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  In 2005, the Sun picked up a story from the South London Press that squirrels in Brixton were turning on to crack thanks to addicts burying their stashes in gardens (adding that crack-crazed squirrels are a common sight in the US). Even the Guardian got in on the act, launching its own search for the drug-hoover rodents. ‘I’ve just seen one jump down from an old sunflower by the Seventh Day Adventist church,’ it quoted one Reg Throssell as saying. ‘I locked eyes with it and it stared back at me really confidently. It was scavenging and it looked scrawny.’

  Crop circles are the great silly-season standby, but in 2000 the Daily Mail found a different angle. Its two-page spread, headed CROP CIRCLES ARE MESSAGES FROM ALIENS (ACCORDING TO A CAT), was about a giant circle in a wheat field in Wiltshire, in which the paper’s science correspondent (!) asked, ‘A message from aliens – or are the hoaxers having a field day again?’ An ‘expert’ opined that the circle was located on one of the energy lines that apparently criss-cross the planet; the evidence consisted of her friend taking a Burmese cat into the circle and reporting: ‘The animal seemed to know it was something extraordinary.’

  But the grandaddy of political summer-holiday stories occurred in 1973 when Harold Wilson, then leader of the Opposition, was saved from drowning in the Scilly Isles. Slipping into the sea from a rubber dinghy, he was growing weak after half an hour in the water before he was rescued by the Wolff family. Though it seemed that Wilson tried to keep it quiet, the story soon came out – SCILLY SECRET FLOATS TO THE SURFACE was one headline. Wilson’s press secretary, Joe Haines, tried to have the blame put on Paddy, Wilson’s golden labrador, for knocking him into the drink. But as was later recalled by the bestselling novelist Isabel Wolff, who was in her teens at the time, Paddy was innocent.

  But the winner must surely go to the Sun, which on a particularly quiet news day dedicated a front cover to the actor Richard Wilson. Under the front-page headline VICTOR MELDREW FOUND IN SPACE, the paper reported that astronomers had found a constellation that, when its dots were joined, made the face of his best-loved character.

  This was on the front page of a newspaper read by two million people. Only in England …

  CHAPTER FIVE

  MAD DOGS AND ENGLISHMEN

  ‘That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.’

  John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

  I have always loved eccentrics. We all know at least one person we can describe as ‘alternative’. They range from the slightly quirky bow-tie wearing sort, like the politician Neil Hamilton, right up to eighteenth-century Shropshire squire Mad Jack Mytton, who rode a bear into dinner parties.

  If you think about it, eccentricity is very unEnglish. Englishness is about not making a scene, about not boasting or being different. And yet eccentricity bucks those character traits and allows us the option to be very noticeable. Visiting American friends always comment on the middle-class obsession with Boden floral shirts. ‘You’d never get away with that at home,’ they marvel at an eye-dazzlingly bright pink floral shirt.

  Eccentricity and Englishness go together like fish and chips. You only need to look at some of our place names. Like Barton in the Beans, Droop, Upper Snodsbury, Nether Wallop, Crudwell and Puddletown, the last of which is not to be outdone by Tolpuddle, Affpuddle and Briantspuddle – which incidentally is just down the road from Throop. There’s Matching Tye, Westward Ho! – complete with exclamation mark – and Blubberhouses in North Yorkshire; Mumford Sock in Somerset; Wetwang in East Yorkshire; and my personal favourite, Great Snoring in Norfolk.

  Although eccentricity is found throughout England’s social strata, it has to be said that the aristocracy have traditionally been gold medallists when it comes to sheer oddness. My personal favourite is Lord Bath, with whom I worked for nearly a decade at his magnificent stately pile, Longleat, in Wiltshire.

  Longleat is one of the finest Elizabethan houses in England. It was built by Sir John Thynne, Member of Parliament and steward to Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset, whose descendants became the Marquesses of Bath. Longleat is still the seat of the Thynn family today. The house was designed by Robert Smythson and took twelve years to build, being largely completed in 1580. The 900 acres of parkland that surround it were designed by Capability Brown and there are a further 100,000 acres of woods and farmland. In 1949 it became the first stately home to open to the public, and most significantly it also boasts the first safari park to be established outside Africa.

  The safari park opened in 1966 as the result of a gentleman’s agreement between the then Lord Bath (the 6th Marquess) and Jimmy Chipperfield of the famous Chipperfield’s Circus family. The latter dynasty goes back more than three hundred years, making the Chipperfields one of the oldest circus families in Europe. The idea of a safari park within the grounds of the stately home was embraced by Lord Bath, who was even then exhibiting early signs of eccentricity, but he was slower to grasp the concept of a drive through a safari park. When Chipperfield put the idea to him, he looked puzzled and said, ‘Won’t the cages have to be awfully big if cars are to drive into them?’

  ‘No sir, it’s the people who are going to be in cages – their cars – and the lions who are going to be free,’ Chipperfield replied.

  At the outset, fifty lions, all extras from the film Born Free, were brought in to roam the 100-acre reserve. Three thousand cars visited the park on the first weekend and within five months the capital cost of the venture had been repaid.

  The Lions of Longleat were thus born. But there is another attraction that has a far more interesting history than the Lions, and that is the ‘Loins of Longleat’, as the press have dubbed him. Alexander George Thynn, the 7th Marquess of Bath, is as much a part of Longleat as the lions and is arguably one of the country’s most colourful and eccentric characters.

  Tall and broad, he has a tremendous presence. Slightly dishevelled with his huge white beard and long curly hair, he looks a little like a cross between a Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean, Henry VIII and Father Christmas. Combine that with his bohemian values and you have quite a winning combo. He also has a very individual dress sense that usually involves a combination of floral waistcoat, velvet trousers, a beret, cowboy boots and a colourful ‘Technicolor dream’ coat. His style has been described as Kabul Chic, although I always found it more Captain Jack Sparrow.

  I have always loved his style and his individuality and though he is undoubtedly eccentric, he is also far more complex than that implies. He is ranked 359th in the Sunday Times Rich List, with an estimated wealth of £157 million, and yet he drinks wine from wine boxes and he sent his children to state school. He is married but he doesn’t believe in monogamy. He is aristocratic but he doesn’t like conservative conformity. He stood for election in 1974 in an attempt to devolve power to Wessex, and sat in the House of Lords as a Liberal Democrat.

  Married to Hungarian actress Anna Gyarmathy since 1969, he has two children. The rest of his private life is open to speculation, often fuelled by the irascible Lord himself. While Lady Bath may be the supreme chatelaine of the main house, dotted around the vast estate in various cottages are a handful of the famous ‘wifelets’ or mistresses.

  A prolific painter, he has covered the walls of much of the historic house with his own creations – at one time his efforts covered nearly a third of the entire wall space. Using a porridge-like combination of oil and sawdust, he has created murals of every shape, size and colour imaginable. They stare out from the walls and ceilings like naive 3D art. In addition to the murals, there are around 150 portraits of the Marquess’s royal ancestors. These are accompanied by sixty-eight paintings of various wifelets, adorning the staircase known as Bluebeard’s gallery. ‘Some people have notches on their bedposts,’ Lord Bath explained the first time he showed me the collection, ‘I prefer to paint them. Far more flattering, I think you’ll agree.’ He is particularly fond of the Kama Sutra room, which is stuffed with pornographic illustrations. The murals are h
is proudest achievement. Due to their highly flammable nature they became a unique fire risk, and the local fire brigade were forced to change their entire fire drill in case of a fire at Longleat to cope with the tons of high-risk artistic materials on display.

  When his son, Ceawlin, and his new wife Emma took over Longleat, there was a huge falling out when Ceawlin decided to remove the murals from the walls. Ceawlin and his father haven’t spoken for years as a result.

  The house is open to the public – all, that is, except for Lord Bath’s private apartments. In these the rooms are interconnected and include a modern kitchen, its shelves stacked with tins of processed foods, and a futuristic dining room, a little like the starship Enterprise from Star Trek. Hidden at the top of the house are the collections of his late father, Henry Thynn, the 6th Marquess, including a collection of Hitler paintings and Nazi memorabilia. At prep school, Alexander tried to please his father by being as good a fascist as possible. As a prep school prefect, he once punished some boys by putting them under the floorboards with a table on top. He then wrote to his father boasting of what he had done. Henry responded by reporting him to the headmaster for bullying.

  Like all good English aristocrats, Lord Bath was never far from his most loyal companion, a yellow labrador called Boudicca. They were inseparable, ‘Boody-boo, Boody, Boody-boo,’ he would boom in his bass voice. The house staff used to joke that they would have to follow his lordship wherever he went to prevent a trail of destruction caused by the ever-excitable Boudicca as her tail knocked against priceless artefacts. It always reminded me of the scene in Mary Poppins where the staff of 17 Cherry Tree Lane have to hold on to all the family’s possessions each time the retired Captain fires his cannon.

  Alexander George Thynn, 7th Marquess of Bath, is a classic English eccentric. Aristocratic, gloriously unconcerned with social norms – of the aristocracy or any class – he simply does his own thing in his own very unusual manner.

  A little closer to home, about ten years ago I hired a woodworker to help me build some shelves in my London office. It soon transpired that this was no ordinary woodworker. Mark McGowan was also an artist, or to be precise, a mix of artist, performer and eccentric. While Tracy Emin and Damien Hirst would firmly fall within the eccentric artist category, there are others who extend the classification further and one of those is Mark McGowan.

  Over the course of the shelf-building, he revealed his bizarre stunts to me. He finds a cause – often these are what is euphemistically called ‘niche’ – and tries to find an eye-catching means of bringing it to people’s attention. Sometimes the causes themselves are a little obscure. He once nailed his toe to a gallery wall for eight hours in a surreal protest against fallen autumn leaves, because … well, I didn’t really follow his train of thought if I’m honest.

  Another issue that captured Mark’s imagination was student debt (he is a graduate of Camberwell School of Art). ‘I once rolled a peanut across London with my nose,’ he announced one day while sawing a piece of wood. He had apparently hit upon the idea of pushing a monkey nut with his nose along the pavement for seven miles from Goldsmiths College to 10 Downing Street. Twelve days and eleven monkey nuts later, he arrived at the famous black door and was greeted with a cup of tea. How English is that whole scenario?

  Flushed with success, he followed up his monkey nut roll with a protest at people taking stones from Brighton beach. For this he tried to cartwheel the sixty miles from Brighton to London. But simply cartwheeling would have not made the point sufficiently clear. So he strapped 12lb rocks to his feet and stuck eighteen sticks of Brighton rock to his face. He had to abandon the feat after four days. I love the fact that he managed even that long.

  He next took up the cause of cleaners, rolling five miles on the pavement from Elephant and Castle to a gallery on Bethnal Green Road. Again, that wasn’t quite enough, so he wore yellow Marigold gloves and sang ‘We Wish You A Merry Christmas’ as he rolled along the London streets.

  But arguably his most inspired ‘performance’ took place when he spent twelve days in a bath of baked beans and tomato sauce. Not odd enough? He also had two chips up his nose and seven pounds of sausages tied around his head. Why?

  ‘Because I wanted to turn myself into a full English breakfast,’ he told confused onlookers. Still confronted by confused faces, he explained his logic a bit further. A visiting friend from Italy had criticized the English diet. ‘I took him to a traditional English pub but he started to complain when he saw the menu,’ Mark revealed. ‘There were things like eggs, chips and beans or steak and mushroom pie with chips and beans, but he didn’t seem impressed by the cuisine. I suppose he would have preferred mozzarella.

  ‘It got me thinking about how much some people criticize our food – even blaming a good old fry-up for obesity. We don’t support our culture enough, so I thought I would celebrate a part of it by turning myself into a full English breakfast.’ He added, ‘I suppose I am the British alternative to David Blaine, but sitting in a plastic box is nothing compared to what I will be doing.’

  McGowan follows a long tradition of eccentrics. Perhaps the earliest we have detailed records of was John ‘Mad Jack’ Mytton. He was born at the end of the eighteenth century and inherited a huge fortune at the age of two. Mad Jack didn’t worry too much about his education from that point onwards. He was expelled from Westminster School for fighting with one of the masters and then was kicked out of Harrow for putting a horse in his tutor’s bedroom. He left Cambridge without a degree having shipped two thousand bottles of port into his rooms.

  Money, drink and animals seem to have played a large part in his behaviour, which became increasingly eccentric as he grew older. Deciding he wanted to be an MP, he offered voters £10 each to vote for him – spending the equivalent of £750,000 in the process. Having attended the House of Commons for half an hour he declared that the debates were boring and promptly left.

  Mad Jack had a weakness for animals, keeping two thousand dogs and feeding his favourites steak and champagne. There are numerous stories of bets and madcap stunts, including an attempt to find out whether a horse pulling a trap could jump over a toll-gate (it couldn’t), riding a horse into the Bedford Hotel in Leamington Spa, up its grand staircase and onto the balcony and over the diners below, out through the window and on to the Parade for a bet, and asking a passenger whether he’d ever been thrown out of a horse-drawn gig. When the passenger said he hadn’t, Mad Jack exclaimed, ‘What!! What a damn slow fellow you must have been all your life!’ and drove the carriage up a slope, tipping both himself and the passenger out. One of the quotes I like about Mad Jack, which is so English, is that it was said of him, ‘Not only did he not mind accidents, he positively liked them.’

  Mad Jack led a dissolute and reckless life which ended, as such lives often do, very young. He died in King’s Bench Prison in Southwark, rather sadly described by his biographer as a ‘round-shouldered, tottering, old-young man bloated by drink, worn out by too much foolishness, too much wretchedness and too much brandy’. He was only thirty-five.

  Another favourite – and a much gentler type – was Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, 14th Baron Berners, who was born in 1884. He showed an early sign of his eccentric mind when, having heard that a dog would learn to swim if you threw it in the water, he tried to teach the family pet how to fly by hurling it from his bedroom window. He was a genuinely talented artist and composer, which might explain why his Rolls-Royce contained a small clavichord, a keyboard which could be stored beneath the front seat, and why he dyed the doves on his estate many colours. He apparently also drove around his estate wearing a pig’s head.

  He built a 140ft tower called Farringdon Folly, to which he attached a sign at the bottom that read ‘Members of the Public committing suicide from this tower do so at their own risk’. When it came time for his own end, in 1950, he wrote his own epitaph, which read:

  Here lies Lord Berners

  One of the learners

>   His great love of learning

  May earn him a burning

  But, Praise the Lord!

  He seldom was bored.

  And one of my favourite nuggets about this lovable eccentric is that his doctor never sent a bill, saying that treating Berners and having his company had been payment enough.

  The old aristocracy supplied many of England’s most bizarre eccentrics, because to have a really odd lifestyle you require a large personal fortune and the arrogance to ignore the reactions of your fellow countrymen.

  Animals and eccentrics seem to go hand in hand. Baron de Rothschild lived in a grand house in Buckinghamshire where he drove a carriage drawn by four zebras. Francis Henry Egerton, the 8th Earl of Bridgewater, preferred dogs to humans and insisted that they eat with him each day at an enormous dining table. Each dog wore a starched white napkin around its neck throughout the meal. Waiters attended one dog each and served them from silver dishes.

  Lord Rokeby, who was born in 1713, would spend hours in the sea off the beaches of Kent. He was obsessed with water and often his servants would have to pull him out unconscious. He built a huge water tank at his home in order to be able to float for hours on end, eating in the water when he was hungry. His beard grew down to his waist and would spread out on the surface of the water as he lay there.

  Lying around seems to go hand in hand with aristocratic eccentrics. Lord North returned from honeymoon in October and announced to his new wife that he was going to bed. After a few days she asked a servant why he was still under the covers, and received the reply that Lord North always stayed in bed from 9 October to 22 March. When she asked her husband about this, he replied that no Lord North had got out of bed between October and March since his ancestor had lost the American Colonies.

  In more recent times, Sir John (‘Jack’) Leslie became known as the Lord of the Rave after getting into electronic dance music very late in life. At the age of eighty-five he celebrated his birthday by going clubbing in Ibiza. When he was asked about it, his enjoyment came through loud and clear: ‘People were worried at first and said these discos might be rough but they are the absolute opposite. Everyone is so nice to me. The boys keep bringing me pints for some reason and the girls keep taking me out to dance and kissing me. It’s wonderful. The people are fantastic and it seems to amuse them I’m there. They say they hope they’re like me at eighty-five. One boy threw his arms round my neck and told me I was his idol.