Tiny Histories Read online

  Publishing director: Sarah Lavelle

  Creative director: Helen Lewis

  Commissioning editor: Céline Hughes

  Designer: Emily Lapworth

  Production director: Vincent Smith

  Production controller: Tom Moore

  Published in 2017 by Quadrille,

  an imprint of Hardie Grant Publishing

  Quadrille

  52–54 Southwark Street

  London SE1 1UN

  quadrille.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers and copyright holders. The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  Text © Dixe Wills 2017

  Inside illustrations © David Wardle 2017

  Design and layout © Quadrille 2017

  All images on jacket iStock, except

  ‘A Meeting of Umbrellas’ on the front cover Heritage

  Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

  eISBN: 978 178713 203 0

  Pour O

  ‘Le cœur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point.’

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  War

  Ealdor Byrhtnoth carries out a misguided act of chivalry

  A sailor has an ear cut off (and possibly pickled)

  Robert Clive reaches for an unreliable pistol

  The freighter Vigilancia sinks off the coast of Cornwall

  Leopold Lojka makes a wrong turn

  A British soldier shows mercy to a future German Chancellor

  A farmer shoots a potato-eating pig

  Food

  A physicist demonstrates his invention for softening bones

  The Duc de Richelieu’s chef cannot find any cream

  An artist creates a lemon juice container that looks exactly like a lemon

  A Spanish ship containing oranges is battered by a North Sea storm

  A Mughal emperor fears chicken bones and a Glasgow bus driver makes a complaint

  Mr Bird loves his wife

  A nobleman doesn’t have the time for a formal dinner

  Science

  Captain Robert FitzRoy is in need of a dinner companion

  A veterinary surgeon cuts up a hose

  A young artist moves into a derelict Lincolnshire lighthouse

  Lord Byron’s daughter is taught maths to save her from becoming like her father

  Three friends take a bet in a coffee house

  A naturalist turns down an offer from Captain Cook

  An English metallurgist aims to improve the rifle

  A chemist standing by his hearth fumbles with a stick

  Politics

  A young woman misjudges the path of a horse

  A king’s intemperate outburst is taken at face value

  An MI5 officer forgets to renew his passport

  The BBC postpones Steptoe and Son and David Coleman has an unlikely interviewee

  A former colonel rides his motorbike through a dip in the road

  An elderly Burmese woman falls dangerously ill just before a national uprising

  A cyberspace prank is played on Prince Philip before the internet even exists

  Music & Literature

  A mender of kettles refuses to leave prison

  Two Liverpool teenagers are introduced after a church fête

  The Duchess of Newcastle writes two remarkable addenda

  Four young Germans make a two-minute appearance on a television show about cutting-edge technology

  A publisher cannot find anything interesting to read for his train journey home

  Health & Safety

  The people of Bradford briefly develop a taste for arsenic

  Henry I indulges in a few lampreys too many

  A key to a locker is accidentally taken off a ship

  An insect conspires against an emperor

  A bacteriologist sneaks off on holiday without doing the washing-up

  No one remembers to steep some strips of gauze in alum water

  Index

  Introduction

  It might be difficult to believe when reading the news but the Britain we live in is not entirely shaped by the whim of the government and the decisions of ministers blessed with varying degrees of wisdom, but very often by tiny, apparently insignificant events. The wars the nation has fought, the great advances made in science, the food we eat, the music we listen to and the politics that shape our daily life – all of these have been governed to a certain extent by incidents or events that may have appeared completely inconsequential at the time.

  For example, there’s the split-second decision that could just as easily have gone another way, with completely different consequences; the small gesture of defiance carried out by an ordinary man or woman that sparked a movement or even a revolution; the chance meeting of two people whose subsequent work together far exceeded the sum of its parts; the moment of carelessness that resulted in a catastrophic defeat or disaster or, alternatively, brought about some extraordinary discovery that would not otherwise have been made; or the idea nurtured in obscurity that blossomed into something astonishing.

  In Tiny Histories we go behind the scenes to look upon a host of fascinating and extraordinary stories of seemingly trivial events that have had enormous repercussions, in many cases moulding both the society we live in today and the people we are. It’s a surprisingly little-known fact, for example, that we owe the existence of the greatest scientific manual ever written to a wager in a coffee house that didn’t even involve the book’s author. The signing of the document that laid out for the first time the rights and freedoms that all Britons should enjoy came about as a consequence of a previous king’s fatal desire to eat a large number of an eel-like fish. Much of British politics in the 1960s and ’70s was determined by the shifting in the schedules of a television show, and an interview on a sports programme. The reason why it’s easier to make jokes in English rather than in German is all down to a disastrous decision taken by an obscure local leader in Essex in 991. Meanwhile, science fiction was invented because a duchess liked to tag on little extras to the books she wrote on natural philosophy.

  I should perhaps emphasise that this is not a book of ‘what ifs’ – those speculations on what might have happened if only some event had turned out differently (yes, OK, we get it – had Hitler conquered Britain, life would have been a bit rubbish). The examples contained within these pages are arguably even more extraordinary than their counter-factual cousins because we can see for ourselves what effect they’ve had on the nation (and often the world beyond) without indulging in a moment’s conjecture.

  Finally, I hope that the events in Tiny Histories are an inspiration to us all. If nothing else, they show that any one of us – however insignificant we may feel – may yet come to have an impact on the world that is far greater than we might possibly imagine.

  Dixé Wills

  War

  Famously decried by Motown soul singer Edwin Starr as being good for ‘absolutely nothing’, war has nonetheless proved itself a disturbingly easy state for the British to get into. The vicissitudes of armed conflict also make it a rich breeding ground for the sort of trivial occurrence whose repercussions are amplified and so go on to echo down the ages.

  Ealdor Byrhtnoth carries out a misguided act of chivalry

  Walk across the short but well-defined causeway to Northey Island and you’re travelling over a strip of land that has arguably had a greater and longer-lasting impact on the history of Britain than almost any other portion of th
e nation. Furthermore, the ill-advised act of chivalry that took place here has few rivals when it comes to the magnitude and scope of the consequences it produced. Not only did it result in one of the most extortionate and prolonged cases of blackmail the world has ever seen, but it determined who ruled the nation 75 years later, the very language that Britons would speak, and even had an impact on their ability to tell jokes.

  None of this, however, could be guessed at on arriving at the scene today. Less than two miles away from the fishermen’s cottages and weatherboarded terraces of Maldon in Essex, Northey Island is a low, marshy, unprepossessing place speckled with trees. Its narrow causeway – probably built by the Romans – is just a few hundred yards long, threading itself out across marshland and then over the deep black mud of the river bed which, when the sun and tide are both out, shines like molten jet. It is the slenderness of this causeway that played a significant part in the events that unravelled there.

  It was in the year 991 that a fleet of 93 ships led by the Norwegian Olaf Tryggvason sailed up the River Blackwater and landed on the 300-acre Northey Island, apparently having mistaken it for the mainland in the mist. Warned of the invasion, a small militia was hastily assembled by a Saxon ealdor (local leader) called Byrhtnoth. When the murk eventually cleared, Tryggvason shouted over that he and his horde would go away if they were given gold, an offer the 60-year-old ealdor rejected. Both sides then patiently waited for the tide to go out so that they could settle the matter by force of arms. Not having read their ‘Horatio at the Bridge’, the Vikings were surprised to find that the extreme narrowness of the causeway meant that a mere three of Byrhtnoth’s soldiers – Wulfstan, Aelfere and Maccus – were able to hold back their 3,000-strong army. Or so goes the tale at least. In reality, one imagines that all of Byrhtnoth’s small force was employed in keeping the Norsemen bottled up on the island.

  Tryggvason soon tired of this and complained to Byrhtnoth that having his troops cooped up in this manner was not playing the game. The Saxon ealdor, chivalrous to a fault, agreed. He fatally allowed the Vikings to come across the causeway unmolested so that the opposing forces might fight on equal terms on an adjacent field. In doing this, he somehow overlooked the fact that his band of peasant warriors was rather seriously outnumbered. The Vikings thanked their hosts, before taking great care to butcher them almost to a man. According to an epic poem about the battle written four years later by an anonymous hand, Byrhtnoth himself was killed in the mêlée, pierced by a poisoned Viking spear before being hacked to pieces.

  So began that inglorious chapter of Anglo-Saxon history that saw the country bled dry by the payment of the so-called Danegeld – the Danes having taken note of how easy it was for their Norwegian brethren to exact money from the English. Naturally enough, each time the hapless king – take a bow, Æthelred II (the Unready) – paid the Danes off with boatloads of money (the initial payment in 991 was an eye-watering 3,300kg of silver), he found that they returned not long afterwards to ask for more. Then the Swedes got in on the act and proved themselves even more adroit at it. Such was the success of these extortion rackets that archaeologists have excavated far more English coinage from this period in Scandinavia than they have in England. It’s estimated that in total the Anglo-Saxons gave over more than six million silver coins, collectively weighing in at over 100 tonnes.

  However, it needn’t have been that way at all. Had Byrhtnoth simply kept Tryggvason’s forces on Northey Island until an army large enough to defeat it had been assembled, England would not have needed to buy its way out of trouble. As a result, the nation would almost certainly not have found itself visited seventy-five years later by Harald Hardrada. The Norwegian thought to go one better than his Nordic countrymen and cousins: rather than merely extort money out of the English – who were understandably seen throughout Scandinavia as a soft touch – he aspired to their throne.

  Had Hardrada not landed his army on the Yorkshire coast in 1066, King Harold II of England would not have had to march his soldiers at full speed from London to defeat the invaders at Stamford Bridge on 25 September. Consequently, the Saxon king’s army would not have been so exhausted and depleted in numbers when, just 19 days and a heroic 240-mile southward march later, it had to face William, the Duke of Normandy’s troops near Hastings. Since, even under these circumstances, Harold’s forces came close to winning the battle, it’s not stretching credibility to claim that had they been at full strength – both physically and numerically – they would indeed have done so.

  William was crowned king of England at Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066. In an eerie echo of the events of 991, on his way to claim the throne he, too, had found his army held back (albeit temporarily) by a much smaller force: on this occasion one defending London Bridge. Once crowned, he swiftly set about the Normanisation of his new territory. This included the introduction of Norman French as the official tongue. Thus the English language experienced a great sea change as its Germanic Saxon words started to be eased out in favour of the more sensuous-sounding Norman French vocabulary. Thus, for example, when an English speaker today wishes to get across the idea that something is bendy, they will say that it is ‘malleable’ or ‘pliable’ rather than that it is ‘schwank’, as might be the case if Byrhtnoth (and thus Harold) had won. Many may say that that is no bad thing.

  Furthermore, the change in language meant that rather than habitually ending sentences with a verb (as is the case with German today), the English are more likely to finish them with a noun or an adjective. Since there are far more nouns and adjectives than there are verbs, this makes it much easier to tell the sort of joke known as a ‘switch’. This works by substituting the word the hearer is expecting at the end of a sentence for one that changes the entire meaning of it. As a result, being funny in English is arguably less challenging than it is in German. This is a good thing to keep in mind next time you hear someone ribbing the Germans for their apparent lack of humour.

  And all this occurred simply because of a single rash decision made by an obscure local leader on the banks of a minor Essex river over a thousand years ago.

  A sailor has an ear cut off (and possibly pickled)

  Countless are the atrocities committed in wartime. It is a much rarer occurrence, however, for a relatively minor act of barbarity to galvanise a nation into declaring war. And yet that is precisely what occurred in the case of the curiously named War of Jenkins’ Ear, a conflict that lasted almost a decade. During that time it merged seamlessly with the War of the Austrian Succession and was notable for the two firsts it created in military history, both of which paved the way for yet more anguish and suffering to be heaped upon future generations.

  The incident that helped spark this off cannot have seemed like a minor act of barbarity to the man on whom it was inflicted. Robert Jenkins, the Welshman whose ear was to become famous, captained a brig called Rebecca which, in the spring of 1731, was cruising the Caribbean, where he was engaged in a little light smuggling. Under the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, Spain had granted Britain a 30-year asiento – the right to supply the Spanish colonies of the New World with a limitless number of slaves and up to 500 tonnes of produce per annum. Naturally, the temptation to get around the latter quota proved too much for some, and undeclared goods often found their way to the colonists. Accordingly, as a concession to Spain in the 1729 Treaty of Seville, Britain afforded the Spanish the right to waylay British ships to ensure that they were trading within the restrictions laid down by the asiento.

  So it came to pass that on 9 April 1731, Juan de León Fandiño, the captain of a Spanish patrol vessel called La Isabela, spotted the two-masted squared-rigged Rebecca and decided to find out what she was up to. La Isabela was brought up alongside the brig and Fandiño and other officers boarded her. What happened next was to have repercussions that would resonate down the centuries. According to reports, Jenkins was accused by the Spaniards of smuggling and was tied to a mast, at which point Fa
ndiño (or possibly an officer named Dorce) drew out a cutlass and hacked at Jenkins’ left ear. Another member of the boarding party stepped forward and tore off the dangling appendage. Fandiño is then reputed to have proclaimed something along the lines of: ‘Go! And tell your king that I will do the same to him if he dares to do what you have done.’ The coast guards then assaulted the crew, plundered the ship and set it adrift without navigational instruments, an act that might well have sent them to their doom. Two months later, however, the Rebecca had struggled back across the Atlantic to England.

  According to an official statement made by the ship’s uni-auricular captain, the sundered organ was handed back to him immediately after its amputation. In March 1738, Jenkins is reputed to have been hawking the offending article around Parliament, in pickled form. If the tale is to be believed, he had been ordered to appear at the House of Commons so that members of parliament could hear with their own ears how Jenkins came to be parted from one of his. When questioned as to his reaction at the time of the outrage, the captain is said to have avowed, with a sententiousness he must have felt the occasion demanded, ‘I commended my soul to God and my cause to my country.’

  A full eight years after the event, this humiliation suffered by one of George II’s subjects was – somewhat conveniently – deemed tantamount to an attack on Britain herself and ample cause to embark on yet another war with Spain.

  Of course, there were many other reasons why British politicians and their king were keen for hostilities to break out again. For one thing, there was the matter of rival imperial conquests in North America. It was also in British interest to increase trade with the colonies on the continent and it was a cause of frustration that the Spanish restricted such activities. Nevertheless, however unlikely it may seem, the ear became a lightning rod for British anger at supposed Spanish aggression and wrongdoings. Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole found himself hemmed in on all sides by those clamouring for the restoration of British pride, which was something the hawks claimed could only be achieved through military conflict. Somewhat reluctantly he bowed to the pressure and, in 1739, Britain and Spain were once again at war.