The Emperor of the United States of America & Other Magnificent British Eccentrics

by Catherine Caufield

Provides an entertaining, whimsical look at 104 unusual Britishers, including opera impresario John Christie and Joshua Norman, the self-proclaimed Emperor of the United States

Genres: History

223 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1981

Reviews

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is basically a dictionary of some major British eccentrics.  Unfortunately I found the book a little boring.   

One big oversight is that the birth and death dates of the people described aren't given, or just a death date might be casually mentioned at the end of the piece.   I've therefore done some googling.   It's a bit frustrating to read a potted history of someone without knowing when they lived.

Another more serious oversight is that the author has done little research into the reason why people become eccentrics.  There obviously are reasons (psychological conditions, trauma, fetishes, family history and so forth), but none of these things are explored.  Rather we just get a flat description of their lives and behaviours.  I can understand this is helpful if you want to shoehorn everyone under the label "eccentrics", but I would have much preferred more detail about the cause of these people's idiosyncrasies. 

On a more positive note, one thing I got from the book was a greater tolerance and acceptance of eccentricity - both in me and amongst my friends - and other people too.   In our culture of media and social media perfection it's so easy to forget that it's fine to be different, even if quite bizarrely so.

Finally, this is the perfect book for carrying around on your travels.   It's a slim volume, light to carry, and there is no continuity whatsoever.   You can literally pick it up, read a couple of pages, and then leave it for months.   I think I've been reading it for about a year.

I shall end with my usual bunch of notes.   This time just a mention of the few eccentric people that I want to remember.

Hannah Beswick (1688 - 1758)

She had a morbid obsession of being buried alive - quite a popular obsession in the 18th century.   She died in 1758, leaving her doctor £25,000 on the condition that he visited her regularly after her death.  He therefore had her embalmed, and kept her in a grandfather-clock case in his house.

These responsibilities were transferred to other parties upon the doctor's death until finally, in July 1868, over a hundred years later, she was buried forever in Manchester General Cemetery, having been pronounced well and truly dead.  Interestingly she was buried in an unmarked grave, though the author doesn't explain why.


Ivy Mabel Blackhurst (Died 1978)

When she died, she left behind her a cat called Blackie.   She left him £20,000.   He lived on in her detached house, waited on by a full-time housekeeper.

John Christie  (1882 - 1962)

He was the founder of Glyndebourne Festival Opera.   He was a general eccentric, joking with the Queen about his glass eye, introducing people by the wrong names, and for a joke giving all the female visitors to Glyndebourne knitting needles and wool.   

He loved tapioca and was known to eat up to seven helpings.  He also was a bit of a dandy and at one time owned 180 handkerchiefs, 132 pairs of socks and 110 shirts.  For a time lederhosen were practically a uniform with him and in the summer of 1933 all the visitors to Glyndebourne were expected to wear lederhosen or dirndls.

Henry Cope (Died 1806)

Known as "The green man" he lived in Brighton and was committed to everything in his life being green.  His green clothing, his green carriage, his green-liveried groom holding a green whip.  He lived in a room which was painted green  and filled with green carpet and furniture.  He ate only green fruit and vegetables.

He died when he walked over the edge of a cliff.

Daniel Dancer (1716 - 1794)

He was the son and grandson of misers, plus his siblings also showed this tendency,  but he was the leader of them all in having miserly traits.   These only came to the surface when his father died.

He inherited a farm and 80 acres of rich land, but he refused to cultivate it and let the land lie fallow.   He didn't live in the main house, but in a run-down shack elsewhere on the property, with his sister acting as housekeeper.   Every Saturday she cooked one piece of beef and 14 hard dumplings, which were made to last for the whole week.

He built a hiding-place for his money out of cow dung.

Before his sister's death he refused to call a doctor, and afterwards he got a like-minded servant named Griffiths instead.

He considered it wasteful to use soap, so would wait for a sunny day, scrub himself with sand at a nearby pond, and lie in the sun to dry.  One biographer said "he was never without a colony of insect friends attached to his person."

He would ride on a sack rather than use a saddle.

He was much kinder to his servant than he was to himself.   When travelling he put his servant up at an inn (costing £15.00), while he slept under his horse's manager in the stable.

FW Densham (1870 - 1953)

This was a rector who quarrelled with all his parishioners.   Most of them left his church when he painted the 12 century building red and blue, with black and white striped pillars.  No-one attended a service in the last year he was there - but the church wasn't empty.   Each vacant seat was occupied by a cardboard cut-out or with a name card supplied by Father Denesham.

He put up an 8 foot barbed wire fence around his rectory, with a box for mail and provisions.   He had no furniture at the rectory, and lived mainly on porridge and nettles.

George Edward Dering (1831 - 1911)

He was the squire of Lockeleys, Welwyn, and also an inventor - mainly in the field of railways and electrical devices.   This earned him a fellowship in the Royal Society.   He was also a friend of the great tight-rope walker, Blondin, who crossed Niagara Falls, and sometimes Blondin would take Dering and while blindfold, push him in a wheelbarrow across a rope across the River Mimram.

For the most part Dering lived quietly - in fact it became an obsession with him.   The shutters on his house were closed all day to keep the noise out.   The farmer whose sheep grazed his land was asked to remove all new born lambs, as their bleating was too loud.   He bought the house next door to his, rather than put up with his neighbour's barking dog.   He even spent £20,000 building a new public highway - purely at his own expense - to divert the noisy traffic from an existing road that ran too near the house.

For a period up to about 30 years prior to 1907 he became an absentee landlord.   No-one knew where he spent his time or when he would return.   Usually he came just once a year, before Christmas.   
In 1907 he again took up residence at Lockeleys, but lived in only one room into which no-one else dared to come.   Eventually he dismissed all his servants and staff, and let the estate run wild.

After his death his friends and neighbours learnt that he'd been living in Brighton under the name of Dale, with a wife and child.   Dering's daughter was even more surprised to find herself heir to Lockeleys and an impressive fortune - about which she had known nothing.

Godfrey Harold Hardy (1877 - 1947)

Hardy was a brilliant mathematician, who taught at Trinity College Cambridge.   He was also a friend and collaborator with Ramanujau, the self-taught Indian mathematician whom he helped bring to England in 1914.

He was dismissive of 20th century technology.   He refused to use a watch, and found quills better than fountain pens.   If he had to use the telephone he would simply shout his message into the mouthpiece and hang up, denying that he could hear anything through the receiver.

He loved cricket but always used to dress for it as if expecting extreme bad weather.  This was designed to deceive God into thinking that he expected rain.   According to Hardy it was excellent insurance against bad weather.

Col. Giles Eyre (died 1830)

Eyre lived in Ireland, with 40 horses and 3 packs of hounds (70 dogs).   When his finances were good he used to keep a plate of money at the back door, for beggers to help themselves.

Robert Hawker (1803 - 1875)

This was a very colourful vicar with a parish in Cornwall.   He devised a working costume of a brown cassock with velvet cuffs, a floppy tie and a black velvet hat.   Later on, he sometimes wore a three-quarter length purple coat, blue jersey, scarlet gauntlets and a yellow poncho.   When his wife died, he wore a pink fez to her funeral. 

In 1849 he began restoring the church and vicarage.  He had the church roof re-tiled, not properly with slate, but with wood.   He knew they wouldn't last long but insisted that bad materials should be used as well as good ones - a symbol of the Church's welcome to sinners as well as saints.

He was a friend to animals, and allowed them into his services.

On his deathbed, after 44 years as an Anglican priest, he converted to Catholicism.

Jemmy Hirst (1738–1829)

He had a legendary love of animals: his best friends were an otter and a tame fox, and he had a pet bear called Nicholas.   He went regularly to  fox hunts,  his mount a bull named Jupiter. 
 
He would go to the races in a multi-coloured wicker carriage drawn by four mules.   He wore a lambskin cap nine feet in circumference, an otter-skin coat, a waistcoat of drake's feathers, patchwork breeches, red and white striped stockings and yellow boots.   He handed out his own private currency - coloured banknotes of his own design worth five and a half pence each.

James Lucas (1813 - 1874)

Although odd as a child, Lucas didn't really blossom into the eccentric hermit he became until after the death of his mother, and an unrequited love affair with Isabella Amos - who also died soon after his mother.

"He barricaded himself in the family house in Hertfordshire, and settled down to live in the kitchen.   There was no furniture in his 'cell', but he kept a fire going night and day, and slept on a bed of ashes.   These were never removed, and by the time of his death the ashes, packed down though they had been over 25 years, reached to more than half the height of the room.

Robert Nicholl Matthewson

In 1912 Mr Matthewson collected his new car from a manufacturer in Lowestoft.   He took the car back to where he lived in Calcutta in India.   It was shaped like a swan and had a horn with eight organ pipes and a keyboard which worked off the exhaust system.   The swan's beak opened by a lever.   A second lever sent half a pint of hot water from the radiator into the swan's nostrils.   This was forced out by compressed air, making a swan-like hissing sound. 
 
Sadly, the car proved so popular that eventually the police were forced to ban it from the streets of Calcutta.

Helena Comtesse de Noailles(1826 – 1908)

The daughter of a wealthy English family, she married the Comte de Noailles in 1849.  They separated after three years and after that she lived as she wished to.

She was interested in art, the pinnacle of this being the purchase of a beautiful young girl aged nine from Spain, who had been an artist's model.   She gave her father two bags of gold.  Maria was then sent to an English convent school.

Madame la Comtesse had a strict health regimen.   She went to bed every night with stockings filled with grey squirrel fur wrapped around her forehead and chin, and a wildcat skin, imported  from Norway, covering her chest.   The windows were furnished with green curtains and red glass.  She kept a number of cows tethered near her window so she could inhale methane, which she thought had health benefits.

When Maria married she moved to Norfolk, Madame went to visit her there, but insisted that all the trees in the vicinity of the house  be cut down, and asked that cows be brought into the garden to improve the atmosphere.

She lived to the age of eighty-four, existing at the end of champagne and milk.