52 Times Britain was a Bellend: The History You Didn’t Get Taught At School

by James Felton

Sedan chair carriers also hated Umbrella Boy for the same reason. Why would anyone pay to have two slightly posh-looking men in top hats carry you around very slowly like a parcel, when what you really want to do was stand under a dry thing.

Cab drivers and coach drivers, normally rivals, united in their hatred of Jonas and regularly pelted him with rubbish, not fully comprehending that one of the many benefits of using an umbrella is it stops stuff from hitting you.

To complicate things a bit, Jonas was also a bellend. He was a big advocate for solitary confinement and was against letting tea and Jewish people into the UK. Ergo, perhaps the abuse was justified – it just would have been nice if it had been about the racism rather than for using an object we went on to adore.

We’ve done a lot of weird shit to the poor in our time but forcing them to wear hats that they don’t want to wear is up there with taxing them for growing beards (which it’s also rumoured we did).

In 1571, the English Monmouth hat was going out of fashion. After enjoying a long era of being England’s favourite woollen knitted headwear, all of a sudden it was soooo 1562.

The hats that had once been the favourite of Lords and Earls were now the 16th-cen...

Queen Elizabeth I decided to force people to wear them by law. Nothing keeps an item in fashion like a Parliament decree to wear it against your will.

In an act of Parliament, she stated that everyone except for ‘maids, ladies, gentlewomen, noble personages, and every Lord, knight and gentleman of twenty marks land’ should have to wear on Sundays a ‘Cap of Wool knit, thicked and dressed in England, made within this Realm, and only dressed and finished by some of the Trade of Cappers, upon pain to forfeit for every Day of not wearing three Shillings four Pence’.7 Since they were already poor, this could mean prison for non-payment.

Essentially, in the 16th century we had the literal fashion police, except they were forcing the poor to look shit on Sundays and making them poorer if they didn’t comply.

It was repealed twenty-eight years later, not because it was a batshit idea to force people to wear hats on Sundays even during summer, but because they realised that enforcing people to wear a hat they didn’t want to wear in their own homes was next to impossible.

Darwin, famous evolutionist and naturalist, also went around chain-eating exotic species like they were goddamn flumps. He ate owls like they were chicken wings, and armadillos like they were the chocolate bar also called Armadillos. Once, after loading his ship up with them in the Galapagos, he and his crew ate endangered tortoises all on the way home.

This wasn’t even a one-off. He was part of the ‘glutton club’, a group of foodies who specifically liked to dine on ‘strange flesh’, a term Hannibal Lecter would label ‘a bit fucking creepy to be honest with you Charles.’

To be fair to Darwin, he didn’t just accidentally use incredibly endangered animals as snacks, he was also partial to messing around with critically vulnerable animals on purpose for a bit of a giggle. Whilst in the Galapagos, he wrote about yanking iguanas’ tails to see how they’d react, poking birds with his gun, and riding around on giant tortoises like they were a horse.

The Great Famine (often referred to as the ‘potato famine’ in the UK as a way of implying a million fussy Irish people died because they wouldn’t eat mash) began in 1845, when a fungus began to grow on Ireland’s main source of food.

If they’d had access to other varieties of disease-free potato or other crops, the suffering that saw one million die might not have been quite as bad it was. But the British continued policies such as artificially inflating grain prices (through tariffs on imports from America), which made grain unaffordable to the poor in Ireland and kept farmers shipping out grain to the British.

As well as a dose of good old fashioned anti-Catholicism, the people in charge of relief in Ireland were also motivated by a belief that a theory based on rabbits applied to the Irish. Thomas Malthus, a cleric and scholar, had a popular-ish theory that, whilst food supplies increased steadily, populations grew exponentially – to a point that they could no longer be sustained by the food supplies. At this point, he thought populations would ‘correct’ themselves through starvation and disease

This was all well and good in theory (it wasn’t though), but unfortunately people in power saw the famine in Ireland and thought ‘that’s happening in practice, that is. Sod it, let’s give this a try.’ Sir Charles Trevelyan, colonial administrator in charge of famine relief to Ireland, took Malthus’s theory of ‘just let them die’ and applied it to the country he was in charge of specifically keeping alive and well.

picture Dick Van Dyke (don’t lie, you pictured Dick Van Dyke the first time) strapping a goose’s feet together and throwing it down the chimney during the second verse of ‘Chim Chim Cher-ee’ whilst Mary Poppins stands there letting the whole thing happen like it’s a perfectly normal thing to do.

During the 17th and 18th centuries, tax was paid on the size of the house, which was determined by the number of chimneys that house had. Keen to avoid tax, richer households would connect fireplaces together to the main chimney using smaller and smaller flues. They became so tiny that the only way to get them clean was to ram a child up them, which everyone knows wealthier Victorians did with reckless abandon.

Kids as young as seven were fired up chimneys to sweep them, enduring terrible conditions. The contact with the soot gave them a ‘chimney sweeps’ carcinoma’* primarily affecting the testicles, because the chimney was so hot and sweaty that the soot would make its way down ...

children were often made to sleep under sacks of soot in basements with several other chimney sweeps – probably why they were known to get a bit sleepy up the chimneys. Fortunately masters were kind and gave them a few min...

at first the chimney sweeps weren’t even paid, and would only earn money by sellin...

Chimney sweeps would grab a goose, tie its feet together (though in some accounts it would be tied by the neck for horror factor) and then throw it down the chimney. It would freak the fuck out and start flapping around, knocking all the soot off the walls in a desperate attempt either to fly or alert the RSPB.

In Victorian Britain, as well as regular ‘you’re alright’ Valentine’s cards, a tradition started where people sent out ‘Vinegar Valentines’ – cards to tell strangers, or even friends, that you secretly hated them, or some other horrible thing that you would never say to their face.

They would inform the reader, through a crudely drawn cartoon and a poem, that they were preachy, shrews, stingy or even an alcoholic, even though a ‘here’s a caricature of what you look like, you big drunk’ card from Clintons probably isn’t the most tactful way of staging an intervention.

Imagine being alone on Valentine’s day, receiving a card, paying the postage (the sender would deliberately not pay it so that you had to purchase your own insult), opening it up and finding out ‘ah I’m being informed I’m bald’ as if you’d never encountered a mirror.

So popular were Vinegar Valentines, that they specialised as much as birthday cards. There were cards made to insult just about anyone in any profession, empowering the buyer to get as specific and personal as they liked.

The majority of entries in this book are about the English being bellends. Well, take a short break from being called a bellend, English folks, because some time before 1567 in Scotland we invented muzzles for women.

The scold’s bridle was a metal contraption or sometimes a weird-looking mask that went over the head, with another piece of metal that slid into the mouth of the wearer and either compressed the tongue or raised it, resulting in excessive salivation and mouth fatigue.

You’d think that women would have to have done something pretty awful to get placed in one of these horrible contraptions, something so unspeakable that, though nobody likes corporal punishment any more, would at least make you go ‘ok yeah fair play, I personally wouldn’t go that far but I get why a severe punishment was needed.’ But no. Women would be placed in these torture masks for the crimes of being a bit rude, ‘nagging’, gossiping, or doing a wrong kind of religion in public.

Some of the contraptions had a spike on the mouthpiece, meaning that if you moved your tongue you’d impale it, making speaking, eating or waggling your tongue about to fight off the boredom impossible without bleeding profusely.

Some women were even made to wear the masks for speaking out about mistreatment from their husbands. Which is a vicious cycle to get into as their husbands clearly were the kind of sadistic bastards who would muzzle their wives at the slightest sign that they would tell anybody about how sadistic and bastardy they were.

Nuclear weapons weren’t ready yet and we needed a way of forcing the Germans to surrender as quickly as possible, so we settled on caking them to death in an initiative named Project Vegetarian.

The idea was to bake a load of biologically weaponised cattle cakes (cakes made from linseed and ram-packed full of anthrax instead of icing) and drop them over agricultural areas of Germany. Then, unsuspecting and innocent cows would rush towards the treats thinking they’re about to get a Linzertorte (they’re German, if they’re aware of the concept of cakes they aren’t thinking Eccles) and instead get a tasty mouthful of anthrax.

If all went right with the plan, millions of people could die over many years of misery. It was sort of like the Great British Bake Off, but instead of a nice picnic where all the contestants return, it ends with mass murder.

Because we’re a thorough bunch of bastards, we tested out the idea first. In late 1942 we took control of Gruinard Island, a tiny private island off the coast of Scotland, in order to murder some sheep.

Unfortunately, it was too effective. The whole island became contaminated with anthrax and had to be quarantined immediately so that we didn’t anthrax ourselves.

The island remained infected for the next fifty years before we dealt with the problem. Luckily we learned our lesson and filed the plans under ‘what the fuck were we thinking’ and scrapped them. I am, of course, taking the piss. In 1943 and 1944, we cooked up five million anthrax cakes and created customised RAF planes to drop them. We didn’t do it only because it looked like Germany was close to surrendering, and we knew that the mess would take decades to clear up.