Eccentricity has traditionally been a quality that’s especially prized by the British. Throughout history, true eccentrics in Britain and the former empire have enjoyed fame and notoriety as others watched their strange habits with amazement and disbelief. Without them, life would be a lot less colourful!
Dogs, boots and literature
Few people indulge their pets as excessively as the celebrated British eccentric Francis Henry Egerton, 8th Earl of Bridgewater (1756–1829).
Although he was the owner of Ashridge House, a grand estate in Hertfordshire, southern England, Egerton lived for much of his life in Paris, a city he said he hated. He bought a luxury hotel there, on the rue Saint-Honoré, and called it the Hotel Egerton.
Each day, Egerton’s dogs would be driven around the city in his carriage, lying on silk cushions. When the dogs went on their morning walk in the Bois de Boulogne, servants would run next to them, holding umbrellas to protect them from the rain.
Egerton’s four-legged friends usually attended his extravagant dinner parties, dressed in specially made formal clothing and leather boots. The dogs would sit on chairs, with linen napkins around their necks, each dog with a personal footman.
Egerton was highly eccentric when it came to boots, too. He wore a new pair each day. In the evening, he would take them off and put them next to the pair he had worn the day before, in a room that was filled with rows and rows of boots. He would count them to calculate the date and examine them to see what the weather had been like on any day that had passed.
Besides dogs and boots, Egerton also loved literature. If he borrowed a book, he’d return it to its owner in style, with four footmen delivering the book in a carriage to the owner’s home.
Egerton himself was an author and wrote 20 books, including several on his own family. He also owned a large collection of manuscripts on French and Italian literature. On his death, he left the collection to the British Museum, where it’s still kept today.
Eight bottles of port a day
John Mytton (1796–1834) was another excessive spender, who earned the nickname “Mad Jack”. Born into a wealthy family in Shropshire, he was just two years old when his father died, leaving John as the head of the family home at Halston Hall, with an annual income of around £1 million (or €1.19 million) in today’s money.
Visitors to the estate soon noticed Mytton’s spendthrift habits: he often left banknotes lying around on the ground. They also met Mytton’s favourite horse, Baronet. He was allowed to walk around inside the hall and lie down to sleep on the floor in front of the fire.
Mytton was extremely fond of all his pets, which included around two thousand dogs. These dined on steak and champagne and wore special costumes. Mytton himself, on the other hand, liked to take off his clothes while riding on horseback. He enjoyed going hunting, naked, in the middle of the night.
A huge drinker, Mytton used to down eight bottles of port a day, followed by brandy. He even killed one of his horses, Sportsman, by forcing him to drink a bottle of port.
Mytton once arrived at a dinner party at Halston Hall riding a bear, until it bit him on the leg. Another tale tells of Mytton setting fire to his shirt to cure an attack of the hiccups. It worked, but he suffered burns to his body.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Mytton managed to lose all his money. Deeply in debt, he fled to Calais to escape his creditors. On the way, he met a 20-year- old woman called Susan and offered her £500 a year to live with him. (That’s around £50,000, or €56,000, in today’s money.) She agreed and accompanied him to France.
Finally, Mytton returned to England. Still unable to pay his debts, he was sent to a debtors’ prison in Southwark, London. He died there in his 30s, worn out by drink and the dissolute life of a Regency rake.
A diamond paperweight
At the other extreme are those eccentrics who were extremely miserly. Take, for example, Sir Osman Ali Khan (1886–1967). He was the last Nizam of the Kingdom of Hyderabad, in southeastern India, ruling the state between 1911 and 1948.
In 1937, Khan was the richest man in the world, with a fortune of $2 billion (€1.77 billion) – a huge sum in those days. Such wealth encouraged Khan to adopt unusual habits. He owned the Jacob Diamond, the fifth-biggest polished diamond in the world. It was worth £50 million, but the Nizam kept it in newspaper and used it as a paperweight. Trucks full of gold stood in his palace gardens. And his jewellery collection was so extensive that it was said the pearls alone would have paved London’s Piccadilly Circus.
Despite his riches, this eccentric Indian ruler was notorious for his meanness. He wore the same crumpled turban for 35 years and dressed in old, patched pyjamas and socks that he had knitted himself. He ate off a tin plate on a mat in his bedroom, bought the cheapest cigarettes and was known for asking his guests for cigarettes, as well as smoking cigarette ends.
One interesting story about the Nizam describes how, on a cold night, he ordered a servant to buy him a new blanket – but it was not to cost more than 25 rupees (£0.32 or €0.38 today). The poor man returned empty-handed – a new blanket cost 35 rupees (£0.45 or €0.54). The Nizam continued to use his old blanket instead.
Sir Osman Ali Khan wasn’t quite so restrained in other areas: he had a complicated personal life that included 86 mistresses and 100 sons.
Over the top
Finally, there are some people whose lives are quite normal apart from one extraordinary moment. Annie Edson Taylor, for example.
On her 63rd birthday, on 24 October 1901, Taylor went over Niagara Falls in a barrel. To the amazement of thousands of spectators, the retired teacher survived. A few days previously, Taylor’s cat had been sent on a test run before the American woman got into the barrel herself.
Taylor personally designed the oak barrel, which was then made for her. The interior came complete with a harness to keep her in place, as well as a lot of heavy padding. A 90-kilogram anvil added weight. Additional air was pumped in using a bicycle pump before Taylor started her daring voyage.
Taylor’s adventure didn’t take long. After she was put into the water near the American shore, the current quickly carried her over the edge of Niagara Falls. About 15 minutes later, she was rescued close to the Canadian side.
Taylor climbed out, dazed but uninjured, apart from a small cut above her right ear.
It was a nightmare journey Taylor would never repeat. She later told the press, “I would sooner walk up to the mouth of a cannon, knowing it was going to blow me to pieces, than make another trip over the Falls.”
So, what made her take the plunge? It seems that financial problems probably drove her to it. Taylor was used to a certain lifestyle, but had fallen on hard times after losing money in an investment. She hoped that the trip over Niagara Falls would bring her enough fame and fortune to finance a comfortable retirement.
Unfortunately, Taylor’s hopes of wealth were short-lived. For a short time, she earned money on speaking tours, telling audiences about what she’d done, and she even wrote a memoir. But her manager, Frank M. Russell, stole the barrel, which she had planned to show to audiences, and ran off with it. Taylor used up all her funds in a failed attempt to get the barrel back.
Sadly, Taylor later developed problems with her health, including blindness, which she said was a result of her plunge. She died very poor, aged 82.