Everything Is Possible For An Eccentric, Especially When He Is English – Part Twenty Five
Charles Waterton (1782 – 1865)
It is a fascinating to see how our perceptions of someone have changed over time. Take Charles Waterton, for example. The Yorkshire born naturalist and taxidermist was viewed principally as one of the 19th century’s foremost eccentrics, not least because he featured in the pages of Edith Sitwell’s 1933 classic, The English Eccentrics. Today, he is viewed as a pioneering environmentalist.
Observing nature and conducting experiments in the tropics in South America in the 1810s required considerable ingenuity and was certainly not for the faint of heart. Waterton once jumped on to the back of a crocodile, seizing its front legs in a vice-like grip and riding it as if it was a bucking bronco, a feat of balance, determination and derring-do which he put down the training he had received riding with the foxhounds of Lord Darlington.
Keen to observe at close quarters the teeth of a boa constrictor, he couldn’t get his native guides to summon up the courage to bundle it up into a sack. Undaunted Waterton whipped off his braces and bound the poor creature up with them. I hope his trousers stayed up. The guides’ circumspection was perhaps justified. After all, when Waterton tried to interest a vampire bat to bite his toe in order to study the effect of its toxins, the ingrate creature swooped down and bit his amanuensis instead. The experiment was abandoned.
Returning to his family home, Walton Hall, in the 1820s Charles astonished his neighbours by building a three mile long perimeter wall around the estate, some eight to nine feet high. The purpose? Not to keep nosey parkers out but to keep fauna in. He was in the process of constructing one of the world’s first wildfowl and nature reserve. Perhaps slightly more unnerving, callers would often find him up a tree, “dressed like a scarecrow,” the better to observe birds or, on occasion, to return chicks which had fallen out of their nest in a storm. He is also credited with inventing the nesting box.
Waterton cut a striking figure. Eschewing the fashion of the time to sport a full set of whiskers and a luxuriant head of hair, he was clean-shaven and wore his hair closely cropped. That was the least that would unnerve an unsuspecting visitor. His house was full of strange creatures, including an albino hedgehog, a duck without webbing on its feet, and a Brazilian toad which, for a time, accompanied him everywhere. Anyone venturing into Waterton’s room would encounter a live three-toed sloth hanging from the back of a chair.
Taxidermy was one of his passions and he would often create grotesque creatures from the parts of two or three different animals. Guests were frightened out of their wits when they came across them in darkened passageways, Waterton adding to his sport by, as an ardent Catholic, naming the most extraordinary specimens of his work after prominent Protestants.
Dinner could also be a bit of a trial. He allegedly dissected a gorilla on the table after the dishes had been cleared away. He would surprise his guests by greeting them on all-fours and occasionally would nip them on the shins as if he were a dog. It is surprising anyone came around.
But Charles was also an environmentalist, waging a long campaign against a soap works adjacent to his property who he claimed were polluting the area. He won his case in 1839 and the company relocated to pollute (and bring employment to) nearby Wakefield.
Charles was deeply affected by the death in 1830 of his young wife in childbirth – the baby survived – and from that day on he slept, wrapped in a cloak, on the floor with a block of beechwood for a pillow, rising at 3.30am and breakfasting on dry toast, watercress and a cup of watery, black tea.
He died from injuries sustained in a fall and his body was taken by barge to its final resting place, between two great oak trees, which, sadly, no longer exist.
A naturalist with a streak of eccentricity, I would say.
