‘MADE IN BRITAIN.’
There isn’t much left that one can say is uniquely British – but there is one oddity … The Eccentric.
When someone behaves oddly in Europe, they are branded a mad misfit and put away. In America, that same someone would be called a whacko (Whacko-Jacko?) and committed to the care of an analyst. In Africa, he or she would be shut away and probably starved to death. In Arabia, oddballs are beheaded, and the Chinese shoot them.
In daft old Britain, those strange souls who deliberately or otherwise defy the accepted rules of normal behavior without actually ever breaking any laws are called scatterbrained or slightly dotty or batty or off their rocker or any one of a dozen more terms of amused endearment. They are our eccentrics and we love them, and protect them, and treasure them.
Many are beloved members of an adoring family. Others end up with their own television programmes or have a TV documentary made about them. Remember the odd behavior of scientist Magnus Pyke on BBC television? Or Quentin Crisp, the self-titled Naked Civil Servant? He had a film, a TV documentary and a mini-series made about his life.
Currently on TV there is Patrick Moore, complete with monocle and ill-fitting clothes. And remember Fred Dibnah, the steeplejack? His TV programmes are continually repeated – and interestingly good they are too.
In television times gone by there was TV cook Fanny Craddock ordering her husband Johnny around like a servant, arm-waving scientist Malcolm Muggeridge, singer and raconteur George Melly and the wonderfully idiosyncratic Goon, Spike Milligan… to name just a few.
From the political arena, I can remember the hugely mustachioed Conservative Member of Parliament, Gerald Nabarro, wearing his usual top hat and Edwardian-style clothes complete with longcoat, wing collar, cravat, and spats. And I often saw Joe Grimmond, Leader of the Liberal Party, standing on a corner of Westminster Square facing outwards and seemingly shouting at the passing traffic. He wasn’t, he was rehearsing the wonderful speeches he made in the House of Commons. I also saw the brilliant Michael Foot, MP, with his slovenly clothes, run at heel shoes and wild hair, clutching his leaky old briefcase to his chest. Foot would rather not use taxicabs because it went against his socialist principles. He much preferred to walk, cycle, or use public transport, even during his three years as Leader of the Labour Party.
Beloved eccentrics all, and how sad we are when we lose one. The average Britisher would rather hear about the death of any number of well-known celebrities, businessmen, archbishops, judges and high-ranking politicians, than a single treasured eccentric. One could say that we British are dotty about them.
Academia has had more than its fair share of eccentrics. One such, was Cambridge University Professor, Charles K. Ogden. His minor claim to fame among scholars is his invention of Basic English, a language-simplifying-scheme but his greatest achievement is to be remembered as academia’s greatest oddball.
The sudden death of Ogden in 1957, at the relatively young age of 68, deeply affected the British establishment. Many asked, ‘Who will step into Ogden’s shoes?’ In fact, since his death, nobody has.
For example, at a time when all men wore hats, a hat rack suspended far out of reach over the staircase confronted visitors to Ogden’s college rooms. Two men did somehow manage to hang their hats on the rack. Not being able to retrieve them, there they hung, gathering dust. And because the college was reluctant to show disrespect for the dead Ogden, it is rumoured that the hats continued to hang on the suspended rack for at least another ten years.
Once past the hat rack, visitors were invariably politely ushered into Ogden’s quarters and invited to sit on the floor to eat from saucers of sweets, nuts and bananas, and to smoke homemade herbal cigarettes. Cannabis perhaps?
Dress was optional when calling on Ogden. He himself always wore the same blue/grey tweed suit, square toed suede shoes, no socks, and a flannel shirt with a collar-size so large that when the shirt was buttoned up to the neck, Ogden could still thrust his arm down inside it to scratch his chest.
As well as being one of the foremost scholars of his day, Ogden was a great collector. He filled his rooms with masks, books, music boxes and clocks. Ogden often set his music boxes a-tinkling, and his ticking clocks a-chiming, all at the same time. Invariably he would add to the din by singing at the top of his voice and joyously dancing, more like stomping, around his rooms, making a huge racket.
Strangely, Ogden detested any noise made by others and was an active supporter of the Anti-Noise League, doing all he could to prevent outside noises from entering his home. Whenever a noise did succeed in doing so, he would turn up his radio full blast. No foreign noises were allowed to intrude upon his own private hullabaloo in which he would often work happily all night, breaking off at dawn for breakfast.
One sure test of true eccentricity is whether it sits comfortably on its owner. A natural eccentric ignores the effect his, or her, odd behaviour has on others, but can, at the same time, display anger when his or her antics cause annoyance. The late eighteenth-century writer and free-thinker, John Fransham, condemned daily bed-making as ‘the height of effeminacy’ and worked towards the day when once a week bed-making would be normal. He was almost always in a rage about something done or said by his peers. Many thought Fransham to be childish, not eccentric, and often said so to his face. His strange behavior included burning his oboe, of which he was an acknowledged maestro, to boil his teakettle, and his obsessive playing of a children’s toy called a ‘bilbo-catch,’ persevering until he had caught the ball on the spike for exactly 666 consecutive times.
What his detractors did not know was that numerologists consider the number six-hundred-and-sixty-six as the perfect number. Fransham, by catching that ball six-hundred-and-sixty-six times, expected to get as close as thought coupled with action to the grand ideal of the greatest happiness.
Nobody knows if the experiment worked.
Another great British eccentric was Squire Charles Waterton. He liked to crouch on all fours behind the hangings of his entrance hall. When guests came to hang up their coats, he would make a noise like a snarling dog and bite their ankles. In South America he rode an alligator bareback, keeping control of it by twisting its forelegs.
To Waterton, such stunts were meant to be funny, and, despite the fact that almost nobody else enjoyed his jokes, he continued to do all sorts of strange things purely for his own amusement. But that isn’t what earned him his rabid-eccentric reputation. His oddness went far deeper. He spent much of his life trying to exterminate black rats. An ardent Roman Catholic, Waterton believed that foreign Protestants had introduced the rats into Britain to infect Catholics with deadly diseases.
When he wasn’t chasing rats, he was one of Britain’s greatest taxidermists. British Customs Officers once held up some crates of South American birds until every bird had died and made useless for taxidermy. Waterton’s retaliation was to disembowel and preserve a large monkey, which he then dressed in fashionable clothes and gave it a face resembling the chief of customs.
In a great fanfare of publicity he set it up in the hall of a London club as a warning to other plebeians (his word) to not hold up scientific progress.
A great explorer, Waterton, who preached that shoes should only be worn indoors, always went barefoot. During every trek, he nightly used a sharp pointed clasp knife to remove the foreign objects, creepy-crawlies and insects that had stuck to, or in, his feet.
During a walk around the USA, Waterton sprained his ankle. Remembering how sprained ankles in Britain were helped to heal by holding the leg under a water pump, he decided to shove his under the falling waters of Niagara Falls.
He wrote in his journal, ‘…as I held my leg under the fall, I tried to meditate on the immense difference there was betwixt a house pump and this tremendous cascade of nature. In the end, the sheer magnitude of the falls obliged me to desist in chasing a quick cure.’
Nothing changes. During a recent walk across the Antarctic ice-cap, Ranulph Feines, the modern day explorer, used a knife to cut away the infected gangrenous flesh and bone of his fingers and toes, leaving himself with half digits.
Are there any other eccentrics around these days? Not many, and Britain is the poorer without them, I say.
