went to court to stop him and had Strong legally declared a free man. Since then, Sharp had become something of a nuisance for slave owners, taking them to court over anything he could think of. He willingly agreed to help Equiano.

Based on Collingwood’s insurance claim, which included an admission of having thrown many men to their death, Sharp attempted to have Collingwood and the ship owners prosecuted for murder. The attempt failed but the resulting publicity gained him more supporters among the growing political classes and from the Quakers, without doubt the most radically political of the Christian denominations of the time. On 22 May 1787, the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was born, consisting of nine Quakers and three Anglicans, including Sharp. Together they set about documenting the treatment of slaves and even brought examples of shackles and punishment devices to London, so the citizens could see how innocent men were being treated as – at best – criminals. It became the first public civil rights campaign. The Society regularly wrote to newspapers and organised public meetings and petitions to end the slave trade – one was signed by a fifth of the population of Manchester, which illustrates how deep and wide the campaign permeated.

As the spirit of the day turned to the Abolitionist cause, they recruited William Wilberforce MP, who offered to introduce a bill to Parliament to abolish the slave trade. It wasn’t until 1807 that Wilberforce managed to get a bill through but it did happen. And 15 years later a bill was passed to abolish slavery itself in most parts of the British Empire. Soon the Royal Navy was actively destroying the slave trade wherever it could find it.

Collingwood’s attempt at insurance fraud had had global effects.

BUT DID HE DO IT? – THE DEATH OF LORD CASTLEREAGH, 1822

Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, was a controversial fellow. For decades he was one of the most influential men in Europe – and therefore the world. His reputation rested on his position as Britain’s Foreign Secretary, which allowed him to build the European system of diplomacy that delivered peaceful but conservative government across the continent. He was also hated by poets.

For example, after the 1819 Peterloo Massacre of political radicals, blamed on the reactionary Cabinet of which Castlereagh was a leading member, Shelley wrote:

I met murder on the way

He had a masque like Castlereagh

Very smooth he looked, yet grim;

Seven bloodhounds followed him

All were fat; and well they might

Be in admirable plight,

For one by one, and two by two,

He tossed them human hearts to chew

Which from his wide cloak he drew.

Shelley died in July 1822. Had he lived another month he might have perked up a little to hear that Castlereagh had been acting distinctly oddly. In an interview with George IV, the minister told the King that he was being watched by a mysterious servant. His ominous words were: ‘I am accused of the same crime as the Bishop of Clogher.’

The Bishop, Percy Jocelyn, had, the previous month, been defrocked and prosecuted after he was found in the back room of the White Lion in Haymarket with his trousers and a Grenadier Guardsman around his ankles. Sensibly, Jocelyn ran away to Scotland, to become a butler. A popular ditty of the time described the tale:

The Devil to prove the Church was a farce

Went out to fish for a Bugger.

He baited his hook with a Soldier’s arse

And pulled up the Bishop of Clogher.

It is uncertain, however, whether Castlereagh (a) really had been foolish enough to do it with a Grenadier Guardsman and was being blackmailed, (b) had not been foolish enough to do it with a Grenadier Guardsman but was being blackmailed anyway or (c) was completely mad.

The King, very concerned, told him to speak to a doctor. Perhaps he was worried that Castlereagh had picked up a dose of something he wanted to get rid of, or maybe he thought the minister was one seat short of an overall majority. Certainly, the Duke of Wellington, a chum of the Foreign Secretary, believed it was the latter and wrote to Castlereagh’s physician, asking him to see his patient as soon as possible.

Castlereagh, in a state of agitation, retired to his home in Kent, where his wife, Amelia, took away all the razors to stop him killing himself. Ever resourceful, however, on 12 August 1822 he managed to find a letter opener and cut his own throat. His doctor found him bleeding and recorded his dying words: ‘Bankhead, let me fall upon your arm. Tis all over.’ It put an unambiguous end to an exceptional career.[*]

Yet, even after dying, Castlereagh managed to influence legislation. An inquiry into his death was held a few days later and ruled that he was mentally ill at the time. This was a charitable judgment because had the ruling been ‘suicide’, he would have had a stake driven through his heart and been buried in unconsecrated ground – possibly at a crossroads in order to prevent his ghost from haunting anyone who lived nearby (crossroads were known to confuse ghosts, who wouldn’t know which way to go).

At the time, many people compared the fact that Lord Castlereagh was buried with full rites in Westminster Abbey with the fact that one Abel Griffiths, a 22-year-old law student who killed himself soon after Castlereagh, was buried in ‘drawers, socks and a winding sheet’ at the intersection of Eaton Street, the King’s Road and Grosvenor Place in London. (At least, according to The Annual Register, a record of the year’s political and social events, which has been published continually since 1758, ‘the disgusting part of the ceremony of throwing lime over the body and driving a stake through it was dispensed with’.) The result of the public outrage was an 1823 law banning crossroad burials altogether, so much good came from his death.

On the other hand, Shelley’s friend Byron wrote:

Posterity will ne’er survey

A nobler grave than this:

Here lie the bones of Castlereagh

Stop, traveller, and piss.

CLASS WAR BREAKS OUT IN THE COURTS – THE TICHBORNE CLAIMANT, 1862

Roger Charles Doughty-Tichborne was due to become Sir Roger Doughty-Tichborne, baronet, upon the demise of his father in 1862. The only barrier to his assumption of the title was that he was dead too. Still, that didn’t prevent him from claiming it. Or, to be more precise, it didn’t prevent an obese butcher from the Australian outback claiming it, and demanding the inheritance.

Roger had rather shot himself in the foot a decade beforehand when he decided his cousin, Katherine, was the girl for him. But, as in a tale by Shakespeare, the two families were less than overjoyed with the prospect. There was nothing wrong with cousins marrying – a little bit of ‘keeping it in the family’ was quite normal with the aristocracy and most of the royals were so inbred it was a surprise when one turned out to look almost normal – it was the fact that he was usually so drunk he could hardly see.

In 1852 Roger therefore sold his army commission and went travelling in the Americas until he had dried out enough to stand up unaided, at which point his uncle and aunt might relent and hand over their offspring. On his travels, he saw all the normal sights – the Andes, Rio – and was on his way to Jamaica in 1854 when his ship sank to the bottom of the sea.

News reached Britain and he was legally declared dead. But his excitable French mother, Henriette Felicite, refused to believe he was gone.

When his father fell off the twig in 1862, the heir presumptive to his title became Roger’s little brother, Alfred, who spent money like it was going out of fashion and nearly bankrupted himself. But Henriette Felicite, convinced for no apparent reason that her son was still breathing, began placing adverts in newspapers across the globe, asking for news of him.

In 1865 the reply came from a lawyer in New South Wales. Her son was alive and well – and masquerading as a fat butcher in Wagga Wagga. His name was now Tomas Castro.

Castro was not the natural choice as the alter ego of Roger Charles Doughty-Tichborne. Roger had been slim, whereas Tomas weighed 27 stone. Having lived in France until he was 16, Roger had spoken fluent French, whereas Tomas had mysteriously forgotten every word. Interestingly, Roger’s mother had brought him up in France because he had a rare genital malformation and in France boys were dressed in girls’ clothes until the age of five so it was felt that wearing knickerbockers would give his nether regions more space to develop normally. This is more important to the story than you might think.

Castro’s genitals were the ace up his sleeve – because they were coincidentally misshapen in the way that Roger’s had been. Reports of his organ therefore had Henriette Felicite convinced and she sent Castro the money to return to her bosom. When he arrived, Castro ‘revealed’ that after being shipwrecked he had been rescued by a passing ship bound for Australia. On arrival, he had decided to discard his comfortable life as a member of the aristocracy to start a new one as a petty criminal. From there, he worked his way up to butchery, so he informed her.

Henriette Felicite was so overjoyed that her son had returned to her that she overlooked the fact that he was now an obese tradesman with a criminal record. In the Paris hotel where she met him, she ‘recognised’ him instantly – which must have come as a surprise to anyone else there who had ever clapped eyes on Roger Charles Doughty-Tichborne and was now presented with a man who looked as if he had eaten a town.

Her family, in fact, pointed out that the man in front of them was no more Roger Charles Doughty-Tichborne than she was. Nonsense, she told them, as she handed him £1,000 – worth perhaps £100,000 today – and promised the same sum each year.

It was only after she too died, in 1868, that things got a bit tricky for the man who was to become known as the Tichborne Claimant. The family, knowing he was a ringer, began civil legal action to strip him of the wealth he had got his ham-like hands on. It became the trial of the decade, lasting nearly a year and calling more than 350 witnesses, some attesting that this was the Roger they had known since childhood, others saying if he was Roger Charles Doughty-Tichborne they were chimpanzees.

During the trial, more facts began to emerge that cast doubt on the Claimant’s case. His first act upon arrival in England, for instance, had been to visit Wapping in east London and enquire about a local family by the name of Orton. It didn’t take a genius to connect this to the fact that a former employee in Australia had identified him as one Arthur Orton. In addition, his English ex-girlfriend confirmed he was Arthur Orton and in Chile a young sailor by that name was identified.

The Claimant explained that he knew Arthur Orton because they had worked together and his former employee and ex-girlfriend must be bizarrely confused. Orton, he said, was a criminal and had disappeared.

What ultimately sank the case, however, was the testimony of Lord Bellow, an old school chum of Roger’s. He testified that when they were at school he had tattooed Roger’s thigh. The lack of such a mark scuppered the Claimant’s case.

From then on, it was a criminal matter. In 1873, Arthur Orton was tried for perjury – again the trial lasted ten months and the judge spent four weeks simply summing up the case. The defendant – a claimant no more – became a convict sentenced to 14 years of hard labour. And his barrister was disbarred for annoying the judge.

The case affected the whole of England. It became a cause célèbre as the increasingly confident and vocal middle classes saw it as a battle against the toffs who were banding together to keep all the wealth to themselves. They believed poor Roger was being denied the family silver just because he couldn’t remember which knife to eat peas with and the courts were in on it, denying ordinary working men justice in the face of money and influence. Incredibly, the Claimant’s cause became the greatest mass political movement since the Chartists had demanded universal male suffrage in the 1840s and Britain didn’t see such a movement again until the formation of the Labour Party, around the turn of the century. Henriette Felicite’s mistake had changed the political landscape.

Orton was released after ten years. He attempted to make a living on the music hall circuit but died in poverty on April Fool’s Day, 1898. Five thousand mourners attended his funeral. By permission of the Tichborne family, his grave was marked: ‘Roger Charles Doughty-Tichborne’.

THE WRONG HAT – FRANZ MULLER STARTS A TREND, 1864

Franz Muller, a German tailor living in Britain, was a murderer. But not just any murderer, he was a Moriarty-like master criminal who had got away with it. Or so he thought…

Just before 10pm on 9 July 1864, a City clerk, Thomas Briggs, was in a first-class carriage on his way back to his home in Hackney, east London. Just after 10pm, as his train steamed through London, things became very Agatha Christie-like. A lady in a neighbouring carriage was understandably perturbed to notice blood flying through the open window and spattering her dress. Another passenger heard ‘a horrid howling’ but presumed it was a dog.

When the train arrived at Hackney Wick station, two young clerks entered an empty first-class carriage. They noticed that the seats were wet, red and sticky in a worrying way; they spotted a silver-topped cane, a black leather bag and a battered black beaver hat in the carriage too.

The clerks raised the alarm, the train was halted and the police called. It wasn’t long before the driver of a nearby train complained about a hump on the tracks that was looking a bit corpsey.

In fact, Thomas Briggs was still just about alive. His son was sent for, and identified all the items in the carriage as belonging to his father. Except for the hat. His father’s hat, he said, was very special. It was a very tall top hat made by a city hatter. His father wouldn’t be seen dead in a black beaver, he insisted – especially not one that looked as if someone had sat on it. Also missing were his father’s gold watch and chain.

Briggs died the next day, setting the case in history as Britain’s first rail-borne murder. The nation was shocked that such a thing could take place on the new method of transport that was being hailed as a modern wonder. ‘Who is safe?’ asked the Telegraph. ‘It would be impossible to imagine circumstances of greater apparent security than those which seemed to surround Mr Briggs. Well known – expected at home. Travelling First Class … If we can be murdered thus we may be slain in our pew at church, or assassinated at our dinner table.’

Dinner-table-based assassination thus became a worry for all those who had such tables, and descriptions of Mr Briggs’s unusual topper were circulated far and wide, supplemented by an offer of £300 – around £25,000 today – for hat-related information.

Soon there was a suspect. A Mr Death informed the police that a man had come into his jeweller’s shop and asked for a valuation on a gold watch chain. The man had been disappointed by the figure but accepted it and exchanged it for another chain, which was put in a small cardboard box. The man had had a German accent.

Foreigners, it seemed, were going around murdering hat-wearing City clerks in first-class carriages for substandard watch chains, and understandably the press went ballistic. Reading one such report, a taxi driver, John Matthews, remembered a box marked ‘Death’, which his daughter had been given by a family friend, Franz Muller. And Muller had possessed a hat that fitted the description of the beaver. Matthews gave a full description of the 25-year-old killer; he also happened to have Muller’s address and photograph. Unfortunately, Muller had set sail for America four days beforehand – he had apparently wanted to go for some time, but had suddenly found the money to buy a ticket the day after Briggs was killed.

The game afoot, the police rushed to Muller’s lodgings, where his former landlords said yes, that was his hat (they remembered because foreigners ‘wore them funny’).

Scotland Yard was on the trail and sent three detectives, Matthews and Death to New York on a fast boat to apprehend Muller. Having arrived two weeks before their quarry – how they amused themselves during that time is unknown – they seized Muller. They knew him for certain because he was wearing Briggs’s topper, which he had cut down in an attempt to disguise its identity. He was taken straight back to Britain.

His subsequent trial at the Old Bailey, which began on 27 October, must go down in history as the most hat-obsessed murder trial in history. Much of the evidence was about hats and there were arguments as to how high the top hat should be and whether Muller would have had the skill to amend its height. The defence declared it was all piffle – Matthews had falsely accused Muller for the reward money and the murder must have taken two men to carry out, hat or no hat. They also argued the mass of hysterical newspaper stories meant a fair trial was impossible. In an unusual decision, the judge said that all the media reports and accusations against Muller had actually helped matters because they had acquainted the jury with the case – i.e. they had saved time on all that dreary presentation of evidence in the court.

The jury took a quarter of an hour to convict Muller. His last words before he was publicly hanged were ‘Ich habe es getan’ – ‘I did it’.

The hanging was such a popular affair, with more than 50,000 people coming to see it (many, ironically, arriving by special train services laid on by the railway companies due to popular demand), that there were constant drunken fights and robberies among the spectators – a shameful sight which resulted in the political pressure that ended public executions four years later. The murder itself also resulted in the invention of the emergency communication cord that train passengers could pull to slam on the brakes, and the introduction of windows between carriages, which were named ‘Muller lights’.

Muller’s name lived on in the world of fashion too. As a result of accidentally picking up the wrong hat when he fled the scene of his crime, he started a national trend among young men for shortened toppers, which were known as ‘Muller cut-downs’. If you buy a top hat now, it’s almost certainly styled on Franz Muller’s.

A CASE TOO FAR – CHARLES DILKE EXCLUDES HIMSELF FROM GOVERNMENT, 1885

The sex lives of MPs never cease to amaze the British public and have been entertaining us for a very long time. Charles Dilke MP led the way in the Victorian era – his wife apparently put up with him conducting affairs but things went much more public than they had previously when his sister-in-law’s sister, Virginia Crawford, tearfully confessed to her husband that Dilke, the leading light of the Liberal Party, had ‘ruined’ her when she was a nineteen-year-old new bride, and that they had continued their affair for two years. Not only that, but he had taught her ‘every French vice’ and they had once had a threesome with the maid. What the maid had thought of it all she did not divulge.

Her husband, Donald Crawford MP, sued her for divorce and cited Dilke as a co-respondent. The case became terribly exciting – especially when Dilke claimed that he had never had an affair with Virginia, but he was conducting one with her mother. At the end of the trial, the judge gave one of the oddest decisions in English legal history – that Virginia had had an affair with Dilke, but there was no evidence that he had had one with her. As the public stood pondering this for a while, Dilke made a very foolish decision: he announced that he was going to sue to clear his name from the slur that he was the sort of man who would have an affair with his brother’s wife’s sister, when he was merely the sort of man to have an affair with his brother’s wife’s mother.

But he blundered in the legal application. Instead of bringing the case himself, he petitioned the Queen’s proctor to reopen the original case. This, ruled the judge, meant that he was not actually a party to the trial, merely a witness. So, throughout the week-long case, he was only allowed to sit mute while all sorts of allegations were made about him, and he was not allowed to dispute them one iota. His only chance to speak was when cross-examined about exactly what he had done with whom and where. He lost the case and Gladstone, who had been expected to name Dilke in the forthcoming Cabinet, made a single mark against his name: ‘unavailable’. The effect was far-reaching. Dilke had been the foremost of his generation in the Liberals. Without his leadership, the party ran out of steam and imploded, ensuring Tory governments for many years.

His decision might even have prevented Britain becoming a republic – Dilke was the last MP to suggest such a thing in the House of Commons, earning the eternal hatred of Queen Victoria – and had he gone on to become party leader and Prime Minister who knows what might have happened?

Years later, an inquiry was held. It decided that Virginia had been lying about the affair. Although nothing had happened after she had married, it is possible that she and Dilke had had an affair beforehand and he had reneged on his promise of matrimony. Virginia had therefore wanted revenge. So, when she needed a divorce from her husband because she had contracted syphilis from another lover, she decided to kill two birds with one stone.

THE WRONG DISGUISE – DR CRIPPEN HANGS HIMSELF, 1910

Hawley Harvey Crippen was an American homeopathic ‘doctor’ who practised in London with his wife, a music-hall singer named Cora, who apparently ‘had gentlemen friends’.

After a party on 31 January 1910, Cora disappeared. Her husband said she had returned home to the US, but later amended his story to say that she had died and been cremated. There was, of course, nothing in the least bit suspicious about his initially forgetting that his wife had died and been cremated but Cora’s music-hall chum Kate Williams, a strongwoman better known as ‘Vulcana’, informed the police that Cora was missing. Suspicions were further raised when Crippen’s mistress, Ethel Neave, moved into the family home and began wearing Cora’s clothes and jewellery. The Peelers thought it was a right rum ’un and no mistake so they searched the Crippens’ home and interviewed Crippen on 8 July.

They found nothing untoward but Dr C panicked. When he and Ethel fled, the police searched the house again. Again they found nothing. They searched it once more but still found nothing. Finally, on the fourth search of the property, they found some loose bricks in the basement. Examining further, they discovered the abdomen of an adult buried under the floor, with the head and limbs missing. Suspecting foul play, the police started about the search for Crippen. As they did so, chemical tests also showed traces of the surgical drug scopolamine in the cellar.

By this time, Crippen had run away to Brussels, and had then boarded a steamship bound for Canada, with Ethel dressed as a boy and pretending to be his son.

It was bad luck for the doctor that the boat on which he was fleeing was captained by a man who was (a) struck by the fact that Crippen kept groping his son, who had large breasts and (b) a pioneer of ship-to-shore telegraphy who happened to be aboard a vessel that was one of only 60 in the world able to send a message back to Britain saying Crippen was aboard. Captain Henry George Kendall wired the authorities the message: ‘Have strong suspicions that Crippen London cellar murderer and accomplice are among saloon passengers. Moustache taken off growing beard. Accomplice dressed as boy. Manner and build undoubtedly a girl.’

Chief Inspector Dew of Scotland Yard jumped aboard a faster boat to beat Crippen to Canada, and arrested him as he docked. His first words were: ‘Good morning, Dr Crippen. Do you know me? I’m Chief Inspector Dew from Scotland Yard.’ Crippen’s reply surprised him: ‘Thank God it’s over. The suspense has been too great – I couldn’t stand it any longer.’

If Crippen had travelled in third class, the captain would probably never have seen him. Had Ethel dressed as a woman instead of a transvestite, the captain would probably not have been curious. If Crippen had sailed for his native land of America, Britain might never have been able to extradite him, but from the British dominion of Canada he was taken back to London, tried, convicted and hanged.

But hang on, there’s a twist. In 2007 a team at Michigan State University DNA tested the abdomen from the cellar and decided that it wasn’t Cora. It was, possibly, the body of a woman on whom Crippen had carried out an illegal abortion, which had gone wrong. Or, possibly, it had been buried there before the Crippens moved in. But all along, it had been the wrong body that had set the police on Crippen’s trail and started the saga of the most celebrated murder case of the early twentieth century.

AN EXPENSIVE KEY – SINKING THE TITANIC, 1912

In 2007, a key was put up for auction. Unexceptional in most regards, it was an ordinary locker key but it fetched £90,000. It was, after all, the key that sank the Titanic.

The key was sold by the descendants of David Blair, the liner’s second officer, who was supposed to be on the ship but was removed from the roster at the last minute. When that happened, it slipped his mind to give the key to his locker to his replacement. Understandable – it wouldn’t have seemed that important at the time. But the locker contained the binoculars for the look-out in the crow’s nest – had Blair handed over the key, the look-out might well have spotted something a bit iceberg-like on the horizon. In fact, during the American inquiry into the disaster that was responsible for the loss of 1,522 lives, the look-out, Fred Fleet, said if the crew had had binoculars they would have been able to warn the captain of the impending icy fate much earlier.

‘How much earlier?’ he was asked.

‘Well, enough to get out of the way,’ he replied.

Of course, there were a host of other blunders that sank the unsinkable ship. Perhaps the first was publicly describing it as unsinkable, because that sounded almost like a challenge to its crew.

Added to that, the boat was the largest in the world – more than twice the size of the largest battleships of the time, it was able to carry 3,000 passengers and almost as many crew. It also had seven miles of deck and the luxury of its state rooms rivalled the palaces of Europe. And because it was ‘unsinkable’, there was really no need for lifeboats – just the 16 necessary to comply with the law. These 16 could carry 1,178 people. Of course, that would mean, of the 2,207 people on the maiden voyage, more than 1,000 would drown even if every lifeboat was launched full, but of course the ship could not sink, so everything was fine. And the company didn’t like having lifeboats around – casually reminding the passengers that they could be drowned at any moment tended to make them nervous.

So off sailed the Titanic on her maiden voyage, leaving Southampton on 14 April 1912 loaded with nobs – including Charles Ismay, chairman of the White Star line and owner of the ship. Soon it got a bit icy out there on the Atlantic. So icy, in fact, that the nearest ship to the Titanic, the Californian, actually shut down her engines and drifted through the pack ice in order to prevent major damage. But the Titanic needn’t do that: it was unsinkable.

Knowing it was unsinkable, Captain Edward Smith, who had been brought out of retirement for this special journey, ordered the ship to continue at 22 knots. He didn’t want to be late docking in New York on her maiden voyage – that would be embarrassing.

At 11pm on 14 April, the captain of the Californian saw the lights of the Titanic speeding through the darkness. He was concerned – he knew that the pack ice was dangerous and told his radio operator to send a signal to the other ship warning of the ice. But the wireless operator on the Titanic was too busy sending holiday telegrams on behalf of the passengers and sent a reply that read: ‘Keep out. You are jamming me.’

So on sped the Titanic through the dark waters. Visibility was good that night (it would have been better with binoculars, of course) and the Titanic received another warning, this time from the Mesaba. ‘We have seen much heavy pack ice and a great number of bergs also field ice,’ it stated. Once again, the Titanic’s operator ignored it and went back to the telegrams, failing to pass the message on to the captain.

The next person to see an iceberg was the Titanic’s first officer. By then, of course, it was too late. The liner hit the berg, tearing a hole 100m in length. In fact, the passengers were entranced – how exciting! – because the ship was ‘unsinkable’ so there was no reason for concern. One of those passengers, however, was Thomas Andrews, managing director of the firm that had built the ship. So, when the captain told him that the gushing water had filled three of the watertight compartments, he knew the Titanic could be best described as ‘sinking’.

The wireless operator decided that it was now time to set aside the telegrams about tennis games on Saturday and send out a distress signal, which brought all the ships in the area rushing to help. All except for the Californian – after the Titanic had been so rude to him, its wireless operator had turned off his set and he therefore had no idea what was going on. A junior member of its crew had spotted distress flares, but was told it must be a fireworks show for the passengers. This was unfortunate – the Californian was the only ship close enough to help. Back on the Titanic, as the women and children were selfishly pushing themselves to the front of the queue for the lifeboats, it became apparent that 16 were not enough after all.

Only 711 people survived the disaster. A later count noted that 63 per cent of first-class passengers had survived, 42 per cent of second class and 25 per cent of third class. It led to questions being asked about how the life of a first-class passenger was given priority over that of someone travelling in third class.

Such considerations probably passed over the heads of the gentlemen left on deck as they waved goodbye, though. The band did play on, as it happens, but they were actually playing ragtime, not ‘Abide With Me’ as legend states. Drinks were still being served – you would presume it was a free bar.

As a result of this incident, the law was quickly changed to ensure that ships carry adequate numbers of lifeboats to provide places for everyone on board and lifeboat drills be carried out so that passengers know what to do in the event of an emergency. Ocean-going vessels had to carry a wireless set for emergency communication, which had to be manned around the clock.

One of the lesser-known facts about the Titanic is that it was actually on fire when it hit the iceberg. Coal in one of the bunkers had caught light some time beforehand and for hours the crew had been attempting to put it out.

So the iceberg might just have been the icing on the cake.

THE WRONG PASSPORT – LORD HAW-HAW HANGS HIMSELF, 1946

William Joyce, the most famous British collaborator with the Nazis, was not British. He was born in New York to Irish parents and the family moved back to Ireland when he was young. Although his father was a Catholic, they were staunch unionists and the young Joyce joined the Unionist special constables, the Black and Tans. After moving to mainland Britain in 1921, he became involved with Oswald Mosley’s Fascists and Mosley took a liking to Joyce, inviting him to join a group travelling to Nazi Germany in 1933 to see what Britain would be like if they were to come to power. Joyce jumped at the chance but, since he didn’t have a passport, he fraudulently applied for a British one, claiming to be a United Kingdom citizen. This petty crime would cost him his life.

Six years later, while still in Britain, Joyce was tipped off by a Fascist sympathiser in British military intelligence that he was about to be arrested as a Nazi and he fled to Germany, where he was recruited to a German propaganda radio station, Rundfunkhaus (the same one that P.G. Wodehouse worked for), to broadcast to Britain. He soon became known to British listeners as Lord Haw-Haw.

On 30 April 1945 Joyce fled the advancing Allied forces but was arrested near the Danish border and returned to Britain to be tried. As an American citizen, legally, he should have been tried in America but his trivial act of fraud a decade earlier meant he had a British passport and that meant Britain had the right to try him – and hang him.

The historian A.J.P. Taylor points out that the normal penalty for a fraudulent passport application was £2 – Joyce’s sentence was somewhat harsher, making him the last man in Britain to hang for treason. His colleagues at Rundfunkhaus received short prison sentences – except for Wodehouse, who got a slap on the wrist and was eventually awarded a knighthood.

A SHOT IN THE DARK – LORD LUCAN IS UNLUCKY, 1974

Richard Bingham, the ironically nicknamed Lord ‘Lucky’ Lucan, wanted to kill his estranged wife, Veronica. He planned to do so on a Thursday – 7 November 1974, to be precise – when his children’s nanny had the night off and always went out with her boyfriend, leaving his wife alone in the house.

So that night he hid in the kitchen of his wife’s home in Belgravia, west London, took the bulb out of the light and waited until nine o’clock when his wife always came down to make herself a cup of tea. When she did so, he sprang out and beat her to death in the dark with a length of lead piping, as in the popular board game Cluedo. He was therefore a little surprised to then hear her voice from upstairs calling for Sandra Rivett, the nanny. With understanding dawning like an unwelcome guest at Christmas, he realised that he had killed the wrong woman. Not one to be put off a task, however, when his wife really did come down this time, he attempted to kill her too, but bizarrely relented halfway through and went upstairs with her to watch television. Lucan, it seemed, couldn’t bring himself to kill his hated wife, but he was perfectly capable of beating an innocent third party to death. This unusual decision allowed Veronica to escape and raise the alarm by running to a nearby pub.

After Lady Lucan burst into the Plumbers Arms, screaming that her husband was trying to kill her, the police rushed to the house and forced open the door to find a bloodstained towel in one bedroom and a large pool of blood with a man’s footprints on the floor of the basement. In the basement they found the body of the nanny stuffed in a canvas mailbag, as in a cheap detective novel.

The perpetrator of this grisly act, however, had disappeared and soon became Britain’s most famous fugitive, passing into near-mythical status. Since then, he has been spotted everywhere and was even inadvertently responsible for one of Britain’s oddest political scandals, the Stonehouse affair…

THE WRONG FUGITIVE – JOHN STONEHOUSE GETS CAUGHT, 1974

John Stonehouse MP, who had been Postmaster General in one of Wilson’s governments, was having a few problems. His debts were mounting and he was cooking the books at his business to hide it; he was also conducting an extramarital affair with his secretary and, to cap it all, he was spying on Britain for the Soviet Bloc, in the form of the Czech intelligence service. Quite how he found the time for all of this is anybody’s guess.

Clearly, the scheduling was becoming tough for him too, so tough that he decided to fake his own death in an elaborate – some might say ‘romantic’ – fashion.

His first step was to identify a dead constituent, Joseph Markham, and go about stealing the man’s identity. He even rehearsed ‘being’ Markham. A psychiatrist’s report from the time states: ‘He spent short periods posing as Mr Markham, a private and “honest” individual, which apparently led to reduced tension. He began to dislike the personality of Stonehouse and came to believe that his wife, colleagues and friends would be better off without him. He therefore devised his escape to get away from the identity of Stonehouse. He thought of suicide but, deciding that this was not the answer, devised a “suicide equivalent” – his disappearance from a beach in Miami.’

On 20 November 1974 Stonehouse went to the beach in Miami, left a pile of clothes on it and promptly disappeared, leaving the authorities to believe he had drowned while swimming. Newspapers printed his obituary, lamenting his death. His wife, Sheila, was distraught at the death of her husband – not realising that he was, in fact, on his way to Australia to start a carefully constructed new life with his secretary/mistress, Sheila Buckley.

Upon arrival in Melbourne, he set about accessing the 36 different bank accounts he had opened in a variety of names, swapping money between them to cover his tracks. As ‘Clive Mildoon’, he deposited Aus$21,000 – around £90,000 now – in cash at the Melbourne branch of the Bank of New Zealand. It was just unlucky for him that the cashier from that bank later spotted him in the branch of the Bank of New South Wales depositing money as John Markham. The cashier thought this was a bit suspicious and spoke to the police.

Here’s where Stonehouse’s luck really fell apart.

At the very time that John Stonehouse was running away from his debts, another British celebrity was fleeing from murder – ‘Lucky’ Lucan. An international manhunt for the fugitive peer was underway and the Australian police were on the look-out for him. When they heard about a suspicious Englishman depositing large sums of money at a number of banks, they therefore thought they had found Lucan and placed him under surveillance.

As part of the investigation, a police officer went to search his flat. By astonishing bad luck, the policeman noticed a book of matches on the table in Stonehouse’s home from a hotel where the officer had stayed 20 years earlier – in Miami. He finally put two and two together and realised they, in fact, had John Stonehouse, who wasn’t even missing.

He was arrested on Christmas Eve. Just in case he was Lord Lucan after all, the police made him pull his trousers down, to look for a scar that Lucan had on his thigh. His skin told them it was probably Stonehouse.

After unsuccessful attempts to gain asylum from the mighty powers of Mauritius and Sweden, Stonehouse was deported to Britain, where he technically remained an MP while behind bars in Brixton prison.

Stonehouse was tried on 21 counts of fraud and wasting police time. He conducted his own defence, which must have gone well because he was convicted and sentenced to seven years in Wormwood Scrubs, where he complained about the fact that the radio in the prison workshop only ever played pop music. A few years later, he was released due to ill health, at which point he blamed the press for his downfall, rather than the fact that he had been a spy, adulterer and international criminal.

In 1980, the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, agreed not to prosecute him even though a Czech defector had revealed that Stonehouse had been spying when he was a minister. This was, in a rare stroke of luck for Stonehouse, due to the fact that the previous year Anthony Blunt, formerly of MI5, had been exposed as another member of the Cambridge spy ring, so a minister being outed as a Soviet agent would make it look as if Downing Street was little more than the Kremlin’s London branch.

There was something of a happy ending for Stonehouse when he came out of prison because his wife divorced him and he married his secretary. He died in 1988, by which time he had joined the SDP.

It is often assumed the novel – and later BBC TV comedy series – The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, in which the eponymous hero fakes his own death, was inspired by Stonehouse. In fact, the novel was written before the MP’s exploits but not published until afterwards.

TREADING ON BRAZILIAN TOES – LETTING RONNIE BIGGS OFF THE HOOK, 1974

It seems 1974 was a bad year for the long arm of the British law, but an exciting year for fugitive Britons. For that was the year that a failure to fill out some paperwork allowed Ronnie Biggs, the most famous of the Great Train Robbers, to continue life on the run.

Biggs had dramatically escaped from Wandsworth gaol in 1965 by constructing his own rope ladder, scaling the wall and jumping onto a waiting van. He eventually managed to get to Brazil but hot on his trail was Chief Superintendent Jack ‘Slipper of the Yard’ Slipper.

In 1974, the Daily Express received a tip-off that Biggs was in Rio, and duly informed the Yard. But Slipper slipped up when he chose to disregard protocol and inform neither his own government nor the Brazilians that he was on his way to Rio, because the Brazilian police were about as trustworthy as a convention of snakes and he didn’t want Biggs to be forewarned of the visit.

When Slipper arrived at Copacabana police station, however, it was explained to him with traditional South American manners that he had no jurisdiction and he should leave before they got really upset. Biggs was soon informed of the British policeman’s visit.

Had Slipper simply informed Interpol, they would have picked up Biggs no problem and handed him over to the British authorities. Instead, he was left to his own devices until 2001, when the ageing thief voluntarily returned to Britain to use the NHS, his age having caught up with him more successfully than the police. He remained stubbornly alive until the end of 2013.

THE WRONG MAN – THE SHOOTING OF STEPHEN WALDORF, 1983

The British people don’t expect gun battles on their streets but in 1983 the residents of Kensington, that plushest of London boroughs, witnessed the police gunning down a criminal as he sat in a stationary car. Unfortunately, the man was actually an entirely innocent film editor and the police had made one hell of an error. As the Times reported: ‘It was a trail of mistakes and coincidences that went terribly wrong.’

The police were after one David Martin, an armed robber suspected of shooting a police officer. Martin had escaped from a crown court cell the previous month and the police wanted him back. They therefore had his girlfriend, Sue Stephens, under surveillance in case he made contact.

A poster was distributed to local police stations warning Martin should be considered armed and highly dangerous, and a number of officers on the 21-strong team put together to hunt him down were issued with firearms. They were informed that Martin had a ‘pathological hatred for authority, particularly directed towards police officers, even more particularly for those officers who had arrested and dealt with him’. It was an understandable warning, but one primed, perhaps, to make any officer coming across Martin very twitchy.

One of the officers on edge was Detective Constable Peter Finch. He had arrested Martin in September 1982 after a violent struggle in Martin’s flat, when Martin, bizarrely disguised as a woman, had threatened Finch with two guns, shouting: ‘I will have you! I will blow you away!’ In the course of the fight, Martin was shot in the neck by another officer and, as a result, he was set to explode.

On 14 January 1983 Finch and another officer, Detective Constable John Jardine, were issued with .38 Smith and Wesson revolvers. They were both qualified to carry them, but neither had ever drawn a gun in anger – it was very rare for British police to even draw their weapons, let alone fire them. In the previous three years, fewer than 50 bullets had been fired by officers, with just six people being hit.

Finch and Jardine were issued with the guns as part of the police unit following Sue Stephens, a unit that also included a black cab, a motorbike and a number of cars, which tailed her from her flat in Kilburn to the home of her friend Lester Purdy, who had arranged to meet Stephen Waldorf to talk about a film job. The three of them met at a car hire shop in west London. It was bad luck for Waldorf that, with his long blond hair and long nose, he looked a lot like David Martin.

The three subsequently drove away in a yellow mini, with Waldorf in the passenger seat and Stephens in the back. As they followed, the police thought it might be Martin, but wanted a positive identification before taking any action. One of the officers reported on his radio: ‘It is looking good, it may be our target. We can see his large nose, his hair. It is looking good.’

When the mini stopped at traffic lights, the officer in charge of the operation, Superintendent George Ness, decided to send an officer on foot to walk past the car in an attempt to identify Martin. Finch knew him best, so he was sent to creep up to the car and identify the suspect. He later testified that he was ‘100 per cent sure it was Martin’.

‘I was looking through the glass and saw a three-quarter profile of Martin. I saw his large nose, his hair and even his high cheekbones,’ he said.

Finch drew his weapon and shot out the tyres of the car. Then he fired four bullets through the window at Martin.

Finch’s colleagues saw what they believed was a gunfight between Finch and Martin and rushed to help. A total of 14 rounds were discharged, five hitting Waldorf. It was only when Waldorf was lying handcuffed on the ground and they got a better look that the policemen realised they had shot the wrong man. He was rushed to hospital. Fortunately, despite a fractured skull, damaged liver and severe blood loss, he survived.

David Martin was captured two weeks later after a chase on the London Underground. He received 25 years in prison. Finch and Jardine were subsequently charged with attempted murder.

The most damning evidence against Finch was that he had exceeded his orders. Ness had expected him to walk past the mini and casually glance in to identify Martin. He was under orders not to effect an arrest unless absolutely necessary, but the court heard that he was seen to draw his revolver even before he arrived at the car. Finch claimed he shouted: ‘Armed police!’ but witnesses said they had heard no such warning.

Jardine was also in a tough position. After Finch had shot Waldorf, the victim was lying half out the car with his head touching the pavement yet Jardine shot him again. Finch then hit him three times over the head with his pistol, fracturing Waldorf’s skull, before handcuffing him. That was when Finch noticed that the victim wasn’t Martin.

The Attorney General, Sir Michael Havers, QC, was prosecuting the case personally, the importance of the events having national repercussions regarding the police, whom, it seemed to the country, had appointed themselves judge, jury and – literally – executioner. He told the court: ‘It does not matter, in fact, whether it was Martin or Waldorf because there was no need, in the submission of the Crown, to take those actions at that stage – either to shoot him, as Jardine did when he was half in and half out of the car, or to fracture his skull with a revolver, as Finch did. Whether Finch was standing or crouching, in order to strike Waldorf hard at least twice, surely he must have been in a position to stop him getting a gun, even if he had a gun to go for. If you are pistol-whipping a man that closely, you must be in a position to restrain him.’

Havers claimed that, after the incident, Jardine had told investigating officers: ‘I intended to totally incapacitate him and the only way to do that with a gun was to kill him.’ In effect, Havers was telling the public that the police were operating a shoot-to-kill policy.

Waldorf told the court that when the shooting began he thought that it was between two other parties and he had just been caught in the cross-fire. Soon, ‘it became pretty apparent I was the target. I was trying to think if I had any enemies. The car windows came in and the bullets kept coming through.’

Finch said he had drawn his weapon in readiness because he was wearing a large jacket and didn’t want to be fumbling for his gun if he needed it. Misinterpreting a movement inside the car, he thought he was about to be shot. The judge told the jury to put themselves in the mind of the officers who truly believed it was Martin and that he might well be armed. They were, he instructed, entitled to shoot first in self-defence.

The two men were acquitted. An internal police inquiry stripped them of their right to carry firearms but they kept their jobs. The victim received £120,000 in compensation.

Waldorf said he wasn’t surprised by the verdict and added: ‘I don’t think I could actually ever forgive them, but I can’t blame them. It’s the system that’s at fault, not them. When you think that they fired 14 shots and only five hit me – and none of them killed me – that had to be luck. It was lucky for me the police were bad shots. At least I think it was luck. I don’t know whether we’re lucky or unlucky when the police are incompetent.’

In the wake of the incident and the resulting public outcry, the Home Office introduced much stricter rules about police use of guns, requiring an officer of Commander rank to sign off on their use, and officers issued with them had to carry a card reminding them that the weapons could only be used as a true last resort. But the public perception of the police was changed irrevocably.

AN OFF-HAND COMMENT – JEFFREY ARCHER SENDS HIMSELF TO PRISON, 1990

In 1990 Jeffrey Archer, the Conservative MP and semi-literate novelist, hosted a party. One of the guests was his old friend Ted Francis. But Francis was more than a friend: he and Archer had once gone into business together. In 1987 Archer had given Francis, a TV producer, £20,000 to make a film about the children’s author Enid Blyton. But there had been a tragic failure of communication – Archer had considered the money a loan, whereas Francis believed it was an investment and had never repaid it. So, at that fateful dinner party, according to Francis, ‘I was chatting to an actress when Jeffrey sidled up to us and said to her in a very loud voice, “You want to watch this man, you know. I lent him £20,000 once and I’m still waiting to get the money back.” She was dreadfully embarrassed and I was deeply hurt. He humiliated me in front of my peers in the industry and I didn’t understand why.’

It was a mind-bogglingly foolish thing for Archer to do, given that Francis was actually in a position to have Archer sent to prison. And Francis exercised this power, but, being a man who could bear a grudge until the time is right, he waited until 1999 to do so.

It all began in 1986 when Archer, a liar and bankrupt who had been cleared of insider trading, was a rising star in the Tory Party. One day, the Daily Star splashed across its front page the fact that he also liked whores. They had caught him paying off a prostitute, Monica Coghlan, with £2,000 and were in no mood to sit on the story.

Archer resigned from the position of Conservative Party Deputy Chairman and released a statement in which he claimed he had never met Coghlan but that she had phoned him out of the blue to say a newspaper was alleging he had had sex with her. ‘Foolishly, I allowed myself to fall into what I can only call a trap in which a newspaper has played a reprehensible part. In the belief that this woman genuinely wanted to be out of the way of the press and realising that for my part any publicity of this kind would be extremely harmful to me and for which a libel action would be no adequate remedy, I offered to pay her money so that she could go abroad for a short period. For that lack of judgement, and that alone, I have tendered my resignation,’ he explained.

The Star, not a newspaper to back off, then went one step further and alleged Archer and Coghlan had enjoyed a bit of rumpy-pumpy in a dodgy hotel, the Albion, on 9 September 1986.

After this outrage, Archer could take no more and sued for libel. Just before the trial, the newspaper realised it had made an error and amended the date of the romance to 8 September. It also fleshed out Coghlan’s character, pointing out that she specialised in kinky stuff.

During her evidence at the trial, Coghlan described the scene in the Albion: ‘Nothing much was said because it was over so quickly. He commented on my nipples. I had no difficulty seeing his face. I was lying on top of him the whole time.’

But Archer had an alibi for that night. He had, he claimed, had dinner at a restaurant with the editor of his books and his film agent, Terence Baker. And he had gone home after the time that Monica Coghlan claimed they were together.

The trial was notable for the lunacy of the judge, who famously informed the jury that they should trust Archer’s wife, Mary, because she had ‘fragrance’, before summing up Archer: ‘You may think his history is worthy and healthy and sporting. What is always a great attribute of the British is their admiration, besides their enjoyment, of good sports like cricket and athletics. And Jeffrey Archer was president of the Oxford University Athletics Club [Archer always claimed to have gone to Oxford, which was untrue: he had attended a teacher training college affiliated to the university] and ran for his country. Is he in need of cold, unloving, rubber-insulated sex in a seedy hotel, round about a quarter to one on a Tuesday morning?’

The answer, of course, was ‘yes’.

Archer received damages of £500,000 – the highest ever recorded at that time. Over the following years, he rebuilt his political career and, in 1999, became the Conservative candidate to be the first elected Mayor of London. Then Ted Francis, like a fat puma, pounced.

On 21 November 1999 Francis revealed to the press that, before the original libel trial, Archer had asked him to write a letter to his solicitor falsely stating, and offering to testify, that they had had dinner together on the night of 9 September 1986, the date that the Star had first claimed the tryst had happened in the Albion. Francis added that Archer had faked an entry in his diary to put them together that night. But when the Star changed the date, Francis was forgotten.

Francis’s revelations revealed Archer as a man fully prepared to commit perjury and to ask others to commit it in his libel case. Helpfully, Francis provided a tape of Archer asking him to lie.

Archer’s career – let alone his mayoral candidacy – duly sank faster than the Titanic. He did his best, claiming that he had only asked Francis to lie because he wanted to protect the identity of a young lady he was really dining with. People wondered who the mysterious female could have been (if she existed at all). Some speculated that it was his former assistant, Andrina Colquhoun. If so, it would make her possibly the most dangerous dinner companion in the world, given that Lord Lucan had been due to dine with her just before he mistakenly killed his nanny in 1974.

Francis opened the floodgates. It appeared that Terence Baker, who had since died, had told a friend he had given Archer a false alibi for the night of 8 September, the night actually argued over in court.

None of this would have happened if Archer had remembered that the tryst had taken place on 8 September, and therefore he had no need of a false alibi for the following night.

Archer’s fall from grace ended with his imprisonment for two years for perjury and perverting the course of justice, and was at least partially responsible for Ken Livingstone being elected Mayor of London. It also managed to remind the British public that even though the Tories were no longer in power, they were still the party of sleazy sex scandals. Surprisingly, Mary Archer, clearly a fan of Tammy Wynette, stood by her man.

SLIP OF THE TONGUE – JOHN PATTEN’S MINISTERIAL CAREER GOES UP IN SMOKE, 1993

John Patten was Education Secretary in John Major’s Cabinet from 1992 to 1994. His career came to an end when, not stopping to think it through, during a fringe meeting at the Conservative Party conference, he publicly described Birmingham’s head of education, Tim Brighouse, in somewhat unusual terms. To be precise, he stated: ‘Birmingham has put this nutter in as their chief education officer. I fear for Birmingham children with this madman let loose wandering round the streets, frightening the children.’

The teachers of Birmingham duly had a whip-round, raising more than £25,000, which enabled Brighouse to sue for libel. He won substantial damages, which he donated to charity, using some of it to set up the University of the First Age, which encourages children to partake in extra-curricular activities.

As well as putting a dent in the government’s plans to centralise the education curriculum and reposition it along more traditional lines, the affair forced Patten to resign from government and vacate his seat at the next election. Don’t worry, though, he was made a peer as compensation.

His wife, Louise, is the granddaughter of the replacement second officer on the Titanic, Charles Lightoller, who was responsible for many of the deaths that night by misinterpreting the order of ‘women and children first’. Getting the wrong end of the stick, he put only women and children in the lifeboats and cast them away even if there were many empty seats that could have been filled by the waiting men – at one point, he ordered 30 men out of a lifeboat at gunpoint, thus condemning them to a pointless death. Don’t worry, though, he managed to find a seat for himself and lived to a ripe old age.

*  In fact, the Sharps’ main claim to fame at that time was that they and their six siblings would occasionally sail up rivers on a barge playing music (Granville liked the kettle drums). One such gathering can be seen in a famous family portrait by Johann Zoffany. In ‘The Family of William Sharp: Musical Party on the Thames’, Granville holds up some sheet music for his sister playing the harpsichord, while William, a French Horn enthusiast, can be seen standing at the back, waving his hat.

Some time after completing the work, Zoffany was ship-wrecked off the Andaman Islands and was forced to eat one of his fellow sailors. The historian William Dalrymple writes in his book White Mughals: ‘Zoffany may thus be said with some confidence to have been the first and last Royal Academician to become a cannibal’, yet Dalrymple provides no evidence for this somewhat sweeping claim.

*  Castlereagh was, for instance, perhaps the only member of a nineteenth-century Cabinet to challenge and fight another member of the Cabinet to a duel over a point of foreign policy, having fought Lord Canning with pistols on Putney Heath on 21 September 1809. Supposedly, Canning followed the gentlemanly convention of the time of firing his pistol into the air – in order to maintain the honour of having fought, but without the danger of actually hurting his opponent – while Castlereagh took careful aim but still only managed to hit Canning in the thigh, somewhat surprising him.

History is littered with battles lost because of poor choice of tactics. Armies that ran when they should have fought (or fought when they should have ran), commanders who attacked with infantry when an artillery barrage could have decimated their opponents, or spies who gave away their own secrets. But far more insidious is the role of the ‘regimented’ military mindset, which results in quartermasters who refuse to hand over desperately needed bullets in the midst of a battle because the correct paperwork has not been filled out; or officers who continue blindly on a suicidal course even when they know the order has been issued by mistake.

Another danger is that soldiers are taught to expect success (an army that predicts defeat is far more likely to experience it), so the warrior who finds himself being roundly trounced often also finds himself without a plan B and has to make it up as he goes along. Both Bonnie Prince Charlie and Simon Mann found out what can go wrong when this happens.

FRIEND OR FOE? – THE BATTLE OF BARNET, 1471

It was a thick dawn mist that did for the Lancastrian forces at the Battle of Barnet during the Wars of the Roses. Through the fog, the Lancastrian Earl of Warwick mistook the silver star on the standard of his ally, the Earl of Oxford, for the sun of the Yorkist Edward IV. Warwick and his men fell upon Oxford’s men, who, despite being a little taken aback by this sudden turn of events, fought back bravely and succeeded in killing Warwick.

The Yorkists were but spectators in the battle, which they largely won by default since the Lancastrians seemed more intent on wiping each other out than fighting their actual enemies.

GENEROUS TO A FAULT – WILLIAM THE SILENT PAYS FOR HIS OWN ASSASSINATION, 1582

The violent repression of Catholics under Elizabeth I, with long wars between those following the Church of Rome and their Anglican rivals, began not in England but in the Netherlands.

William the Silent, aka William of Orange, was the Protestant leader of the Dutch armed revolt against their Catholic Spanish Hapsburg rulers.[*] The Hapsburgs – his former employers – responded by putting a price on his head: 25,000 gold coins for anyone who would knock him off. The declaration by Philip II of Spain is notable for its poetic fury:

We had scarcely turned our back on the Netherlands before William of Nassau began to endeavour, by sinister arts, plots, and intrigues, first to gain over those whom he believed to be malcontents, or haters of justice, or anxious for innovations, and then, above all, those who were suspected in the matter of religion.[**] These he flattered and attracted by fine words and vain promises. He was the instigator and chief author of the first protest which was presented by certain young gentlemen who daily frequented his house and stable.[***]

Moreover, with the knowledge, advice, and encouragement of the said Orange, the heretics commenced to destroy the images, altars, and churches in a disorderly manner, and to desecrate all holy and sacred objects, especially the sacraments ordained of God.**** Yet, by divine grace and the foresight of the duchess of Parma, our very dear sister, matters were remedied, and he was forced to retire from our dominions, breathing out threats of vengeance in his rage.

He began, through his agents and satellites, to introduce heretical preaching where he found it possible, persecuting all the good pastors, preachers, monks, and upright persons, and hunting many of them from the region. Then he had a number massacred; or rather, he tried to avoid the responsibility for a massacre carried on by some of his adherents, until the estates, greatly incensed by this cruelty, demanded an account of the affair, when he pretended that it was displeasing to him. Then he introduced liberty of conscience, or to speak more correctly, confusion of all religion, which soon brought it about that the Catholics were openly persecuted and driven out, and the churches and monasteries, whether of men or women, broken up, ruined, and levelled with the ground.

Although a married man, and although his second wife was still alive, he took to himself a nun, an abbess who had been solemnly sanctified by episcopal authority, and her he still keeps; a most disreputable and infamous thing.

For all these just reasons, for his evil doing: as chief disturber of the public peace and as a public pest we outlaw him forever and forbid all our subjects to associate with him or communicate with him in public or in secret. We declare him an enemy of the human race, and in order the sooner to remove our people from his tyranny and oppression, we promise, on the word of a king and God’s servant, that if one of our subjects be found so generous of heart and so desirous of doing us a service and advantaging the public that he shall find means of executing this decree and of ridding us of the said pest, either by delivering him to us dead or alive, or by depriving him at once of life, we will give him and his heirs landed estates or money, as he will, to the amount of twenty-five thousand gold crowns. If he has committed any crime, of any kind whatsoever, we will pardon him. If he be not noble, we will ennoble him for his valour; and should he require other persons to assist him, we will reward them according to the service rendered, pardon their crimes, and ennoble them too.

Over the next few years, William became accustomed to people he knew, as well as complete strangers, trying to kill him. In 1582 a Catholic servant named Juan de Jáuregui shot him with a pistol, but had stuffed too much powder into it, so that it exploded, blowing his own thumb off and setting light to William’s hair. William’s guards leapt on De Jáuregui and stabbed him to death before beheading him. It wasn’t a complete loss for De Jáuregui, though – a bullet did pierce William’s neck. William survived, however, because his servants spent the next 17 days in round-the-clock shifts, holding the wound closed.

Next up in the William assassination stakes were a couple of Spaniards who tried to poison him but were arrested before they could do so; then a Frenchmen named Le Goth, who planned to poison some eels, knowing William was fond of them – but he made the schoolboy error of mentioning his plot to a friend of William’s who notified the authorities; then a Dutchman called Hans Hanzoon who tried – twice – to blow William up, once at his palace and once in church. But William the Silent remained stubbornly alive.

It all came to an end, however, when William literally paid for his own death. A young Frenchman, Balthasar Gérard, came into his service claiming to be the son of a Protestant who had died fighting the Catholics. William sent him on a diplomatic mission to France but when, some time later, William noticed Gérard hanging about the palace and looking shifty, he asked him why he was still there.

Gérard, who hadn’t the first clue how he was going to go about killing William and was such a hopeless assassin that he didn’t even have a weapon, told William that the reason he had not left for Paris was that he couldn’t afford to buy shoes for the journey. William gave him 12 crowns to buy himself some suitable footwear. Gérard bought a gun and some bullets and shot William dead with them that afternoon.

In revenge, William’s guards tied Gérard’s wrists behind his back and suspended him by them from an overhead beam. They then whipped him, poured salt into the wounds, and cut his hands off. Following this, they cut off his breasts, salted him again, pulled out chunks of his flesh with hot pincers (followed by another salting), disembowelled him, tore out his heart while he was still alive and showed it to him, and finally cut him into four pieces.

The effect of all this in England was electric. Queen Elizabeth I herself wrote to William’s widow, saying she hoped ‘the authors of this execrable act [will have reason to wish] that they had never been born’.

Her courtiers began detecting Popish plots everywhere (not without reason, when the Pope heard of the killing, he ordered all the church bells in Rome be rung in celebration) and it became English law that no one could carry a pistol within two miles of a royal palace. Some of Elizabeth’s supporters even formed a secret association to ensure that if she were murdered no one who might have been behind it – i.e. Mary, Queen of Scots – would succeed to the throne. They convinced Elizabeth to sign Mary’s death warrant, just in case.

The fear sparked by the assassination even led to war. England was so worried that the Spanish could take over the Netherlands and use the Dutch ports to invade Britain she entered the Netherlands’ war against Spain, resulting in the Spanish attempt to invade Britain that ended with the destruction of the Spanish Armada in 1588.

KEEP ’EM HAPPY – THE ASSAULT ON CÁDIZ, 1625

When Britain launched an attack on Spanish ships in the port of Cádiz on 1 November 1625 as part of the ongoing hostilities against Spain, things started off pretty well. Then Sir Edward Cecil landed with a number of his troops to defend against the Spanish soldiers who were rushing to the scene. Better described as a mob than an army, the Britons were forced to march through the hot day without food or water. As night fell, they made camp beside some old buildings. It turned out that these buildings were wine stores. Cecil, concerned for his men’s happiness, said they could drink one butt of wine per regiment – strictly no more.

The soldiers, however, paid very careful heed to the bit about ‘drink the wine’ and not so much to ‘one butt only’. On empty stomachs and dehydrated, they got as drunk as students and proceeded to forget about the enemy, preferring to shoot each other in drunken brawls. When Cecil ordered that the rest of the wine be poured away, they threatened to kill him. For the rest of the night, the officers were much more scared of being shot by their own men than by the Spanish and hid in their lodgings.

As dawn broke, 100 men were still so drunk they couldn’t even stand and had to be left behind while their comrades marched off. They may have come to regret this overindulgence shortly before the Spanish troops turned up and killed them all.

As their sober comrades sailed back home, Cecil continued to show his natural capacity for command. It turned out that Plague had broken out on some of the vessels and they could not properly sail, so he ordered that two men from each ship where there was no Plague be moved onto an infected vessel to be replaced on the healthy boats by two men from those where the highly virulent disease raged. The results will come as no surprise to anyone: Cecil managed to wipe out a good part of his army without them firing a shot.

PREMATURE CELEBRATIONS – ALLOWING BONNIE PRINCE CHARLIE TO ESCAPE, 1746

Over-optimistic Italian chancer Charles Edward Louis John Casimir Sylvester Severino Maria Stuart was a pretty awful military commander. Not only was he terrible at deciding what his troops should do on the battlefield, but also, when he saw that he had severely messed things up on the field of Culloden, on 16 April 1746, and his men were being churned up by the English troops, he set a brave example by fleeing the scene at the earliest opportunity.

He was aided in his escape by the fact that the English search parties sent after him had little or no idea what he looked like, although they knew vaguely where he had run away to: an area near the River Doe in Glen Moriston. Before long the area was full of soldiers after the £30,000 bounty placed on his head (most of them were English, but you wouldn’t put it past his own troops wanting a slice of the action).

Proving the old adage that fortune favours the delusional, salvation appeared in the form of Roderick Mackenzie, a jeweller from Edinburgh who had fought for Stuart and was doing his best to disappear too. He happened to stumble through the search zone, looking ‘a bit Scottish’ and the soldiers got it into their heads that they had found their man. Mackenzie started to run for it and they opened fire, fatally wounding him. History records that he cried out: ‘You have killed your prince!’ in order to ‘confirm’ their mistake and save Charlie.

Charlie was, in fact, displaying the military prowess and bravery that has always characterised the Italian army by cowering in a nearby cave.

A poem of the time commemorates the confusion:

Rod’rick Mackenzie, a merchant-man,

At Ed’nburgh town had join’d the Clan,

Had in the expedition been,

And at this time durst not be seen.

Being skulking in Glen-Morriston,

Him the soldiers lighted on.

Near about the Prince’s age and size,

Genteely drest, in no disguise,

In ev’ry feature, for’s very face

Might well be taken in any case,

And lest he’d like a dog be hang’d,

He chose to die with sword in hand,

And round him like a madman struck,

Vowing alive he’d ne’er be took,

Deep wounds he got, and wounds he gave;

At last a shot he did receive,

And as he fell, them to convince,

Cry’d, Ah! Alas! You’ve killed your Prince;

Ye murderers and bloody crew,

You had no orders thus to do.

Somewhat pleased with themselves and mentally listing how they would be blowing their cut of the reward money, the troops returned home to Fort Augustus with Mackenzie’s head – the rest of him they buried beside what is now the A887. When they got back to the fort, their commander, the Duke of Cumberland – popularly known as ‘the Butcher’ – took a look at the head. He was, however, uncertain if it was the Prince because he had generally only seen Charlie as a complete person. So he sent it to London to be identified. Soon it came back, with a note saying no one in London was sure either.

The outcome of all this to-ing and fro-ing was that Charlie was given sufficient time to slip away to the Isle of Skye – giving us another literary work: ‘The Skye Boat Song’.

Speed, bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing,

Onward! the sailors cry;

Carry the lad that’s born to be King

Over the sea to Skye.

Loud the winds howl, loud the waves roar,

Thunderclaps rend the air;

Baffled, our foes stand by the shore,

Follow they will not dare.

Strangely, the lyrics make no mention of the fact that during his princely scarpering, Charlie was dressed as a girl because he was so frightened.

SACKVILLE FREEZES – THE BATTLE OF MINDEN, 1759

At the Battle of Minden on 1 August 1759, which was part of the Seven Years War between Anglo-German forces and France, Lord George Sackville was one of the British cavalry commanders. He was also a noted coward.

When ordered to charge the fleeing French and ensure a full rout of their forces, he simply refused and instead stood there doing nothing. He received the same order three times, on each occasion claiming he did not understand it. When his deputy attempted to follow the perfectly clear order, Sackville stopped him, allowing the French to escape. He was duly arrested and court-martialled.

OH, IT’S TOO LATE TO READ – FAILING TO QUELL THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, 1776

Those troublesome colonials! The United Kingdom had better things to do in the late 1770s than deal with their silly ideas about independence. But still, Britain had a duty to save them from themselves and, since, in July 1776, they had gone so far as to declare themselves independent, the only thing to do was send in the troops.

The first 10,000 soldiers who arrived in New York from the mother country were no amateurs – they were veterans of campaigns in India, Africa and China and had proved successful in putting the British flag in the soil. They were commanded by the competent William Howe, who had previously captured Quebec from the French. Thus, it wasn’t long before they were inflicting stinging defeats on the rebels, driving the Americans’ leader, George Washington, and his forces out of New York and New Jersey. It seemed victory was assured for Britain; only the onset of winter forced Howe to halt the campaign and settle down in lodgings until the weather changed. Unluckily for him, this allowed the colonists to escape to a very basic camp they had established in Pennsylvania.

As the winter grew colder, the rebels’ condition worsened. They were poorly supplied and demoralised. Many were deserting – there was nothing to stay for, and if they were defeated and taken prisoner things would be much worse than if they just drifted off. Even their financial backers were cutting off funds as the fight appeared hopeless and punishment by the royalists looked ever more likely.

So the British forces were happy to sit it out and watch, planning a final decisive push in the spring. This might well have come to pass had one of the King’s most experienced officers not handed the colonists a stunning victory wrapped up like a Christmas present. It turned the war around and led the revolutionaries to ultimate victory.

Among the most efficient sections of the British Army were the Hessian regiments from Germany. These weren’t mercenaries as the Yanks often portrayed them, but troops loyal to their ruler, the equally Germanic King of Britain, George III (of Hanover). Not only were they excellent fighting forces, but they were also used to foraging for their supplies – i.e. taking them wherever they could find them, which didn’t endear them to the local farmers. They also spoke little English so would shoot first and ask questions never, because there was little point in asking the American colonists questions in German.

Eyeing the Hessian troops on the other side of the icy River Delaware, Washington came up with a plan. He would give morale a huge boost if he inflicted a defeat on the hated Germans. And it was winter, when no one ever fought, so they wouldn’t be expecting an attack. His tenacious plan was to have two large rebel regiments cross the ice floes on the river; they would surprise the Hessians and possibly inflict some sort of defeat.

So it was that on the night of 25 December 1776 Washington personally led one of the two regiments, comprising 2,400 men, across the ice. They managed the difficult crossing, but the other force failed to make it. And, although the Hessians numbered only 1,500, they were better-armed, better-trained, better-disciplined troops than the ragtag Americans. It would be a very balanced affair.

At least the colonists had the element of surprise in their favour, which they made sure of by approaching in darkness, even though this made their crossing more dangerous and much slower – so slow, in fact, that they were seriously behind schedule. Instead of attacking at sunrise on Boxing Day, they were still marching towards the Hessians as the sun came up.

This meant that they were spotted on the road by a farmer loyal to the Crown (many colonists were very much opposed to independence) and said farmer, realising what was about to happen, rushed to warn the German troops. Huffing and puffing, he made it to the door of Colonel Johann Rall, their commander. At this point, one would presume the seasoned soldiers would realise vital information was coming their way and make all haste to prepare defences. Instead, the guard on the door refused to allow the farmer entry, explaining the colonel was halfway through a very interesting game of chess and had left strict instructions not to be disturbed. The farmer, a little distraught, therefore wrote out a note explaining that the gentleman’s troops were all about to be massacred, and asked for it to be passed to the officer. The guard passed it along and it found its way to Rall. But it was in English and Rall spoke only German. He could have sent for a translator, who would have told him what was afoot, but he was enjoying his game of chess too much to start sending for interpreters willy-nilly. Instead, he folded up the note and put it in his pocket.

Washington, unaware of how close he had come to being discovered, led his troops, with the element of surprise intact. They were aided by the fact that, because it was Boxing Day many of the Hessians were asleep, hungover or still drunk from the previous day’s carousing. The colonists captured or killed two-thirds of them, with the remainder scattering into the countryside. Not only was it a vital propaganda victory, the captured supplies were hugely important to the survival of the American forces as fighting men.

The battle was the turning point in the secession of the American colonies.

THE LUCKY HAT – WASHINGTON RIDES AWAY, 1777

In the 1940s, a document was discovered in the Public Record Office in London. It was written by one Major Patrick Ferguson, a renowned shot in the British Army who had fought the revolutionary forces in the American colonies. He described how, one day, he encountered an American patrol. One officer was wearing a ‘remarkably large cocked hat’ and he considered shooting the man but, since the American had his back to Ferguson, it would have been ungentlemanly and so the Briton let him ride off, unmolested. It was later revealed that the man was Washington.

Ferguson was later killed in battle, after which his killers urinated on his corpse and then ‘ill used’ it – although the records do not specify how. He was, however, buried next to his mistress, Virginia Sal.

TOO MUCH AIR – FAILING TO DISPOSE OF THE SECRET TREATY, 1780

Henry Laurens was the first president of the Continental Congress – in effect making him the first president of America. In September 1780, two years after his term in office ended, he was on board the packet ship Mercury, sailing from the Netherlands to America. It was the middle of the American War of Independence and when a British frigate spotted his vessel off the coast of Newfoundland it was ordered to stop. As it did so, a British sailor, Michael Fitton, saw a man fall into the water from the American ship. He cried, ‘Man overboard!’ and the British made to save the man. But when they pulled him out of the water, they found that he was actually a large bag full of papers and weighed down with lead shot but, because the bag was also full of air, it had not sunk.

When the British read the papers, they found a secret treaty between the Dutch and the Americans, which Laurens had negotiated; the Dutch were offering commercial support for the Americans. Had Laurens simply thrown the papers over the side without the bag, they would have been at the bottom of the ocean before the British could do anything about it.

Discovery of the treaty led to the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War, a four-year conflict, which largely consisted of Britain pummelling the Dutch forces. Laurens was duly arrested, taken back to London and imprisoned in the Tower – the only American ever to have that honour. He was later released in a prisoner swap for a British general, Lord Cornwallis.

Shortly before Laurens began crying out for freedom for the American colonists from the wicked shackles of British rule, he was the greatest slave-trader in North America; in the 1750s alone, he had sold 8,000 enslaved Africans.

SCAREDY CATS – THE LAST INVASION OF BRITAIN, 1797

Across Britain, history teachers are lying to children, telling them the nation was last invaded by a foreign force in 1066. In fact, the French landed a full regiment of men in 1797 in an attempt to take over the country. Of all the places to try it, just outside Fishguard in southwest Wales seems unlikely, but then the whole thing was pretty strange.

The Napoleonic Wars at the end of the eighteenth century saw Britain and France at each other’s throats on land and sea. Getting carried away, the French government decided to invade Britain – at the very least it would be a surprising distraction from the main war effort – and the landing in Wales was due to be part of a three-pronged invasion, with the other assaults coming in Ireland and Newcastle upon Tyne. Unluckily for the French, bad weather forced the other legions to turn back, leaving a one-pronged invasion doomed to failure.

The French commander of choice for the mission was also a somewhat surprising – and poor – choice. Colonel William Tate was an Irish American in his seventies, who was utterly unable to communicate with his 1,200 French troops, half of whom had been recruited or dragged from French prisons. Some were actually English, and yet were expected to fight against their fellow countrymen for no reason. The company didn’t even have proper uniforms; they were wearing British uniforms that they had captured and attempted to dye, leaving them a dark brown – hence their nickname: the Black Legion.

Tate was happy to go along with the plan, however, because he hated Britain. During the American War of Independence, the American Indians had fought with the British against the colonists, who were taking over Indian land wherever they felt like it, and an Indian unit had killed Tate’s parents. So, on 18 February 1797, his four ships were due to dock in Bristol and he was then to march across the land cutting a swathe; but the boats were blown off course and headed towards Wales. The British watched them pass by, wondering what on earth they were planning to do. And, as they approached land, the French met fierce resistance from the brave burghers of Fishguard, who fired a single shot at the ships – one shot only because it was the only shot that the town had in its possession.

The less-than-steely-brave Tate, however, presumed it was just the first shot of many and ordered his ships to sail on, before finally landing on an unprotected beach. They disembarked and scaled the cliffs in the dark of night to make their one territorial gain in Britain – a remote farmhouse, Trehowel Farm.

From there, the Black Legion went on to plunder a few local houses – all of which also happened to contain a large amount of port and brandy, recently rescued from a Portuguese wreck. The effect of this booty was to somewhat incapacitate the soldiers, and the local militia was soon bearing down on them, having stripped the lead off the roof of St David’s Cathedral to make bullets.

It didn’t come to fighting, however, because the pickled French troops had already begun destroying their own HQ, the farmhouse, burning anything to keep warm. Outside, 12 of Tate’s legless men had meanwhile been captured as prisoners of war by Jemima Nicholas, a local woman armed with a pitchfork (there is now a local brand of tea named after her).

Feeling the jig might be up before it had even started, Tate ordered his men down to the beach, Goodwin Sands, in order to open surrender negotiations but to be ready to fight, if needs be. When they reached the beach, they looked up and saw a regiment of regular British redcoat troops standing on the cliff top. The French realised they didn’t have a hope and immediately surrendered. It was only later that they discovered that the British soldiers were actually local women in their traditional dress, including red flannel shawls and tall black hats, which had a vaguely military look to them. Tate signed his surrender in the local pub and the last invasion of Britain was cancelled.

FRANCE’S SECRET WEAPON – WILLIAM ERSKINE, 1811

During the Peninsular War between Britain and the Napoleonic forces in Portugal, France had one ace up her sleeve: William Erskine, one of the most incompetent British officers in history.

During the 1811 Siege of Almeida, Wellington, who was in command, had tried for some time to sideline Major-General Erskine, who had a history of getting lost during battles or leading his men in charges in the wrong direction. On 10 May 1811 he issued Erskine with an apparently simple order to guard a bridge and thus prevent the French from escaping. Erskine cleverly wrote the order down, put it in his pocket and forgot about it. The French, who could not believe their luck, simply walked out of the siege. In a letter to his chum W.W. Pole, Wellington later wrote: ‘They had about 13,000 to watch 1,400. I begin to be of the opinion that there is nothing on earth so stupid as a gallant officer.’

Soon after that, Erskine was declared insane and cashiered. He did manage one thing, though: he killed himself by jumping out of a window. His last words before dying on the ground were: ‘Now, why did I do that?’ – which makes one wonder if it was, indeed, his plan.

JUMPING THE GUN – THE WAR OF 1812

The War of 1812 between Britain and the United States erupted over a few issues, mostly to do with shipping. The Yanks didn’t like the fact that they were occasionally impressed into the Royal Navy, or that Britain was restricting America’s seaborne trade with other nations. America therefore declared war on 18 June 1812. If they had just waited a few weeks – the average length of a baseball game – they would have known that the war was completely unnecessary because Lord Liverpool had just become Prime Minister and had moved to end the conscription of Americans into the Navy. In fact, he ordered the policy to end the very day before the Americans declared war, but news of it only reached America a few weeks later, by which time hostilities had begun, not to end for years.[*]

Equally pointless, and for just the same reason, was the final battle of the war; the Battle of New Orleans took place on 8 January 1815, even though a peace treaty between Britain and America had been signed three weeks beforehand. It was simply that the two armies hadn’t heard about it yet. About 400 men perished in the battle.

Britain’s war effort was aided by the service of General William Hull. Though nominally on the American side, Hull’s orders could well be taken as working to the distinct advantage of the Europeans. It wasn’t entirely his fault – when asked to become the Governor of Michigan and command the left flank of the US invasion of Canada, which was part of the American plan, he protested that, at 58, he was too old. President Madison talked him around, though, and Hull agreed to the jaunt. And he cannot be accused of going at it half-heartedly – he threw himself into it, even taking his daughter and grandchildren with him on the 200-mile march from Cincinnati to Detroit, through hostile Indian country, with 1,500 militia and no road. Averaging just three miles per day, it was very slow going.

Things took a turn for the worse when he reached the Maumee River, which meets Lake Erie, and spotted a boat. With a stroke of genius, he requisitioned it to carry the officers’ luggage, which included the full muster rolls, containing details of his forces’ strength, and his battle plans and orders. To save time, he put all the luggage on the boat and sent it up to Detroit, where he planned to recover it. When the British forces stopped the boat a few miles upriver, they were therefore quite pleased to find everything they needed to defeat Hull.

It might be unfair to blame Hull entirely for this lack of guard, given the fact that at that point he didn’t know if America and Britain were actually at war (they were, but no one had told him that). Notification that war had been declared had been sent to him by the government but despatched through the normal postal service to the post office at Cleveland, with the request ‘please forward’ written upon the letter. Surprisingly, it did actually reach him, but just after his ship had – literally – sailed. No doubt he was left on the dock, frantically waving his hat at its retreating stern.

After the debacle he withdrew to Detroit, where he spent four days locked in his bedroom, not speaking to anyone.

LOST LEECHES – NAPOLEON LOSES AT WATERLOO, 1815

Napoleon was a martyr to his haemorrhoids and it was only through frequent use of leeches that he managed to sit down with any comfort. But, two days before the Battle of Waterloo, the leeches staged a jailbreak and went on the run. With his piles hurting him as never before, the Emperor was unable to ride his horse, preventing the short man from properly viewing the field of battle and directing his forces. As a substitute for the leeches, his physicians doped him up to the eyeballs with laudanum, the mixture of opium and brandy so popular with writers and other assorted oddballs of the time. So there was Napoleon, staggering around with his eyes swivelling and clutching his rear in a combination of pain and paranoid terror – just the sort of man to command a major military offensive. His distracted state could have been one reason – along with the weather – why he fatally delayed the opening assault by a few hours until the afternoon. The delay allowed the ground to dry out, which enabled the British Army to manoeuvre fully and defeat the French.

None of this would have taken place, however, if Napoleon had killed himself in 1814, as he had tried to do. Having been defeated by British and Austrian forces, he was to be exiled to the island of Elba but decided to cheat the victors of the satisfaction of seeing him live out the rest of his days on a barren rock, by swallowing poison. The result was to give him such violent hiccups that he vomited up the poison and survived.

HOLDING OUT TOO LONG – GENERAL GORDON DISOBEYS ORDERS, 1885

In 1884 General Charles Gordon – known as ‘Chinese Gordon’ after a successful stint in the Far East – was sent to Khartoum in the Sudan to evacuate the British troops in the face of attack by a Muslim army led by the Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad. On arrival, however, Gordon started acting a bit strangely. Instead of organising an orderly withdrawal, he made every appearance of digging in for the long haul. He hadn’t agreed with the government’s clear policy and orders; he was going to go it alone, aware that once the British public became aware of his men’s proud, brave defiance of the Islamic Army, Gladstone, the PM, would be forced to send another column of troops to aid the defence. As part of his strategy, he began sending vague and misleading reports of the situation back to London.

But, back home, Gladstone was not bending with the wind – even Queen Victoria was requesting he send troops to relieve Gordon, but he remained steadfast. And during this time the Mahdi’s army was on the move.

When Gladstone finally relented, the British government was forced into an unusual move. Instead of relying on Britain’s military and diplomatic contacts to ensure safe passage to the Sudan, it paid Thomas Cook, a former cabinet-maker who had begun organising day trips for temperance groups, to use the foreign contacts he had built up with Egyptian tribal chiefs to facilitate the movement of 18,000 British soldiers to the Sudan. The bill for this came to a whopping £500,000 – around £45m today – and made Thomas Cook the biggest tour operator to this day.

The going was not so quick, though, and the troops arrived two days too late. Meanwhile, the Mahdi and 50,000 men had overrun Khartoum, killing and enslaving the population. Gordon had been killed in action and had his head cut off. The Mahdi ordered that the head be suspended in a tree ‘where all who passed it could look in disdain, children could throw stones at it and the hawks of the desert could sweep and circle above’.[*]

Gordon’s decision to hold out also managed to bring down Gladstone’s government. Previously known as the ‘GOM’ – Grand Old Man – he gained the new name of ‘MOG’ – Murderer Of Gordon. Queen Victoria sent an uncoded telegram openly criticising her government’s failure to support the Empire and its heroes, and Gladstone was duly forced to resign four months later.

APPEARANCES CAN BE DECEPTIVE – THE BLACK BOTTLE AFFAIR, 1840

James Brudenell, Seventh Earl of Cardigan, liked to be smart. And as Commanding Officer of the 11th Light Dragoons he wanted to instil a bit of discipline. Yet this was a man who was so ‘relaxed’ about his unit that in the two years following his appointment he spent a total of four weeks with the regiment. Still, Brudenell was a stickler for correct uniform and custom; those were the main things.

For one thing he outlawed the drinking of porter, a dark beer enjoyed by a number of the regiment’s professional officers who had served in India. So, when Captain John Reynolds, one of the Indian officers, ordered a bottle of Moselle wine, which, like porter, was served in a black bottle, Cardigan mistook it for the contraband drink and had Reynolds arrested. Even when his error was pointed out to him, Cardigan stubbornly refused to relent.

The strange case made its way into the newspapers of the day, infuriated at the snobbery of Cardigan, who refused to accept that he was in the wrong. (For months wherever he went, people in the street would shout ‘Black Bottle!’ at him.) Cardigan was especially enraged by an article by one Captain Harvey Tuckett and challenged him to a duel. The challenge was, of course, accepted. Unfortunately for Tuckett, Cardigan seems to have been a better shot than he was an officer, and hit the captain in the stomach.

Duelling was illegal by that time and Cardigan was tried for the crime. But one legal anomaly was on his side – the historical law that as a peer of the realm Cardigan could choose to be tried by his friends in the House of Lords. This he did and the result was one of the most corrupt verdicts of the nineteenth century: although the prosecution had shown that Cardigan had used a special type of pistol, giving him a secret advantage over Tuckett, he was acquitted on the grounds that the official written indictment had accused him of shooting ‘Harvey Garnet Phipps Tuckett’, whereas throughout the case Cardigan’s victim had been named only as Captain Harvey Tuckett and there was not a shred of evidence to say these two people were the same man.

The obvious manipulation of the law by those who wrote it led The Times to state: ‘in England there is one law for the rich and another for the poor’. It added fuel to the political fire at a time when the privileges of the aristocracy were under assault from the burgeoning middle classes who were demanding greater legal equality. Eventually, they achieved it.[*]

A BREAKDOWN IN COMMUNICATIONS – THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE, 1854

THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE

I

Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

‘Forward, the Light Brigade!

Charge for the guns!’ he said:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

II

‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’

Was there a man dismayed?

Not tho’ the soldier knew

Someone had blundered.

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

III

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon in front of them

Volleyed and thundered;

Stormed at with shot and shell,

Boldly they rode and well,

Into the jaws of Death,

Into the mouth of Hell

Rode the six hundred.

III

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon in front of them

Volleyed and thundered;

Stormed at with shot and shell,

Boldly they rode and well,

Into the jaws of Death,

Into the mouth of Hell

Rode the six hundred.

IV

Flashed all their sabres bare,

Flashed as they turned in air,

Sabring the gunners there,

Charging an army, while

All the world wondered.

Plunged in the battery-smoke

Right thro’ the line they broke;

Cossack and Russian

Reeled from the sabre stroke

Shatter’d and sunder’d.

Then they rode back, but not

Not the six hundred.

V

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon behind them

Volleyed and thundered;

Stormed at with shot and shell,

While horse and hero fell.

They that had fought so well

Came through the jaws of Death

Back from the mouth of hell,

All that was left of them,

Left of six hundred.

VI

When can their glory fade?

O the wild charge they made!

All the world wondered.

Honour the charge they made!

Honour the Light Brigade,

Noble six hundred!

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

And they did know, on that cold morning in the Crimea where the allied British and French forces faced down the Russian enemy, that someone had blundered. Because it was patently clear that someone had given an order that crossed from ‘reckless’ into ‘suicidal’.

The cavalry charge for which the Battle of Balaclava would go down in military history was the product of a rivalry between two British officers and a message that was too vague. As a result, the 600 cavalry charged through a heavily defended ravine, chasing after an impossible goal, under deadly fire.

Among the contributing problems was the confusing topography, which meant that the overall commanding officer, Lord Raglan, was positioned on top of the ridge and had full sight over the battlefield. But in charge of the cavalry – which was divided into the Light Brigade and the Heavy Brigade – was Lord Lucan, who was down in the valley and had a restricted view. Commanding the Light Brigade was Lord Cardigan. Cardigan and Lucan, brothers-in-law, utterly loathed each other.

The Heavy Brigade had been in action that day and had done well against the enemy. Raglan therefore sent a messenger to Lucan telling him to send his forces to capture a number of guns, which the Russians were attempting to withdraw. Raglan was referring to the guns he could see on the upper redoubts that the British were capturing, but from his position Lucan couldn’t see those guns. The only ones he could see were at the end of the valley, about a mile away. He queried the order, but the messenger, Captain Nolan (another man who hated Lucan), presumed Lucan was just being difficult and angrily repeated the order before riding off.

Lucan prepared for what even he knew was a suicide mission. Russian batteries lined the sides of the valley. Riding directly towards cannon while other cannon fire at you from the sides was the sort of military strategy that got you into the history books for all the wrong reasons. Still, he had his orders.

Or, to be more precise, Cardigan had his orders because it was he who had to lead the 673 troops on the insane expedition, followed by Lucan and the Heavy Brigade.

As soon as Cardigan set off, Nolan realised what had happened and galloped after him, presumably to clarify the order, but he was struck by a shell and killed. So the Light Brigade rode on. Despite a storm of fire from all sides, they somehow managed to reach the Russian forces at the end of the valley and engaged them in fighting. Cardigan reached the Russians, but then turned around, later claiming that it was because he disdained to ‘fight the enemy among private soldiers’. His men were also driven back (partly because he had left them leaderless) and they then had to endure the mile-long ride back with fire from behind them now, as well as the sides.

Seeing the carnage, Lucan and the Heavy Brigade stayed in their positions, offering their comrades no support – Lucan’s enmity for his brother-in-law ran deep, although he later said he had seen no point in both brigades being cut to pieces.[*]

Of the British men, 118 were killed, 127 wounded and about 60 taken prisoner. Cardigan, however, survived and spent the evening on his yacht, where he enjoyed a champagne dinner. On his return to Britain, he lied about his exploits, hugely exaggerating his own bravery and success. According to his biographer, Saul David, ‘a more misleading account of his own exploits could hardly have been given’. He became a national hero and his knitted waistcoat became a national fashion.

Perversely, the exploit only strengthened the reputation of the British cavalry. After all, men who would ride into certain death were capable of anything.

Although it is the most famous one, the charge was far from an isolated act of incompetence in the Crimean War. In the 1929 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, F.J. Huddleston, formerly librarian of the War Office, described some of the absurdities of the various forces:

• Raglan had an unshakable habit of referring to the Russians as ‘the French’.

• As no combined plan of attack on the Russian position behind the Alma River had been arranged beforehand, cooperation between the Allies was conspicuous by its absence and they fought two unrelated actions side by side. But ‘generalship was equally absent on the side of the Russians where no one received any orders and every man did what he thought best’.

• ‘The Allies had no maps of the Crimea and those in the possession of the Russians were so indifferent that one regiment, after marching steadily [from Sevastopol] for the whole of the 20th finally found itself back in Sevastopol.’

• When an electric cable that cut communication time between the battlegrounds and Paris and London from 10 days to 24 hours was laid, the French used it for battle plans, while the British ‘concerned itself more with enquiries as to the health of Capt. Jarvis, believed to have been bitten by a centipede, and a heated discussion as to whether beards were an aid to desertion’.

Of course, regulations were there to be followed. That is why when, in November 1854, after 12,000 greatcoats arrived at Balaclava for the men – many of whom were dying from exposure – they sat in the stores without being distributed. Because regulations said that greatcoats must only be issued to each man once every three years. So those who had lost theirs on the battlefield would just have to put up with it until the three years were up. Perhaps they could try sharing one with another soldier who had not been so profligate with his kit.

At the same time, many of the men were starving, sometimes going for days without any food. Sent to relieve the problem was the supply vessel Harbinger, with tons of fresh vegetables. But it left port in the Bosphorus without the right papers, so that when it arrived at Balaclava the captain couldn’t find anyone willing to accept the cargo, which was instead thrown over the side. The next month, the Esk docked with a cargo of lime juice needed to prevent scurvy among the men but the cargo sat on the boat until February 1855 because the officer in charge of supplies, Commissary General Filder, said it wasn’t his job to tell the Army it had arrived. So it remained a secret. It was also Filder who insisted that coffee beans be shipped over unroasted because they might go mouldy on the voyage. This resulted in the troops at the front being given inedible green beans that they could do absolutely nothing with. The commander of the 1st Regiment commented: ‘A ration of green raw coffee berry was served out, a mockery in the midst of all this misery. Nothing to roast coffee, nothing to grind it, no fire, no sugar; and unless it was meant that we eat it as horses do barley, I don’t see what use the men could make of it except what they have just done, pitched it into the mud!’

Things weren’t much better regarding other types of supplies. One young officer at the Front wrote to his mother: ‘Will you also be kind enough to send me a map of the Crimea with the forts etc well marked out in Sebastopol. I see them advertised at Wylds in The Strand. You can choose which you think best and send it by post.’

It might have intrigued the Russian troops to know that their enemy’s battlefield intelligence was being supplied by the soldiers’ mothers.

ELSEWHERE, AT SEA… – THE CRIMEA ON WATER, 1854

It wasn’t just British soldiers who were having trouble with their officers. The ‘Crimean’ war also took place at sea in the Pacific Ocean and Baltic Sea, and one of the odder experiences for the British sailors took place in the China Sea. Here, Britannia was busy Ruling the Waves with a five-ship battle group under the command of Rear Admiral David Price in the President. With him was a French group of four vessels commanded by the aged and ailing Rear Admiral Febvrier-Despointes in the Forte.

The Russian fleet was represented by Rear Admiral Poutiatin, who felt quite outgunned as they squared up to the Anglo-French force outside the port of Petropavlovsk. Had he known he was up against Price, he might have felt differently. Somewhat elated, in fact.

For Price was not relishing the battle. Price did not relish battles – or so he presumed, having never actually been in a single one in his 64-year life. His naval career had been long, stretching to nothing short of 53 years, but, sadly for the men in his flotilla, he had spent 49 of those years on land, 45 of them on half pay and without a post. This major battle was, in fact, his first command. Appointing him had straddled the fence between blunder and insanity.

Some men rise to the occasion – cometh the hour, cometh the man. In this case, the hour cameth and Price wenteth away: he decided the best naval strategy was to take to his cabin and quietly shoot himself. Yet he couldn’t even achieve that properly, it seems. Aiming for his heart, he missed and instead shot himself in the lung. His death was therefore lingering and agonising – he pleaded with the ship’s surgeon to ‘Kill me at once’ but that act of mercy was not forthcoming, the surgeon perhaps not wishing to be recorded as having killed his own commander. At least this way Price had time to explain that he had chosen suicide because he ‘could not bear the thought of taking so many noble and gallant fellows into action’. You have to conclude that he probably did his men a favour.

Chaplain Holnie, who witnessed the scene, later explained: ‘The poor old man was always weak and vacillating in everything he did. And what all will say at home of an English [Price was actually Welsh] Admiral deserting his post at such a moment we cannot conceive.’

The loss of their commander threw matters into disarray, and, after a brief, disastrous sortie into Petropavlovsk, the Anglo-French battle group gave up and left the port to the Russians.

MAKIN’ BACON – THE PIG WAR OF 1855

For 14 years in the mid-nineteenth century, Britain and America were on the brink of war over a pig that liked to wander.

America and British Canada both laid claim to the Oregon Country, a huge area now encompassing the states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, and parts of Montana, Wyoming and the Canadian province of British Columbia. A treaty of 1818 had allowed for joint occupation of the land, but by 1845 both sides were unhappy with the deal. Britain was annoyed by the number of Americans hopping over the Rocky Mountains to settle on land they claimed was British. The Americans declared the treaty was outdated and said they wanted the land. To sort things out, another treaty was therefore signed: The Oregon Treaty of 1846.

As so often happens in these situations, though, there was a bit of an error when it came to the document. It gave the US the land south of the 49th parallel, up to ‘the middle of the channel which separates the continent from Vancouver’s Island; and thence southerly through the middle of the said channel to the Pacific Ocean’. Britain got the rest.

What no one seems to have noticed is that there are two channels, not one, and in the middle of them was a small island called San Juan. Each country chose the channel it preferred to call the border, meaning both laid claim to this tiny outcrop of rock.

In 1850 Britain’s Hudson Bay Trading Company built a salmon-curing station, and then a sheep farm, Belle Vue Farm, on San Juan. At the same time, around 25 Americans also settled on the island, believing that they owned it and the British were the invaders. On 15 June 1859 the incident that put a spark to this international powder keg of intrigue happened. A British pig owner, Charles Griffin, failed to properly secure his livestock and one of them went exploring on the potato patch owned by his American neighbour, Lyman Cutler. Cutler, apparently a pig-hater, shot the creature dead. This open act of pig-aggression was not taken lying down. Griffin protested to the British government, which threatened Cutler with arrest. In return, the American residents of the island complained to their government, demanding military intervention.

Never one to avoid a battle, the American government happily complied and sent an infantry unit. In a measured, proportional response, Britain sent three full-scale warships to teach the stupid Yanks a lesson. The Yanks, however, refused to leave, even though they were completely outnumbered: the Pig War was up and trotting.

The British officer in charge, Captain Geoffrey Hornby, seemingly a sensible chap, did not want to fight over a pig, so he refrained from ejecting the Americans, and for two months the opposing forces directed nothing more than harsh language at each other. They did, however, continue to enlarge their forces so that, if war did come, by God, they were going to win it. By August, there were 461 American troops supported by 14 cannon, whereas Britain wasn’t messing about, with 2,140 soldiers, 167 cannons and 5 warships. They could have invaded Washington and won.

Speaking of Washington, in the American capital, the government was bemused by the idea that they were about to go to war with the world’s greatest empire over an escaped farm animal. Similarly, Rear Admiral Robert Bayes, commander of the British Navy in the Pacific, told the Governor of British Columbia he did not want to involve ‘two great nations in a war over a squabble about a pig’. A peace agreement was finally reached, involving both sides removing most of their belligerent forces and setting out what military presence San Juan needed. The Americans could keep a company of soldiers on the island, while Britain could moor a warship in the harbour to keep an eye on pigs and whatnot.

Thus it stayed until 1872, possibly the oddest cold war in Britain’s history. Even the method of final resolution was strange, with mediation between the two sides conducted by Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany of all people. This eventually led to a new treaty properly defining the borders between the United States and Canada.

THE WRONG KIND OF OIL – THE INDIAN MUTINY, 1857

When Queen Victoria looked at a map of the world, she must have kept saying: ‘Really, I own that as well? And this one? What about that place? Really, that too?’ But in 1857, when she came to that huge blob known as India, her question became slightly trickier to answer.

The Indian Mutiny of that year, in which many locals rebelled against British rule, sent shockwaves through the Empire. If the Jewel in the Crown, as India was held to be, could go it alone, then so could all the little islands and stuff that Victoria kept saying ‘And this one too?’ about.

Also known as the Sepoy Rebellion, the Mutiny started with the sepoys – regiments of local soldiers employed by the East India Company, who had enabled a colonial governorship backed up by a small number of regular British troops to rule 150 million. The underlying causes of the revolt were complex, to do with identity, religion and culture. But the final spark was to do with the wrong kind of grease.

Giving Muslim soldiers cartridges oiled with pork fat was not a clever move. Presenting Hindu troops with cartridges oiled with beef fat was equally foolish. Doing both at the same time was really asking for trouble. Yet that’s what happened.

In 1857 all troops – British and locals – were issued with the new Enfield rifle. The bullet and the gunpowder that would send it on its way came in paper-wrapped cartridges and, as was the norm of the time, the end of the cartridge had to be bitten off [*] before powder was poured down the barrel. Then the rest of the cartridge, which was in greased paper to ease its journey, would be pushed down after it.

Already there had been fear on the part of many natives that their British masters wanted to forcibly convert them all to Christianity. This wasn’t an entirely baseless fear – for years the number of Christian missionaries devoted to bringing more lost souls to Anglican salvation had been steadily increasing. As one missionary said at the time: ‘The missionary is truly the regenerator of India. The land is being leavened and Hinduism is everywhere being undermined. Great will some day, in God’s appointed time, be the fall of it.’

There was therefore a lot of discontent among the Indians. The British got wind of something a bit rum with the sepoys, but they had other things on their mind – specifically a series of disasters in the Crimean War. At the same time, professional agitators employed by the Russians and local princes were, in fact, feeding the sepoys hugely exaggerated accounts of British losses in the Crimean conflict, undermining their reputation.

The Indians were also told a few other tall tales. Apparently, there were only 100,000 Britons in the world and they just kept moving about a lot so it seemed there were more of them. And most of them had died in the Crimea. So to anger was added the belief that a revolt might just succeed.

The dum-dum bullet, the type that flattens on impact for increased wounding, is actually named after the Dum Dum factory in India, and this factory plays a central role in our tale. One day in 1857 a low-caste labourer at the factory asked a sepoy for a drink from his water bottle. The sepoy was a high-caste Brahmin, who told him in the strongest terms that there was no chance. The labourer angrily replied: ‘You will soon lose your caste altogether because the Europeans are going to make you bite cartridges soaked in cow and pork fat.’

This was an explosive claim. The Indians hadn’t minded so much when the British were just there to plunder the natural resources but now they were planning to grab everyone they could and sit them in church to listen to four hours of Victorian hellfire and damnation. And secretly poisoning them with meat forbidden under religious edicts was clearly the first step on the path.

Soon rumours were flying about the beef-fat-laced cartridges, and the sepoys at the factory asked their British officers for reassurance that they would never have to bite the forbidden bullets. Unfortunately for the British, the man who gave them the answer was Colonel Mitchell, commander of the 19th Native Infantry, who told them that, unless they did so, he would take them all to Burma ‘where, through hardship, you will all die’.

Naked threats were not the answer the locals were looking for and a quiet rebellion spread as sepoys across northern India refused to bite open the cartridges. Luckily, Lord Canning, one of Britain’s most capable politicians and then Governor-General of India, issued orders that the men could tear them open instead of biting them, if they preferred. Unluckily, this instruction was given to the Military Secretary to the Governor-General, Colonel Richard Birch, who threw it in the bin on the grounds that he didn’t fancy giving in to revolting soldiers. He was aided in his incompetence by General George Anson, the Commander-in-Chief of India, who ordered no compromise be offered, stating: ‘I’ll never give in to their beastly prejudices.’ The first interesting thing about this statement is the indication of how the British saw their role as partly one of modernising and rationalising the beliefs of the locals, pulling them out of the quagmire of religious prejudice and into the nineteenth century, a time of reason. The other thing to note is that he sounds a bit hurt by it all – although not nearly so hurt as the many British officers and men who were about to be killed.

Really putting the boot in was left to Colonel George Carmichael-Smyth of the 3rd Indian Light Cavalry. On 23 April 1857, in Meerut, he decided enough was enough, and just to make the point he ordered his men to parade, telling them beforehand that they would be required to bite their cartridges. When they turned out, of 90 men, 85 refused to bite the bullets and he dismissed them before reporting the outcome to his commander, General Hewitt – a man so fat no horse could carry him so he instead travelled about by buggy. Hewitt wasn’t slim, but he wasn’t stupid either. ‘Oh, why did you have to parade?’ he cried when he heard. ‘If you had only waited another month or so all would have blown over.’ He knew that he now had no choice but to court-martial the refusers.

Courts-martial in nineteenth-century India were not known for their liberal values. It was no surprise, then, when all the sepoys who had refused to bite the cartridges were found guilty and sentenced to between five and ten years’ hard labour. In fact, a number of the tribunal voted for the death sentence, so in a sense the soldiers got off lightly. Those who had voted for execution grumbled a bit afterwards, saying it wouldn’t have hurt to shoot at least one or two of them.

Adding insult to injury, the guilty men were paraded in shackles in front of their compatriot comrades-in-arms before being taken to prison. Still, it must not be thought that all the British officers were unfeeling towards their sepoys – a number of them visited their men in prison and complained about their treatment and conditions. One Lieutenant Hugh Gough wrote: ‘Old soldiers with many medals gained in desperate fought battles for their English masters wept bitterly, lamenting their sad fate and imploring us to save them from their future.’

It was also Gough who, on 10 May, told Carmichael-Smyth that there were fires burning in the natives’ quarter of the town. The fires were not homely bonfires, but widespread arson and the beginning of the revolt. It turned out that the sepoys who had not rebelled had been mocked by the prostitutes in the bazaar for abandoning their colleagues. In response, they had got drunk and stoned on hashish and were up for a fight. When a British colonel rode through their part of the town and told them all to return to their barracks, they responded by shooting him. That was just the warm-up act for a night in which 50 European men, women and children were all hacked to death. Then things really got out of hand.

The British authorities didn’t fancy having the mutinous and apparently astonishingly violent sepoys hanging about Meerut. So, when they got wind that the rebels were leaving town in the direction of Delhi, 40 miles away, they wiped their brows at having not been horribly murdered and simply let them go. This was a mistake, however, because, if you are trying to start a revolution, you need to get the word out. The sepoys were therefore on their way to the ancient Mogul capital to really get things going. Had General Hewitt ordered the 2,000 British soldiers to pursue and apprehend the rebels, the 14 months of terrible violence about to engulf India might have been avoided. Instead, the British officers raised a glass of sherry and thanked their lucky stars that things were about to ‘blow over’.

SLOW MESSAGE – THE BIRTH OF KAISER WILHELM II, 1859

Kaiser Bill was a brutal, bullying man who was always out to prove himself stronger than everyone else, mainly because he was in fact weaker. His arms race with Britain, which resulted in the First World War, was, perhaps ironically, a result of his arm. His left arm, to be precise, which was malformed.

Friedrich Wilhelm Viktor Albrecht (Fred Bill Victor Bert to his English cousins) was born on 27 January 1859. His father was Crown Prince Friedrich of Prussia, but his mother was English – Vicky, eldest daughter of Queen Victoria. Vicky wanted good English doctors around her for the birth of her child, rather than one of those foreigners, so she sent for Dr James Clark[*], Dr Edward Martin and the royal midwife, one Mrs Innocent. But having all these Britishers swanning about the place irritated the Teutonic medical brotherhood and Dr Martin was deliberately given accommodation about as far away as they could find it. The German royal physician, Dr Wegner, was especially determined to keep them away from the future heir to the German throne and if that meant the expectant mother suffered, so be it.

And suffer she did. The baby was in breech position in the birth canal and the lack of modern anaesthetics meant the Princess felt every second of it. Labour began in the early hours of 26 January and Wegner, neither a competent doctor nor a competent correspondent, decided to inform Martin – but, instead of sending a note by messenger, he sent it by normal post, meaning it was 36 hours before Martin discovered his patient was in severe difficulties. He arrived to find Wegner had botched the procedure and the child had still not been born, but the mother was utterly exhausted and unable to push any more. In fact, as he entered the room, the German doctor called over in full earshot of Vicky and her husband to say that there was no point in exerting himself because both mother and son were going to die soon.

Unfortunately for European history, Martin didn’t take heed of his advice and first administered chloroform to reduce the Princess’s pain before proceeding to perform an arduous forceps delivery.

Mother and son lived – just. There was great rejoicing in the room, but it ceased when the midwife noticed that the baby was silent and had turned blue. For half an hour, Mrs Innocent smacked the royal buttocks to get the child breathing properly. Eventually, Wilhelm began to scream and joy returned to the room.

The next morning, however, there was great concern again as Mrs Innocent informed Martin that the boy’s left arm was blue and limp (the elbow had become dislocated during the forceps delivery). The limb never recovered, remaining stunted and weak.

As Wilhelm grew older, Vicky, who was fiercely protective of her son, worried that his deformity would make him seem and feel weak so she encouraged his aggressive nature, overly praising him whenever he succeeded in a physical task and telling him that he had enemies everywhere, whom he must confront. Thus, his physical inferiority to other men resulted in a bullying nature, using his hereditary power to hurt them. It was a character that would be exhibited on a global scale when he tried to prove his superior might to his British cousins.

BLAMING ONE’S TOOLS – THE BATTLE OF ISANDLWANA, 1879

The Zulu Wars were brutal affairs – especially when the soldiers were being stabbed by African warriors to the front, and British bureaucracy to the rear. Already in two minds as to how sensible it was to wear bright-red uniforms in a predominantly brown landscape, the British troops were fighting the Battle of Isandlwana when it became clear they were running out of ammunition. No trouble, though: they had lots to spare in crates to the rear of their lines.

But when one young officer, Lieutenant Smith-Dorien, took some of his men on a desperate errand for more ammunition, he found that the screwdrivers to open the crates were nowhere to be found. His men therefore resorted to hacking away at the boxes with axes and bayonets. When they eventually got one open and started handing out the precious cargo, however, the lieutenant heard a cough at his shoulder as the regimental quartermaster informed him that he would have to put it all back because he didn’t have the right chit to request a distribution of more ammunition. If he would like to fill out the correct forms, the quartermaster would see what he could do.

While the surreal argument about the paperwork raged, in the background his men ran out of bullets and the Zulus completely over-ran the camp.

‘I DON’T BELIEVE YOU’ – ZANZIBAR’S SHORT WAR, 1896

Lasting just 35 minutes, Britain’s war against Zanzibar is chiefly notable for being the shortest in the history of the United Kingdom.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the pro-British sultan of Zanzibar (part of modern Tanzania), Sultan Hamad, was poisoned by his devious pro-German relative, Khalid bin Barghash, who usurped the throne. At the time, Britain had a veto over candidates for the sultancy, but Bin Barghash didn’t seem to care. In fact, he told Britain to take a running jump – he was going to rule and there was nothing they could do about it.

‘Actually,’ replied the British, politely, ‘there’s quite a lot we can do about it.’ The Royal Navy consequently turned up in Zanzibar harbour, anchoring five warships opposite the palace. Bin Barghash was confident, however, because he had given his slaves and the women of his harem guns to repel the British – after all, he was a sultan and the British were mere infidels.

At 8.30am on 27 August 1896 he told the British once more that he didn’t believe for one second that they would do anything to him. He was informed that at 9am precisely the Navy would begin shelling his palace. Once more he scoffed. At 9am precisely, the Navy began shelling his palace. At that point he bravely fled, after giving his subjects in the palace strict instructions not to do the same. He ran to the German compound, seeking refuge, and during the next half hour the palace was turned into matchsticks.

At 9.35am the war was declared over, when the Navy was surprised (and somewhat distraught) to discover that Bin Barghash’s servants had actually followed his orders and remained in the palace while it was being reduced to rubble.

THE WRONG ENEMY – THE RUSSIAN FLEET DECLARES WAR ON BRITAIN, 1904

When a number of fishermen from Hull went out one day in October 1904 they didn’t expect the Russian Navy to attempt to kill them all. But while the trawlers were happily drifting about in the North Sea, a number of Russian warships did, indeed, open fire. A 15-minute one-sided battle commenced, with one of the trawlers being sunk and three men killed.

The Russians, it seemed, had somehow misidentified the fishing trawlers as part of the Japanese Navy. Russia and Japan were at war and there had been a bizarre belief, started by an over-zealous Russian spy, that Japanese vessels were planning to sail halfway around the world to fight the Russian fleet from the other direction – what would have been one of the world’s most pointless sneak-attacks. The Russians’ action served only to strengthen British anti-Russian, pro-Japanese bonds and, when the Russian fleet was destroyed by the Japanese Navy, Britain awarded the Japanese commander, Admiral Togo, the Order of Merit.

THE INDIAN VISITORS – INFORMING THE ENEMY, 1914

During the Great War the campaign in East Africa was seen by the British Army as a sideshow to the main event in Europe, meaning it could be left to Indian troops. In fact, other than the Gurkhas (who enjoyed the same high reputation as they do now), the badly equipped, ill-disciplined and under-trained Indian regiments were among the least able troops under British command. They were therefore given the relatively simple task of taking the port of Tanga, in modern Tanzania, from the Germans.

So it was that the 8,000-strong force that Britain dispatched from Bombay under the command of Major-General Arthur Edward Aitken was described by his intelligence officer as ‘the worst in India … I tremble to think what may happen if we meet with serious opposition. The senior officers are nearer to fossils than active energetic leaders.’ They would, at least, have one vital weapon in their armoury: surprise. The Germans would not know about the assault until it happened.

At least that was the plan. It went somewhat wrong during embarkation when the crates with their equipment were clearly labelled ‘Indian Expeditionary Force B, Mombasa’, giving the local German spies a pretty good idea that their target was Tanga, just down the coast. If that wasn’t enough, the newspapers reported their destination; then there were the uncoded radio messages from the convoy to Mombasa, allowing the German residents of that town to tip off the authorities in Tanga. Just to make sure the Germans knew exactly when to expect them, the flotilla sailed along the coastline in full sight of land.

Ahead of the main convoy, the cruiser HMS Fox sailed into Tanga for a little chat. The captain, F.W. Cauldfield, asked the German commissioner if the harbour was mined. After thinking for a second, the German said that it was. Cauldfield, a trusting soul, took him at his word and spent a day and a half trawling the entirely un-mined harbour for explosives. The German commissioner took the time to put on his army uniform, run up the German flag and wander off to join his military unit.

Meanwhile, the British, beginning to think that German chappie might not have been telling the truth, decided to land their troops. For the task, they selected a landing site that turned out to be a swamp infested with deadly water snakes, tsetse flies and leeches.

The ensuing conflict didn’t go much better. On one battleground, at the sound of the first gun firing, the terrified Indian troops turned around and ran back to the water, paddling in up to their necks, where they floated about, waiting for something to happen. Slightly further up, their brothers-in-arms were advancing through some trees when they disturbed a number of hives full of African wasps – a highly aggressive species, which attacked the men. They too turned around and ran back to the water, where they joined their comrades bobbing about in the sea. As one British officer remarked: ‘I would never have believed that grown-up men of any race could have been reduced to such shamelessness.’

After this, despite outnumbering the Germans eight-to-one, the invasion was called off and the forces returned to their ships, which sailed back to Mombasa. The invasion became known as the Battle of the Bees.

THE RUSSIAN VISITORS – DISINFORMING THE ENEMY, 1914

On the other hand, German intelligence could do an even worse job. In August 1914, a train full of soldiers arrived at a countryside station in England. The porter, a curious fellow, did what came naturally to him and asked the troops where they were from. ‘Ross-shire,’ one shouted down in reply. But here fate stepped in and instead whispered ‘Russia’ into the porter’s ear. And thus Germany lost the war.

There was, at the time, a belief that Russia, Britain’s ally in the war, was going to send troops via Britain to join the Western Front, and soon a rumour of Russian troops having arrived ‘with snow on their boots’ spread through Britain.

One of those who heard the rumour was Carl Hans Lody, who would become the first German spy to be executed during the war, and the first person to be executed at the Tower of London since the Jacobite rebel Lord Lovat in 1747. He knew that Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, had been considering a scheme whereby Russian soldiers would be shipped to Scotland, and then be sent through England and on to support the Western Front. So, on 4 September, Lody sent a telegram to Berlin informing them that large numbers of Russian troops had landed in Aberdeen and would soon join the Allied troops.

The message was passed to General von Moltke of the German intelligence, who took the news badly and consequently held back two German divisions from the next day’s Battle of Marne as reserves in case the phantom Russian troops joined the fray. Those two divisions would probably have prevented the success of an Allied counter-attack, which sent the Germans into retreat, halting the advance on Paris and beginning the trench warfare phase of the war that led to Germany’s eventual defeat.

It is hard to think of any case in the whole of history where such a momentous event has been brought about by a single mis-heard word.

ENFORCED BRAVERY – LEAVING THE PILOTS TO IT, 1915

It raises the odd eyebrow to read just what was expected of British pilots during the First World War. Professionalism, training, decent equipment – all these were certainly ‘out’, while stiff upper lips, shiny boots and excellent family trees were very much ‘in’. Older gentlemen who had attended public schools were ‘OK’, whereas young men who would be unable to translate Latin proverbs were ‘not OK’. As the editor of the leading journal Aeroplane explained in 1915: ‘There is an idiotic theory that a man is too old at 30 and that a howling little bounder of 20 is going to make a better officer aviator than a thoroughly sound sportsman of 32. The youngster, who may certainly fly more recklessly till his nerve breaks just as a mongrel dog will go yapping into a fight till he gets a damned good hiding, will never fly after a bad smash in the way the better class of man will do. Blood tells in a man as much as it does in a horse or a dog.’

This was the generally approved thinking of the Royal Flying Corps. Field Marshal Douglas Haig himself commented on the new-fangled flying thingummies: ‘I do hope none of you gentlemen is so foolish as to think that aeroplanes will be able to be usefully employed for reconnaissance in the air. There is only one way for a commander to get information by reconnaissance and that is by the use of cavalry.’

Had anyone asked what the cavalry were supposed to do about reconnaissance on shipping – strap some planks to the underside of the horse and teach it to swim, perhaps – one wonders what answer Haig might have given. But the most brutal of mess-ups on the part of Haig and chaps of his ilk was the decision to deny British pilots parachutes. These were readily available[*] but the British command viewed it as ungentlemanly for a pilot to bale out and save his life when he could be much more sporting and smash his body into a thousand parts on the ground. It was also believed that an exit strategy would make the pilots cowardly and interested in staying alive rather than killing the sausage-eaters.

Given that of the 14,166 British pilots who perished in the First World War, more than 8,000 died during training, it can only be surmised that those who saw their pals dying at their feet, even without an enemy in sight, and still volunteered to fly in combat must have had rather more courage than they were being credited with. Condemning them to death even as a result of a mechanical failure was not only harsh, it also robbed the British forces of the airmen so desperately needed and gave the German aerial forces a huge advantage.

DROPPING YOUR COUNTRY IN IT – THE SINKING OF RMS LUSITANIA, 1915

One of the most infamous deeds of the First World War was the attack by a German submarine on the transatlantic passenger liner Lusitania – an event, more than any other, which brought the US into the war.

The ship sailing with 1,257 passengers from New York to London sank, but what truly angered the American public was that the attack was apparently planned by a cold-blooded Germany days in advance, rather than as a spur-of-the-moment decision. And the reason they thought this was a manufacturing error by a German jewellery maker.

The ship set sail on 1 May 1915. At the time, Germany had declared that it would attack any ship sailing for Britain, even those flying neutral flags, such as the American one. In the US, the German embassy went so far as to advertise warnings in the newspapers – but the adverts didn’t appear until the day of departure, at which point few would have seen them or been prepared to alter their plans.

On 7 May the Lusitania was seen in Irish waters by the German sub U20, which shot a single torpedo and hit the boat. The ship went down in 18 minutes, with 1,198 lives lost; of them, 128 were Americans, resulting in US outrage when the news broke. The mood was summed up by the American magazine The Nation, which described the sinking as ‘a deed for which a Hun would blush, a Turk be ashamed, and a Barbary pirate apologise’.

Despite this pressure, America’s isolationist president Thomas Woodrow Wilson resisted public pressure to enter the war at Britain’s side. He insisted, with thin justification: ‘There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight. There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.’ Instead, he merely lodged a protest with the Germans.

Britain was angry at Wilson’s stance – at the Front, shells that did not explode were thenceforth named ‘Wilsons’. But things took a turn when, in August, a German manufacturer of medals struck a Lusitania medal to celebrate the sinking. And, importantly, the medal-maker, Karl Goetz, mistakenly emblazed the date 5 May on the medal, instead of 7 May. In Britain and America, this was taken as proof that there had been a plan all along to sink the ship.

In London, the director of Naval Intelligence, Reginald ‘Blinker’ Hall, seized on this proof of bosch treachery and ordered 300,000 copies of the medal to be struck in Britain (by Harry Selfridge who founded the eponymous department store), with the date translated into English to make sure everyone understood the point. These were then distributed in neutral nations across the world to show how Germany had planned for days to sink a civilian liner from a neutral country and was celebrating the bloodshed.

A POOR CHOICE OF LINE – THE ZIMMERMANN TELEGRAM, 1917

The Lusitania had turned US public opinion against Germany, but, if there was one man responsible for finally drawing the United States into the fray, then his name was Arthur Zimmermann.

By January 1917, the war was at a stalemate; the opposing sides were dug in and, with President Wilson still opposed to entering the conflict, there was no end in sight. But in April something happened to so infuriate Wilson that he declared war on Germany: Arthur Zimmermann sent a telegram along the wrong wire.

Zimmermann was Germany’s Foreign Minister. When he was appointed in 1916, America had liked him – The New York Evening Post ran a profile headlined ‘Our friend Zimmermann’, and, having once visited America, Zimmermann felt he knew its character and what the people were all about.

His strategy, though, was not just to maintain friendship with America. It was to bring Mexico into the war on the German side, and to persuade Japan – up until then an ally of Britain – to switch teams. He desperately wanted to keep America out of the war, but, if the US did join the fight, then he wanted a deal with Mexico and Japan such that they would declare war on America and tie up its military forces. In return, he would offer to help Mexico recapture land it had lost to its northern neighbour. Mexico joining in would, he hoped, be enough to persuade Japan.

Direct communication with Mexico was the hard part since the negotiations obviously had to be top secret. His first plan was to send a letter by submarine to the German ambassador in Mexico, asking him to put the deal to the Mexicans, but the submarine voyage was cancelled at the last minute. Zimmermann therefore switched to plan B – sending the message by encrypted telegram along America’s own transatlantic cable, which passed through Britain and then on to Germany. The telegram would go to the US State Department, which would pass it to the German ambassador in Washington, DC, and he would then send it on to Mexico. Although Britain and America could ‘eavesdrop’ on the message, it would be encrypted and therefore safe to send. He believed this because he thought German codes – and intelligence – far superior to that of the British or the Americans.

In fact, British Naval Intelligence was already reading Germany’s messages at will so when the message fell into their laps, they saw a missive which stated:

We will make Mexico a proposal of alliance on the following basis: make war together, generous financial support, and an understanding on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.

You will inform the President [of Mexico] of the above most secretly as soon as outbreak of war with the United States is certain and add the suggestion that he should, on his own initiative, invite Japan to immediate adherence and at the same time mediate between Japan and ourselves.

Zimmermann

Britain casually brought the contents of the message to President Wilson’s attention. He was, understandably, apoplectic and released the message to the press.

The Germans had one extremely simple strategy that might have neutralised the problem: they could have claimed the message was a fake dreamed up by the devious British in Whitehall. It would have been easy to do and there was no way of proving it either way. Zimmermann, however, seems to have been on a one-man mission to undermine the German war effort and publicly admitted that he had sent the message.

After the resulting publicity, even Wilson could no longer keep the US neutral. He told a joint session of Congress to ‘declare the recent course of the Imperial German Government to be in fact nothing less than war against the government and the people of the United States’ and to state America ‘formally accept the status of belligerent’, i.e. war. The telegram, he announced, showed that Germany ‘means to stir up enemies against us at our very doors, the intercepted note to the German Minister in Mexico is eloquent evidence’.

Four days later, America did indeed declare war. Mexico stayed out of it.

THAT SINKING FEELING – THE K-CLASS SUBMARINES, 1917

The K-Class subs were Britain’s answer to intelligence that Germany was building a fleet of huge submarines capable of 22 knots. There were two problems with this: first, the reports were false and, second, the K-Class subs were more lethal to British sailors than the German Navy. Of the 18 built, six sank in accidents and only one ever engaged a German vessel, firing a torpedo that failed to detonate. They became known as ‘Kalamity Class’.

The steam-powered boats were three times the size of previous submarines, but their sheer size meant they were about as manoeuvrable as a mountain and took five minutes to dive, leaving them vulnerable to attack.

At the beginning of 1917 the first boats were ready for testing. When they did so, K2 caught fire and K13 sank. K3 mysteriously dived down to the sea bed with the future George VI aboard, before luckily managing to resurface; K4 ran aground; K5 sank; K6 got stuck on the sea bed; K7 rammed K17 by accident and was destroyed. So much for the first test dives. On the next dives, K13 – renumbered as K22 to hide its shame – got stuck on one bearing and caused a collision involving K6, K4, K17 and a cruiser.

Finally on active service, K1 collided with K4 off the Danish coast and was scuttled to avoid capture by the Germans.

IGNORING THE TOPOGRAPHY – THE BOMBARDMENT OF FLANDERS

In the summer of 1917 Field Marshal Haig decided to launch an offensive in Flanders. In itself that was not a bad plan, but choosing to begin it with the heaviest bombardment of ordinance of the First World War on the Ypres battleground was an error of the first order.

The problem was that the land around Ypres in northern Belgium was reclaimed marshland, and the drainage system that prevented it from turning into a swamp was delicate and had been carefully developed over centuries.

On 22 July 1917 Haig ignored the warnings from the Belgian government and proceeded to pummel the German lines with more than 3,000 artillery guns. By the end of the bombardment the land looked like a volcano had erupted; then heavy rain turned it, as predicted, into a swamp. Dismissing the concerns of his officers, Haig ordered the British troops to wade through the mud and attack. They were cut down by the German machine guns.

It was a deadly failure that lasted far longer than that terrible day. More than 90 British men drowned each month.

LET’S STICK WITH WHAT WE KNOW – CAVALRY, NOT TANKS, 1922

The post-conflict defence cuts of 1922 showed the true colours of Britain’s idiotic commanders. Field Marshal Haig, an old man who had grown up seeing impressive cavalry officers, didn’t believe in tanks: they weren’t dashing, unlike those chaps with sabres. So he ensured that when the cuts were being made, cavalry regiments would be protected at the cost of tank units. The changes left 126 infantry battalions, 20 cavalry regiments and a mere 6 tank battalions.

In 1929 the British military spent £72,000 on petrol and £607,000 on horse feed – the tanks would have been handy in the upcoming Second World War.

NOT VETTING YOUR CLEANERS – HIRING MELITA NORWOOD, 1935

Melita Norwood was as openly communist as you could get, publicly supporting the Soviet Union. The perfect applicant for a job at a British top-secret nuclear research institute, it seems.

Norwood’s red credentials went back to before she was born. Her father had been a member of the Marxist British Socialist Party and had personally translated Lenin’s The Collapse of the Second International. When she was 20, Melita had joined the Independent Labour Party, while she was living with her husband, Hilary, and his Russian parents. She and her mother-in-law sold copies of the Daily Worker and were members of the Friends of the Soviet Union. If there was any doubt whatsoever, Norwood went on to join the Communist Party in 1935.

Astonishingly, the previous year she had been recruited as a spy for Soviet intelligence, who were either none too picky about their agents maintaining a low profile, or bluffing it by making her such an obvious spy that MI5 would laugh and overlook her. By then she had started work as a secretary at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association, which everyone knew was a secret weapons research institute. She was transferred to Tube Alloys – i.e. nuclear weapons – in 1939.

When the war ended she began supplying Moscow with secrets regarding uranium research, and the Soviets later said that it was her information that allowed them to produce a nuclear weapon years before the Western powers had thought they would be able to – even before Britain was able to build one.

Still no one suspected her – perhaps because she was only a secretary and therefore had no security clearance. She got around this by opening her boss’s safe each night and photographing his documents, which she then passed on to her handlers. She even recruited another agent, who spent 14 years passing Moscow details of British arms sales.

Norwood retired in 1973 and hung up her spy’s camera. She went into local politics and refused a Soviet pension, insisting she did what she did for purely ideological reasons and had never accepted a rouble in pay.

In 1992, a Soviet defector unmasked her but the British government saw no point in a prosecution. She publicly declared: ‘I did what I did not to make money, but to prevent the defeat of a new system which had, at great cost, given ordinary people food and fares which they could afford, a good education and a health service.’

In fact, she only regretted one thing: ‘I thought I’d got away with it.’

SWITCHING TARGETS – THE GERMANS FAIL TO DESTROY THE RAF, 1940

Had Hermann Goering pressed home his advantage over Britain’s air force in 1940, Hitler’s plans to invade could well have come to fruition. Luckily, Goering did everything but actually spy for Churchill.

After the disaster of Dunkirk, Hitler planned a full-scale invasion of the United Kingdom for September 1940. In preparation, the Luftwaffe went after air bases through southern Britain, bombing them time after time for seven weeks during the summer. The RAF was losing, and they knew it – they couldn’t hold out much longer. Adding to the fears, information from the codebreakers at Bletchley Park said that the Nazi invasion fleet was gathering. The British commanders knew that after a few more days of German raids on the RAF bases the Air Force would be unable to mount any defence against a naval assault.

Goering’s plan was that the Luftwaffe would ‘continue the fight against the enemy air force until further notice, with the aim of weakening the British fighter forces. The Enemy is to be forced to use his fighters by means of ceaseless attacks. In addition the aircraft industry and the organisation of the air force are to be attacked by individual aircraft by night and day.’ Had he stuck to this strategy, Hitler’s invasion might have succeeded. Instead, Goering and a lost German bomber pilot inadvertently came to Britain’s rescue.

On 24 August the pilot of the lead aircraft in a small flight of Heinkel bombers was on a night raid over Britain when he realised he had no idea where he was. Completely lost and a bit worried because he had no fighter escort, he decided to return to base in France. Before doing so, he dropped his bombs on whatever was underneath him. The other planes in his group followed suit and they all headed for France. The bombs fell onto the streets and houses of London. Without knowing it, the Germans had just bombed the capital. Up until then, raids on civilian populations had normally been off the table.

Although the bombs did little damage, there was fury in Britain like nothing before and the RAF decided that the only response was to bomb Berlin. Of 95 RAF bombers, 81 reached Berlin and released their loads. Their main target was an airfield at the centre of the city, but the bombs rained down all over the German capital.

After frequently boasting about Germany’s air superiority, Goering now looked foolish in front of his colleagues. He had gone so far as to make a promise on the radio to the people of Berlin that they would never even see an RAF aeroplane. As a result, he ordered the Luftwaffe’s strategy to change – the Nazis would put the RAF to one side and have revenge on the British civilians. In so doing, he scuppered his master’s invasion plans.

On the night of 6 September Goering sent over 68 bombers. The next night, it was a mass raid, with more than 500 dropping bombs on the capital. It was the beginning of two months of attacks.[*] But the break allowed the RAF to rebuild its bases, meaning they could get planes in the air and fight off the Germans. The renewed strength of the Air Force meant Hitler had to put off his invasion at the last minute. Then, within a month, he cancelled it entirely.

Lost German bomber crews were something of a gift to Britain. In 1944, the Nazis were doing suspiciously well in defending their towns until a stroke of British luck reversed the trend. Then, on 13 July, at the Woodbridge airbase in Suffolk, a British officer, W.D. Raymond, saw a British Mosquito aircraft overhead circling the base, possibly in distress. He used signal flares to guide it down. When it touched down, he drove his jeep over to it but noticed it had a crew of three rather than the usual two, and as he got closer he noticed that it was, in fact, a German Ju88 G1 night fighter. A brand-new model, what made it a fantastic prize was the electronic equipment aboard – including radar-related technology that Britain had been unable to get her hands on.

The crew surrendered when Raymond drew his pistol but what he really wanted to know was what on earth they were doing there. Sheepishly they explained that they had only just completed their flight training, the pilot had misread his compass and had flown in precisely the opposite direction to the one he had wanted to go in. They had thought they were over Holland, rather than Suffolk.

The gadgetry on board was a godsend to RAF intelligence. It included a new technology that used RAF bombers’ own radar signals to locate them – this was the secret that had enabled the Germans to fight off the British bombers. When Bomber Command discovered this, the bombers’ radar equipment was removed, immediately reducing the German fighters’ kill rate and virtually finishing their defence against Allied bombing raids.

AN OPEN SECRET – THE ENIGMA CODE, 1940

Cracking the Enigma Code was one of the greatest British achievements of the Second World War. A rag-tag assortment of crossword fanatics and algebra geniuses came together in an orgy of maths to unravel the secret of the Enigma encoding machines that the Nazis were using to send messages, and in 1940 they managed to break the cipher and eavesdrop on German messages.

It was a brilliant achievement but a wholly unnecessary one because the Enigma machine had been around since the 1920s and the German company that had produced it filed a patent in Britain in 1924, providing full diagrams of how it worked, including the ‘default’ wiring settings. The British codebreakers at Bletchley Park presumed that the German military would have wired their machines differently to the default – rather like changing the password on a computer from ‘password’ – but it wasn’t until Britain got hold of a military Enigma machine in 1939 that they discovered the Germans hadn’t thought of that. Had Bletchley Park simply constructed an Enigma with the default settings, they would have been able to read German messages, which could even have averted the invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Peter Twinn, the first man to break the code, said in 2001: ‘I know in retrospect it sounds daft. It was such an obvious thing to do, rather a silly thing, that nobody ever thought it worthwhile trying.’

Luckily, the Germans were even more foolish with the code. By 1943, the Allies were using the decoded messages to launch stunning attacks on the German sea fleet and the chief of the U-Boat fleet suspected the code had been cracked. His suspicions were confirmed by information from the Swiss intelligence service, which had a spy in the US Navy. But the German ministry of war insisted it was impossible that anyone could outthink Germany and continued to use Enigma.

THE WRONG LAUNDRY – THE GERMANS SPILL THE BEANS, 1941

The Nazis were sticklers for a sharp crease in their jackboots and this proved a great aid to British Army intelligence. Agents in occupied France came up with an offbeat but highly successful method of tracking German troop movements – they set up a chain of laundry firms offering first-class service at low cost. The Germans were hooked and their officers used them all the time. This meant that the French agents could keep track of which regiments were where, and where they were going – because the Germans would always leave forwarding addresses for any items not yet ready. One account from the time said the Hun ‘might be going to Valhalla, but they were not prepared to go without their linen’.

This system gained the vital intelligence in advance of D-Day that the SS Panzer divisions in France weren’t on the move, indicating they were unaware of where the invasion was going to be, and were still expecting it near Calais.

AN UNWELCOME SIGN – HMS TRINIDAD IS DISABLED, 1941

In 1941 the cruiser Trinidad was sailing in the Arctic when it engaged three German destroyers. Immediately, the Trinidad shot a torpedo, but the icy waters froze the weapon’s steering mechanism and the crew had to watch, slightly uncertain, as the torpedo sailed through an arc and sped back towards the British boat. It exploded and caused such damage that the Trinidad was out of action for the rest of the war.

LOOKING THE WRONG WAY – LOSING SINGAPORE, 1942

Singapore was supposed to be impregnable but, as a certain young mother from Bethlehem could tell you, impregnation can sometimes come from the most unexpected direction.

In the case of Singapore, the island city state at the southern tip of modern Malaysia, it came on bike on 8 February 1942. After sweeping through mainland Malaysia, a British possession, the Japanese were so low on motor transport that they cycled down to Singapore. This sneaky Jap trick surprised the British, who had expected a seaborne invasion.

Most of all, the defeat of Singapore was down to complacency. When the Japanese first attacked, one British officer commented that he couldn’t ‘understand why the Governor had got the wind up and mobilised the local volunteer force’. And right up until that moment the British government was resisting recommendations from the Singaporean authorities that Japanese workers in sensitive locations be reduced, because London didn’t want to offend Japan in case it provoked them to attack. This was despite the fact that Tokyo’s agents were everywhere – even the official photographer to the Singapore naval base was believed to be a colonel in Japanese intelligence and no one stopped to question if all those photographs he was taking of the boats and sailors might just be of some use to the Japanese Navy.

Even after the Japanese defeated the British forces on the mainland, Singapore was most definitely not expecting an attack from that direction. For one thing, all the British guns were pointing out to sea – they could be turned to face the mainland, but the ammunition was designed to attack shipping, not land forces. For another, last-minute defences against boats carrying hostile troops from the mainland had not been completed because of a wages dispute with the labourers – not an isolated problem, since many of the Australian troops stationed there had ‘withdrawn their labour’ over pay and many others were drunk for a substantial proportion of the time.

In addition, British intelligence had dismissed any threat from the Japanese Air Force because they had reports saying Japanese men’s bodies were too small and frail to withstand the G-force of aerial manoeuvres. Even when Japanese bombers started to hover ominously over the city, the lights stayed on because no one could find the master key to turn them all off. The Post Office, on the other hand, messed up in the opposite manner – by cutting off all phone calls to the front line after the wartime regulation three minutes.

In the end, 130,000 British, Indian and Australian troops surrendered to just 35,000 Japanese. It is generally considered the worst disaster in British military history.

The military authorities might also have been criticised for ignoring a specific warning of the attack on the Malay mainland – along with details of the simultaneous attack on Pearl Harbor as an added bonus.

Stationed at an RAF base in northern Malaya, as it was then, was the 18-year-old Air Technician Peter Shepherd, who had signed up to the Air Force at the tender age of 15 when war was declared. On 4 December 1941 he was told that he would be taking a trip in a Dutch East Indies civilian plane as the Dutch engineer was ill. He described what happened in his book, Three Days to Pearl: Incredible Encounter on the Eve of War:

To my surprise we landed in Cambodia on a private landing airfield in the south at a place near Kampot. As French Indo-China was virtually in Japanese hands at the time, this made Cambodia a pretty dangerous place for a Dutch plane to land. The French authorities were of course liberally sprinkled with pro-Vichy elements and so no friends of the British in 1941.

My own position as an RAF serviceman in civilian clothing was therefore highly dangerous. To make things worse, on the way north, the Dutch pilot divulged that the real purpose of the trip was to collect a single British passenger under cover of what sounded to me like a clandestine commercial flight smuggling contraband. To me this looked like a combination of agent-running and smuggling. I had been told none of this before we took off. I thought we were going to Thailand, which was neutral, not to Cambodia, so I was extremely unhappy as you can imagine. I decided to stay out of the way on the ground.

Later in the day the pilot took me to a restaurant to eat. There were only the two of us. The pilot went off into the back of the kitchen to do some business, probably about the cargo. I was only eighteen and stranded in a strange country in civilian clothes. I thought I could be shot as a spy, so I was fairly frightened as you can imagine, and kept my head well down.

At the restaurant, an Oriental came up to me and offered me some of his Tiger Balm for my mosquito bites, which were pretty bad. He started to talk, but I could hardly understand a word. I gathered from his mixture of broken English and sign language that he was a Jap civilian and some sort of aircraft engineer himself. After all, ‘engineer’ sounds the same the whole world over. He thought I was a French aircraft engineer. He seemed very pleased about something and kept trying to talk to me. He was pretty drunk, mainly on cognac. We communicated in a weird mixture of sign language and place names and eventually he pulled out his diary and a map and tried to tell me where he had been and what he was doing there.

He indicated that he had sailed on an aircraft carrier from Japan to Hitokappu Bay north of Japan and had seen a huge armada assembled there. On the 24 November he had been flown south to Phu Quoc Island to supervise some urgent operational modifications on the bomb racks of the Japanese planes based in southern Cambodia.

He seemed very proud of what he was doing and what he had seen and indicated that we were the only people who knew about the fleet, and that it had been planning to sail on 26 November to obliterate the US fleet in Pearl Harbor and to launch a simultaneous invasion of Malaya and Singapore. He explained this with lots of signs and ‘boom, booms’. When I indicated surprise, he dragged out a kind of diary book and even showed me a few rough sketches of some of the naval ships that he said he had seen moored the week before to convince me.

I realized it was important, so when he staggered out to the lavatory, I stole the drawings from his book. He got even more drunk after he came back, and when the pilot told me it was time to go I left my new friend vomiting over the verandah rail.

On returning to Malaya the next day, 5 December, I immediately reported all I had been told to the RAF Station Intelligence Officer. Later that morning I was flown down to Kuala Lumpur where I was interrogated by two civilians whom I took to be intelligence officers. I handed over the sketches that the Japanese engineer had drawn and went through all the details yet again. During the course of my interview I said that I believed the Japanese to have been telling the truth as he saw it, and we agreed that if all the details of his story were true, then the time of the supposed attack would probably be in three days on 8 December [7 December Hawaii time, because of the International Date Line]. I flew back north to Sungei Patani that afternoon with strict instructions to keep my mouth shut once I got back to the station.

Nothing happened after I got back. Despite the state of emergency the airfield never even went on full war alert, much to my surprise, and the next thing I knew was when a bomb blew me through the concrete doorway of the aircraftsmen’s showers at 7 a.m. on the morning of 8 December during a surprise Japanese air raid.

As a result of my serious injuries I was evacuated from Malaya to Batavia and then Karachi and didn’t pay much attention for the next two years while my wounds healed. Then I was invalided out of the RAF back in the UK in early 1944.

I often wonder what happened to the information I gave to those intelligence officers at Kuala Lumpur. To this day I can’t understand why Malaya Command didn’t go on a war alert that morning, let alone attack the Jap shipping which we all knew had been detected offshore.

KEEPING A CODEWORD A BIT TOO SECRET – ALLOWING THE GERMAN FLEET TO ESCAPE, 1942

In 1941 the British Navy and a fair whack of the RAF were engaged in attempting to destroy the German warships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, which were docked in Brest on the French coast. From time to time, the Air Force would drop bombs on the ships, and the Germans had little choice but to sit there and take it. Although the RAF had failed to sink them, the vessels had sustained substantial damage and the German authorities wanted to move them into German waters, where they would be better protected by the Luftwaffe. The British knew this and were on the alert for a sudden departure from Brest and back to Germany.

There were two options for the Germans – the long way round, going around Ireland, Scotland and past Scandinavia; or the ‘Channel Dash’, through the Straits of Dover, then the North Sea. The second route would seem like suicide for the Germans, bringing the boats in range of Britain’s coastal guns, as well as the Navy and the RAF. Their only chance, it was felt, would be to try it under cover of darkness but it would still be very dangerous.

The sheer absurdity of a daytime Channel Dash was just why the Germans went for it. The surprise, they hoped, would be enough to wrong-foot the British, rather like attempting to kick the ball into your own goal during a football match. The plan was to pass through the Straits of Dover on 12

February 1942 with a heavy bodyguard. The battlegroup would consist of the two warships, an escort of destroyers, cruisers, dozens of torpedo boats and no fewer than 280 fighters providing air cover in rotations of at least 30 planes in the air at any one time. The Germans were most concerned about the threat from mines and British torpedo planes, which had recently helped sink the battleship Bismarck.

But the British forces were going to be a lot lighter than the Germans expected. This was partly because the Royal Navy refused to send heavy battleships into an area where they would be as vulnerable to British sea mines as to German ones – not to mention the Luftwaffe’s French airbases. The Admiralty declared they were more than up for a fight off the coast of Scotland, but anything that happened in the English Channel would be the RAF’s bag.

In fact, the body with the greatest chance of sending the Germans to the bottom of the sea was the RAF Coastal Command, who had the perfect weapon: the Beaufort torpedo-bombers. They even had a plan for activating these aircraft in the case of a daylight Dash. It was codenamed ‘Operation Fuller’. In the case of the German ships being spotted afloat, the codeword – ‘Fuller’ – would be relayed from the detection base to the airfields, the planes would be scrambled and the Nazis sunk.

Unfortunately, this codeword was so secret that the RAF kept it a secret from those who needed to know what it meant and what they had to do with it. ‘Are you ready for Fuller?’ an officer in a radio station might have enquired of his contact in Coastal Command. ‘Ready for what?’ would have been the answer. ‘Yes, that’s right,’ would have been the officer’s reply, while tapping his nose and winking.

Without the Beauforts, the British response would be restricted to nine low-grade torpedo boats, six destroyers (already decades old) and, incredibly, six Swordfish torpedo biplanes which had last seen service during the First World War and were popularly known as ‘Stringbags’ – their pilots were, encouragingly, told they were being put on ‘suicide alert’ because, if sent out, they knew that they wouldn’t be coming back. They would be swatted out of the air by the hundreds of German aircraft and the heavy guns on the ships below.

The pilots’ bravery, it must be said, is as astonishing as how badly planned the operation was.

On the night of 11 February the Germans set sail. As they moved through the dark waters, they were extremely lucky not to be spotted by a nearby British patrol plane, whose radar had blown a fuse. The hours passed and their luck seemed to hold, until, as dawn broke, the Germans, surprised not to be under attack, approached the Straits of Dover, where they began to suspect they were being led into a trap.

It was then that the secrecy of the codeword ‘Fuller’ became important. Radar stations identified a large squadron of German aircraft, possibly providing air cover for a flotilla. Squadron Leader Bill Igoe at Biggin Hill airfield realised what was afoot and phoned his HQ to activate the secret plan.

‘Fuller, I think,’ he said.

‘Afraid not, old chap. Wrong number,’ was the response.

‘No, it’s Fuller.’

But the old chap at HQ had no idea who this Mr Fuller was. Igoe gave up and decided to scramble a reconnaissance plane himself to check the situation. It was piloted by Squadron Leader Oxspring and carried Sergeant Beaumont for an extra pair of eyes.

In fact, the Germans had already been spotted because at the same time a Spitfire was returning with all speed to base after coming across the enemy battlegroup by accident. But instead of radioing through the urgent information the pilot had stuck to the rules and maintained radio silence, giving the Germans a few more vital minutes of safety.

Oxspring was not such a prig and broke the rules to radio Biggin Hill and inform them what was going on. But he did not know the secret codeword, Fuller, so his report was ignored. In fact, all that happened was it tipped off the Germans, who overheard his report.

When they got back on the ground, Beaumont rushed to inform an intelligence officer that he had spotted the Scharnhorst, which he had recognised from a briefing lecture about German vessels. But he was only a sergeant, so couldn’t really be trusted to have any idea about anything. The officer sent a man urgently to fetch a book of ship silhouettes to make sure. The man stopped off at the canteen for a cup of tea.

At this point frustrated by the delay, Igoe and Oxspring tried to leapfrog the layers of military bureaucracy by contacting Air Vice Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory, commander of their section, directly. But they were informed that he was busy handing out medals and his aide-de-camp dismissed Oxspring’s report, telling him: ‘You saw fishing boats. We are not going to bother the AOC over this.’ By this time, the Germans had had 12 hours of pleasant cruising.

When, sometime later, more reports came in that confirmed what Oxspring was saying, the shocked British officers realised their earlier errors and activated the official plan: It was time for Fuller.

It was just a pity that even those who knew what Fuller was had no idea what it really entailed. Of course, the plans were all written down. They just needed to look at the papers. But where were they?

They were locked in a safe at Biggin Hill and the man with the key was on holiday.

Across Britain, pilots rushed to their planes; unfortunately, neither they nor anyone else had the faintest idea what they were supposed to do in them. The only people who had some sort of view on the matter were the crews of the six Swordfish. They had an idea what was going to happen: they were going to die. They were supposed to have an escort of five Spitfire squadrons, which would protect them from the scores of German fighters while the Swordfish concentrated on the ships, but in the end only ten planes turned up. In such small numbers the Spitfires would have no more chance than the pilots of the Swordfish. Yet, despite knowing well the odds, they flew on to their target.

When the RAF planes approached, the Germans genuinely thought it could only be a suicide attack such as the Japanese Kamikazes went in for – there could be no other explanation. The commander of the Scharnhorst later described it in his log: ‘The mothball attack of a handful of ancient planes, piloted by men whose bravery surpasses any other action by either side that day’. All the Swordfish were shot down and all but three of the 18 crewmen died. None of their torpedoes hit the mark.

After their loss, the rest of Operation Fuller finally staggered into action. A few Beauforts joined the fray hours later, but were hampered by the fact that they were under-strength due to some of their squadron having been armed with bombs instead of torpedoes (no one knew that ‘Fuller’ was a naval operation). In addition, a number of their fighter escort had failed to turn up because their command base was trying to communicate with them in Morse code, but the planes had recently switched over to radio telephones and no one had mentioned it to the base, so it was like writing a letter to a blind man. Altogether a massive 675 planes were nominally involved in Fuller. Of them, only 39 attack aircraft sighted the enemy and dropped their bombs. All missed and 15 planes were shot down.

It could have been worse, though. The Royal Navy was not entirely absent from the battle – the British destroyer Walpole engaged the enemy and was attacked by two aircraft. It was especially surprised by the fact that they were RAF Wellington bombers, which flew out of a cloud and aimed their bombs at their naval colleagues, luckily missing their target. The commander of the Wellington must have been even more astonished to see a squadron of fighters arrive and chase away the British, considering the heroic guardians who continued to escort and safeguard the Walpole were equally confused Luftwaffe Me-109s. Soon realising their mistake, the Germans withdrew, unsure what to do next.

The greatest damage to the German fleet came from a mine that the Scharnhorst hit soon before it arrived back in Germany.

OUT OF DATE, OUT OF TIME – ALLOWING BURGESS AND MACLEAN TO ESCAPE, 1951

The Cambridge Spy Ring will go down in British history as the debacle that will forever undermine the image of British intelligence officers as suave, tough or brilliantly cunning, and replace it with a caricature of effete, effeminate chaps without the faintest idea of what they are doing or what they came into the room for.

The five spies (one of whom has never been identified for certain) were all high up in the British intelligence and diplomatic services. For decades, they fed the Soviet Union information that often had British agents killed.

Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean were the first to be unmasked as traitors but they were tipped off and fled for France on 25 May 1951, on their way to mother Russia. Their attempt to escape had a hitch, however – they had been recognised boarding a ferry to the French port of St Malo by a customs officer at Southampton. After he informed the authorities, an MI5 officer was dispatched to head them off. He was to fly to St Malo and arrest them – he just had to run home to get his passport first. When he did so, he noticed that he had forgotten to renew it and he wasn’t going anywhere. He could only return to the office with his tail somewhere between his legs. He was later knighted and made chief of the Security Service.

ARGY-BARGY – THE ARGENTINES INVADE THE FALKLANDS TOO EARLY, 1982

In 1983 a government inquiry, the Franks Committee, partly blamed the Falklands War on Margaret Thatcher’s decision in 1981 to withdraw the Royal Navy’s only ship patrolling the South Atlantic, HMS Endurance. As Britain’s sole vessel in those waters, removing it had sent a message to the Argentine military junta that the UK was not interested in defending the Falklands, the Committee declared.

The funny thing was that that message sent to Argentina was quite true. Although the Endurance was withdrawn simply to keep in with Thatcher’s ‘good housekeeping’ financial policy, the British government was also planning an orderly withdrawal from the Falklands. In 1981 Nicholas Ridley, one of the Foreign Office ministers, told a journalist: ‘We have 13 colonies left. It is my job to get us out of them. After Honduras [British Honduras, now independent Belize] the Falklands are next on the list.’

Later that year he designed a sale-leaseback deal which would hand sovereignty over to Argentina, so long as the islanders could remain there under a British administration. Thatcher had wanted rid of the islands too and was drastically scaling back that part of the Navy that could defend them – the aircraft carrier Hermes was to be scrapped, as were two assault craft; and the carrier Invincible was being sold to the Australian Navy, which was preparing to take delivery when Argentina invaded.

Had Endurance not been withdrawn, it is unlikely that Argentina would have thought it could stage an unopposed military takeover. For that matter, had Argentina waited another year before its incursion, Britain might well have voluntarily handed over the islands – and even if it hadn’t done so the Royal Navy would not have had the vessels needed for the counter-attack. Withdrawing Endurance saved £2m; the war that it led to cost £3bn.

And the war was never a foregone conclusion. In fact, in 1982, one foolish mistake nearly turned the whole thing around.

The British media are a pugnacious lot. According to them, the government is always venal, wrong and amateurish, and they always know better. But does anyone listen? Nope. Still, there’s one time when they all fall into line – when the nation is at war. Publishing stories that would actively help the enemy is considered something of a no-no, even in Fleet Street (well, with the sole exception of the Guardian, anyway). Despite this, in 1982, at the height of the war, the Ministry of Defence sent out a press release. It was good news of Argentine naval failures and the BBC happily ran an item based on it. The BBC’s report sang: ‘Following the Argentine air attacks on 21 May two unexploded bombs on one warship have been successfully defused and a further one dealt with on another warship. Repairs are being carried out on the other warships.’

In fact, the problem with the report was that it was absolutely true. British craft were being repeatedly hit by Argentine bombs which were failing to explode, most probably because the Argentine pilots were flying too low over their targets, so that when they dropped the bombs the fuses didn’t have enough time to arm the device before it hit the ships. Nearly three-quarters of all the ordnance dropped on the British ships was failing to detonate and the British Navy wanted to keep it that way. The last thing they wanted was for the Argentineans to cotton on, and start flying a bit higher up, because the sea was the real battleground when it came to the Falklands. On land, British troops entirely dominated, but on the water things were more evenly matched and the Argentines sank a number of British boats, drowning many of the crew.

Had the Argentine pilots been able to treble their effectiveness simply by realising they were flying too low, the entire campaign might have been reversed.

THE WRONG NUMBER – THE INVASION OF GRENADA, 1983

The Americans do like their dramatic codenames. And the invasion of the former British dominion of Grenada was named Operation Urgent Fury, which seems excessive.

Anyhow, the American invasion restored the constitutional government to the small island a wee bit north of Venezuela, after a military junta had seized power from the ruling People’s Revolutionary Government, which had itself seized power from the elected government four years previously with the help of the Soviet Union and Cuba. The American invasion outraged the sort of person who gets outraged by that sort of thing, but especially the People’s Revolutionary Government, which went so far as to send a telex to the British Foreign Office on 23 October 1983 alerting the British government to the invasion and begging them to talk the Yankee imperialists out of it.

Unfortunately, the telex number the People’s Revolutionary Government used was for an office no longer used by the Foreign Office, but instead occupied by a Scandinavian plastics firm, which seemed bemused by the request for military assistance from Grenada to fight off an invasion by the United States.

Margaret Thatcher was another of those people outraged by the US invasion, but by the time she heard about it the best she could do was telephone the White House and object to it. Had the telex been sent to the right number, she would have known rather earlier and could possibly have mediated between the Americans and the Grenadians. As it was, relations between Britain and the United States were severely soured by the affair.

In the House of Commons, Denis Healey, the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, posed the question:

I should like the Foreign Secretary to tell us whether it is true, as widely reported in the newspapers this morning, that both the Prime Minister and the Palace first heard of the invasion from press reports. Is it also true that a telex from the Government of Grenada announcing the invasion was delivered to an old Foreign Office number which now belongs to a Scandinavian plastics company? It is difficult to believe that incompetence and lack of grip could go any further. How on earth could the Prime Minister possibly imagine that a couple of minutes on the telephone with President Reagan, when the invasion was already underway, would make any difference? The Prime Minister has been an obedient poodle to the American President.

THE WORLD’S WORST CODE – THE DOGS OF WAR TRIAL, 2004

Question: According to the CIA World Factbook, which African country has the highest Gross National Product per person?

Answer: Equatorial Guinea.

For those who did not even know there was somewhere called Equatorial Guinea in the first place, it must come as a real shock to know the inhabitants are some of the richest people in the world. Well, up to a point, anyway.

Equatorial Guinea is an oil-and gas-rich brutal African dictatorship where most of the 500,000-strong population desperately trying to find enough food to eat each day probably have no idea that they are all millionaires. One person perfectly aware of the nation’s wealth is President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, who seized power from his uncle in a military coup in 1979. It must have been quite a day when massive oil and gas fields were discovered in Equatorial Guinea’s waters, propelling the country up the international wealth list overnight. But, as every African dictator knows, one thing that tends to follow a sudden expansion of your bank account is an expansion in the number of people who want to shoot you.

In 2004 it turned out that the latest group of people attempting to depose Obiang in a very direct manner were a group of foreign professionals – i.e. mercenaries. They were led by an Old Etonian former SAS officer, Simon Mann, who was then working in South Africa.

On 7 March 2004 a plane landed in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe. The passengers were 64 mercenaries, most of whom had fought in the civil wars that had rampaged through Mozambique and Angola. They were stopping off in Harare to pick up weapons and ammunition arranged by Mann, who was already there. From there, they were to fly to the capital of Equatorial Guinea, Malabo, where they would join an advance team of 15, who were already there. They would then infiltrate Obiang’s home and either fly him to exile in Spain or simply blow his brains out, depending on how pleasant he was. Behind them was an opposition leader, Severo Moto, who would declare himself president and no doubt bring in an era of peace and prosperity for all, without any more of the corruption and systematic embezzlement that had characterised Obiang’s murderous regime.

Sadly for those concerned, the coup was scuppered before it had even begun when the Zimbabwean police arrested everyone upon arrival in Harare. The problem was that plans for military coups in Africa tend to be common knowledge – even if most of the people involved are professionals who keep their lips sealed, there’s always one who boasts about it at the local bar or brothel. Not only was Obiang aware of the scheme, having been tipped off by the South African security service, the Scorpions, but Zimbabwean security was also on the case because they had become suspicious of Mann’s attempts to buy arms in the country.

So, when the passengers of the plane were arrested on immigration charges, Mann was also seized. Not one to lose his nerve, though, he tried to talk his way out of it, claiming the men were all on their way to a contract to provide security for diamond mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The story was believed until the Equatorial Guinean police got in touch, after arresting the advance party. Most outraged was the Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, perhaps angry that there was a plan to create a military dictatorship that wasn’t going to involve him. When interrogated, Mann revealed that he had been introduced to Moto by a Lebanese businessman, Ely Calil, who had originated the coup plan.

The captive Mann knew he needed the support of the money men behind the scheme – probably to bribe his way out of prison and away from the danger of being executed by what passed for a justice system in Equatorial Guinea, should he be extradited. He managed to write a letter to his wife, Amanda, on scraps of paper, asking her to get in touch with the rich men in the shadows. Here is where he made his fatal error, however. Having neglected to agree codenames with his wife in advance, he resorted to schoolboy-like attempts to disguise the names, thus revealing the full details of who organised what when the letter was intercepted. Mann had referred to ‘Smelly’ and ‘Scratcher’. ‘Smelly’ was clearly Eli, but the South Africans rightly guessed that ‘Scratcher’ was Mark Thatcher, the businessman son of the former British prime minister, then living in South Africa. This letter and its laughable approach at disguise was the evidence that the South Africans needed to prosecute.

Thatcher was arrested and charged with providing logistical support for the coup, which became known as the ‘Dogs Of War’ plot after Frederick Forsyth’s novel of the same name, which dealt with a similar story. Although he denied any knowledge, it didn’t look good for Thatcher when the police noticed that his home in South Africa was up for sale and his bags were packed in what looked a lot like an attempt to evade the law.

Newspapers worldwide reported the case – many in Africa portraying the Mann affair as a British plot to once more rule the continent, which went to the very top of the establishment (Eton, the British Army, Margaret Thatcher). All this added to anti-British feeling and soured a few relations.

Thatcher eventually managed to avoid extradition to Equatorial Guinea by pleading guilty in South Africa. He was fined three million rand (£250,000). In Equatorial Guinea, the leader of the advance party and Mann, who had been extradited, were sentenced to 34 years in prison each; Moro was given a 63-year sentence in absentia (it is presumed he won’t be going back to serve it voluntarily). Mann was eventually released after five years, and in 2011 he wrote a book about the plot entitled Cry Havoc, from Shakespeare’s line in Julius Caesar: ‘Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war’.

*  The Dutch national anthem, ‘The Wilhelmus’, is named after him. He may, perhaps, have performed a little dance whenever he heard it.

**  Suggestion of heresy.

***  Suggestion of homosexuality.

****  Suggestion of Satanism.

*  It was a pointless war and the majority of the British people have no idea that it ever took place. Indeed, its greatest legacy is probably ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, now the national anthem of the United States, which was written for the defence of Baltimore.

*  The moment before he died, at least, Gordon would probably have been fairly happy due to his unusual religious beliefs and the expectation that he would be reincarnated. ‘This life is only one of a series of lives which our incarnated part has lived,’ he once wrote. ‘I have little doubt of our having pre-existed; and that also in the time of our pre-existence we were actively employed. So, therefore, I believe in our active employment in a future life, and I like the thought.’ He also believed the world was enclosed in a hollow sphere and God’s throne hovered directly above the Temple of Jerusalem; the Devil’s seat was on the opposite side of the sphere, placing it above the Pitcairn Islands. The Garden of Eden, he suspected, was situated in the Seychelles.

*  Although the right for peers to be tried in the Lords remained on the statute books until 1948, the last case was in 1935. Edward Russell, Lord De Clifford (a fascist who supported Oswald Mosley) was charged with vehicular manslaughter after he drove his car on the wrong side of the road and killed another driver. Even though a coroner’s court had already found him guilty, his friends in the Lords acquitted him. Ironically, in 1928, Clifford had made his maiden speech on the subject of road safety, proposing the introduction of mandatory driving tests, and during his time in the Lords he had called for the imposition of speed limits.

*  When people speak of the Charge of the Light Brigade, they often quote the French commander Marshall Pierre Bosquet: ‘C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre!’ (It is magnificent, but it is not war.) Yet, for some reason his final words are cut off: … ‘C’est folie.’ (It is madness.)

*  Hence the phrase ‘bite the bullet’.

*  The Foreign Secretary, Lord Clarendon, once described Clark as ‘not fit to attend a sick cat’.

*  In fact, British pilots often looked on jealously as their Hunnish opposite numbers saved their skins with Calthrop’s Patent Safety Guardian Angel Parachute, which had been designed in London, sold to Moscow and copied by Berlin.

*  The raids on the two capitals continued for years, with variable success. Among those especially unlucky were the residents of West Ham in east London. The Labour councillors who controlled it had declared they would have nothing to do with a ‘capitalist war’. As pacifists, they refused to make warmongering preparations, such as building bomb shelters. It led to a terrible incident on 9 September 1940 when 450 people sheltering in a school died because they had no more appropriate place to hide.

The main lesson from the history of cultural creation is that those who most want to contribute to it are often the last people you want doing so. In the fields of literature, architecture and study of history, it’s usually someone so fixated on leaving a part of himself to posterity who has his back turned to the realities of the here and now. So desperate to be judged well by future generations, he often feels he can get away with leaving the current one to hang or believes in flattering liars who should be turned out and pursued with a pitchfork and flaming torches.

A FAKE THAT STUCK – NAMING THE HILLS, 1747

Not exactly a mistake, but a hoax that continues to this day and will go on fooling people for a long time. The Pennine Hills aren’t really the Pennines – or at least you might as well make up your own name for them, really.

The story begins in 1746 when Charles Bertram, a 23-year-old English tutor at the Royal Marine Academy in Copenhagen, began to correspond with a noted British historian, William Stukeley.

Bertram claimed to have found an ancient manuscript composed by a medieval English monk by the name of Richard of Westminster. It included a travelling itinerary by a Roman general complete with the lost Roman names for British places and a map. The document apparently detailed the Roman occupation of Britain.

His letter read that he had ‘at present in my Possession, a copy of an old Manuscript Fragment (and am in hopes of getting the original) called Ricardi Monachi Westmonasteriensis comentariolum Geographicum de situ Britanniae & Stationum quas Romani ipsi in ea Insula aedificauerunt. It seems to me to have been part of a greater Treatise compiled out of Beda, Orosius, Pliny, &c. & some Authors quite unknown; it is pity it is so tenuous, consisting only of four sheets & an half in Quarto, the half of Parchment on which is depicted in colours the Islands of Britain, but in a manner peculiar to this Author.’

Stukeley was excited – at the time, many historians had been discussing how Britain had been divided during the Roman era – and asked to see the document. Bertram sent him what he said was a copy he had made of the original, which he did not want to send. He later sent Stukeley a fragment of parchment, which was confirmed by an expert as being four centuries old.

Stukeley went about researching this mysterious mediaeval monk and found, by chance, a likely candidate with a similar name and background, adding to his belief that the document was genuine. He announced to the world that an invaluable record of Roman Britain had been found, declaring: ‘We learn from the present work, now happily preserved, the completest account of the Roman state of Brittain, and of the most antient inhabitants thereof; and the geography thereof admirably depicted in a most excellent map.’

Bertram published the document and map as De Situ Britanniae (Description of Britain), and the pair were generally taken to be true by British scholars. Only a few people casually enquired why no one was ever allowed to see the original document, which Bertram had kept in his possession. Of course, the reason was that it was a complete fake that he had manufactured from a combination of genuine ancient authorities and his own highly vivid imagination.

It was a time when classicism was all the rage for cartographers and they went about renaming parts of Britain according to any Roman names they could lay their hands on, including Bertram’s map. Bertram had written that the Romans had named the series of mountains in the heart of the country after the Italian Apennine range: ‘This province is divided into two equal parts by a chain of mountains called the Pennine Alps, which rising on the confines of the Iceni and Carnabii, near the River Trivona (River Trent), extend towards the north in a continued series of fifty miles,’ he stated. When the Ordnance Survey heard this, the spurious name was included in maps from then on.

It was not until 1845 that people began to question the validity of the document, and over the coming decades it was proved to be fake, but by that time the place names had stuck.

PREMATURE ENDING – KUBLA KHAN GETS SHORTENED, 1797

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round;

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

So wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He composed the famous work after an opium-inspired dream, while holed up in a farmhouse on Exmoor. The preface to the work states that it was printed ‘at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity, and as far as the author’s own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the ground of any supposed poetic merits’. It runs to 54 lines but, adds the preface, it was meant to be much longer:

The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he had the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two or three hundred lines … On Awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved.

At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purpose of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!

POOR DRESS SENSE – IMPROVING CRICKET, 1822

Cricket is one of the few games so slow you can actually enjoy a full meal while you play it. Yet, staggering as it may sound, it used to be even slower. Bowlers were once gentlemanly sorts who would gently toss the ball to the batsman using an underarm delivery. This would allow the batsman to take in the vista before knocking the ball back to his chum. Then one day a young tearaway by the name of John Willes asked his sister to give him a hand with his batting practice. She turned up wearing one of those house-sized skirts of the era, however, and it was clear that she would be unable to deliver the ball in the usual way, so she threw it to him in a straight-armed, around-the-body motion.

Willes found it much more difficult for the batsman, and not caring one jot for sportsmanship, he began to terrorise other blameless batters in that fashion. Soon it developed into the over-arm style now in fashion.

WARMING UP – CARLYLE HAS TO REWRITE HIS MAGNUM OPUS, 1843

Thomas Carlyle, the greatest historian of his day, was a good friend of tedious political theorist John Stuart Mill. As part of their friendship, Carlyle gave Mill the 300,000-word manuscript of the first volume of his work The French Revolution to look over and comment upon.

Mill, an untidy sort, left it in a pile of waste paper in his kitchen and his maid, who was not so interested in recent Gallic historical study, used it to light a fire. It was, of course, the sole handwritten copy of the book.[*]

Mill turned up on Carlyle’s doorstep to confess. Carlyle’s diary from the next day reads:

Last night at tea, Mill’s tap was heard at the door. He entered pale, unable to speak; gasped out to my wife to go down and speak with Mrs Taylor and came forward (led by my hand, and astonished looks) the very picture of desperation.

After various inarticulate utterances to merely the same effect, he informs me that my First Volume (left out by him in too careless a manner, after or while reading it) was, except four or five bits of leaves, irrevocably ANNIHILATED!

I remember and can still remember less of it than of anything I ever wrote with such toil. It is gone, the whole world and myself backed by it could not bring that back: nay the old spirit too is fled.

I find it took five months of steadfast, occasionally excessive, and always sickly and painful toil…

Mill very injudiciously stayed with us till late; and I had to make an effort and speak, as if indifferent, about other common matters: he left us however in a relapsed state.

Carlyle later described in a letter ‘to prevent him almost perishing with excess of misery, we had to forebear all questioning on the subject, which indeed was of no importance to either of us and to bid him “Be of Courage. Never mind, Be certain I can write it again and will!”’

And he did – the new version becoming, and remaining, one of the greatest works of the era.

Mill offered Carlyle £200 towards the cost of rewriting, but Carlyle only accepted £100. A forgiving sort, Carlyle offered to give Mill the manuscript of the next volume to look over, but he refused.

Privately, Carlyle described himself as the man who ‘nearly killed himself accomplishing zero’.

FAILING TO APPRECIATE THE SENTIMENT – QUEEN VICTORIA PUTS HERSELF IN THE LINE OF FIRE, 1882

Other than a massive number of Indians, few people wanted Queen Victoria dead. There were some, though – as demonstrated by the fact that at least seven people tried to shoot her dead over the years. Most would-be assassins missed, two failed to load their guns and one doesn’t seem to have been taking the whole thing seriously at all. But perhaps the most interesting of them was the last one, because both his motivation and his legacy were poetic.

On 2 March 1882 Roderick McLean fired a loaded gun at the monarch while she was out riding – an event that had become the traditional time to attempt to kill her. His reason was that he had sent her a poem and had not liked her apparently curt reply. He was tried for treason, but found ‘not guilty but insane’. Incensed, Victoria demanded the law be changed so that madmen who tried to shoot her on a horse could be found guilty too. She got her way and the verdict of ‘guilty and insane’ came into the courts.

McLean’s more intriguing cultural legacy, however, was the poem written about the case by William McGonagall, generally considered the worst poet in the history of the English language.

ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION OF THE QUEEN

God prosper long our noble Queen,

And long may she reign!

Maclean he tried to shoot her,

But it was all in vain.

For God He turned the ball aside

Maclean aimed at her head;

And he felt very angry

Because he didn’t shoot her dead.

There’s a divinity that hedges a king,

And so it does seem,

And my opinion is, it has hedged

Our most gracious Queen.

Maclean must be a madman,

Which is obvious to be seen,

Or else he wouldn’t have tried to shoot

Our most beloved Queen.

Victoria is a good Queen,

Which all her subjects know,

And for that God has protected her

From all her deadly foes.

She is noble and generous,

Her subjects must confess;

There hasn’t been her equal

Since the days of good Queen Bess.

Long may she be spared to roam

Among the bonnie Highland floral,

And spend many a happy day

In the palace of Balmoral.

Because she is very kind

To the old women there,

And allows them bread, tea, and sugar,

And each one to get a share.

And when they know of her coming,

Their hearts feel overjoy’d,

Because, in general, she finds work

For men that’s unemploy’d.

And she also gives the gipsies money

While at Balmoral, I’ve been told,

And, mind ye, seldom silver,

But very often gold.

I hope God will protect her

By night and by day,

At home and abroad,

When she’s far away.

May He be as a hedge around her,

As He’s been all along,

And let her live and die in peace

Is the end of my song.

A THREE-PART TRAGEDY – THE TRIAL OF OSCAR WILDE, 1895

In 1885 Parliament passed the Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act – commonly known as ‘The Blackmailer’s Charter’. It tightened the laws against male homosexuality to the point where liking flowers in the presence of another man was enough to have you thrown into gaol for a good long time. Under the amendment, anything that could be described as ‘indecency between males’ was now illegal, whereas previously it had only been sodomy that was proscribed. Female homosexuals, of course, could go at it like rabbits – the chaps had no problem with that.

But it was also a time when aesthetes – many of whom were well known to like a bit of the other – were in fashion. Chief among them was Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, whose comedies with social bite were the toast of London. Despite being married with children, his proclivities were well known. His real problem was his obsession with the pompous little twerp Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas. Douglas was 15 years younger than Wilde, but introduced his mentor to the rough trade on London’s streets.

Although they could be prosecuted at any moment, Wilde believed his fame would protect him, and that ‘the Treasury will always give me 24 hours to leave the country’. But Douglas’s father, Lord Queensbury[*], didn’t quite see it like that. Outraged by the relationship between the playwright and his son, he decided to publicly harass Wilde. When he left his (misspelled) calling card at Wilde’s club, the Albemarle, he wrote upon it: ‘To Oscar Wilde, posing as a Somdomite’.

Incensed by this blatant truth, Wilde decided to sue for libel. Of course, it is difficult to win a libel case when everyone knows that an allegation is 100 per cent true. Also, it somehow didn’t occur to him that by launching the action he would be putting together a case file of sworn witness testimonies that he had been engaged in regular criminal activities and presenting them to the prosecuting authorities literally tied up in ribbon. And, since it would be a public trial, the government would no longer be able to turn a blind eye even if it wanted to.

Had Wilde laughed off the ‘posing as a Somdomite’ slur, or simply fumed to his friends and gone home, he would never have had to sit in a trial where more than ten young male prostitutes described what Wilde and Douglas had done to them. Throughout, Wilde and Douglas came across as arrogant and thoroughly unpleasant. Within hours of the judge throwing out Wilde’s case, he was arrested. The testimonies of the boys in the case Wilde had brought were all the evidence the Crown needed to successfully prosecute him. As a result, he spent two years in Reading Gaol before emigrating to France, where he was ignored by Douglas and died of syphilis.

BADLY CHOSEN WORDS – RUDYARD KIPLING GETS FIRED, 1889

Had he remained as a journalist at The San Francisco Examiner, Rudyard Kipling might never have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. But the editor sacked him, saying: ‘I’m sorry, Mr Kipling, but you just don’t know how to use the English language. This isn’t a kindergarten for amateur writers.’

THE TOWER FOLLY – CLEARING A SITE FOR WEMBLEY, 1889

In 1889 nutty businessman Sir Edward Watkin decided what London really needed wasn’t clean drinking water, but a massive metal tower to rival the one in Paris.

Watkin’s Folly, as it was soon to become known, was planned for Wembley, an otherwise quiet and unassuming area of west London with no idea what it was about to be lumbered with. The reason for pitching an enormous and pointless tower there was that Watkin also happened to be chairman of the Metropolitan Railway – which, by coincidence, terminated in Wembley. He really thought that if he could convince most of London that what they wanted to do with their Sunday afternoons was trek out, week after week, to some place they had never heard of to look at a 358m-high pile of junk, he could make some cash out of it.[*]

Watkin held an architectural competition to find the right design. One, ominously, was based on the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and another very classy one sported a 1/12-scale model of the Great Pyramid of Giza, envisioned as a ‘colony of aerial vegetarians, who would grow their own food in hanging gardens’.

For some reason, Watkin thought this design quite mad, and went for one that was really just a rip-off of the Eiffel Tower – only a tiny bit taller, to teach the French a lesson. For some reason, it also contained Turkish baths – which was just what you might expect up a big metal pole. His builders cleared the area and created a park to surround the tower, which they set about constructing. But they had barely reached 70m when the engineers noticed that they had made a bit of a mess-up: the foundations were shifting about in a most worrisome manner and construction was halted before it all fell on someone’s head. It wasn’t long before the scheme was abandoned altogether. The stump of the tower remained in situ until 1907 when its owners blew it up with dynamite.

Fifteen years later, the government was casting about for somewhere to build a national sports stadium, which was to be the centrepiece of the British Empire Exhibition. They noticed that Watkin’s men, having created a pleasant park, had made the site of his somewhat foolish tower the perfect place for the Wembley Stadium.

MAKING THEMSELVES HOMELESS – EVERTON FC CREATES LIVERPOOL FC, 1892

Liverpudlians are endlessly fascinating on the subject of their home team. Which team that is, however, is controversial, because Everton were the original residents of the Anfield Football Stadium. It was a rent dispute with one of their financial backers, John Houlding (later to become mayor of Liverpool), that led to them being evicted. On 15 March 1892 Houlding set up his own club, Liverpool FC, really just to spite them.

JOIN THE PARTY – EXTENDING THE MARATHON, 1908

Since the first modern Olympic Games of 1896, marathons had been 26 miles long. But when the 1908 Games were held in London the course was set from Windsor Castle to the White City Stadium. On the day of the race, Princess Mary was holding a birthday party for her daughter – also named Princess Mary – and, keen to curry favour with someone who might just know someone who could get them a knighthood, the Olympic organisers said they would be delighted to begin the race from underneath the nursery window so the little cherubs could be bored by the sight of eight skinny men limbering up for a bit of a jog.

This presented a quandary, however, because it meant the race would end some distance from where the rest of the royal family would be sitting in the stadium. So, yet again, the lickspittle lackeys offered to move the race for the mild comfort of the Windsors. The finishing line was placed in front of where the royals would be seated, making the distance 26 miles 385 yards, and it has stuck.

On that day, the first to cross the finishing line was Italian pastry chef Dorando Pietri. But as he entered the stadium he was suffering from heat exhaustion and seemed confused by the fact that the finishing line was not where he expected it to be. He fell twice and had to be picked up and helped. When American John Hayes crossed the line moments later, it was decided that Pietri should be disqualified on the grounds that he had, in fact, been carried across the line.

Curiously, one group who never got to see the beginning, let alone the end, of the race was the Russian shooting team. Russia was working on the Julian Calendar, rather than the Gregorian one, which most countries had adopted some time before. They turned up for their events two weeks late, by which time everyone else had gone home.

TAKING HIS SECRET TO THE GRAVE – LORD CARNARVON KEEPS TUTANKHAMUN’S TREASURE HIDDEN, 1923

Highclere Castle, an incredible neo-Gothic pile in Berkshire which sports gargoyles, turrets and Latin inscriptions, is the country seat of the Earls of Carnarvon – the most famous of whom, the fifth earl, George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, jointly discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun with Howard Carter in 1923.

In 1988 another discovery was made in Highclere itself by the sixth earl, Henry George Alfred Marius Victor Francis Herbert. According to his son, the seventh earl, Henry George Reginald Molyneux Herbert: ‘My father was doing an inventory of the contents of the house when his butler said, “My Lord, there are also some Egyptian items which haven’t been listed.” My father said, “No, no, there aren’t – they’re all in either Cairo or New York.”’

The butler, who had been at the house since 1936, took the earl to a disused doorway, blocked off by furniture, which led from the smoking room to the drawing room. In the thickness of the wall between two doors were two hidden panels opened by a tiny key that the butler remembered seeing when the house was opened up again after the Second World War. ‘And there, inside, were the remnants of my grandfather’s amazing collection.’

It was a row of old cigarette tins holding a total of 300 items from the 3,000-year-old tomb of King Tut. For half a century the world had only had half the great treasure of the Pharaoh because the fifth earl had failed to mention the priceless personal collection before he fell off the twig. The butler had known about them because he came across them by chance, and looked in on them from time to time, but decided they were none of his business and presumed the present earl knew about them. So he didn’t say anything. They should have been in the British Museum but, for 65 years, these artefacts had been lost.

According to the seventh earl, his grandfather probably hid them away because of the famous curse of Tutankhamun. ‘I think my grandfather was a superstitious man,’ he said. ‘Normally he was the biggest raconteur ever; he loved to be the centre of attention. But the one subject he scarcely ever talked about was Egypt. And not only did he not talk about it, he locked all the Egyptian artefacts away out of sight – I think it was because he didn’t want to be reminded of them.’

After the death of the fifth earl in 1923, his widow, Almina, also made something of an error when, a few months after her husband’s death, she married one Lieutenant Colonel Onslow Dennistoun and unwittingly became mixed up in one of the most exciting divorce cases Britain had ever seen.

Dennistoun had divorced his previous wife, Dorothy, in Paris in 1921. Their settlement said that he would financially support her as soon as he was able to do so, so long as she did not go to court to secure the payments. Not quite understanding this agreement, Dennistoun had not only failed to pay her anything, but, by the time he wed Almina, he had, in fact, borrowed £952 from Dorothy. And he was no struggling poet living in a garret – according to Dorothy, he was actually living it up in an elegant flat without a care in the world. So, in 1925, she took the case to court. Dennistoun really should have settled, because what was about to come out in open court was really juicy.

Since before the Great War, it seemed, Dennistoun had been pimping his wife. To be precise, he had lent her to General John Stephen Cowans, the Quartermaster General, on a sort of hire-purchase agreement in exchange for promotion within the Army. Dennistoun and Cowans agreed in writing what favours Cowans could expect from Dorothy, and what favours Dennistoun would receive from the Army in return. As a result, Dennistoun became Governor of Jamaica, where he could enjoy the sunshine, and Cowans got to enjoy Dennistoun’s wife. At the Treaty of Versailles, Dennistoun was Cowans’s deputy, which must have made for interesting dinner-table conversations.

All of this, of course, Dennistoun denied when it came to court. However, he admitted everything when letters between himself and Cowans outlining the arrangement were produced.[*]

The Dennistoun case was reported around the world. The middle classes of the day loved the daily reports of these bed-hopping aristos and perhaps glanced at their dreary, monogamous, worn-out spouses and felt a certain pang of jealousy. Dorothy Dennistoun was awarded very substantial damages – America’s Time Magazine reported the figure of $30,000 – and the lurid details so embarrassed the Establishment that Parliament introduced laws to limit reporting of divorce proceedings.

STUNG CONSCIENCE – EVELYN WAUGH ATTEMPTS SUICIDE, 1924

In 1924 Evelyn Waugh was depressed. He had had to drop out of Oxford after poor academic results meant his scholarship had been cancelled, he was unemployed and the publisher to whom he had sent his novel was not impressed. Worst of all, he was living in Wales. He had no option, he decided, but to take his own life.

Waugh went to the nearby beach where he took off all his clothes, left a farewell note for his family and swam out to drown himself. But he had chosen the wrong beach. After being attacked by a swarm of jellyfish, he swam back as quickly as he could. English literature was the beneficiary.

MAKING THE WRONG POINT – ARNOLD BENNETT DIES, 1931

The eminent novelist Arnold Bennett died of typhus on 27 March 1931 following a trip to Paris. He contracted the disease from a glass of local tap water, which he had drunk to prove that it was safe.

THE WRONG QUEEN – NAMING CUNARD’S LATEST SHIP, 1934

The Queen Mary cruise liner was originally to be named the Queen Victoria. When one of the company directors, Sir Thomas Royden, informed George V that the firm had decided to name the liner ‘after the greatest Queen this country has ever known’, the King was elated. ‘Oh, my wife will be pleased!’ he replied.

GREAT BRITISH HYPOCRISY – THE CHRISTIE AND EVANS CASE CREATES YES MINISTER, 1950

The case of John Christie and Timothy Evans is one of the most famous miscarriages of justice in British history. In 1950 Evans was hanged for the murder of his wife and daughter but, after his execution, it was discovered that his neighbour, Christie, was a serial killer and had probably murdered them. This event was a major factor in the ending of capital punishment in Britain.

It also gave us one hilarious TV series.

In the early 1960s Frank Soskice was a Labour MP who signed a petition demanding a posthumous pardon for Evans. When, in 1964, he was elevated to the post of Home Secretary, he was presented with the very petition he had signed, yet chose not to grant the pardon he himself had demanded. This hypocrisy inspired the writers of Yes Minister to create a series about untrustworthy politicians and devious civil servants.

A NAZI PIECE OF WORK – THE HITLER DIARIES, 1983

What a scoop! Hitler’s personal diaries, which the monotesticular madman wrote in his own hand between 1932 and his suicide in 1945.

It was the German magazine Stern that gave the world the most famous forgery since the Turin Shroud, paying £2.5m for the privilege of being utterly humiliated in every town from Frankfurt to Sydney. And it was the Sunday Times that brought them to Britain, in the process massively undermining the British people’s confidence in journalism.

The forgeries were all the work of one man, Konrad Kujau, a small-time forger whose main product was fake luncheon vouchers; but he couldn’t have been successful without the collaboration of a Stern journalist, Gerd Heidemann. Like many corrupt and incompetent reporters, Heidemann had won awards for his journalism.

Alongside the luncheon vouchers, Kujau sold fake antiques, especially war memorabilia certified genuine by equally fake documentation. His method of ageing these documents was literally schoolboy – soaking them in tea to give them a yellowish tint.

Before the diaries, Kujau, who had once been arrested for stealing a microphone from a youth club, was happily knocking out paintings supposedly from the Fuhrer’s own brush. One of his favourite clients was Fritz Stiefel, so in 1978 Kujau decided to treat him to something special: Hitler’s war diary.

This is where Heidemann, a dim-witted Nazi ‘enthusiast’, entered the scene. In 1980 he got wind of the story, began investigations into whether the diary was plausible and found that a courier plane carrying some of Hitler’s papers from Berlin had crashed near the Czechoslovakian border at the end of the war so the diary could, conceivably, have been among them. Heidemann told his editor that Kujau had acquired the diary from an East German contact who had found it in a hayloft – odd, but not entirely impossible.

The added interest from Heidemann meant that Kujau, understandably, didn’t want to sell just one egg from this golden goose so he set about fabricating Hitler’s thoughts left, far right and centre. Over the next two years, he created no fewer than 61 further volumes and was paid 2.5m Deutsche marks.

But what of the experts? Did no one smell a Nazi rat? Well, during this time, Stern’s management went about making it difficult for their own experts to verify if the documents were genuine. The magazine, for instance, gave selected historians a single page from the diaries without telling them what it was supposedly from, thus making it near-impossible for the readers to decide if it was real.

In 1983 the Sunday Times sent its own historian, Hugh Trevor Roper, to authenticate the diaries. He declared: ‘I am now satisfied that the documents are authentic; that the history of their wanderings since 1945 is true; and that the standard accounts of Hitler’s writing habits, of his personality and, even, perhaps, of some public events, may in consequence have to be revised.’ But at a later press conference to launch the Sunday Times’s serialisation of the diaries, he declared that he wasn’t so sure after all.

Still, it was only after Stern and the Sunday Times had begun publishing the diaries that, as an afterthought, Stern sent the diary to experts at the German national archives, who tested the paper and said it was post-war and soaked in tea. These were ‘grotesquely superficial fakes’ peppered with historical inaccuracies, and largely copied from a book of Hitler’s speeches, with a few additions by Kujau. Apparently, Stern’s hard-nosed investigative journalists hadn’t thought it at all strange that the diaries were stamped ‘FH’ instead of ‘AH’ on the covers – a result of Kujau buying the wrong letter from a Hong Kong printer.

Kujau and Heidemann were both arrested. Heidemann was charged with defrauding Stern, which had paid him 9m Deutsche marks for the diaries. Throughout his 11-month trial, which ended in August 1984, he maintained that he was an innocent dupe. Kujau, on the other hand, didn’t just admit his guilt: he revelled in it, seeming to love every minute of the trial. It came out that he had once given an overjoyed Heidemann, who also possessed a pair of pants once worn by genocidal Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, some ashes collected from the local crematorium and claimed they were Hitler’s last remains.

Kujau and Heidemann were both found guilty. As a result, Kujau received four-and-a-half years inside; Heidemann (who was possibly a Nazi sympathiser as well as a fool) received five.

Following the scandal, the Sunday Times’s editor, Frank Giles, was removed from his post and made ‘Editor Emeritus’. When he asked the owner, Rupert Murdoch, what that meant, Murdoch replied, ‘It’s Latin. The “e” means you’re out and “meritus” means you deserve it.’

*  Perhaps not since 642 CE and the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, when Omar, Caliph of Baghdad, had the entire collection of books except for the works of Aristotle used as fuel to heat water for the city’s public baths, had so much learning gone up in flames.

*  Creator of the rules of boxing that still bear his name.

*  Watkin had form for over-optimistic engineering schemes. Previously, he had tried to build a tunnel to France. It didn’t get very far, partly because it was pointed out that it might be a handy way to invade England, should any European power wish to do so.

*  Cowans was apparently a real dark horse. His image was normally that of a staid and reliable sort and he was described by the Prime Minister, Asquith, as ‘the best quartermaster since Moses’ (although quite what that means is anyone’s guess), but it had already come out a few years earlier that he was some sort of sexual athlete, borrowing his friends’ wives – he had also been conducting an affair with one Mary Cornwallis West, wife of the Duke of Westminster and mistress of the Prince of Wales – and coming up with formal arrangements for their services. Apparently, Lady Westminster had provided her services in exchange for a commission for her other lover, Sergeant Patrick Barrett of the Royal Fusiliers.

Like most holy books, the Bible is extensively and popularly misquoted to serve the interests of pressure groups, madmen or those with violent tendencies. For one thing, it doesn’t say that money is the root of all evil but rather ‘the love of money’. Pursuing lucre, it claims, blinds you to what is so obviously going on around you, including the crumbling of your prospects. Declaring this, St Paul could have been writing about any financial scandal over the last 300 years. If there is one area where the same mistakes are made over and over again, to the point where you want to hand out copies of a history textbook, it’s in financial speculation.

MONEY FOR OLD ROPE – THE SOUTH SEA BUBBLE, 1720

Stock market boom and bust is nothing new. In the early eighteenth century, apparently sensible middle-class merchants as well as idiot sons of the gentry threw their life’s savings onto the massive funeral pyre known as the ‘South Sea Bubble’. They all stood about, warming their hands and waiting for the cash to magically rise, phoenix-like, from the flames. A little bit later, they began poking about in the ashes, wondering where it had gone.

At least they could blame the Spanish – because it was all their fault. If they hadn’t been dragging sackloads of gold and silver back from South America, which had been handed over as going-away presents by the Incas during most of the previous century, the English might never have felt like getting a foothold in that malaria-infested part of the world best known for having thousands of things that could kill you. But when the Iberian menace was finally defeated in 1714 after the War of the Spanish Succession, Britain got a concession – the Asiento, which allowed one British ship to trade with South America each year. (Making it even less attractive, the shipowners also had to pay a quarter of the profits to the King of Spain in tax.) ‘Don’t worry, Juan, we’ll stick to that agreement. One ship per year is definitely all we want,’ replied the British. ‘And that whole tax thing seems perfectly fair. There is no way we will try to get out of it.’

The British thought that before long they would be screwing over the Spanish. In fact, in even less time they would be screwing themselves like there was no tomorrow.

All the wars of the previous 100 years had left the British government in some financial difficulty. With Teutonic efficiency, George I sensibly thought paying down some of the national debt might be just the thing to do and the Asiento could be part of the solution. Not sure how to do it himself, he invited suggestions from the two leading financial institutions of the age: the Bank of England and the South Sea Company. The South Sea Company, which been created in 1711 by the Earl of Oxford and had soon been granted monopolies on British trade in the South Seas, came up with the best wheeze: instead of the government paying its debts with real money, the company would take on £31m of the total public debt (representing three-fifths of the debt) by exchanging it for shares in the company which would be exploiting the Asiento; and would raise £2m by public subscription. That would put the public finances on a much better keel. The public would be guaranteed to pump their hard-earned cash into the South Sea Company because everyone knew it was a one-way bet.

But just to make sure the government was behind the scheme, the company – which was going all-out for fraud from the very beginning – bribed a few key members of the administration, including Charles Stanhope, Secretary to the Treasury. What they were playing down was the fact that the South Sea Company actually had very little trade going on with the lands of South America. The attraction was all in the legends and myths of the continent – people were basing their investment decisions on travellers’ tales of El Dorado. And one thing the company directors forgot to mention was that the sole trading ship that the Spanish were allowing had set sail in 1717 and the following years’ had been cancelled due to worsening relations with Spain.

The House of Commons was taken in too. A few members of the Lords spoke out against it – Lords North and Grey declared the bill unjust in its very nature, designed as it was to make a few rich and many poor. Earl Cowper compared it to the Trojan Horse – accepted with great joy and public acclamation, but hiding a dark, treacherous secret that would destroy them all. Those who voted for it would soon rue the day, he said. But on 2 February 1720 Parliament adopted the financial plan based entirely on the sort of breathless adventurism more commonly found in a novel by H. Rider Haggard.

We are used to financial market bubbles now – the technology bubble of the late 1990s, the mortgage market bubble over the following years. But back then, when the South Sea Company share price trebled in a single day everyone simply thought that that was what it was worth. At the beginning of the day the company was worth a certain amount of money, and then eight hours later it was somehow worth three times that. As a popular saying noted soon after, ‘Every fool aspired to be a knave’. In other words, they knew someone was going to get screwed, they just never thought that it would be them.

Some people stood back, took a deep breath and asked all those rushing to buy shares in the company if they really knew what they were doing. Whig politician Robert Walpole, soon to be the first Prime Minister,[*] shouted the odd warning at the hordes rushing to their stockbrokers to throw away everything they had ever worked for. He said the bill encouraged ‘The dangerous practice of stock-jobbing, and would divert the genius of the nation from trade and industry. It would hold out a dangerous lure to decoy the unwary to their ruin, by making them part with the earnings of their labour for a prospect of imaginary wealth. The great principle of the project was an evil of first-rate magnitude; it was to raise artificially the value of the stock, by exciting and keeping up a general infatuation, and by promising dividends out of funds which could never be adequate to the purpose.’

But no one listened. Not only did they not listen, but they actually went out of their way not to listen. Whenever it became known that Walpole was going to make a speech in the Commons about the South Sea Company, everyone in the chamber would leave so that they wouldn’t have to listen to any doom-mongering from old misery guts: they were all going to be rich.

Luckily, the directors of the South Sea Company really knew their business – and their business was lies and deceit. They put it about in the coffee shops (where all the serious news of the day was exchanged) that significant trade treaties had been signed with Spain, meaning the gold would arrive any minute now. They claimed that for some unfathomable reason the Spanish had decided to give the company the Potosi silver mine (in modern-day Bolivia), which was churning out more of the shiny metal than the Spanish knew what to do with. Not content with handing over silver mines, the Spanish were apparently planning to give Britain the whole of South America in return for Gibraltar, that near-barren rock that Britain had captured a few years before. On 21 April, they publicly declared the midsummer dividend on all stock would be 10 per cent. If anyone asked where the money would come from to pay this huge sum, they were presumably met with embarrassed glances. It was the economics not of the madhouse, but of the playground.

But up and up went the company’s shares, like a hot-air balloon on a sunny day. The shares had cost £128 on 1 January 1720, rose to £500 as soon as the stock conversion scheme opened in May, and were up to £1,050 on 24 June. Every man, woman, child and domestic animal in London now had shares in the South Sea Company. The streets around Exchange Alley – where the coffee houses served as the ancestors of the Stock Exchange – were crowded with carriages and happy onlookers dreaming of huge houses and fat bellies.

The fun didn’t end there, though. Half the con-men in England swapped from three-card tricks on the street to setting up joint-stock companies – known as ‘bubbles’. Often they were listed on the Stock Exchange one day, and gone the next. But people poured money into them because, as everyone was making so much cash on the South Sea Company, the others were guaranteed to be profitable investments too. Everyone wanted in on the ground floor, and if they were to hang around asking silly questions such as ‘And what do you actually do?’ they would miss a golden opportunity.

Some of the business plans were extraordinary. Who on earth would put money into a company that said its plan was to create ‘a perpetual motion wheel’? Or Puckle’s Machine Company’s plan to create a weapon for ‘discharging round and square cannon balls and bullets, making a total revolution in the art of war’? Or the simply mind-boggling ‘company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage but nobody to know what it is’? The answer, apparently, was ‘everyone’. They mortgaged their homes, pawned their jewellery and raided their piggy banks. The founder of ‘the company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage but nobody to know what it is’ opened an office on the Cornhill one morning, advertised his scheme, took in £2,000 and closed up at three o’clock in the afternoon ‘nobody to know where he had gone’. He promised that he would be back in a month to reveal all: his shareholders are still waiting.

Equally absurd were the Globe Permits. These were square pieces of playing cards with a wax seal bearing the sign of the Globe Tavern, which was near Exchange Alley. The cards were inscribed with the legend ‘Sail Cloth Permits’. They were bought on the basis that possession of them allowed the owner to buy shares in a possible future venture to maybe make sail cloths. In other words, they were inherently worthless, but they went for up to 60 guineas apiece.

The answer to the Globe Permits was the Bubble Cards. These were satirical playing cards that ridiculed many of the schemes popping up. They were emblazoned with images of fools throwing themselves out of trees into the South Sea. The eight of spades, for instance, featured Puckle’s Machine Company with the ditty:

A rare invention to destroy the crowd

Of fools at home instead of fools abroad.

Fear not, my friends, this terrible machine,

They’re only wounded who have shares therein.

The nine of hearts attacked the English Copper and Brass Company:

The headlong fool that wants to be a swopper

Of gold and silver coin for English copper,

May in Change Alley, prove himself an ass,

And give rich metal for adultrate brass.

In total, more than £300m was invested in the bubbles.

Jonathan Swift, best known for the biting satire Gulliver’s Travels, wrote a nice poem on the subject:

Ye wise philosophers, explain

What magic makes our money rise,

When dropt into the Southern main;

Or do these jugglers cheat our eyes?

Put in your money fairly told;

Presto! be gone – ’Tis here again:

Ladies and gentlemen, behold,

Here’s every piece as big as ten.

Thus in a basin drop a shilling,

Then fill the vessel to the brim,

You shall observe, as you are filling,

The pond’rous metal seems to swim:

It rises both in bulk and height,

Behold it swelling like a sop;

The liquid medium cheats your sight:

Behold it mounted to the top!

In stock three hundred thousand pounds,

I have in view a lord’s estate;

My manors all contiguous round!

A coach-and-six, and served in plate!

Thus the deluded bankrupt raves,

Puts all upon a desperate bet;

Then plunges in the Southern waves,

Dipt over head and ears – in debt.

The bubblemasters would often rope in a famous name or two to lend credibility to an otherwise ludicrous scheme. The Prince of Wales even became governor of one bubble, made a £40,000 profit on it and then left through the back door before any of the investors started asking difficult questions.

One interesting question is just how many of those involved in the trade were actually taken in by it – sure, the directors were all bent as a three-bob note, but presumably so too were many of the shareholders who were just praying to any god they could find that they would be able to buy their stock and flog it on to some schmuck before it dropped like a shot pheasant.

At the height of the madness, there was such chaos that shares in a scheme would often be sold for 10 per cent higher at one end of Exchange Alley than at the other end. If you were a fast runner, you could make money just by legging it from a seller to a buyer at the other end of the street.

Persuaded to come to his senses, the King eventually declared the bubbles illegal. But by that time the market had already been saturated and the big fraudulent players had made their money and disappeared back into the woodwork.

Upon the King’s pronouncement, the market caught its breath for a minute and many of the investors in the South Sea Company took a second to think. On 3 June, so many turned up at Exchange Alley to sell their shares that the price began to plummet – but then the directors of the company stepped in to buy up all that was being sold and spread a few more rumours, sending the price rocketing once more.

The voices of the killjoys were growing, however. One MP wrote to the Lord Chancellor saying: ‘Various are the conjectures why the South-Sea directors have suffered the cloud to break so early. I made no doubt but they would do so when they found it to their advantage. Their most considerable men have drawn out, securing themselves by the losses of the deluded, thoughtless numbers, whose understandings have been overruled by avarice and the hope of making mountains out of mole-hills. Thousands of families will be reduced to beggary. The consternation is inexpressible – the rage beyond description and the case altogether so desperate that I do not see any plan or scheme so much as thought of for averting the blow.’

The pin that burst the bubble was the news that the directors themselves had realised that it was time to book a one-way ticket out of there, and they were selling their own shares. Once more the price fell like a stone and the ordinary investors finally took the time to enquire what it was that the company actually did that could make any money. When their polite questions were met with blank looks, they too began to panic-sell their stocks. Thousands were bankrupted as the price totally collapsed. Violence erupted, the directors were attacked in the streets and the government believed riots were on the way. Everyone knew that something, definitely, had to be done; they just had no idea what it was. In order to effect the unknown cure, the King was summoned back from holiday in Germany, evidently none too pleased.

Strangely, the satirist Tobias Smollett wrote: ‘Such an era as this is the most unfavourable for a historian … no reader of sentiment and imagination can be entertained or interested by a detail of transactions such as these, which admit of no warmth, no colouring, no embellishment; a detail of which only serves to exhibit an intimate picture of tasteless vice and mean degeneracy.’ Tasteless vice and mean degeneracy being two of the most interesting aspects to human behaviour, it must be left to the reader to decide if Smollett’s argument is valid.

Fury took over Parliament too. Lord Molesworth declared that there was only one fair and humane punishment for the directors of the company: they should be sewn into sacks and thrown into the Thames. The Postmaster General, James Craggs, MP, who had acted as an advocate for the company, was accused in Parliament of dishonesty; in front of the entire House he challenged anyone who suspected him to a duel. Molesworth pointed out that it would be difficult to fight the entire House of Commons at the same time, and, even though he was over 60, he would take Craggs up on the challenge if he would like to step outside.

Petitions were received from all over the empire demanding the guilty men be punished without mercy, and both Houses of Parliament launched investigations. The public outcry led to five of the directors being arrested, and the company treasurer might have been next, had he not grabbed the accounts books and fled to Calais in disguise, hotly pursued by an edict from George I demanding any country he entered should give him up or face a King’s wrath. A reward of £2,000 was offered for his capture. It was an incredible about-turn – there was still frenzy, but it was no longer a frenzy of speculation, it was a frenzy of blood-lust. In order to prevent any guilty MPs escaping, the doors to the Commons were all locked and the keys placed on the table in the chamber.

John Aislabie, the Chancellor of the Exchequer who had spoken in support of the South Sea Company, fared especially ill. It was discovered that he had been bribed and he was not only forced to resign, but actually imprisoned. When the House of Commons unanimously resolved to throw him in the Tower of London, houses throughout London lit their lights in celebration. The crowd who assembled to jeer at him being jailed left him in few doubts as to their feelings towards him as they burned his effigy on a bonfire. It was like a holiday.

Walpole, as it happens, might have felt just a twinge of sympathy since he himself had spent three months in the Tower in 1712, charged with corruption when he was Secretary at War.

Examination of the company books showed industrial quantities of fraud. Bribery was more common than ordering biscuits, figures were simply made up and changed from time to time as the company felt like it; pages had been torn out and entire books burned.

In the wake of the scandal, there was a run on the Bank of England. The terrified response from its managers was to instruct the cashiers to make things as difficult as possible for anyone trying to take money out. The cashiers therefore only paid out in sixpences, and frequently ‘forgot’ where they were so had to start counting again from the beginning. In this way, they kept the queues so long that many people simply gave up trying to withdraw their cash. Larger sums were, however, secretly handed out to friends of the directors, who loudly and ostentatiously paid them back into their accounts at the cashier’s desk numerous times, to create an image of confidence and block up the queues to prevent genuine account holders from getting their money out.

As the terror gave way to misery, Walpole forced the government to take some responsibility, and a scheme was created that sorted out some of the mess. But it only left creditors with up to a third of their money; and, ever since, the debacle has stood as a warning to those who would believe the stock market can be a one-way bet.

Lord James Stanhope (cousin of the aforementioned Charles) probably fared worst of all. On 4 February 1721 he was accused in the Lords of sharing the guilt for the debacle. He defended himself, but developed a headache, which 24 hours later turned into a stroke that killed him. But he wasn’t the only one to die – Craggs expired the day before he was to be examined by the Commons investigation committee, possibly at his own hand. All the property he had amassed over the previous few years, amounting to £1.5m, was confiscated by the Crown. Aislabie was relatively lucky, eventually being released, after which time he retired to concentrate on gardening, producing a famous water garden at his stately home in Yorkshire, and providing Britain’s first obelisk, which he placed in Ripon’s Market Square.

LETTING THE CAT OUT OF THE BAG – REVEALING THE CONTENTS OF THE BUDGET, 1947

Hugh Dalton, Labour’s Chancellor of the Exchequer for the important post-war Budget of 1947, was a charmingly trusting soul. He was wending his merry way through the Palace of Westminster to the House of Lords chamber – where the Commons were actually sitting while bomb damage to their own chamber was being repaired – to reveal the government’s financial policy for the coming year, when John Carvel, a terribly nice young chap who wrote for the Star, stopped him on his way and asked what was going to be in the Budget. Not seeing how it could possibly hurt to reveal one of the closest-guarded secrets in government to a journalist, he told him: ‘No more on tobacco, a penny on beer, something on dogs and [football] pools but nothing on horses…’

Dalton seemed to think that Carvel was asking out of mild curiosity. Carvel then scampered to the nearest phone and called it in to his newsdesk. A special edition of the Star was on the newsstands before Dalton had finished his speech to the House. He might as well have not sat down at the end of it – he was forced to resign almost immediately for spilling the beans to a reporter.

BAD MATHS – THE UNNECESSARY AUSTERITY, 1969

During the 1960s, Britain’s trade deficit reached crisis point. Things were getting worse by the day and the government brought in painful austerity measures to bring the figures out of the red and into the black. They hurt the populace, reducing living standards, but it was felt they were necessary.

Then, in 1969, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Roy Jenkins, announced the Treasury had been getting its sums wrong for the previous six years. It had been underestimating Britain’s export trade by 2–3 per cent each year, thus cheating the taxpayer out of about £1bn in total and causing pointless hardship.

THE MOST EXPENSIVE HOLE EVER DUG – BENN’S BLACK HOLE, 1973

In 1973 Tony Benn was in charge of the Department of Energy. He knew what he wanted – he wanted a staggeringly big hole to be dug in Scotland. That hole was supposed to capitalise on Britain’s burgeoning North Sea oil industry by becoming a site to build large concrete oil platforms.

Instead of digging up somewhere that deserved it, Ben thought the perfect place for a massive hole would be overlooking the picturesque Loch Fyne on Scotland’s west coast. Not only was it a beautiful place, which would be wonderfully ruined, but it also had very poor road communication and the outlet from the loch to the sea was not, in fact, deep enough to accommodate any oil platform, whether or not it was made of concrete.

Benn had also hugely overestimated demand for the platforms, which would carry price tags of around £250m, and, adding insult to injury, the oil industry was on the way down. So, no one wanted the platforms and absolutely no one wanted the really big hole.

By 1976, the hole had cost £11m to dig, and another £3m had been spent on building a village for the 700 workers involved in the project. It cost another million to fill it in again and became known as ‘Benn’s Black Hole’. Tony Benn became a figure of fun for the whole country, further lowering any chance he might have had of ever leading the Labour Party.

*  And father to Horace Walpole, the Gothic novelist and spookiest MP ever to sit in the House of Commons.

The study of science means grappling with the unknown. Sometimes it is literally staring into space and hoping to spot a star. But scientific knowledge is interlinked, which means that ignorance in one field can lead to revelation in another as the explorer stumbles in the dark. That’s why a number of scientific errors have turned out for the good – the discovery of penicillin, cat’s eyes, or the false positive of Piltdown Man, which advanced a correct theory even though it was based on false evidence. So even a hoax can sometimes make people believe the truth.

FROZEN OUT – THE DEATH OF FRANCIS BACON, 1626

One of Britain’s finest philosophers and scientists, Francis Bacon died from a cold he developed while stuffing a chicken with snow in order to explore freezing food. Had he wrapped up more warmly, Britain might have been a world leader in food preservation technology.

ANAGRAM GAMES – SWIFT BECOMES AN ASTRONOMER, 1726

Gulliver’s Travels is a remarkable piece of work. Outstanding as a work of satire, it is also strikingly dull to read. But at one point its author, Jonathan Swift, does something quite extraordinary – he makes an astronomical discovery that would only be recognised as correct well over a century later.

In part three of Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon and then a Captain of Several Ships (aka Gulliver’s Travels), Swift describes the people who live on Laputa, a flying island. He writes: ‘They have made a Catalogue of ten Thousand fixed Stars, whereas the largest of ours do not contain above one third Part of that Number. They have likewise discovered two lesser Stars or Satellites, which revolve about Mars’.

The Laputians were Swift’s caricature of the gentlemen of the Royal Society. Those real-life learned gentlemen scoffed at the writer’s ignorance, however, because they knew that Mars had no moons (i.e. satellites).

Then, 151 years later, an American astronomer working at the US Naval Observatory announced that Mars had two moons. So, Swift had been right – it was just a mystery as to how on earth he knew.

Over the years, people came up with many theories as to how Swift had been aware of this obscure astronomical fact but the answer is that it is down to the poor anagram skills of a German stargazer. In 1610, the illustrious astronomer Johannes Kepler received a letter from the yet-more-illustrious Galileo Galilei. It read: ‘Smaismrmilmepoetaleumibunenugttauiras’.

He was not entirely bemused by this word, for in those days scientists would often send each other anagrams. In order to protect their discoveries, when they suspected they had found something, they would write it as an anagram and send to a friend, the letter’s date being recorded. In the meantime, they could further test their theories. If another scientist then claimed to have found the same thing, the code could be deciphered to prove that the first scientist had formulated the hypothesis by the date of the letter.

But Kepler was an impatient sort and set about trying to unscramble the letters. Eventually he worked out that they meant ‘Salue umbistineum, geminatum, Martia proles’ – at least they did if he ignored one letter – which means ‘Hail, twin companionship, children of Mars’.

It fitted with Galileo’s previous research, discovering moons left, right and centre – he had built a telescope that had been the first to observe four moons around Jupiter, for instance. And it was all pretty handy, because Kepler had already postulated from mathematical models that Mars had two moons. He therefore had no qualms about announcing the discovery to the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II.

The news spread like wildfire among the moon-curious societies of Europe. Rudolf II wanted personal assurance that the find was true. He therefore asked Galileo for confirmation. The astronomer was a bit embarrassed by the request and felt bound to point out that Kepler had mis-deciphered the anagram. It actually read: ‘Altissimum planetam tergeminum observavi’ – ‘I have observed the most distant planet to have a triple form’. He had, in fact, discovered that Saturn had rings around it – although his primitive telescope could only show the rings as adjuncts to the body of the planet.

Swift heard about Kepler’s mistake and, wanting to satirise such foolish astronomers, created his Laputians with the same delusion spawned of arrogance. It was mere accident that his joke was the truth – although, Cassandra-like, no one took it as fact, and for more than a century Mars’s moons drifted undiscovered.

THE POET’S FRIEND – DOCTORS EXPOUND THE WONDERS OF OPIUM, THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

No one is sure when the narcotic effect of the juice of the opium poppy was first discovered, although Sumerian records from 7,000 years ago speak of it and Homer’s heroes ate the poppy. It was in the eighteenth century, however, that wealthy Britons began using the stuff at their doctors’ insistence.

Thomas Dover was one of those medical men. He became a household name for Dover’s Powder, a compound heavily reliant on opium that was supposed to cure colds and fevers by inducing strong sweats in the patient and was commonly available right up until the 1960s. At least by then the proportion of opium in the medicine had been reduced from the absurdly dangerous levels prescribed by Dover himself.

The problem was that the doctors of Dover’s era didn’t realise how quickly the body develops resistance (and addiction) to opium, so the doses simply got higher and higher. Dover did, however, note the unfortunate habit of his patients to die: ‘Some apothecaries have desired their Patients to make their Wills and Settle their affairs before they venture on so large a Dose as I have recommended. As monstrous as they may represent this I can produce undeniable Proofs, where a Patient of mine has taken no less a Quantity than a Hundred grains and yet has appeared abroad [out and about] the next day.’ A hundred grains would normally be enough to knock a Roman legion out cold for an afternoon.

On the bright side, had opium, taken in the form of laudanum (a cocktail of opium and alcohol), not been the doctors’ pain reliever of choice, Thomas de Quincey wouldn’t have taken it to ward off toothache while a 19-year-old student at Oxford in 1804, and Britain would have missed out on his gripping memoir Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, which describes how his life spiralled downwards as addiction took hold. In the book, his days become minutes counted until the next drop of laudanum. It’s not all bad news, though: while his work purports to warn of the dangers of opium, it also makes it sound quite good fun – after all, it led to De Quincey knocking up a prostitute in Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage in the Lake District.[*]

But opium wasn’t just for poets – the little scamps in the nursery also had a taste for it. Dalby’s Carminative medicine, for instance, was sold especially for ‘infants afflicted with wind, watery gripes, fluxes and other disorders of the stomach and bowels’. Its list of ingredients included not just opium, but also ‘Rectified spirits of wine’ and ‘Oil of peppermint’ to give it that child-friendly taste.

HEALING HANDS – BYRON’S DOCTORS KILL HIM, 1824

Bleeding patients was once the most popular treatment for the sick, with the doctors of the day rarely stopping to ponder why their patients tended to end up white and dead rather than up and playing tennis.

In July 1823 Lord Byron headed off to fight for Greek independence from the Turkish occupation fully expecting the Greeks to be toga-clad citizen-philosophers sitting about quoting Plato and enjoying orgies, rather than the group of slack-jawed goatherds he actually found. And worse was to come – he developed malaria as a side effect of the unpleasant conditions.

The doctors who attended him were certain that the way forward lay in opening up one of his major veins and literally watching the life drain out of him. ‘Trust us,’ they told him. ‘It’s sure to help.’

History records the club-footed romantic maniac as replying: ‘Come. You are, I see, a darned set of butchers. Take away as much blood as you will, but have done with it.’

Surprising all, the first session of bloodletting seemed to make him worse. So they tried again. Twice. Contrary to all medical expectations, Byron died three days later, aged 36.[*]

WELL, IT’S SORT OF MY FAULT – THE FIRST OPERATION PERFORMED WITH ANAESTHETIC, 1846

The first operation in Europe under general anaesthetic (ether, to be precise) took place on 21 December 1846 at the University College London Hospital when Robert Liston amputated a man’s infected leg. Of course, amputation with or without anaesthetic wouldn’t have been necessary, had Liston not caused the infection in the first place.

The man, a butler, had come to him with the broken limb. There was a minor infection but pus was draining from it and it would probably have healed soon enough. Liston, however, had other ideas. He made an incision in the leg, into which he pushed his fingers to have a bit of a feel around. Afterwards, he closed the wound, but soon the whole leg was infected: the only thing to do was cut it off.

At least Liston was just the man for an amputation. He was famous for his speed – holding what was probably a world record for having taken off a leg in under two and a half minutes. Unfortunately, that occasion hadn’t gone entirely to plan: the patient died of gangrene; also, his young assistant lost three fingers when Liston accidentally hacked them off (he too died of gangrene); and a distinguished surgeon who was observing the operation died of a heart attack when Liston unintentionally slashed through his clothes. It was an exceptional operation, both for setting a world record and registering a mortality rate of 300 per cent.

POOR WORKMANSHIP – THE DEATH OF PRINCE ALBERT, 1861

It’s not often that a plumber’s slapdash workmanship kills his employer, but Queen Victoria’s husband was one of those rare victims.

Prince Albert just loved engineering. He enjoyed seeing things built, knocked down, set sail or burrowed underground. It’s ironic, then, that it was the poor installation of the sewers at Windsor Castle that killed him. According to the Lord Chamberlain at the time, the drainage pipes from the toilets and baths had been a bodge job, resulting in bad smells: ‘The noxious effluvia which escapes from the old drains and the numerous cesspools still remaining is frequently so exceedingly offensive as to render many parts of the castle almost uninhabitable,’ he wrote.

It certainly was for Albert, who, in 1861, contracted typhus from it and died.

The Queen, however, refused to accept this medical diagnosis of her husband’s death. She put it down to the fact that her idiot eldest son, Bertie, had recently lost his virginity. This had happened unexpectedly when he had visited an army barracks and some of the officers had arranged for an actress, Nellie Clifton, to join him in his bed. Nellie, a popular girl, then blabbed all about it to the papers. When Bertie’s father read the reports he lost all sense of proportion, accusing his son of treason and apparently suffering sleepless nights at the very idea of Nellie falling pregnant (as if a royal bastard was something unusual). He wrote a letter to Bertie suggesting that, even if Nellie became pregnant by another man, she would claim the child was the Prince’s and drag his name ‘before the greedy multitude’, forcing him to reveal ‘the disgusting details’ of their night-long affair.

‘O, horrible prospect … and to break your poor parents’ hearts,’ he wailed. A few weeks later, he died. According to his hysterical wife, although the doctors pointed to the fairly obvious symptoms of typhus, the Queen knew it was really from a broken heart.

THE MODERN ICARUS – PERCY PILCHER INVENTS POWERED FLIGHT, 1899

Percy Pilcher … It’s a name on everyone’s tongue. Well, it might have been had Percy not flown his hang glider straight into the ground on 30 September 1899. Because if he hadn’t done that, he could instead have shown off his latest invention: an aeroplane.

Although his name sounds more like a music hall act, Percy Pilcher was actually a pioneer of flight. Having created and flown a number of hang gliders (which he dubbed ‘the Bat’, ‘the Beetle’ and ‘the Gull’), in 1896 he registered a patent for what is unmistakably a design for a powered flying machine. By the summer of 1899, he had designed an engine that would have worked and produced four-horse power of thrust. At the time in the American Colonies, the Wright Brothers were only just thinking about gliders, but Pilcher – the People’s Prince of Planes – was building the engine that would make Britain the home of powered flight.

On 30 September his triplane was complete and ready to take off. The first ever powered flight was to be in a muddy field in Leicestershire in front of a gathering of garrulous guests. And then: disaster! A problem with the crankshaft meant there would be no demonstration of the fabulous flying machine. What could they do? The afternoon would be a wash-out.

But Percy was nothing if not a showman. So he offered to demonstrate his hang glider, the Hawk, instead. Sadly for the aviation industry, he ploughed straight into the ground and died two days later from his injuries. His plane never made it off the ground.

In 2003 a group of researchers from Cranfield University with a lot of time on their hands built a replica of Pilcher’s flying machine. It worked, and flew for more than a minute.

THE WRONG QUEUE – JAMES CHADWICK BECOMES A PHYSICIST, 1907

Sixteen-year-old James Chadwick enrolled at Manchester University in 1907 (not an unusual age to matriculate in those days). He joined the queue to study mathematics, but soon discovered he was in the wrong one – it was the line for physics. But he liked the tutor who interviewed him and so on a whim decided to give physics a go instead. He went on to win the Nobel Prize for discovering neutrons and was a lead scientist in the design of America’s nuclear bomb.

‘HOW ARE YOU FEELING?’ ‘RUFF’ – THE BROWN DOG RIOTS, 1907

Experimenting on animals generates some strong feelings, and results in the occasional nutter breaking into a laboratory – but that’s nothing compared to what happened in London in the summer of 1907.

It all began with a lecture and a couple of Swedes. Since 1876, use of animals in scientific experimentation had been regulated, and in 1903 Swedish anti-vivisectionists Louise ‘Lizzy’ Lind-af-Hageby and Leisa Schartau enrolled in the London School of Medicine for Women in order to record what was happening during lectures.

One of the demonstrations they attended was being taken by Dr William Bayliss.[*] The lesson was to demonstrate that salivary pressure was independent of blood pressure, and this would be shown by electrically stimulating the exposed nerve of a live dog’s salivary gland. Doing so was perfectly legal. However, there was an aspect to this particular demonstration that was definitely illegal, the women later claimed. The brown terrier brought into the demonstration room had not been anaesthetised. Furthermore, the dog showed an operation scar from a previous demonstration, when the law said animals could only be used once. They added, in their diary, that the dog tried to get away and the other students around them laughed at its attempts. This wasn’t actually illegal, but it certainly wasn’t very nice.

They took their case to a leading anti-vivisectionist lawyer, Stephen Coleridge,[**] and he made a public speech about the affair without mincing his words and making the full allegations put to him by the women. The speech was reported in the newspapers, angering Bayliss, who demanded a full retraction of Coleridge’s allegations. Coleridge declined, and Bayliss sued for libel.

The trial took place on 11 November 1903 and hit the headlines. One of the witnesses, Professor Ernest Starling of University College London,[***] admitted that he had previously performed a demonstration on the dog and had allowed a second – illegal – demonstration in order to avoid a second animal having to die. But he stated that the dog was anaesthetised during the demonstration, his accusers just hadn’t seen the pipe under the table delivering the anaesthetic. It would have been impossible to perform such a delicate procedure had the dog not been asleep, he argued.

The court also learned that the experiment with the salivary glands was, in fact, a failure, with Bayliss giving up halfway through. The dog was later killed, it was admitted, by a student named Henry Dale, who was not licensed to euthanise animals.**** Bayliss’s case was conducted by Rufus Isaacs.*****

Isaacs successfully argued that Bayliss had done nothing illegal and the jury awarded him libel damages and costs in the region of £400,000 in modern currency. Most people thought it was going to end there but they were very much mistaken.

Coleridge established a public appeal for the money, and received it in double-quick time. Bayliss gave it all to the university for medical research – perhaps including just the sort of experiment Coleridge objected to. Then Coleridge’s brothers-in-struggle demanded there be a memorial to the brown dog. They decided it should be a fountain with a statue of the unfortunate mutt, carrying an inscription:

In memory of the Brown Terrier Dog done to Death in the Laboratories of University College in February 1903, after having endured Vivisection extending over more than two months and having been handed from one Vivisecteur to another till Death came to his Release. Also in Memory of the 232 dogs vivisected at the same place during the year 1902. Men and Women of England, how long shall these things be?

It was a canine cri de coeur but it proved difficult to find a sympathetic local council willing to accept the monument. In the end, in 1906, Battersea, famous for its dogs’ home, agreed to play host to one of the odder memorials in London. George Bernard Shaw was a guest at the unveiling.

Controversy continued to reign, though, and a guerrilla war broke out between groups of medical students who would creep through the hours of darkness to attempt to destroy the statue, opposed by a standing police guard presumably made up of Battersea’s least-precocious officers and backed by a motley alliance of trade unionists and suffragettes, who identified with the ground-down and disenfranchised dog. The ‘anti-dogger’ gangs thought it a dangerous insult to medical research, whereas their opposition saw it as a monument to Spartacus-like defiance of despotism.

Things escalated. Soon there were public marches in support of, and opposed to, the statue. On 10 December 1907 an anti-dogger march sported more than 1,000 participants and ended in the Brown Dog Riots – running battles around Trafalgar Square between them, the pro-doggers and 400 police.

Battersea Council eventually announced that it had had enough of paying for round-the-clock protection for a statue of a dog, and in 1910 it had the memorial broken up by four workmen and a police guard 120-strong – despite a petition signed by 20,000 pro-doggers.

Accurately, all that is now left of the old statue is a hump in the pavement and a sign that reads ‘no dogs’.

MONKEY BUSINESS – PILTDOWN MAN, 1911

In 1911 a skull was unearthed on Piltdown Common in Sussex that had the bone-loving community climbing museum walls in excitement. It seemed that Charles Dawson, a solicitor and amateur palaeontologist, had discovered the Missing Link. His finding would quieten the religious freaks who refused to believe man and monkeys had a common ancestor.

Dawson was quite well known, having previously found a number of important relics, including no fewer than three new species of iguanodon (as everyone knows, the iguanodon was the second dinosaur formally named, after megalosaurus, and, together with megalosaurus and hylaeosaurus, it was one of the three genera originally used to define dinosauria) and had a good reputation among his fellow scientists. He had also briefed the local quarrymen that, if they found any bones in the ground, they should let him know.

Thus, in late 1911, a group of workmen digging out gravel to use on roads showed him a piece of skullbone. It intrigued him and he looked for the rest of the structure in a shallow gravel pit. Over the next six months, accompanied by a strange Jesuit priest named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, he found the rest of the skull, half a lower jaw and a human tooth. Buried with them were the bones of prehistoric animals and some flint tools.

The skull was of a new species. It appeared to be essentially human, but with some characteristics of a young chimpanzee. This suggested that the long-term evolution of the human skull had reflected the changes that take place within a chimp’s skull as the animal goes from infant to adult. It was very exciting.

The find and its implications were announced to the London Geological Society, which could barely contain itself. The skull was deemed to be a female from a hitherto unknown species of human that represented the common ancestor of cave people and modern humans. In tribute to its discoverer (not the quarryman), it was named Eoanthropus dawsoni – Dawson’s man of the dawn. Dr Arthur Smith Woodward of the Geological Society declared: ‘The most significant thing about this discovery lies in the fact, proved by the shape of the jaw, that the creature, when alive, had not the power of speech. Therefore in the evolution of the human species the brain came first and speech was a growth of a later age.’

Dawson died in 1916, and in 1924 Woodward was knighted for his work analysing the bones. Piltdown Man was even cited in the famous Monkey Trial of 1925 that held the American State of Tennessee up to ridicule for prosecuting a biology teacher who had taught his class evolutionary theory.

In 1926, however, things began to unravel. A detailed survey of the land showed that the gravel pits were much younger than thought – younger, in fact, than the apparent age of the relics. Then, over the coming decades, archaeological finds in other countries established a timeline in evolution that left Piltdown Man with nowhere to hide – he just couldn’t have existed. People took another look at the bones. Material testing showed that the cranium was human, but only about 500,000 years old – a mere whippersnapper in evolutionary terms. The jaw, it turned out, was from an orang-utan and the tooth came from a chimp. It was as if a fight had broken out in a zoo. The animal bones found beside the skull weren’t even British. But what exposed the skull as a deliberate hoax was chemical testing that showed it had been stained with chromium compounds and the teeth artificially rubbed down to imitate a pattern close to normal human wear.

No one is sure who created the hoax, but in 1953 The Sussex Express ran an article which read: ‘Mrs Florence Padgham, now of Cross-In-Hand, remembers that in 1906, aged thirteen, her father gave Charles Dawson a skull, brown with age, no lower jaw bone. Dawson is supposed to have said, “You’ll hear more about this, Mr Burley.”’

The lasting importance of Piltdown Man is the precise opposite of its original importance. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was cited by Darwinian evolutionists as evidence that Creationism was based on a myth. Now it is cited by Creationists as evidence that Darwinian Evolution is a hoax.

MAKING IT HARD ON HIMSELF – SCOTT OF THE ANTARCTIC DIES, 1912

In 2000 a letter was discovered that showed that brave, heroic Scott of the Antarctic was really a fool, largely responsible for his own fate. It was written by one Lieutenant Edward Evans, a navigator who was part of Scott’s attempt to reach the South Pole. He reveals that part of the reason for Scott’s failure was that he insisted on dragging scientific and geological specimens and records with him to the Pole and back. Evans and the others had quietly suggested perhaps he would like to leave them at the base camp and collect them on the way back, especially since they were already short on food and things were looking pretty bleak, but they were rebuffed.

Evans had accompanied Robert Scott to within 150 miles of the Pole, at which point Evans and two others turned back. In his letter, he described what happened: ‘I had a narrow squeak, thank God I was not included in the advance party. It seems to me extraordinary that they stuck to all their records & specimens. We dumped ours at the first check. I must say I considered the safety of my party before the value of the records and extra stores, not eatable. Apparently Scott did not. His sledge contained 150lbs of trash, he ought to have left it, pushed on and recovered the specimens and records this year.’

Scott and the advance party reached the Pole only to discover sneaky Norwegian Roald Amundsen had already been there and left his flag. They trekked back, half of them dying on the way. When Scott expired, he was only 11 miles from a big food store – without the scientific equipment weighing them down, he would almost certainly have made it.

On the way back to base camp, Evans developed scurvy, but he survived and eventually commanded the Australian Navy.

MOULD MAN – THE DISCOVERY OF PENICILLIN, 1928

Labs are supposed to be clean environments that prevent contamination of biological samples. So when Alexander Fleming one day left a petri dish containing staphylococcus bacteria – which you really don’t want to get too close to – beside an open window it was bad practice. But he noticed that some of the mould spores which had flown in and were now growing in the dish were killing the nearby bacteria. For a while he called the substance ‘mould juice’ but he soon moved on to ‘penicillin’.

‘When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928 I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionise all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic or bacteria killer. But I suppose that was exactly what I did,’ he observed later, with his trademark modesty.

SLOWING THINGS DOWN – IGNORING JET ENGINES, 1930

In 1930 a young RAF officer designed the world’s first jet aircraft engines. Frank Whittle was only 22 when he patented the design and handed the idea to the Air Ministry. Not only did the Ministry take no action, it also failed to classify such a useful military tool. Ten years later both Italy and Germany had jet aircraft, beating Britain to the goal.

CLEVER KITTY – THE INVENTION OF CAT’S EYES, 1933

Inventor Percy Shaw was driving home from the Old Dolphin pub in Clayton Heights through the Yorkshire fog one night when he suddenly saw the glint of a pair of cat’s eyes through the gloom. He swerved to avoid the moggy and realised that in so doing he had probably just saved his life – the cat was sitting on the fence along the side of the mountain road and, had he not turned sharply, he might otherwise have gone right off the side. He patented his design for reflectors embedded in the road surface and soon they were being installed all over the world.

As Shaw grew older, he had all the carpets and furniture taken out of his house and kept three televisions on at all times – one tuned to BBC1, one on BBC2 and one on ITV. All had the sound muted.

THE RESERVES REACH THE SUMMIT – EDMUND HILLARY AND SHERPA TENZING SCALE EVEREST, 1953

Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were never meant to be the first men to reach the top of Mount Everest. They were the back-up team to the completely forgotten pair Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans, who had been selected for the honour by the team leader, Colonel John Hunt. Bourdillon was chosen because he had designed the breathing equipment that they all relied on.

Unfortunately for him, Evans’s set malfunctioned when they were just 100m from the summit. Close enough to spit. They had to descend, and three days later Hillary and Norgay went up in their place. No doubt Bourdillon and Evans wished them all the luck in the world getting up there.

They managed it and Hillary took a photo of Norgay on top of the mountain. Norgay would have reciprocated, but he had never used a camera and didn’t know how to. On descent, Hillary met his friend George Lowe and his first words after reaching the summit of Everest were therefore: ‘Well, George, we knocked the bastard off!’

On 6 June 1953 Hillary was knighted (Norgay was also offered a knighthood but the Indian Prime Minister, Nehru, refused to let him have it) and Time Magazine named him one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World, thus further rubbing Evans and Bourdillon’s noses in it.

*  Before De Quincey’s arrival, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Britain’s most pharmaceutically enhanced poet, was in residence at Dove Cottage. His preferred brand of laudanum was Kendal Black Drop – apparently four times the normal strength of the medicine and one for the real aficionado. Without it, his odder, visionary poems – ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, ‘Kubla Khan’, etc. – might never have come about. He wrote to his brother, George: ‘Laudanum gave me repose, not sleep; but, you, I believe, know how divine that repose is, what a spot of enchantment, a green spot of fountain and flowers and trees in the very heart of a waste of sands!’

*  Although he was famous for mental instability, extreme narcissism and sleeping with his half-sister, one can’t really blame Byron for being a bit naughty, it was probably in his genes. His father was Captain ‘Mad Jack’ Byron, who abandoned his wife and child after squandering his wife’s fortune and condemning the family to poverty; his grandfather was Admiral ‘Foulweather’ Byron, whose nickname referred to the fact that storms always used to follow him wherever he went and he had a habit of being shipwrecked or imprisoned; and his great uncle was Lord William ‘The Devil’ Byron – so dubbed after he destroyed his family home in order that his hated son would inherit nothing. He also shot his coachman dead because he was irritated by his driving and killed his cousin during an argument about pheasants.

*  One of the men to discover hormones, he was later knighted for his contribution to medical knowledge and has the Bayliss Effect (to do with muscle contraction) named after him.

**  Coleridge, the great-great-nephew of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was also co-founder of the National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

***  Starling was co-discoverer of the Frank–Starling Law of the Heart, which sounds romantic but in fact states that the stroke volume of the heart increases in response to an increase in the volume of blood filling the organ.

****  Dale would go on to win the Nobel Prize for work on the chemical transmission of nerve impulses.

*****  Isaacs went on to become Viceroy of India and Attorney General – it was certainly an all-star trial.

If one thing is striking about the behaviour of those who inherit power, it is the levity with which they can exercise it. Land and fortunes may be frittered away according to a personal fondness for beards or national naval strategies decided because a prince’s mistress is also sleeping with his best friend. When you play with nations as you play with streets on a Monopoly board, it’s no surprise that decisions will be made that entire populations will come to regret.

BAD HAIR DAY – HANDING A CHUNK OF FRANCE TO ENGLAND, 1152

When Louis VII returned to France from the Crusades, he had shaved off his beard. His exceptionally powerful wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, found his actual face quite frightening, and demanded the facial hair be regrown. But Louis, like a 14-year-old who really wants people to think he’s an adult, insisted on shaving.

Eleanor promptly divorced him and six weeks later was married to Henry II of England. She took with her nearly a quarter of France as a wedding gift, ushering in three centuries of Anglo-French conflict, including the Hundred Years War.

MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL – HENRY II CREATES A SAINT, 1170

Henry II was a volatile soul. Often he would become so angry that he fell to the ground and chewed straw. This could get him into trouble – as it did in 1170 when he was visiting Normandy and news reached him that Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was still defying him over the power and privileges of the Church.

What Henry really did cry out at that point is up for grabs – the schoolboy version ‘Who will rob me of this turbulent priest?’ is plausible, but the best contemporary account, by one Edward Grim, gives: ‘What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?’ What it lacks in brevity it more than makes up for in eloquence.

But the essential error beloved of gore-loving children remains the same: the four knights who heard the King’s outburst took it as a request, rather than mere speculative wondering and travelled to Canterbury to carry out the assassination. They arrived on 29 December 1170 and, after hiding their weapons under a tree outside the cathedral and throwing cloaks over their mail armour, they sought out the quarrelsome priest and ordered him to accompany them to Winchester to account for his actions. Becket, however, had other ideas. When he refused, the knights informed him that they might well return, before collecting their weapons and going to plan B, which was murdering him. Anyone who happened to be in the cathedral at the time was then witness to the unusual sight of four knights in full armour sprinting after the Archbishop of Canterbury, swords drawn, attempting to acquaint him with his maker far earlier than he had expected.

Grim was an eyewitness (and actually wounded in the attack). He recorded:

The wicked knight leapt suddenly upon him, cutting off the top of the crown which the unction of sacred chrism had dedicated to God. Next he received a second blow on the head, but still he stood firm and immovable. At the third blow he fell on his knees and elbows, offering himself a living sacrifice, and saying in a low voice, ‘For the name of Jesus and the protection of the Church, I am ready to embrace death.’ But the third knight inflicted a terrible wound as he lay prostrate. By this stroke, the crown of his head was separated from the head in such a way that the blood white with the brain, and the brain no less red from the blood, dyed the floor of the cathedral. [A] clerk who had entered with the knights placed his foot on the neck of the holy priest and precious martyr, and, horrible to relate, scattered the brains and blood about the pavements, crying to the others, ‘Let us away, knights; this fellow will arise no more.’

The clerk was right. Becket was soon canonised by Pope Alexander III and his tomb became the greatest pilgrimage in England – inspiring, in the process, the finest work of early modern English, The Canterbury Tales.

SHOOTING HIMSELF IN THE CASSOCK – THE POPE GIVES IRELAND TO ENGLAND, 1172

Pope Alexander III – known to his mother as Roland – was the man who laid the foundation stone of Notre Dame de Paris. His other great contribution to European history and open-ended religious warfare was handing Ireland to England to make sure the locals would give up their foolish Pagan beliefs, become good Catholics and keep away from any non-Roman ways. Henry II assured the Pope that Catholic Ireland was safe in England’s hands. It wasn’t an easy decision – the Pope had taken a dim view of the murder of Thomas Becket and he didn’t want any funny business with Ireland, he told the King.[*] In fact, the Pope’s remit to hand over Ireland was all a bit dodgy, since it rested entirely on an obviously forged document.

The Vatican based its authority to do as it pleased with Ireland on the Donation of Constantine. This document claimed to be a record of a decision by the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great (after whom Constantinople was named), the first emperor to convert to Christianity. The paper, supposedly from 315, gave the Pope religious supremacy over the four great sees of the empire: Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria and Constantinople; and over all Europe too. Somewhat suspiciously, the document did not surface until 754, when the Pope used it to justify taking over a few choice chunks of the continent. This wasn’t just a forgery, it was a rubbish forgery – it named Constantinople as one of the possessions to be handed over, but the city wasn’t even founded until 326, 11 years after the document was apparently written.

AN INSURANCE ISSUE – KING JOHN AND THE CROWN JEWELS, 1216

On 11 October 1216 King John was on his way from Spalding in Lincolnshire to Bishop’s Lynn, Norfolk, when he fell ill and decided to turn back. This meant re-crossing the Wash Estuary. He took the scenic route, sending his baggage train, which included the Crown Jewels, along the causeway and ford across the mouth of the Wellstream. That path, however, was only safe on low tide. Horses, knights and the luggage fell into marsh and quicksand. The original crown jewels, including the crown worn by Edward the Confessor, have never been found.

THE OVER-ENTHUSIASTIC GROOM – ALEXANDER III GOES FOR A RIDE, 1286

Alexander III of Scotland was easily entertained. A widower who had outlived all his children, he had one thing on his mind. According to one mediaeval account, he never suffered from loneliness because ‘he used never to forebear on account of season nor storm, nor for the perils of the flood or rocky cliffs, but would visit none too creditably nuns or matrons, virgins or widows as the fancy seized him’.

Visiting nuns none too creditably was certain a popular pastime for monarchs of the age, but Alexander also needed a son and married Yolande de Dreux with that purpose in mind. One night he had dined in Edinburgh and was in the mood to visit his new wife and see about getting an heir. He rode out in the dark, over a cliff, and left Scotland without a king for six years.

FLATTERY GETS YOU EVERYWHERE – HENRY VIII’S POOR CHOICE OF BRIDE, 1539

Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne of Cleves was unusual in that, instead of having her executed in his usual fashion, he chose instead to execute Thomas Cromwell, who had arranged the match in the first place.

The problems began in 1538 after the death of wife number three, Jane Seymour. Cromwell thought it would be nice if Henry had a new queen to play with and suggested the German Anne of Cleves, who would be a good alliance for political reasons. Henry asked for a painting of Anne to see if he was attracted to her – but it had to be a true representation, not some retouched soft-focus job that made her out to be a beauty when really she looked like a heavyweight boxer at the end of a long fight. Cromwell said that he would see what he could do.

He tried to get a painting knocked up at short notice, but the only decent local painter, one Lucas Cranach, was off sick and the sole existing portrait was out-of-date and someone else had it, anyway.

Henry’s envoy to Anne’s family, Christopher Mont, then asked her father if he could see her himself so he could describe her to Henry. The Duke of Cleves angrily replied: ‘Do you want to see her naked?’ Mont thought about it for a minute, crossed his legs and forced himself to say that wouldn’t be necessary.[*]

Instead, Henry sent Hans Holbein to paint her, again demanding a true image. A few weeks later, Holbein returned with the portrait but there must have been something about the light in the room where he was working, because the portrait he painted not only made her out to be a lot more attractive than she was but somehow failed to record that her face was pitted with smallpox scars.

After considering the portrait, Henry agreed to the marriage. Given that she was 19 and he was 49, a few commentators of the time suggested that he was getting the better end of the deal, but when she turned up and he saw that she had the sort of face that terrified soldiers, he declared: ‘I am ashamed that men have so praised her as they have done and I like her not.’ (Henry was somewhat less polite later when he described her as ‘a fat Flanders mare’.) In fact, he had brought her a hamper of gifts, but, after seeing her, he chose to keep them to himself. He didn’t even want to go through with the marriage, but Cromwell told him it was too late to back out now and so Henry sullenly agreed.

On the wedding night of 6 January 1540, nothing happened. Henry simply couldn’t bring himself to consummate anything. What he wanted was a divorce, but Anne, for some reason, didn’t seem to mind that her new husband wanted to annul their marriage after 24 hours and found her physically repulsive (the King’s personal physician, William Butts, publicly declared that Henry’s inability to ‘rise to the occasion’ on his wedding night could not be due to any physical problems on his part, because he had experienced ‘duas pollutiones nocturnas in somno’ – ‘two nocturnal pollutions while in sleep’, i.e. two wet dreams). In July Anne agreed to a divorce, however, so long as she got a few nice houses and a pension and could stay in England where – despite not being able to speak English – she seemed to feel at home.

Henry was so incensed with Cromwell over the portrait that had caused all the trouble that he had him arrested and thrown into the Tower. Soon Cromwell’s head and body were travelling in separate coaches.

TO PLAY A QUEEN – THE SUPPLANTING OF ELIZABETH I, 1543

Elizabeth I was something of a trailblazer for the ladies. A strong monarch, she presided over what was arguably the greatest period of learning, conquest and artistic endeavour England has ever seen. Of course, some people believe she was only able to do so because she was actually a man in a skirt. Among them was Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula.[*]

If Elizabeth was indeed a man, then his elevation to the throne of England had actually come about as a result of an accident that left the young Elizabeth on her deathbed. The story was uncovered by Stoker when he visited the village of Bisley in the Cotswolds, where he was intrigued by the fact that the May Day celebrations involved a boy May Queen dressed in Elizabethan costume. He investigated further, and the story he uncovered led to his devoting a chapter of his 1910 book Famous Imposters to the story of the Bisley Boy.

The Tradition is that the little Princess Elizabeth, during her childhood, was sent away with her governess for change of air to Bisley, where the strong sweet air of the Cotswold Hills would brace her up. The healthy qualities of the place were known to her father and many others of those around her. Whilst she was at Overcourt [her home there], word was sent to her governess that the King was coming to see his little daughter; but shortly before the time fixed, and whilst his arrival was expected at any hour, a frightful catastrophe happened. The child, who had been ailing in a new way, developed acute fever, and before steps could be taken even to arrange for her proper attendance and nursing, she died. The governess feared to tell her father – Henry VIII had the sort of temper which did not make for the happiness of those around him. In her despair she, having hidden the body, rushed off to the village to find a living girl child who could be passed off for the princess, whose body could be hidden away for the time.

Throughout the little village and its surroundings was to be found no girl child of an age reasonably suitable for the purpose required. More than ever distracted, for time was flying by, she determined to take the greater risk of a boy substitute if a boy could be found. Happily for the poor woman’s safety, for her very life now hung in the balance, this venture was easy enough to begin. There was a boy available, and just such a boy as would suit the special purpose for which he was required – a boy well known to the governess, for the little Princess had taken a fancy to him and had lately been accustomed to play with him. Moreover, he was a pretty boy as might have been expected from the circumstance of the little Lady Elizabeth having chosen him as her playmate. He was close at hand and available. So he was clothed in the dress of the dead child, they being of about equal stature; and when the King’s fore-rider appeared the poor over-wrought governess was able to breathe freely.

The visit passed off successfully. Henry suspected nothing; as the whole thing had happened so swiftly, there had been no antecedent anxiety. Elizabeth had been brought up in such dread of her father that he had not, at the rare intervals of his seeing her, been accustomed to any affectionate effusiveness on her part; and in his hurried visit he had no time for baseless conjecture.

Then came the natural nemesis of such a deception. As the dead could not be brought back to life those who by now must have been in the secret did not and could not dare to make disclosure. Moreover the difficulties and dangers to one and all involved would of necessity grow with each day that passed. Willy nilly they must go on. Fortunately for the safety of their heads circumstances favoured them. The secret was, up to now, hidden in a remote village high up on the side of the Cotswold Hills. Steep declivities guarded it from casual intrusion, and there was no trade beyond that occasional traffic necessary for a small agricultural community. The whole country as far as the eye could see was either royal domain or individual property owned or held by persons attached to the dynasty by blood or interest. Facilities of intercommunication were few and slow; and above all uncertain and therefore not to be relied on.

This then was the beginning of the tradition which has existed locally ever since. In such districts change is slow, and what has been may well be taken, unless there be something to the contrary, for what is. The isolation of the hamlet in the Cotswolds where the little princess lived for a time – and is supposed to have died – is almost best exemplified by the fact that though the momentous secret has existed for between three and four centuries, no whisper of it has reached the great world without its confines. Not though the original subject of it was the very centre of the wildest and longest battle which has ever taken place since the world began – polemical, dynastic, educational, international, commercial.

According to Stoker, this all happened in 1543 or 1544. As part of his proof, he points to rumours from the time that Elizabeth could not have children. In April 1559, when Elizabeth was 25, the Count de Feria wrote: ‘If my spies do not lie, which I believe they do not, for a certain reason which they have recently given me, I understand that she [Elizabeth] will not bear children.’

She was also, apparently, far too clever to be female. Elizabeth’s tutor, Roger Ascham, wrote a letter to John Sturmius, rector of the Protestant University of Strasbourg, in 1550, saying: ‘The constitution of her mind is exempt from female weakness, and she is endued with a masculine power of application.’

All pretty convincing, although it does seem odd that Henry – distant father though he might have been – could not spot that his daughter was now a son. Still, that was the belief in Bisley.

The story may have begun in the nineteenth century when the Reverend Thomas Keble told his family that during building work at Overcourt the body of a young girl wearing Elizabethan dress was found in a stone coffin. He said he had realised who she must have been and secretly reburied her to prevent the house becoming a dreary shrine. Keble was, presumably, a lunatic.

THAT’S WHAT HAMLET WAS TALKING ABOUT – THE SLOW SUICIDE OF ELIZABETH I, 1603

Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that.

– Hamlet to Yorick’s skull

In March 1603 Elizabeth was about to gasp her last breath but she remained stubborn to the end and refused to take to her deathbed. At least we think it was her – she also utterly refused to remove her white make-up, which was so thick it could have been the Bishop of Oxford under there.

The fashion during the Renaissance was for ladies to wear thick white paint to hide the pock-marks from disease, as well as the inevitable toll of time and life in the sixteenth century – Elizabeth was especially keen as it hid the legacy of smallpox which she carried.[*]

When the expired Elizabeth’s make-up was finally chiselled away, the woman underneath looked as though she had been dead for some time, primarily because she had always used the most popular make-up of the day: Venetian ceruse. Venetian ceruse was chic, but it was also made of white lead and so was highly toxic when applied to the skin, with a habit of burning away the face. Of course, this didn’t put the fashionable ladies of the day off their favourite beauty product, which they slapped on their faces, bosoms and necks like second-rate plasterers in a rush to finish the job. Washing wasn’t a big deal in the sixteenth century, and often the ladies would go to bed with the day’s make-up still on, and then, rather than remove it in the morning, simply throw on another layer, adding more and more of the stuff until their faces contained more lead than the Roman plumbing network.

One monk at the time wrote that the compound ‘wears them out and makes them old before their time, and destroys the teeth, while they seem to be wearing a mask all the year through’. Another commentator said the constant layering left women ‘ugly, enormous and abominable’.

The lead was also slowly killing them. And, when they started using cosmetics based on mercury sublimate to ‘improve’ their skin, they just made things worse, causing their gums to recede, teeth to fall out and flesh to melt away.

Venetian ceruse was popular enough in the white version alone, but when other colours came onto the market demand boomed. One doctor wrote: ‘There are many who have so betard their faces with these mixtures and slubber-sauces that they have made their faces of a thousand colour: that is to say, some as yellow as the marigold, others a dark green, others blunket colour, others of a deep red died in the wool. Thus the use of this ceruse, besides the rotting of the teeth and the unsavoury breath which it causes, does turn fair creatures into infernal Furies.’

But the older Elizabeth got, the more she slapped on the slap. And, as she did so, her ladies-in-waiting followed suit. They even experimented with a few new methods for making themselves look ill and tried consuming potions mixed from coal dust, candles and ash. Instead of that fashionably ‘chalky’ look they craved, they tended to turn green. Washing in their own urine was rumoured to aid ladies’ skin, so many a bath was run with an unusual tint to the water. It was also a time of mixed blessings for ravens, as eating their flesh was rumoured to produce just the desired effect – but only if the bird had been fed for 40 days on hard-boiled eggs.

UP IN FLAMES – THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON, 1666

As the year 1666 began, people in the English capital were getting pretty jumpy. The coming twelvemonth, they all pointed out, would feature the number of the beast: 666. It could well be Judgment Day when thousands would burn for their sins. In fact, a number did burn, but mostly because a baker named Thomas Farriner forgot to extinguish his oven at night.

In fact, the cockneys nearly made it through the year without being incinerated – it wasn’t until just after midnight on Sunday, 2 September when things took a fiery turn. That night, Farriner, a baker working in Pudding Lane, left his oven alight. Around 2am he and his family were woken by flames, and managed to climb from their upper storey to the house next door.

As the fire grew, the authorities were alerted and the local firemen said the only thing to do was to demolish the adjoining wooden houses to work as a firebreak, or the entire city could burn. The Farriners’ neighbours, however, were none too happy at the idea of having their homes pulled down or – more likely – blown up with gunpowder. They refused and the only man in London with the authority to order the destruction of their homes was sent for. He was Thomas Bloodworth, the Lord Mayor of London. He turned up, looked terrified, but didn’t fancy taking an unpopular decision, so instead stated that no one was in any danger, famously declaring, ‘Pish! A woman could piss it out!’ before turning tail and leaving. Some time in the next couple of days as the city burned down around his ears, he nobly ran for the countryside.

At that time around 80,000 people lived in the City of London.[*] By the time the fire was extinguished on 5 September, 70,000 of them were homeless. Despite this, the death toll was surprisingly low – only a handful were officially recorded, although that might be down to the fact that most were poor people who no one bothered to set down in ink. However, 87 churches, a lot of other historic buildings and St Paul’s Cathedral also went up in flames. St Paul’s was especially unlucky to come a cropper – its stone walls would probably have fended off the flames had it not been for the fact that it was undergoing restoration at the time and was surrounded by wooden scaffolding, which acted as tinder, melting the lead on the roof. Courtier, diarist and keen gardener John Evelyn recorded the scene: ‘The stones of Paul’s flew like grenados the melting lead running down the streets in a stream, and the very pavements glowing with fiery redness, so as no horse, nor man, was able to tread on them.’

As tends to happen in these cases, scapegoats were sought. The Catholics had a tough time of it, being blamed for deliberately starting the fire – a theory supported by the false confession of a French watchmaker who claimed he had started the fire on the orders of the Pope. He was hanged for the crime only for the authorities to later discover that he had arrived in London two days after the fire had started. This did not, however, dampen the anti-Catholic feelings.

After three days of devastation, the city picked itself up. Many of the homeless were resettled outside of London and the churches were rebuilt – some by that most famous British architect Christopher Wren. And the legacy of the fire was streets rebuilt wider, safer, and with improved sanitation, and houses made of stone, not wood. The fire also roasted a lot of rats, perhaps putting paid to the Plague, which had cut a swathe through the city the previous year.

A BAD SHOT – CLIVE OF INDIA FAILS TO KILL HIMSELF, 1744

History is littered with tales of people shooting themselves and messing it up. French revolutionary leader Robespierre shot himself and missed – merely blasting off his own jaw. Robert Clive, known as Clive of India, who went on to secure Britain’s rule in that country, didn’t even get that far. In 1744 he was 19 and had been in India for only a few weeks, yet the belief that it was all too much for him and mounting debts had driven him to suicide. Placing a revolver to his temple, he pulled the trigger. But the gun misfired and no bullet appeared. Although he tried again, once more nothing happened.

‘It appears I am destined for something. I will live,’ he announced. Just how a number of generations of Indians felt about what he was destined for is open to question, but he ended up as governor of Bengal with a personal fortune worth perhaps £5bn in today’s prices. He also did it in double-quick time, retiring at the age of 42, before finally succeeding in killing himself at 49, when he stabbed himself to death with a penknife.

Perhaps his live-fast-die-young devil-take-the-hindmost attitude could have been predicted when, as a boy, he was expelled from three schools and was once discovered attempting to set up a protection racket in his home town, threatening the shopkeepers that if they didn’t pay him off he would have his friends break their windows.

Clive was succeeded by six children and one giant tortoise. His pet, named Adwaita (Sanskrit for ‘the one and only’), lived until Thursday, 23 March 2006 in the Calcutta Zoo where he had resided – perhaps happily, who knows? – since the 1870s. Adwaita was never known to have mated and therefore was succeeded by no offspring. He liked to eat wheat bran, carrots, lettuce and grass.

TOO MUCH EXPLOSIVE – THE FENIANS CONDEMN ONE OF THEIR OWN TO SWING, 1867

Contrary to much misconception (and a fair amount of outright propaganda), the Irish Potato Famine generated a lot of sympathy among the British population. Much of it disappeared, however, when the Irish nationalists inadvertently blew up a chunk of London, making one of their own innocent supporters the last man to be publicly hanged in England.

On 13 December 1867 a number of Irish Fenians were residing in London’s Clerkenwell prison. Their friends on the outside decided to get them out and believed brute strength as opposed to finesse was the way to do it. So they loaded a cart with explosives, pushed it to the wall of the prison and lit the fuse. The plan was to blow a hole in the wall to let their colleagues escape. The result was the demolition of the entire wall as well as a row of houses on the other side of the road, killing 12 people. It turned out the gang had got their sums wrong on the amount of explosive needed.

The public, who had been concerned for the welfare of the Irish people, rapidly changed direction and wanted a good number of them hanged for the crime. At the time, Karl Marx accurately summed up the atmosphere: ‘The London masses, who have shown great sympathy towards Ireland, will be made wild and driven into the arms of a reactionary government. One cannot expect the London proletarians to allow themselves to be blown up in honour of Fenian emissaries.’

The strength of pro-Fenian feeling that had existed up until then is demonstrated by the fact that, the day before the explosion, the Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, had banned all political meetings due to the number attending weekly Fenian marches. The day after the explosion, things were very different. Now people were out on the streets, demanding Irish blood be spilled.

Sensing the building anger, the police decided they needed a suspect – and pronto. They had drafted in 50,000 special constables to deal with the ensuing unrest, but had no idea how long they could keep a lid on things if the public didn’t have some taste of vengeance. But, ever efficient, they quickly found a candidate for the rope: one Michael Barrett.

Barrett was an Irish Fenian, formerly living in Glasgow, who had once been arrested for firing a gun. There were strong suspicions surrounding him and he was charged with the murder of one of the victims of the bombing. During the subsequent trial, he produced witnesses that he was in Scotland at the time but the prosecution had a witness who said Barrett had confessed to him – one Patrick Mullany, who was probably paid for the testimony, his price being a ticket to Australia.

Montagu Williams, one of the lawyers during the trial, described Barrett when the jury declared him guilty: ‘I must confess I felt great commiseration … the frank, open expression on his face. A less murderous countenance than Barrett’s I have not seen. Good humour was latent in his every feature and he took the greatest interest in the proceedings.’

Less emotional souls might point out that it was not surprising given that Barrett was about to be executed owing to the proceedings and that ‘good humour’ in his face was not a strong legal argument for his innocence.

For his part, Barrett was allowed some final words in the court: ‘I am far from denying, nor will the force of my circumstances compel me to deny, my love of my native land. I love my country and if it is murderous to love Ireland dearer than I love my life, then it is true, I am a murderer. If my life were 10 times dearer than it is and I could by any means redress the wrongs of that persecuted land by the sacrifice of my life I would willingly and gladly do so.’

This probably didn’t help his case and he was hanged at Newgate on 26 May 1868. The Times reported: ‘Yesterday morning in the presence of a vast concourse of spectators, Michael Barrett, the author of the Clerkenwell Explosion, was hanged in front of Newgate. In its circumstances there was very little to distinguish this from ordinary executions. The crowd was greater, perhaps, and better behaved; still from the peculiar atrocity of the crime for which Barrett suffered, and from the fact of its being probably the last public execution in England, it deserves more than usual notice.’

Public sympathy for the Irish cause had evaporated. The crowd, numbering around 2,000, sang ‘Rule Britannia’ as Barrett dropped.

PROMISE TO BE GOOD? – RELEASING JOHN DEVOY, 1869

John Devoy was another Irish Fenian. Incensed by the British government’s response to the Potato Famine – which was largely to ignore it – he had dedicated his life to recruiting others to the cause. His most audacious scheme had been to infiltrate Irish regiments in the British Army in order to foment discontent and persuade some of the soldiers to secretly swear allegiance to Irish independence, which, he claimed, would be brought about by an invasion of Irishmen from America.

This plan was not quite as far-fetched as it sounds. The Irish population of the United States was substantial – mostly because the Potato Famine had brought about mass emigration from the starving island. By 1851 around a million people had made it across the Atlantic and the American Fenian Brotherhood, a brother group to Devoy’s Irish Republican Brotherhood (forerunners of the IRA), had raised $200,000 – worth about £10m today – for the cause. More importantly, it had recruited many veterans of the American Civil War to fight. The group claimed to have 30,000 fighting men ready for the invasion, which was planned for late 1865, but poor organisation and squabbling in the ranks meant it kept being put off and eventually the organisation collapsed.

Unluckily for Devoy, his role as a spy in the British camp might have gained him a number of supporters – he claimed to have ‘converted’ 7,000 – but it also gained him a place in Millbank prison at the age of 27. His prospects were grim in the gaol where he was due to spend the next 20 years of his life. But then the British government made an astonishing mistake. Instead of keeping Devoy in solitary confinement until he was too old to fight, they told him he had a choice: he could either stay in prison for two decades performing hard labour, or he could go to America. All he had to do was promise not to return and that he wouldn’t immediately rejoin the Fenians and start organising another insurrection in Ireland. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he chose the latter option. And so did four other members of Devoy’s group who seemed equally surprised by the kind offer.

So, in 1871, the five men found themselves on a Cunard liner sailing for New York. If the British authorities hoped their exile would be a low-key affair and the Irishmen would be keeping their heads down from then on, they would have been somewhat disappointed by the Fenian funfair that greeted their arrival. Not only were they the guests of other Irish émigrés, but they were also invited to the White House to meet President Ulysses S. Grant. The President hated Britain for supporting the Confederacy in the Civil War and wanted to pooh-pooh the current government in revenge.

But, despite sitting down to a little fried chicken with the US President, the Fenian Brotherhood was divided and much smaller than in the past. One of the splits was down to a hare-brained scheme five years earlier to get their own back on Britain by invading Canada. Then, the Fenian army, mostly made up of 1,000 young men with nothing better to do, had assembled in plain sight on the American side of the border, allowing the Canadian authorities to fully comprehend what they were about to do (if not why on earth they wanted to do it). On the morning of 1 June 1866 they crossed into Canadian territory near Niagara Falls and threatened the strategically irrelevant town of Ridgeway.

Boding ill for the Fenians, by the end of the day half their men had deserted, apparently treating the voyage more as a day trip than an invasion. Despite this, they managed to win a small battle against Canadian troops after the Canadians mistook one of their own regiments for another and accidentally retreated. The Fenians, who found themselves in control of Ridgeway but without any plan for it, burned it to the ground, then scarpered before British reinforcements could arrive. In fact, after one more brief battle, they turned tail for home and most either swam across the Niagara River back to the US, or paddled across it on logs and surrendered their arms to the American authorities. The huge waste of time that the invasion represented exacerbated the split in the ranks of the Brotherhood, and it was a divided campaign for Irish independence that Devoy and his pals discovered. A new leader was needed and the British government had graciously sent just the man.

Settling down in the US, Devoy took a job as a clerk and joined a secret society, the Clan na Gael – The Irish Family. It gave him a power base away from the Brotherhood, which spent most of its time bickering about internal politics. For a while, he was unsure how to go about uniting the Irish in America until a scheme to do just that fell into his lap.

In 1874 he received a letter. It was from one of his fellow Millbank prisoners who had been transported to Australia for life and had somehow seen a newspaper story about Devoy’s arrival in New York. It began: ‘Dear friend, this is a voice from the tomb…’ and asked for his help in organising a campaign to get him and some fellow Fenian prisoners pardoned. Instead, Devoy had an idea: if he could spring his colleagues from Australia and bring them to America, he and they would be the toast of the nation. Soon he had convinced the Clan na Gael to give him the funds to charter a getaway ship: the Catalpa, which had a Portuguese crew and an American captain. In 1875 it set sail for Australia, arriving in 1876 to find that the prisoners were not closely guarded when out in work parties (on the grounds that there was nowhere they could run to unless they wanted to die in the Bush). A message was soon sent to the Irishmen from two Fenian agents, John Breslin and Tom Desmond, who had arrived earlier, purporting to be businessmen. In a daring daylight operation, the convicts made a run for it and got to the Catalpa, helped by the fact that most of the British were watching a sailing regatta at the time.

But they were far from safe. The crew of the Catalpa soon realised they were being followed by a Royal Navy gunboat, which was steaming towards them. The gunboat’s captain demanded the prisoners be handed over or he would open fire, to which the captain of the Catalpa responded: ‘We sail under the protection of the flag of the United States. Fire on us and you fire on the American flag.’

It was a clever move – a jailbreak was one thing, but the British captain didn’t want to start a war. He backed off and the Fenians made it to America. The ‘American’ defiance of the Royal Navy meant both Irishmen and Americans felt proud. They even had their own theme song:

Now boys, if you will listen,

A story I’ll relate

I’ll tell you of the noble men

Who from their foe escaped

Though bound with Saxon fetters

In the dark Australian jail

They struck a blow for freedom

And for Yankeeland set sail.

On the seventeenth of April

Last the Stars and Stripes did fly

On board the bark Catalpa,

Waving proudly to the sky

She showed the green above the red

As she did calmly lay

Prepared to take the Fenian boys

In safety o’er the sea.

When Breslin and brave Desmond

Brought the prisoners to the shore

They gave one shout for freedom;

Soon to bless them evermore

And manned by gallant Irish hearts,

Pulled towards the Yankee shore

For well they knew, from its proud folds,

No tyrant could them drag.

They had nearly reached in safety

The Catalpa taut and trim

When fast approaching them

They saw a vision dark and dim

It was the gunboat Georgette,

And on her deck there stood

One hundred hired assassins,

To shed each patriot’s blood.

The gunboat reached the bounding bark

And fired across her bow

Then in loud voice commanded

That the vessel should heave to

But noble Captain Anthony

In thunder tones did cry

‘You dare not fire a shot

At that bright flag that floats on high.’

‘My ship is sailing peacefully

Beneath that flag of stars

It’s manned by Irish hearts of oak

And manly Yankee tars

And that dear emblem near the fore,

So plain to be seen

Is the banner I’ll protect,

Old Ireland’s flag of green.’

The Britisher he sailed away,

From the Stars and Stripes he ran

He knew his chance was slim

To fight the boys of Uncle Sam

So Hogan, Wilson, Harrington,

With Darragh off did go

With Hassett and bold Cranston,

Soon to whip the Saxon foe.

Here’s luck to Captain Anthony

Who well these men did free

He dared the English man-o’-war

To fight him on the sea

And here’s to that dear emblem

Which in triumph shall be seen

The flag for which our heroes fought,

Old Ireland’s flag of green.

Devoy was a hero and the new leader of the cause. Over the next few years, he developed his strategy, which began with overruling his colleagues, who wanted to use terrorism – blowing up civilians in England would only lose them popular support in America, he reasoned. By 1868, there were two million Irishmen in America and he was eager to make the campaign a popular one with mass involvement but there needed to be a specific issue. He focused on land reform – giving Irish land to the natives.

In 1879 Devoy broke the letter of his agreement with the British authorities, as well as the spirit, by returning – in secret – to Ireland. He wanted to organise the army that he still hoped would rise. This wasn’t a forlorn prospect – there was much unrest in the country as bad weather had meant a poor harvest and it was only down to a massive relief operation jointly run by Britain and America that the whole country wasn’t starving. As part of the groundwork, Devoy returned to America with the Irish political leader Charles Parnell, MP, who went on a speaking tour of the country, kicking off with a meeting in Madison Square Garden attended by 10,000 people. He also spoke in the US House of Representatives, gaining the support of the government. Along the way, he raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the cause, and in two years that had reached half a million dollars.

Officially, the money was to go to the Irish Land League, but instead it went to the militant Irish Republican Brotherhood for their forthcoming violent insurgency. All of it went through the hands of a priest, Father Lawrence Walsh, presaging the involvement of Catholic parishes in laundering money for Republican violence. The campaign may have been partly responsible for the British Parliament passing the Land Act of 1881, which mitigated much of the suffering.

Devoy’s dual strategy of political pressure from within Parliament, and a parallel underground preparation for violent insurrection, was paying some dividends, though not as quickly as he had wanted. Then Parnell’s death from a heart attack at the age of 45 dealt a terrible blow to the campaign, which ran out of steam and fractured. As a result, the revolution never came. But Devoy was far from finished; he switched tactics again and over the coming decades continued to build vital support in America. In 1916 he conspired with Roger Casement to bring German weapons to Ireland by submarine to arm the volunteers of the Easter Uprising and his influence undoubtedly contributed to the partition of Ireland in 1921 – and to the raising of funds for Republican terrorism for decades.

John Devoy lived to see the Irish Free State. Had the British not offered him a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card, it might never have come about.

THE COCK CROWS – CHARLES BERESFORD FUMBLES IN THE DARK, 1891

There is a flower within my heart,

Daisy, Daisy!

Planted one day by a glancing dart,

Planted by Daisy Bell!

Whether she loves me or loves me not,

Sometimes it’s hard to tell;

Yet I am longing to share the lot

Of beautiful Daisy Bell!

Daisy Daisy,

Give me your answer do!

I’m half crazy,

All for the love of you!

It won’t be a stylish marriage,

I can’t afford a carriage,

But you’ll look sweet on the seat

Of a bicycle built for two!

We will go tandem as man and wife,

Daisy, Daisy!

Ped’ling away down the road of life,

I and my Daisy Bell!

When the road’s dark we can despise

P’liceman and lamps as well;

There are bright lights in the dazzling eyes

Of beautiful Daisy Bell!

I will stand by you in ‘wheel’ or woe,

Daisy, Daisy!

You’ll be the bell(e) which I’ll ring, you know!

Sweet little Daisy Bell!

You’ll take the lead in each trip we take,

Then if I don’t do well;

I will permit you to use the brake,

My beautiful Daisy Bell!

Lord Charles Beresford was the darling of the newspapers. An MP and naval commander (ending up as an admiral) who would often leave Westminster for a short while to fight in the waters off the Sudan or Egypt, he was also known in his circle as something of a sexual athlete. Perhaps most importantly for our story, he was also a close friend and adviser of the Prince of Wales, soon to be Edward VII.

All of this endeared him to many an impressionable upper-class female, one of whom was the Countess of Warwick, Frances Evelyn Greville – ‘Daisy’ to her friends, and the inspiration for the eponymous music hall song. When she wasn’t out inspiring songs, Daisy was equally busy as the mistress of the married Prince of Wales. And his pal, Charles Beresford. And many other members of the House of Lords. She must have been utterly exhausted when she crawled home to her husband, Lord Brooke. And she wasn’t very discreet about her extra-curricular activities – she was, in fact, widely known as ‘the babbling Brooke’.

One weekend, the Prince, Beresford, Daisy and a host of others were at a house party. At night, Beresford crept out of his room to find Daisy’s. He stole in and leapt upon the bed, loudly crying, ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’ This understandably startled the Bishop of Chester and his wife, who woke up to find a madman on their bed pretending to be a farmyard animal. Whether Beresford eventually found which room Daisy was really staying in has not been recorded, but the revelation of their affair strained relations between himself and the Prince, and ended up with Beresford threatening to publicly reveal details of Edward VII’s affairs to the press.

The enmity continued to fester so that, when reform of the Navy was on the public agenda a decade later, Edward ignored Beresford’s arguments for broadening out its deployment in favour of those of the First Sea Lord, who preferred a more specialised service based on torpedo boats and dreadnoughts to rival Germany – exacerbating the arms race between Britain and Germany which led to the outbreak of the First World War.

THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND – PROMOTING IDI AMIN, 1948

Idi Amin, genocidal maniac, cannibal, racist, madman, British Army cook and good friend of Saudi Arabia, seems to embody the danger of employing people without really getting to know what makes them tick first.

Amin enlisted in 1946 to feed the King’s African Rifles and it was the Ugandan boxing champion’s size – six feet four inches tall and weighing in at twenty stone – that got him noticed by the officers. Britain was looking for a new generation of leaders to take over in her former colonies when they were granted independence, and men were needed who would command respect, who would be looked up to. In the new African republics, these would not be men with degrees in macroeconomics, they would be men like Amin. ‘Not much grey matter, but a splendid chap to have about,’ as one British officer described him.

Indeed, he was promoted far more quickly than his intelligence deserved but that might have been part of the appeal – low intelligence meant low ambitions, which meant pliable and unlikely to cause too much trouble. Soon the cook had become an officer with ambitions his superiors had no idea he harboured, and a brutality that would revile millions around the world.

The men who promoted him were not, however, entirely insensible to Amin’s violent nature. He was nearly court-martialled when, as a lieutenant, he saw action in Kenya in 1961 and ordered his men to kill dozens of local tribesmen, leaving their corpses to be torn apart by hyenas. Amin also personally tortured many men – castrating a number of them to gain information. Naturally, this was not the normal behaviour of a cook but since Uganda was about to become an independent nation with the much-loved Kabaka of Buganda as the head of state, the British authorities chose not to make one of their last acts the prosecution of the man who was about to become the senior native officer in the Ugandan Army. They informed the Prime Minister designate, Milton Obote, but he too decided to do nothing: he didn’t want to rock any boats just weeks before independence. Of course, rocking and, preferably, sinking any boat with Idi Amin in it would have been a boon to the world beyond anything else Obote could possibly have achieved in his entire life.

The day of 9 October 1962 was one of mixed fortunes for Uganda. It gained independence, but also one utterly psychotic new major, Major Amin. Within a few months, the British officers who had given him his first leg up had left for home, crossing their fingers that he wouldn’t turn out to be as mad as he looked. As soon as they left, the new Ugandan government, in need of senior officers to take their places, bumped Amin up to Colonel and Army Chief of Staff. One quick brutal overthrow of Kabaka by Obote and Amin was pushed up to General Amin – one of the fastest rises for a chef in the history of cookery. Obote was sure he could control Amin, however. After all, he was just a cook with a brain the size of a carrot – and Obote had read Socialist theory.

It surprised precisely no one when Amin mounted a coup. The only surprise was that he waited until 1971 to do so, using the occasion of Obote’s absence at a meeting of Commonwealth leaders in Singapore to decide that Uganda would be a better place with him in charge. Britain was almost certainly aware of Amin’s plans – well, who wasn’t? – but did nothing because Obote looked to be heading down the path of Marxism and that wouldn’t be much good either. So the British government thought it might as well sit back and watch to see how things turn out.

The United Kingdom recognised Amin as the new ruler quicker than you could say ‘pastry’ and the people of Uganda, having no clue what they were letting themselves in for, gave him rapturous support. Even one British observer remarked: ‘I have never encountered a more benevolent and apparently popular leader than General Amin.’

Amin, as most new dictators do, announced that he had no wish to rule for long, and elections would soon be held. They seemed to slip his mind, however, while he was having all his political enemies massacred over the weeks that followed. Around 10,000 civilians died and 3,000 army officers and men who may or may not have supported Obote (Amin’s ironically named Public Safety Unit quickly gave up on identifying those who actually supported Obote, and simply killed anyone they found whose name started with the letter ‘O’). There were so many deaths that the Owen Falls hydro-electric dam on Lake Victoria became clogged with bodies, causing power-cuts in Kampala.

This episode gave rise to one of the most famous stories about Amin: that he kept the head of his erstwhile rival, Brigadier Suleiman Hussein, in his fridge, alongside the body parts of other enemies he would eat.

Amin’s foreign policy was just as crazy as his domestic policy. Since Uganda’s independence, the country had been aided by Israel, which helped develop its infrastructure and agriculture and produce clean drinking water for the inhabitants. When he took power, Amin’s first overseas visit was to Israel, which included a meeting with the Defence Minister, Moshe Dayan. When one of Amin’s first questions was: ‘Can I have 24 Phantom jets?’ Dayan politely enquired why. ‘I need them to bomb Tanzania,’ was the reply.

Dayan’s comment, in Hebrew, to his aide was: ‘This guy is out of his mind. Let’s get out of here.’

But the refusal didn’t make Amin reconsider his approach: he simply asked Britain for the same thing. When Britain also politely turned him down, he turned to Colonel Gaddafi of Libya – and Gaddafi was rather less concerned about the prospect of bombing a neighbouring country for no apparent reason than the Israelis or British. As a result, Amin began sending bizarre letters to the UN praising Hitler, and allowed Uganda to become a base for Palestinian terrorists. He also terrorised Uganda’s Jewish tribe, the Abayudaya. But they were far from alone.

The greatest target for his brutality was the 80,000-strong Indian population who had come over during the British colonial era. In 1972 he expelled them all, stripping them of their citizenship. In so doing, he wrecked Uganda’s economy and condemned most of his countrymen to poverty or starvation: no fewer than 85 per cent of Ugandan businesses were run by the Asian population and at a stroke he destroyed them all.

The property and businesses they were forced to leave were handed out as plunder to Amin’s friends and supporters. None of them knew the first thing about running a printing firm or a hotel, but suddenly they were in possession of these enterprises. Unsurprisingly, many simply never reopened and their employees found themselves out of work; their families found no food on their tables.

The sudden shock to the economy had long-lasting effects. Suddenly, the people who were the economy, who organised the production, distribution and trade of nearly all the goods sold in the towns were gone. It was years before you were able to buy butter in the markets of Kampala. And there was no chance of being seen by a doctor.

It was partly the Indians’ association with Britain that drove Amin over the edge. Amin always had a strange attitude to Britain: he admired the country, but also seemed to hate it (he was nothing if not unstable). When he visited it as his country’s dictator, he was especially taken with Scotland and liked the kilts. He strongly supported Scottish independence, sending letters of support to the Scottish Nationalist Party and even bringing the subject up with Mao Zedong when the two of them met. Chairman Mao was apparently less concerned about the subject than Amin and somewhat bemused to be discussing it. Amin also declared himself King of Scotland, which sat strangely with his support for its independence.

On the other hand, he did offer to help the British out in Ireland by taming the Irish rebels. Perhaps some of them would have ended up in his fridge too, if he had had his way. In January 1974, during a period of economic crisis in Britain, he offered to send a planeload of vegetables over ‘to help’. History does not record just how many of his starving countrymen laughed at the joke.

At least we presume it was a sense of humour. His psychological condition was deteriorating at this time – the syphilis he carried may have been driving him mad. It’s hard to say where he picked it up: perhaps one of his four wives. As his rule stretched out, schizophrenia and paranoia became his norm and he believed he was speaking to Allah. Whether it was his insanity or mere hatred that made him praise the Palestinian terrorists who killed 11 Israeli athletes in the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre is uncertain, but he was becoming increasingly murderous. His reign, supported by the Soviet Union and aided by the East German secret police, saw hundreds of thousands murdered. Many of them he killed himself, enjoying the brutality. He found it hysterically funny to personally torture his prisoners, cutting off their limbs or beating them to death. When Kay, one of his wives, died during an abortion that she undertook to conceal the fact that she had had an affair, Amin ordered her body to be cut apart and sewn back together again with the limbs reversed as a warning to his other wives.

His instability eventually led to war with Tanzania, which he invaded with little reason in 1978. Amin may have been adept at using his troops to butcher civilians, but actual warfare was not his strong point (he did, after all, inform the world that the Arab forces were assured of victory in their 1973 invasion of Israel, even though Israel had already beaten them) and he lost the war, despite support from Libyan troops and planes and Palestinian guerrillas. The Libyans soon found themselves fighting the war on their own – they would be heading for the front line only to be passed by Amin’s troops driving in the opposite direction, their trucks loaded with the booty they had looted. But it was the Tanzanian counter-attack in January 1979 that finally forced Amin out of Uganda.

Gaddafi gave the defeated Amin a home – until Amin attempted to molest the Libyan dictator’s daughter. Even Muammar ‘Mad Dog’ Gaddafi was somewhat taken aback by that and Amin was thrown out again, before eventually gaining refuge and friendship in Saudi Arabia.

Amin’s psychotic rule did have one unexpected positive effect, though. Around a third of the Asians he expelled had British passports and many took their expertise, entrepreneurship and their ethos of hard work to the UK, creating a new pool of economic talent. The Asian corner shop may now be a stereotype rapidly becoming out of date, but in the 1970s it was a welcome service to many Britons and a boost to the economy. And the National Health Service recruited many new doctors and nurses.

Very much without meaning to, Idi Amin did Britain a big favour.

*  Henry was later deposed by his sons. All but his illegitimate child, Geoffrey, turned against him, at which point he stated: ‘My other sons are the real bastards.’

*  Henry would later mutter that no one wanted to see Anne of Cleves naked.

*  Elizabeth certainly had some suspicious habits: she refused to marry, she always wore wigs, and she left strict instructions that no post-mortem be carried out on her body. But most of all it was her manly bearing – on proudest display when she gave her famously rousing militaristic speech to her troops at Tilbury before they defended England from the Spanish Armada:

I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.

*  The trend for cosmetics had begun in mediaeval times as mirrors became widespread, allowing women to see just how awful they looked, even though the Church condemned the looking glass as a tool of Lucifer himself and these painted women as harlots.

*  The City being the ancient Roman settlement enclosed in the city walls, whereas London as a whole, including the separate city of Westminster and Southwark, etc., had around 500,000 inhabitants.

By definition, the affairs of state have consequences that reach into every town, village and rocky outcrop of Britain. But the nation is a complicated place. No battle ever fought has been as complex as the economy, no scientific theory as intricate as the schools’ science education syllabus. So a conflict arises as ministers attempt to grapple with the thousand different factors and outcomes in order to reach decisions. And when the British Cabinet is trying to reach those decisions in French, as it bizarrely had to at the beginning of the eighteenth century in order to please a foreign king, it exponentially increases the chance of failure.

NO MORE FRANGLAIS – CREATING THE FIRST PRIME MINISTER, 1717

Perhaps uniquely in British constitutional law, the creation of the post of Prime Minister was a direct result of the poor French spoken by Britain’s ministers of state. But it was also, less directly, the product of the conflict between a Protestant nation and its own system of monarchical succession, which, on occasion, would present a Catholic as the heir apparent. And it wasn’t mere bigotry that meant a monarch with allegiance to Rome was unacceptable – a Catholic ruler was a recipe for civil strife or outright warfare of the type that tore the country apart in the seventeenth century. In extremis, it was necessary to look overseas for a suitable heir presumptive to be – ironically – elected to a hereditary position.

George I, the first of Britain’s German Hanoverian kings, spoke no English. He had inherited the throne from his cousin Queen Anne in 1714 despite there being more than 50 relatives closer to her. But there was good reason to disqualify them: George might have been a German, but he was a Protestant German, and the others he leapfrogged over were all Papists, which ruled them out.

Now that he was king, however, he refused to sit in the corner of the room understanding nothing while all his ministers decided what was going to happen in his realm. So, in 1717, it was decided that ministerial meetings would be conducted in French – a language he did sort of understand. This led to the strange situation of everyone in the room speaking in a foreign language that few were comfortable speaking. After a number of decisions were apparently made by accident, the arrangement was abandoned, so George refused to attend any more meetings – meaning that the system of an independent ministerial government meeting without the monarch developed. Thus it was that in 1732 Robert Walpole became the first real Prime Minister, presiding over his fellow ministers.

The mistake they had made was to attempt to serve both the private interests of the King, who wanted to retain personal charge of the doings of state (given that he was a usurper brought to power by the machinations of politicians, he could be forgiven a certain degree of paranoia about what might happen if he didn’t closely monitor what those self-same politicians were up to), and the interests of the state. Since those two sets of interests were not in synch, something had to give, and the resulting shake-up led to a new form of government far more democratic than that which had preceded it.

IT’S GOING TO FALL DOWN – NUMBER 10 BECOMES THE SEAT OF BRITISH PRIME MINISTERS, 1732

Now that Britain had a Prime Minister, he needed somewhere to live. There is a strong reason why national leaders in democracies live in properties provided by the state. It is not merely for the prestige of a large property – most early British PMs were very wealthy and had huge houses in London – but living in a state property divorces them from their former lives and allows them to keep the interests of the nation foremost in their minds.

Perhaps aware of this, perhaps merely as an attempt to curry favour with a man at least as powerful in Britain as himself, in 1732 George II offered Walpole 10 Downing Street as a gift with full ownership.[*] But Walpole, fancying himself a bit of a chartered surveyor, took one look at it and decided it was going to fall down. He based his belief on the knowledge that the street’s foundations were on Thames silt, which shifted from time to time. Instead of accepting the house as a personal gift, he therefore told the King that he was not personally worthy of such a present and it should remain the possession of the crown. That said, he was more than happy to live there, thanks, so long as any repairs were paid for by the state. He moved in and resided there until he died seven years later, still waiting for it to fall down around his ears.

As it happens, that was nearly the end of the prime ministerial residence. No other PM lived at Number 10 until George Grenville, three decades later. Since then, virtually all British premiers have resided there.

MISSING THE BOAT – THE TRIALS AND TRAVAILS OF JOHN WILKES, 1763

There is a saying that you should never pick a fight with an ugly man because they have nothing to lose. This should have warned the British government of the day off a 20-year war of attrition with John Wilkes. Wilkes was famously ugly, with a strange squint and a projecting jaw – but he was also strikingly charismatic and boasted that with women ‘give me half an hour and I can talk away my face’. He was, indeed, a noted rake and a fully paid-up member of the Hellfire Club, which would meet for raunchy rituals with a black-magic theme. But all this was secondary to his political radicalism. Indeed, when the Earl of Sandwich told him: ‘You will die of a pox or on the gallows,’ Wilkes replied: ‘That depends, my lord, on whether I embrace your principals or your mistress.’

Already a radical MP, Wilkes became a household name as a result of a pamphlet, a strategic error of judgement on the part of the establishment, and a message sent one minute too late.

On 23 April 1763 Number 45 of the North Briton pamphlet (named for Wilkes’s Unionist nomenclature for a Scot) hit the streets and became an instant hit. It openly opposed the policy of George III, who had just concluded peace with France; claimed the peace was a product of French bribes paid to British officials and stated that British ministers were ‘the tools of despotism and corruption’. The King was incensed and vowed to silence Wilkes by hook or by crook.

A week later, officers of the Secretary of State, Lord Halifax, arrested Wilkes on the charge that the pamphlet was a libel and a breach of the peace, and took him to the traditional lodging in these circumstances – the Tower of London. He was held for a week and refused permission to receive visitors. While jailed, he wrote a letter to his daughter, Polly:

Be assured that I have done nothing unworthy of a man of honour who has the happiness of being your father. I have not yet seen my accusers, nor have I heard who they are. My friends are refused admittance to me. Lord Temple and my brother could not be allowed to see me yesterday. As an Englishman, I must lament that my liberty is this wickedly taken away, I am not unhappy, for my honour is clear, and my health good, and my spirit unshaken, I believe, invincible.

His friends were, indeed, being turned away at the gate – a decision by Halifax that led to perhaps the most aristocratic protest march in history, in advance of Wilkes’s first court hearing. To organise it, the Duke of Newcastle sent a letter to the Duke of Devonshire, stating: ‘Our friends are in the highest spirits upon this violent proceeding. They say the whole city of London will attend Mr Wilkes to Westminster Hall when he comes up to be bailed or discharged.’

For his part, Lord Middleton wrote to Lord Hardwicke: ‘For God’s sake, my Lord, consider well the point and show Wilkes that we will not abandon him unconvicted to the fury of an insolent minister.’

The march took place on foot and horseback, and included MPs, lawyers and at least 15 members of the nobility. One after another they approached the Tower and demanded to speak to Wilkes. Each was refused. But the resulting publicity forced Halifax to relent and allow Wilkes visitors from then on. The victory became a cause célèbre – ballads were written about the prisoner who became known as the ‘jewel in the Tower’.

As a result, the newspapers of the day suddenly became fascinated with Wilkes, and, when his case came up in the Court of Common Pleas sitting in Westminster Hall, the room was packed with his new-found supporters.[*] The hearing was not to decide whether the pamphlet was, indeed, libellous or a breach of the peace, but whether or not there was a case to answer and thus whether a warrant should have been issued. If not, he should be released immediately.

Speaking for himself, Wilkes told all who would listen:

The liberty of all peers and gentlemen – and (what touches me more sensibly) that of all the middling and inferior set of people, who stand most in need of protection – is, in my case, this day to be finally decided upon; a question of such importance, as to determine at once whether English liberty be a reality or a shadow. Your own free-born hearts will feel with indignation and compassion all that load of oppression under which I have so long laboured: close imprisonment, the effect of premeditated malice; all access to me for more than two days denied; my house ransacked and plundered; my most private and secret concerns divulged together with all the various insolence of office, form but a part of my unexampled ill-treatment. Such inhuman principles of star-chamber tyranny, will, I trust, by this court, upon this solemn occasion, be finally extirpated; and that henceforth every innocent man, however poor and unsupported, may hope to sleep in peace and security in his own house, unviolated by king’s messengers, and the arbitrary mandates of an overbearing secretary of state.

There was silence. Then Pratt made his ruling. He said that Halifax had been right in his assessment of the nature of the pamphlet – for any ordinary man it would have been sufficient grounds for a trial. But Wilkes was not an ordinary man – he was an MP and as such he enjoyed parliamentary privilege and could not be prosecuted for his writings. The verdict was a sensation.

Unbeknownst to the court, however, the government forces ranged against Wilkes had been working on a way to overrule this privilege and had sent two representatives to hand the judge a legal argument that could have reversed the decision. But they were sent – and arrived – 30 seconds too late, for Sergeant Nares, a government prosecutor, cried out just as the decision was handed down: ‘My Lord, I have just received a note from the Attorney and Solicitor General desiring they may be heard upon the point of privilege.’

Pratt replied solemnly: ‘It is too late.’

Had the Attorney and Solicitor General taken one minute less for their scheming, they could have had Wilkes held in the Tower and smothered his rebellion at birth. As it was, he burst out of the court in front of a tide of supporters, crying: ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’

Wilkes was not out of the woods, however. A supporter of the King, Samuel Martin, MP, challenged Wilkes to a duel in Hyde Park. Wilkes accepted the challenge and was shot in the stomach but he survived.

Having tried imprisonment and something akin to assassination without success, the government tried to undermine him another way. Wilkes had written, with Thomas Potter (the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury), a poem entitled ‘An Essay on Woman’, an eye-popping filthy parody of Alexander Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’.

Let’s compare the start of ‘Essay on Man’ (Epistle I, II. 1–8):

Awake, my St John! Leave all meaner things

To low ambition, and the pride of Kings.

Let us (since Life can little more supply

Than just to look about us and to die)

Expatiate free o’er all this scene of Man;

A mighty maze! But not without a plan;

A Wild, where weeds and flow’rs promiscuous shoot,

Or Garden, tempting with forbidden fruit.

to ‘Essay on Woman’ (II. 1–8):

Awake, my Fanny! Leave all meaner things;

This morn shall prove what rapture swiving brings!

Let us (since life can little more supply

Than just a few good fucks, and then we die)

Expatiate free o’er that loved scene of man,

A mighty maze, for mighty pricks to scan;

A wild, where Paphian Thorns promiscuous shoot,

Where flowers the Monthly Rose, but yields no Fruit.

We can go on to: Pope (Epistle I, III. 9–14):

O blindness to the future! kindly given,

That each may fill the circle marked by Heaven:

Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,

A hero perish, or a sparrow fall,

Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,

And now a bubble burst, and now a world.

With Wilkes’s:

O blindness to the future! kindly given,

That each may enjoy what fucks are marked in Heaven:

Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,

The man just mounting, and the virgin’s fall,

Pricks, cunt, and ballocks in convulsions hurled,

And now a hymen burst, and now a world.

Wilkes’s enemies – and there were plenty of them – got hold of the verses. One such man was John Montagu, Earl Sandwich, who had a personal axe to grind: Sandwich was a fellow member of the Hellfire Club and Wilkes had apparently embarrassed him with a prank during one of the Club’s meetings, possibly involving a monkey dressed as Satan. Sandwich read the poem out to the House of Lords – perhaps the only time such language has been heard in that chamber – resulting in a declaration of blasphemy (a debatable claim) and obscenity (it would be hard to argue with that one). Upon hearing the decision, Wilkes, not fancying another stint in the Tower, fled to Paris. A trial was held in absentia and he was found guilty of obscene and seditious libel.

In 1764 the case against Wilkes and the North Briton was also heard. By this time, Wilkes was in France and he had a quandary: if he failed to return he couldn’t defend himself but if he returned to Britain he would be arrested. He stayed where he was.

For refusing to appear in court, the government declared him an outlaw, meaning that he could be shot on sight and the only thing his killer would get would be a pat on the back. The Annual Register wrote that the declaration ‘completed the ruin of that unfortunate gentleman’.

Four years later, however, Wilkes was broke and had to return to Britain. Not one to slip into obscurity, he decided to meet his opponents head-on by standing in the forthcoming general election. And, on 28 March 1768, he duly became the member for the County of Middlesex. London went mad for Wilkes. His supporters charged about the streets once more crying ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’ and writing the number 45 – the number of his famous pamphlet – on every surface.

Still an outlaw, however, he handed himself in to the Court of the King’s Bench. But the presiding judge, too scared to arrest John Wilkes, ruled that, since no officer had brought him in, he was invisible to the court. It took Wilkes a week to arrange his own arrest and detention while he waited for the case against his outlawry to be heard.

Even behind bars, he caused chaos. During his incarceration, a number of his supporters surrounded the prison, chanting, ‘No justice, no peace!’ – at which point an altercation arose with the troops stationed there. The soldiers shot a volley of bullets, killing six of Wilkes’s men and injuring 18 others. They then broke into a tavern and killed another man whom they took to be one of the ringleaders. A coroner’s jury found the soldiers guilty of murder, but a grand jury overturned the verdict. It was clear there would be no justice for Wilkes or his supporters.

Perhaps the febrile atmosphere that followed was the reason the government decided to clear Wilkes, declaring there had been a technical error in the language of the original writ of outlawry. On the other hand, he was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for the original libel.

Things have changed in the last 200-odd years and the King’s Bench Prison of those days would hardly be recognised as a house of correction now. The wealthier denizens lived in something like a gated community, with their own suites of rooms, servants, coffee house and tavern. Visitors of both sexes came and went and many females arrived to entertain Wilkes in the way he enjoyed most.

Still the government wanted to put a stop to Wilkes and had him thrown out of the Commons on the basis that he had been an outlaw at the time of the election. But his expulsion resulted in a by-election at which no other candidate had the nerve to stand against him. Wilkes was re-elected. The Commons expelled him again; he was elected again – the voters were beginning to enjoy this. Once more expelled, once more he put himself up for election – but this time he had an opponent, one Henry Luttrell, who was clearly a government and King stooge. Once again, the people of Middlesex happily voted for Wilkes in their droves, defeating Luttrell by 1,143 votes to 296, but the House of Commons declared any votes for Wilkes had been ‘thrown away’ and Luttrell ‘should have been returned’, thus giving him the seat that Wilkes had won handsomely. Luttrell, an Irishman, was rewarded with the Adjutant Generalcy for Ireland.[**]

After this odd interpretation of voters’ preferences, the politician and historian Edmund Burke imitated the language of the popular playbills of the time, describing it as ‘the fifth act of a revenge tragic-comedy acted by His Majesty’s servants, at the desire of several persons of quality, for the benefit of Mr Wilkes and at the expense of the constitution’.

This was the spark that lit the dry hay under the corrupt, pocketed government that Britain had for so long been labouring under. It had been a merry game for the electorate of Middlesex, going to the polls every five minutes to re-elect their choice of MP. But now Parliament and the King had gone one step further and imposed a man they disliked upon the voters. Across the country, the latent forces of popular democracy were awoken – signatures were collected on petitions, public meetings held, speeches were made in taverns and coffee houses. The Civil War may have asserted the superiority of Parliament over the will of the King, but Wilkes and Liberty was asserting the superiority of the electorate over the entire corrupt Establishment. Sixty thousand people signed the petition. There were even expressions of support from political groups in the American colonies, perhaps encouraging them in their own growing interest in throwing off the shackles of taxation without representation – the South Carolina Assembly sent Wilkes 10,000 South Carolina pounds, equivalent to £1,500.

The King’s speech to Parliament that year did not mention Wilkes but it did have a lot to say about the diseases of horned cattle – no doubt an important subject for those interested in cattle, but something of an oversight to those what wanted a representative democratic process.

It took time but eventually Wilkes managed to overturn the bar on him sitting in the Commons and took a seat. Perhaps the government had been worrying over nothing because, when Wilkes was back in Parliament, he did his best to introduce radical bills, but generally without success. His greatest coup was to end Parliament’s censorship of reports of debates and to end the practice of General Warrants, which were a hammer to destroy the Free Press. It was through one of these that Wilkes had originally been arrested for the 45 pamphlet – without it, his fame and entire career may never have happened. Inside Parliament his effect was small, but by keeping him out, the Establishment had pushed the populace to decide it was they who ran the government, not the other way around.

In 1774 Wilkes went on to be elected Lord Mayor of London. He was a liberal – not quite so liberal as he had been but still a damn sight better than what had gone before him – although his record was blackened by the event of the Gordon Riots, the anti-Catholic violence of 1780. After nights of Catholic homes being attacked, he called out the militia, who promptly shot 257 rioters. They may have had cause, but it was still a massacre. Wilkes’s reputation never recovered.

John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated President Lincoln, was a distant relative of his.

BUT THE POINT WAS TO KEEP THEM OUT – THE GREAT REFORM ACT GENERATES THE WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT, 1832

In the early nineteenth century, women’s suffrage was not just a minority concern, it was virtually unknown. Some oddballs on the fringes of political thought, such as Jeremy Bentham, thought it might be a nice idea but no one was organising any serious campaign. However, when the Great Reform Act of 1832, which overhauled the House of Commons and extended the franchise a bit, was written, it made the error of specifically stating only men would be allowed to vote.[*] Prior to that, a few women had – theoretically – been able to vote, as some constituencies were enfranchised on the basis of property ownership, so wealthy women were able to cast a vote. There had been one or two – literally, one or two – cases of it actually happening.

So when their secondary status came to be enshrined in law, rather than just being custom, women and their male supporters had a specific target and cause – the Great Reform Act had actually taken away women’s right to vote. And, having argued for and secured the Reform Act itself, many political reformers were feeling confident and looking for a new project. Why not let the ladies have a bit of a go?

As part of the ensuing debate, in August 1832 Henry Hunt, MP brought a petition from Mary (or Margaret) Smith, a property-owner and spinster, asking that she might be allowed to vote. Some observers were bemused by the idea – the Age magazine, for instance, stating: ‘We suspect that the petition is nothing more than an advertisement for a husband.’ Others were more credulous, but it wasn’t until 1865 that female suffrage became a major issue again when the name of Lily Maxwell, a shop owner, was accidentally added to the list of voters in a by-election. Her wealth meant that, under the law prior to the Reform Act, she would, technically, have been eligible to vote. It was the Act that had specifically barred her but because her name had been added to the list she became the first woman to cast a vote after the 1832 Act. A court case ensued and the Court of Common Pleas nullified her vote.

Thanks to the Great Reform Act, women’s suffrage was now an issue being debated in court – it could no longer be ignored as a triviality not worth discussing.

ROYAL MISDIAGNOSIS – THE BATTLE OF FLORA HASTINGS, 1839

Queen Victoria, the dumpiest of British monarchs, was not beyond a bit of petty revenge, especially when it came to Flora Hastings.

Lady Flora was one of her ladies-in-waiting and the young Queen disliked her because Flora was rumoured to be having an affair with John Conroy. What was that to Victoria? Well, Conroy was also rumoured to be enjoying an affair with Victoria’s mother, and Victoria hated him both for that and for creating the Kensington System, a series of rules for Victoria’s upbringing, designed to make her weak-willed and dependent upon her mother and Conroy, so that they could be the power behind the throne when she became queen.

Flora, therefore, would be Victoria’s revenge.

When, in 1839, Flora’s waistline began to expand, the Queen pointed to her ‘friendship’ with Conroy and declared that Lady Flora was in a certain condition. She insisted that doctors examine ‘that nasty woman’ to confirm the imminent arrival of a minor Hastings.

Lady Flora’s brother, Lord Hastings, then entered the fray. He informed the Times of the Queen’s despicable behaviour and said it was born out of a ‘depraved court’. Their mother, also named Flora, then wrote a furious letter to Lord Melbourne, the Prime Minister, demanding an end to the ‘atrocious conspiracy’.

Melbourne replied equally furiously: ‘The demand which your ladyship’s letter makes upon me is so unprecedented and objectionable that even the respect due to your ladyship’s sex, rank, family and character would not justify me in more, if indeed it authorises so much, than acknowledging that letter for the sole purpose of acquainting your ladyship that I have received it.’

After it transpired that Flora’s swelling was not a pregnancy, but a cancerous tumour on her liver, which killed her a few months later, the case became a national scandal, hotly talked about in the press, the coffee houses and the theatres. When Victoria attended the opera, she was publicly booed and heckled by the patrons who – quite reasonably – felt she had done wrong by Lady Flora.

The heckling even reached the royal enclosure at Ascot, when the Duchess of Montrose and Lady Sarah Ingestre publicly booed and hissed their monarch. The Queen’s response was to declare: ‘Those two abominable women ought to be flogged.’ They were, however, expressing a public mood. Victoria’s reign had got off to a very unpopular start and might have fallen apart were it not for the fact that she herself fell pregnant a year later.

SHOOTING THE WRONG MAN – ROBERT PEEL SURVIVES, 1843

You have to feel sorry for Spencer Perceval. His sole contribution to British history is to remain the only prime minister to be assassinated. That is not for the want of trying on the part of amateur hit men – a good number of PMs have had their stalkers. But few have experienced would-be killers so incompetent as Robert Peel’s failed murderer, Daniel M’Naghten.

M’Naghten was probably crazy. On 20 January 1843 he walked up to the Prime Minister’s private secretary, Edward Drummond, in Whitehall and shot him from behind. Drummond died five days later from complications, probably because his doctors ‘treated’ him by draining his blood, as was the unhelpful practice of the time.

M’Naghten, of course, thought he was killing the Prime Minister. It was a case of mistaken identity stemming from the fact that Peel was a generous sort who had chosen not to reside in 10 Downing Street, preferring his own house nearby, and had lent the residence to Drummond as a house-sitter. M’Naghten had been watching Number 10 and concluded that the man who came and went all the time must be the PM.

M’Naghten’s case led to the definition in English law of insanity regarding defendants. He was found not guilty on these grounds and incarcerated in a mental asylum rather than a prison.

SWORN ENEMIES – CHARLES BRADLAUGH IS BARRED, 1880

Charles Bradlaugh, MP is responsible for atheists being allowed into Parliament, thus undermining the grip that religion had on government in the Victorian era.

Bradlaugh had worked his way up from humble beginnings as a messenger boy in London. Via the Army, he became a solicitor’s clerk, radical atheist and pamphleteer who railed against Christianity. He produced a journal, the Free Thinker, which brought him to the attention of the political classes, and went on to found the National Secular Society in 1866 (two years after publishing a pamphlet entitled ‘A Few Words About The Devil’, which ranks as his most intriguing title). When he was editor of the Reformer newspaper, the journal was unsuccessfully prosecuted for blasphemy and sedition, but this clearly didn’t worry the people of Northampton, who elected him to Parliament in 1880.

There was a problem, though. Commons procedure stipulated that new members had to swear allegiance to the Crown and Parliament and this was done on the Bible. Bradlaugh, not wishing to be a hypocrite, asked to make a solemn oath without the holy book. The other MPs knew of his atheism, but this was a new development and no one was sure what happened in such circumstances.

There was no law requiring an MP to be a Christian, but the parliamentary procedures simply presumed that they all would be. In fact, neither was there any actual rule that the oath must be taken on the Bible, as far as anyone could see – Britain’s government had evolved over 1,000 years, so many of the supposed rules were little more than custom.

But there was Bradlaugh, literally waiting at the House of Commons bar to see if he would be allowed to take his seat. The man who had the power to rule one way or another was the Speaker, Sir Henry Brand. As arbiter of Commons procedure, Brand could have ruled that Bradlaugh could swear an oath without a Bible – he could probably have ruled that Bradlaugh could take his seat swearing that he was a Chinaman or a 12-year-old girl – but he instead referred the question to the House. This mistake was to cost Parliament dearly. Because the House referred it to a select committee and the select committee decided by a majority of one that Bradlaugh had to swear on the Bible.

Had they stopped for a minute, they might have heard Bradlaugh shouting that it was OK – he had made his protest and he was now prepared to swear on the Bible so long as he could take his seat. After all, everyone inside and outside Parliament knew he thought the Bible was a fairy tale.

But, instead of that happening, Brand made another error: he allowed a debate to take place, at the end of which a spurious and possibly illegal vote was passed, which debarred Bradlaugh, whether or not he swore on the Bible. The issue was seized up and exploited by a group of young Conservative MPs led by Randolph Churchill, who saw that it could be used to embarrass the Liberal government led by William Gladstone, who was in favour of letting Bradlaugh take his seat.

Something like a comedy sketch followed as Bradlaugh attempted to take his seat anyway, only to be chased away, arrested and locked up in the Commons clock tower. Since he was not being allowed to take it, his seat technically fell vacant and there was a by-election. He won it. There was another one. He won it again. And another one – yes, he won that one too.

The issue snowballed in the national conscience, with Bradlaugh, Gladstone, George Bernard Shaw, the electors of Northampton and hundreds of thousands of people who had signed a petition ranged on one side. On the other were Churchill, the Archbishop of Canterbury and an assortment of religious oddballs.

None of this deterred Bradlaugh, who was determined to take the seat he had been elected to three times. On at least one occasion he had to be removed from the Commons by policemen, and in 1883 he managed to take his seat and vote three times before he was fined £1,500 for voting. In support, his friends brought a bill before the House allowing members – i.e. him – to affirm their oath without recourse to the Bible. They lost. But in 1886 there was a new Speaker, Arthur Peel, who ruled (as Brand should have done) that no member would be allowed to prevent another from taking the oath, and Bradlaugh was finally allowed to take his seat six years after being elected.

Two years later, in 1888, a new bill was passed, which allowed Parliamentarians to affirm, rather than swear on the Bible, meaning that non-Christians could, for the first time, represent their constituencies without lying from the very beginning.

THE LOST LETTER – PEEL SAVES DISRAELI, 1846

Benjamin Disraeli: novelist, wit, politician, lover. But his parliamentary career came within a whisker of being cut short. As a young, loyal and brilliant Tory MP in 1841, he wrote to the Prime Minister, Robert Peel, asking for a position in the government. He was rejected – and he wasn’t happy about it.

So he went to plan B: make Peel’s life hell. For the next five years, Disraeli did everything but knock on Peel’s front door and then run away when someone answered. The real showdown came in 1847 in a debate over the Corn Laws; once again, the PM heard that familiar voice rise from the back benches, where Disraeli had become a hero, to mock and humiliate him. But Peel had a secret weapon up his sleeve. He asked Disraeli, if, as he claimed, he so despised his government, why had he once written, begging to be a part of it?

Disraeli had a choice: he could claim he had changed his mind, or that his letter had been misunderstood. Instead, he went for the third option and lied, saying he had never written such a letter. But Peel had him on that for he had kept the letter and had brought it with him to the debate.

He just couldn’t find it.

Had he done so and presented it to the assembled MPs, Disraeli might even have been forced to resign his seat for lying to the House. But it remained unseen.

Disraeli kept his seat and ended up one of Britain’s greatest prime ministers.

A VIRILE MAN – LORD PALMERSTON SHOWS HE’S STILL GOT IT, 1863

Palmerston became Prime Minister at the age of 71 – a ripe old age for such high office. By this time, his numerous affairs had already gained him the nickname Lord Cupid, and he proved he still had the energy to hold it by accidentally fathering a bastard when he was 79. The lady in question was one Mrs O’Kane, who claimed she and the Prime Minister had consummated their adulterous love in the Palace of Westminster.

It all came out when her husband, Timothy, a journalist, sued for divorce, naming the Prime Minister as co-respondent and claiming £200,000 in damages. Marvelling at the energy of the man, the newspapers of the day asked: ‘She was certainly Kane, but was he Abel?’ The story substantially increased Palmerston’s public popularity and strength in government. He died in office two years later, the last British PM to do so.

BAD TIMING – EMILY DAVISON FALLS UNDER THE KING’S HORSE, 1913

It was an incredible act of self-sacrifice. The suffragette Emily Davison killed herself in spectacular fashion, throwing her frail body under the fascist hooves of the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby on 4 June 1913, forcing her cause onto the front pages for weeks.

Only she probably never meant it at all.

In 1986 Davison’s personal effects, which had been kept by her family solicitor, came to light. They included a return train ticket from the race. Even at the time the jockey who ended up on top of her, Herbert Jones, said he thought it was an accident. He often told how he was haunted by the look of surprise on her face when she saw the horse approaching. It seems she had run onto the track under the impression that all the horses had passed, but the King’s horse was a straggler and its approach had been hidden by a hump in the course. She had expected to run on, shout a bit, wave the flag she was carrying, and catch the train back home to London where she had also bought a ticket for a dance that evening. Instead, she was trodden to death and earned her place in the political hall of fame. There is a road named after her, Emily Davison Drive, which is next to Tattenham Corner railway station on the outskirts of Epsom.

Davison was once arrested for violently assaulting a man she mistakenly took for the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George. She later bombed Lloyd George’s house but he was out of the country at the time.

A FOND OLD MAN – ASQUITH GETS DISTRACTED, 1915

During the First World War, H.H. Asquith, the Prime Minister, often failed to pay attention during Cabinet meetings because he was writing love letters. Although in his early sixties, he had become obsessed with his daughter’s 28-year-old friend Venetia Stanley. The 35-year difference in their ages was nothing more than a blink of the eye to a strange old man in love. Over the course of just three months in 1915, he wrote her 151 letters, they weren’t just about lambs and all that stuff – he asked her advice on how to conduct the war. So the Tommies in the trenches were partly following the war plan of an unemployed socialite.

Still, Asquith might well have been drunk half the time – during the reading of the Parliament Bill of 1911, which made Britain a democracy by giving the elected Commons primacy over the unelected Lords, he was so smashed he was unable to speak.

SUFFRAGETTE PITY – ENFRANCHISING WOMEN ON A WHIM, 1925

According to Winston Churchill, it was a dull Friday afternoon in the House of Commons. The Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks – known as ‘Jix’ – was speaking during a debate on female suffrage and outlining the government’s opposition to a private member’s bill which would reduce the age at which women would be allowed to vote from 30 to 21.[*]

When Lady Astor, the first female MP, interrupted his speech to ask if the government ever planned to lower the age, he promised to do so in the next parliament. No one knows why he did this. It wasn’t government policy – it was quite explicitly not so – and he had no authority to do it. But he did. And from then on, having promised it in Parliament, the government had no choice but to deliver on the promise.

‘Never was so great a change in our electorate achieved so incontinently,’ Churchill wrote later.

RULING HIMSELF OUT AS PRIME MINISTER – HERBERT MORRISON LEAVES THE ROOM, 1945

The General Election of 25 July 1945 produced a shock result. Churchill, the man who had won the war, was thrown out of Number 10 by an electorate that gave the Labour Party just under 50 per cent of the vote to the Conservatives’ 36 per cent. Labour took 393 seats, meaning a huge majority of 147.

Labour’s chances had been substantially boosted by a single radio address made by Churchill. He had led the country for four years, and almost to a man the people had been behind him. They had seen their friends, their siblings, their parents, their sons and daughters all killed by the Nazis. Then, during the electioneering, Churchill had gone on the radio to rail against Socialism in a fashion not a million miles from Hitler’s and, adding insult to injury, telling the public: ‘I declare to you from the bottom of my heart that no Socialist government can be established without some form of Gestapo.’

It was seen as being in shockingly poor taste – especially to the families of those who had died at the hands of the Gestapo, such as many of the intelligence agents of the Special Operations Executive who had parachuted into occupied Europe to destroy the German war machine from within.

Clement Attlee, the Labour leader who had served with Churchill in the wartime coalition government, dryly commented: ‘I see that Mr Churchill wishes you to realise that if you vote Conservative you will be voting for the leader of that party, not for the Mr Churchill who led us during the war.’

In all areas, the Tories seemed out of touch with the mood of the nation. Their manifesto, Mr Churchill’s Address to the Electors, sounded like something from the nineteenth century. In Kensington, their candidate had election posters depicting him in officer’s dress, with the simple slogan ‘Vote for Captain Duncan’. His Labour opponent capitalised on this political naivety and produced near-identical posters with ‘Vote for Corporal Woodford’. The Corporal won the seat.

Despite all this, no one was more surprised by Labour’s victory than the party’s MPs. Previously, they had been a lonely bunch wandering the corridors of power, occasionally catching a glimpse through closing doors of the nice warm offices that ministers occupied. Suddenly, the Labour benches were stuffed full of new boys and girls. And their very first thought was of treachery.

Attlee had led the party through the lean times, but had been chosen as party leader by the small number of Labour MPs who had been in the Commons during the previous Parliament. There were mutterings that the new members should have their say because perhaps they wanted someone else in charge – especially since that person would be the Prime Minister.

Thus it was that Attlee and senior MPs Herbert Morrison and Ernest Bevin sat in Attlee’s office just after the election results were announced silently plotting for their own ends. As they did so, a phone call came through. It was George VI inviting the party leader to attend him at Buckingham Palace to become Prime Minister. Morrison was insisting on a vote by the full crop of MPs as to whom it should be. And if anyone were to suggest it should be him … well, who was he to argue with public opinion?

Attlee was considering the proposition when Morrison was called away to take a private phone call. The moment he left the room, Bevin said: ‘Clem, go to the Palace straight away.’ Attlee thought this a very good idea. As Attlee was working his way across London to the Palace, Morrison was almost certainly under the impression that a leadership election was in the bag and he might be collecting the keys to Number 10 that evening. Instead, the only thing he got was an evening paper, informing him that Attlee had sneaked out and made himself Prime Minister.

Attlee’s meeting with the King was a stilted affair. The new PM wasn’t known for his gregarious nature, and George VI had a terrible stutter and preferred not to speak to anyone. After the two had stood staring at each other for a few minutes, Attlee informed him: ‘I’ve won the election.’

The King replied: ‘I know – I heard it on the Six O’Clock News.’

A FALSE POSITIVE – HAROLD MACMILLAN RESIGNS, 1963

Despite the terrible handicap of having gone to Eton and Oxford, Harold ‘Supermac’ Macmillan struggled up through the Conservative party ranks to become Prime Minister. He is perhaps most famous for having informed the British public that they ‘never had it so good’ a few months after coming to power in January 1957 – possibly factually correct in the late 1950s so long as you weren’t in need of an abortion. But his time in Number 10 came to an abrupt end six years later when his doctor informed him that he had prostate cancer. We can only guess how Macmillan, who had planned to lead his party against Harold Wilson in the 1964 General Election, felt while he wrote out his resignation letter, which was to be read to the faithful at the party conference. His misgivings were unlikely to have been substantially mitigated as he watched Alec Douglas-Home, who was to succeed him as party leader, sprint to the conference and make it public before anyone could stop him.

Macmillan must therefore have had mixed feelings when he was informed by his doctors that they had made a mistake and there was nothing wrong with him. Rather than dying in a matter of months, he lived until 1986. In the General Election, Wilson gained the most wafery of wafer-thin majorities – just four MPs.

Had his doctors not misdiagnosed his condition, it would have been the trusted incumbent Macmillan fighting Wilson rather than the untried Douglas-Home, and the election result might well have delivered another Conservative government.

‘THIS IS OFF THE RECORD, ISN’T IT?’ – MICHAEL FOOT’S WIFE STABS HIM IN THE BACK, 1983

As the choice to lead the Labour Party, Michael Foot should have been slightly less popular than Mussolini. Coming across as a befuddled academic with misty-eyed views of Soviet politics, he contrasted sharply with Margaret Thatcher, who could orate in language understood by one and all, and seemed to quite like Britain, instead of wanting to phase it out. That even his own party didn’t want to be members if he was in charge was proved when six Labour MPs broke away to form the Social Democratic Party, led by David Owen.

In the run-up to the 1983 General Election, Foot wasn’t going down well with the electorate. Having just won the Falklands War, Britain was in no mood for a pacifist who wanted to voluntarily give up the nation’s nuclear deterrent – a policy then a central plank of the election manifesto that was famously described by one of the Labour Party’s MPs as ‘the longest suicide note in history’.

In addition, Labour had a much more plausible potential leader in the form of Denis Healey. He was witty, as deputy leader he was already halfway there, and he could perform on television without coming across as some sort of biological experiment. The dark mutterings against Foot led to an extraordinary announcement during the election campaign when Labour’s campaign manager held a press briefing to announce: ‘At the campaign committee this morning we were all insistent that Michael Foot is the leader of the Labour Party and speaks for the party. The unanimous view of the campaign committee is that Michael Foot is the leader.’ He might as well have come out and said: ‘Michael Foot? Yeah, I suppose so.’

And all that was before Foot’s wife got involved.

Just as the British public were about to go to the polls, Jill Foot was speaking to a group of people she didn’t really know. Not for one moment imagining that they might tell anyone, she informed them that her husband would resign if Labour lost, but, even if they won, he wouldn’t stay very long: he would resign to make room for a younger man.

She believed that she was talking exclusively to loyal party members but one was a reporter for the local newspaper, who broke the news that even Foot’s own wife thought he was too old and frail to be Prime Minister.

On 9 June the Tories were elected with a majority substantially increased from their last. It led to soul-searching and a repositioning of the Labour Party – from then on, the left wing was on the run and the centrists under Neil Kinnock, then John Smith, were on the rise – culminating in Tony Blair’s descent upon the party to lead it to the promised land of Downing Street.

ALWAYS CHECK YOUR MIKE – GORDON BROWN AND BIGOTGATE, 2010

In 2010 one of the least charismatic men ever to hold the office of Prime Minister left Number 10 Downing Street. Had Gordon Brown remembered to take his radio microphone off after an interview during the election campaign, he might just have remained there for another five years.

According to people who have met him, Brown can be charming, witty and good company. If this is true, he has always managed to hide it brilliantly from newspaper and broadcast interviewers alike.

His people skills were on particular display during the 2010 General Election when Brown, a man not noted for his common touch, was on a painful-to-watch walkabout in Greater Manchester to ‘connect’ with ordinary voters. One of those to whom he was presented was Gillian Duffy, a harmless, grey-haired grandmother and widow from Rochdale, whom Brown called ‘a bigoted woman’ live on national television without meaning to, or even realising it.

Mrs Duffy, a Labour voter, had asked the PM about state benefits not being available to those who needed them because they were going to people who weren’t in real need. She added: ‘You can’t say anything about the immigrants because you’re saying that you’re … but all these Eastern Europeans what are coming in – where are they all flocking from?’

In front of the cameras, Brown replied with his trademark uncomfortable smile and a few bland words designed to sound like an answer without actually being one. He then waved goodbye and got into his car. As he drove away, he failed to notice that he hadn’t removed the radio mike that Sky News had placed on him earlier. It picked up the conversation in the car with his aide, Justin Forsyth, and faithfully relayed it back to the Sky newsroom. It ran thus:

Brown: That was a disaster. Sue [Brown’s adviser] should never have put me with that woman. Whose idea was that?

Forsyth: I don’t know – I didn’t see her.

Brown: Sue’s, I think. Just ridiculous!

Forsyth: What did she say?

Brown: Everything! She was just a sort of bigoted woman who said she used to be Labour. I mean, it’s just ridiculous!

In the blink of an eye, Brown’s comments were broadcast on every television and radio channel. Duffy was asked for a response. She gave one: ‘He’s an educated person, why has he come out with words like that? He’s supposed to lead this country and he’s calling an ordinary woman who’s just come up and asked questions what most people would ask him – he’s not doing anything about the national debt and it’s going to be tax, tax, tax for another 20 years to get out of this mess – and he’s calling me a bigot. I thought he was understanding – but he wasn’t, was he? The way he’s come out with the comments.’

In a cringingly desperate attempt at damage-limitation, Brown’s car immediately spun around and took the ashen-faced PM right back to Duffy’s door, where he apologised profusely and asked if he could come in to apologise some more. She allowed him to do so, although she didn’t look overjoyed at the prospect of taking tea with someone fond of insulting her on national television.

For the electorate, the incident was easily the most memorable moment of the campaign. They had never warmed to Brown, and now they had good reason to hate him. Ageing, dyed-in-the-wool Labour voters saw that he secretly treated them with contempt whenever he thought he could get away with it and many no doubt put their cross against the name of the nice, smiley young Tory leader David Cameron, who had never been unpleasant about them on Sky News. The election delivered a hung parliament – with just a few of the voters Brown personally alienated, Labour might have clung on to power by their fingertips.

*  It’s hard to know what other nations think when they see the home of British PMs – the Americans have the marvellous neo-classical White House; the French have the elegantly imposing Elysée Palace. British leaders have a terraced house that suffers the occasional mouse infestation. In fact, Number 10 is actually three houses joined together – a sixteenth-century mansion, a cottage (occupied by a Mr Chicken when Walpole took possession) and the normal terraced house that is usually seen. Between them there are more than a hundred rooms – it’s just the façade that looks dull and unimposing. Downing, by the way, was a spy for Oliver Cromwell.

* Although Westminster Hall had been built as a throne room, its use was somewhat multi-functional on an ad hoc basis. The Chancery of the Exchequer used a room above the entrance hall for its meetings. The Court of the King’s Bench met at the southeast corner of the great hall; the Court of Chancery occupied the southwest; and the Court of Common Pleas, which was presided over by Lord Chief Justice Pratt, sat at the middle of the south wall. Their plots were divided up by nothing more than removable screens, and were connected by a gangway filled with stalls hawking books, clothes and anything else people wanted to buy.

**  When the Dublin Post of 2 May 1811 wrongly reported Luttrell had died, he demanded a retraction, which the paper printed under the headline ‘PUBLIC DISAPPOINTMENT’.

*  The Reform Act was a jolly affair, although ‘Great’ is up for debate. Only increasing the franchise from 400,000 to 650,000 men – around one in six of the adult male population – it was really just a clear-out of all the dross that had built up in the parliamentary system over the previous 500 years. Top of the list for reform were the rotten boroughs. These were constituencies that had once possibly justified having an MP, but over the centuries had become ghost towns. The most famous was Old Sarum, a muddy field in Wiltshire, which had been the original settlement that became Salisbury, but by the nineteenth century was occupied only by goats.

Those goats returned not one but two MPs to Parliament, including William Pitt the Elder. And he only got the job because his family had bought two constituencies for his elder brother, Thomas, and his brother had been ‘elected’ to both, so he gave Old Sarum to William. At least you could stand in Old Sarum – the parliamentary seat of Dunwich in Suffolk was largely underwater.

*  Jix was an anti-semite, a great opponent of people enjoying themselves in nightclubs and spent a good deal of energy on banning Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness.

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