The Great Cat Massacre (15 page)
Read The Great Cat Massacre Online
Authors: Gareth Rubin
Thatcher eventually managed to avoid extradition to Equatorial Guinea by pleading guilty in South Africa. He was fined three million rand (£250,000). In Equatorial Guinea, the leader of the advance party and Mann, who had been extradited, were sentenced to 34 years in prison each; Moro was given a 63-year sentence in absentia (it is presumed he won’t be going back to serve it voluntarily). Mann was eventually released after five years, and in 2011 he wrote a book about the plot entitled
Cry Havoc,
from Shakespeare’s line in
Julius Caesar:
‘Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war’.
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The Dutch national anthem, ‘The Wilhelmus’, is named after him. He may, perhaps, have performed a little dance whenever he heard it.
**
Suggestion of heresy.
***
Suggestion of homosexuality.
****
Suggestion of Satanism.
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It was a pointless war and the majority of the British people have no idea that it ever took place. Indeed, its greatest legacy is probably ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, now the national anthem of the United States, which was written for the defence of Baltimore.
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The moment before he died, at least, Gordon would probably have been fairly happy due to his unusual religious beliefs and the expectation that he would be reincarnated. ‘This life is only one of a series of lives which our incarnated part has lived,’ he once wrote. ‘I have little doubt of our having pre-existed; and that also in the time of our pre-existence we were actively employed. So, therefore, I believe in our active employment in a future life, and I like the thought.’ He also believed the world was enclosed in a hollow sphere and God’s throne hovered directly above the Temple of Jerusalem; the Devil’s seat was on the opposite side of the sphere, placing it above the Pitcairn Islands. The Garden of Eden, he suspected, was situated in the Seychelles.
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Although the right for peers to be tried in the Lords remained on the statute books until 1948, the last case was in 1935. Edward Russell, Lord De Clifford (a fascist who supported Oswald Mosley) was charged with vehicular manslaughter after he drove his car on the wrong side of the road and killed another driver. Even though a coroner’s court had already found him guilty, his friends in the Lords acquitted him. Ironically, in 1928, Clifford had made his maiden speech on the subject of road safety, proposing the introduction of mandatory driving tests, and during his time in the Lords he had called for the imposition of speed limits.
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When people speak of the Charge of the Light Brigade, they often quote the French commander Marshall Pierre Bosquet: ‘C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre!’ (It is magnificent, but it is not war.) Yet, for some reason his final words are cut off: … ‘C’est folie.’ (It is madness.)
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Hence the phrase ‘bite the bullet’.
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The Foreign Secretary, Lord Clarendon, once described Clark as ‘not fit to attend a sick cat’.
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In fact, British pilots often looked on jealously as their Hunnish opposite numbers saved their skins with Calthrop’s Patent Safety Guardian Angel Parachute, which had been designed in London, sold to Moscow and copied by Berlin.
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The raids on the two capitals continued for years, with variable success. Among those especially unlucky were the residents of West Ham in east London. The Labour councillors who controlled it had declared they would have nothing to do with a ‘capitalist war’. As pacifists, they refused to make warmongering preparations, such as building bomb shelters. It led to a terrible incident on 9 September 1940 when 450 people sheltering in a school died because they had no more appropriate place to hide.
T
he main lesson from the history of cultural creation is that those who most want to contribute to it are often the last people you want doing so. In the fields of literature, architecture and study of history, it’s usually someone so fixated on leaving a part of himself to posterity who has his back turned to the realities of the here and now. So desperate to be judged well by future generations, he often feels he can get away with leaving the current one to hang or believes in flattering liars who should be turned out and pursued with a pitchfork and flaming torches.
Not exactly a mistake, but a hoax that continues to this day and will go on fooling people for a long time. The Pennine
Hills aren’t really the Pennines – or at least you might as well make up your own name for them, really.
The story begins in 1746 when Charles Bertram, a 23-year-old English tutor at the Royal Marine Academy in Copenhagen, began to correspond with a noted British historian, William Stukeley.
Bertram claimed to have found an ancient manuscript composed by a medieval English monk by the name of Richard of Westminster. It included a travelling itinerary by a Roman general complete with the lost Roman names for British places and a map. The document apparently detailed the Roman occupation of Britain.
His letter read that he had ‘at present in my Possession, a copy of an old Manuscript Fragment (and am in hopes of getting the original) called Ricardi Monachi Westmonasteriensis comentariolum Geographicum de situ Britanniae & Stationum quas Romani ipsi in ea Insula aedificauerunt. It seems to me to have been part of a greater Treatise compiled out of Beda, Orosius, Pliny, &c. & some Authors quite unknown; it is pity it is so tenuous, consisting only of four sheets & an half in Quarto, the half of Parchment on which is depicted in colours the Islands of Britain, but in a manner peculiar to this Author.’
Stukeley was excited – at the time, many historians had been discussing how Britain had been divided during the Roman era – and asked to see the document. Bertram sent him what he said was a copy he had made of the original, which he did not want to send. He later sent Stukeley a fragment of parchment, which was confirmed by an expert as being four centuries old.
Stukeley went about researching this mysterious mediaeval monk and found, by chance, a likely candidate with a similar name and background, adding to his belief that the document was genuine. He announced to the world that an invaluable record of Roman Britain had been found, declaring: ‘We learn from the present work, now happily preserved, the completest account of the Roman state of Brittain, and of the most antient inhabitants thereof; and the geography thereof admirably depicted in a most excellent map.’
Bertram published the document and map as
De Situ
Britanniae
(Description of Britain), and the pair were generally taken to be true by British scholars. Only a few people casually enquired why no one was ever allowed to see the original document, which Bertram had kept in his possession. Of course, the reason was that it was a complete fake that he had manufactured from a combination of genuine ancient authorities and his own highly vivid imagination.
It was a time when classicism was all the rage for cartographers and they went about renaming parts of Britain according to any Roman names they could lay their hands on, including Bertram’s map. Bertram had written that the Romans had named the series of mountains in the heart of the country after the Italian Apennine range: ‘This province is divided into two equal parts by a chain of mountains called the Pennine Alps, which rising on the confines of the Iceni and Carnabii, near the River Trivona (River Trent), extend towards the north in a continued series of fifty miles,’ he stated. When
the Ordnance Survey heard this, the spurious name was included in maps from then on.
It was not until 1845 that people began to question the validity of the document, and over the coming decades it was proved to be fake, but by that time the place names had stuck.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
So wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He composed the famous work after an opium-inspired dream, while holed up in a farmhouse on Exmoor. The preface to the work states that it was printed ‘at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity, and as far as the author’s own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the ground of any supposed
poetic
merits’. It runs to 54 lines but, adds the preface, it was meant to be much longer:
The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he had the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two or three hundred lines … On Awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved.
At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purpose of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!
Cricket is one of the few games so slow you can actually enjoy a full meal while you play it. Yet, staggering as it may sound, it used to be even slower. Bowlers were once gentlemanly sorts who would gently toss the ball to the batsman using an underarm delivery. This would allow the batsman to take in the vista before knocking the ball back to his chum. Then one day a young tearaway by the name of John Willes asked his sister to give him a hand with his batting practice. She turned
up wearing one of those house-sized skirts of the era, however, and it was clear that she would be unable to deliver the ball in the usual way, so she threw it to him in a
straight-armed,
around-the-body motion.
Willes found it much more difficult for the batsman, and not caring one jot for sportsmanship, he began to terrorise other blameless batters in that fashion. Soon it developed into the over-arm style now in fashion.
Thomas Carlyle, the greatest historian of his day, was a good friend of tedious political theorist John Stuart Mill. As part of their friendship, Carlyle gave Mill the 300,000-word manuscript of the first volume of his work
The French Revolution
to look over and comment upon.
Mill, an untidy sort, left it in a pile of waste paper in his kitchen and his maid, who was not so interested in recent Gallic historical study, used it to light a fire. It was, of course, the sole handwritten copy of the book.
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Mill turned up on Carlyle’s doorstep to confess. Carlyle’s diary from the next day reads:
Last night at tea, Mill’s tap was heard at the door. He entered pale, unable to speak; gasped out to my wife to go down and speak with Mrs Taylor and came
forward (led by my hand, and astonished looks) the very picture of desperation.
After various inarticulate utterances to merely the same effect, he informs me that my First Volume (left out by him in too careless a manner, after or while reading it) was, except four or five bits of leaves, irrevocably ANNIHILATED!
I remember and can still remember less of it than of anything I ever wrote with such toil. It is gone, the whole world and myself backed by it could not bring that back: nay the old spirit too is fled.
I find it took five months of steadfast, occasionally excessive, and always sickly and painful toil…
Mill very injudiciously stayed with us till late; and I had to make an effort and speak, as if indifferent, about other common matters: he left us however in a relapsed state.
Carlyle later described in a letter ‘to prevent him almost perishing with excess of misery, we had to forebear all questioning on the subject, which indeed was of no importance to either of us and to bid him “Be of Courage. Never mind, Be certain I can write it again and will!”’
And he did – the new version becoming, and remaining, one of the greatest works of the era.
Mill offered Carlyle £200 towards the cost of rewriting, but Carlyle only accepted £100. A forgiving sort, Carlyle offered to give Mill the manuscript of the next volume to look over, but he refused.
Privately, Carlyle described himself as the man who ‘nearly killed himself accomplishing zero’.
Other than a massive number of Indians, few people wanted Queen Victoria dead. There were some, though – as demonstrated by the fact that at least seven people tried to shoot her dead over the years. Most would-be assassins missed, two failed to load their guns and one doesn’t seem to have been taking the whole thing seriously at all. But perhaps the most interesting of them was the last one, because both his motivation and his legacy were poetic.
On 2 March 1882 Roderick McLean fired a loaded gun at the monarch while she was out riding – an event that had become the traditional time to attempt to kill her. His reason was that he had sent her a poem and had not liked her apparently curt reply. He was tried for treason, but found ‘not guilty but insane’. Incensed, Victoria demanded the law be changed so that madmen who tried to shoot her on a horse could be found guilty too. She got her way and the verdict of ‘guilty and insane’ came into the courts.
McLean’s more intriguing cultural legacy, however, was the poem written about the case by William McGonagall, generally considered the worst poet in the history of the English language.
A
TTEMPTED
A
SSASSINATION
OF THE
Q
UEEN
God prosper long our noble Queen,
And long may she reign!
Maclean he tried to shoot her,
But it was all in vain.
For God He turned the ball aside
Maclean aimed at her head;
And he felt very angry
Because he didn’t shoot her dead.
There’s a divinity that hedges a king,
And so it does seem,
And my opinion is, it has hedged
Our most gracious Queen.
Maclean must be a madman,
Which is obvious to be seen,
Or else he wouldn’t have tried to shoot
Our most beloved Queen.
Victoria is a good Queen,
Which all her subjects know,
And for that God has protected her
From all her deadly foes.
She is noble and generous,
Her subjects must confess;
There hasn’t been her equal
Since the days of good Queen Bess.
Long may she be spared to roam
Among the bonnie Highland floral,
And spend many a happy day
In the palace of Balmoral.
Because she is very kind
To the old women there,
And allows them bread, tea, and sugar,
And each one to get a share.
And when they know of her coming,
Their hearts feel overjoy’d,
Because, in general, she finds work
For men that’s unemploy’d.
And she also gives the gipsies money
While at Balmoral, I’ve been told,
And, mind ye, seldom silver,
But very often gold.
I hope God will protect her
By night and by day,
At home and abroad,
When she’s far away.
May He be as a hedge around her,
As He’s been all along,
And let her live and die in peace
Is the end of my song.