Everything Is Possible For An Eccentric, Especially When He Is English – Part Twenty Three
Richard Whately (1787 – 1863)
An economics professor at Oxford in the 1820s who made his name with two hefty tomes, Elements of Logic and Elements of Rhetoric, sartorially Richard Whately cut quite a dash. Eschewing the traditional academic gown he favoured a long white cloak and a beaver hat, earning himself the sobriquet of the White Bear. To his astonishment, not least because he was sympathetic to the Catholic cause, he was plucked from the groves of academe in 1831 by Lord Grey and appointed Archbishop of Dublin in 1831.
Already regarded with suspicion by the Protestants in Ireland, Whately’s character failed to endear him to the locals. He enjoyed an argument, peppering his conversation with puns and word play, but always had to have the last word. Perhaps his most famous contribution to what passed as 19th century humour was this rather contrived quip; “Why cannot a man starve in the desert? Because he can eat the sand which is there. But how did the sandwiches get there? Noah sent Ham and his descendants mustered and bred.” Boom, boom.
Whately could also be insensitive and rude. When a cleric asked his Grace’s permission to go to New Zealand for health reasons, he responded; ““By all means go to New Zealand; you are so lean that no Maori could eat you without loathing.” Annoyed by a cleric who was droning on, Whately suddenly piped up and asked the poor man, “Pray, sir, why are you like the bell of your own church?” The Archbishop then enlightened him by revealing the answer to the riddle; “it is because you have a long tongue and an empty head.”
Perhaps more disconcerting to the great and the good of Dublin society were some of Whately’s physical traits. He seemed unable to keep his feet still. He would pace up and down whilst waiting for his dinner, sometimes take out a pair of scissors and trim his nails or, if the pre-dinner small talk was particularly annoying, he would take the calling cards and fling them across the room. Another pre-prandial trick was whilst talking to whirl a chair round on one of its legs. Sometimes the leg would break – Lady Anglesey, a regular hostess, is said to have lost six of her best chairs this way.
It was perilous to be seated next to the Archbishop at a dinner as Provost Lloyd found out on one occasion. Whately was giving the after dinner speech and was in full flow, telling stories and cracking jokes. But what caught his fellow diners’ attention was what was happening to his right foot. Somehow Whately had managed to double it back over his left thigh, grasp the instep with both hands as if to strangle it and then placed it on the poor Provost’s lap. And there it stayed for the duration of his speech. The stoic Provost is said not to have turned a hair.
Chief Justice Doherty was sitting next to Whately at a Privy Council meeting and felt the need to sneeze. Reaching down to his pocket for his handkerchief he was astonished to find Whately’s foot already nestling in there. Perhaps even more alarmingly for society hostesses, Whately would often draw a chair up to the fireplace and rest his legs up on the mantelpiece, oblivious to any valuable objets d’art that may have been deposited there.
Regarded as pro-Catholic by the Protestants and a wolf in sheep’s clothing by the Catholics, Whately’s attempts to reform the Irish education system and enhance the lot of the poor were stymied. His spirit was broken and he lived out his final decade almost as a recluse. His beloved wife died in 1860, plunging him further into depression. He became reclusive and with his health failing, he turned to homeopathy. He finally met his maker in 1863 and there is a rather splendid memorial to him in Dublin’s St Patrick’s Cathedral.
These days Whately would have been diagnosed with some fancy syndrome, perhaps autism, but at the time his eccentricities gave his enemies plenty of scope to make mischief.
