QI: The Book of General Ignorance - the Noticeably Stouter Edition (15 page)

The English Civil War (or the ‘War of the Three Nations’ as historians now call it).

In the seven years between 1642 and 1649, a staggering one in ten of the adult male population died, more than three times the proportion that died in the First World War and five times the proportion who died in the Second World War.

The total UK population in 1642 is estimated at five million, of whom roughly two million were men of fighting age: 85,000 died on the battlefield, another 100,000 died of their wounds or of disease. The war was the biggest military mobilisation in English history with a quarter of those eligible to fight finding themselves in uniform.

In Ireland, things were even worse as the Civil War merged into a doomed battle for independence. Some historians calculate that half the Irish population had perished by the end of Cromwell’s expedition in 1653.

In a 2004 poll organised by the BBC, it was revealed that 90 per cent of Britons cannot name a single battle of the English Civil War, 80 per cent do not know which English king was executed by Parliament in 1649 and 67 per cent of schoolchildren have never heard of Oliver Cromwell.

Rabbits.

While Waterloo was no doubt Napoleon’s most crushing defeat, it was not his most embarrassing.

In 1807, Napoleon was in high spirits having signed the Peace of Tilsit, a landmark treaty between France, Russia and Prussia. To celebrate, he suggested that the Imperial Court should enjoy an afternoon’s rabbit-shooting.

It was organised by his trusted chief-of-staff, Alexandre Berthier, who was so keen to impress Napoleon that he bought thousands of rabbits to ensure that the Imperial Court had plenty of game to keep them occupied.

The party arrived, the shoot commenced, and the gamekeepers released the quarry. But disaster struck. Berthier had bought tame, not wild, rabbits, who mistakenly thought they were about to be fed rather than killed.

Rather than fleeing for their life, they spotted a tiny little man in a big hat and mistook him for their keeper bringing them food. The hungry rabbits stormed towards Napoleon at their top speed of 35 mph (56 kph).

The shooting party – now in shambolic disarray – could do nothing to stop them. Napoleon was left with no other option but to run, beating the starving animals off with his bare hands. But the rabbits did not relent and drove the Emperor back to his carriage while his underlings thrashed vainly at
them with horsewhips.

According to contemporary accounts of the fiasco, the Emperor of France sped off in his coach, comprehensively beaten and covered in shame.

The Sphinx, which means ‘strangler’ in Greek, was a mythical beast with the head of a woman, the body of a lion and the wings of a bird. As you may have noticed, its giant 6,500-year-old statue beside the pyramids has no nose.

Over the centuries, many armies and individuals – British, German and Arab – have been accused of deliberately blowing it off for various reasons, but Napoleon generally gets the blame.

Almost none of these accusations is true. In fact, the only person that we can definitely say damaged it at all was an Islamic cleric named Sa’im al-dahr, who was lynched for vandalism in 1378.

The British and the German armies in either of the two World Wars are not guilty: there are photographs of the Sphinx without its nose dating from 1886.

As for Napoleon, there are sketches in existence of a noseless Sphinx done in 1737, thirty-two years before he was even born. When he first clapped eyes on it as a twenty-nine-year-old general, it had probably been missing for hundreds of years.

Napoleon went to Egypt with a view to disrupting British communications with India. He fought two battles there: the battle of the Pyramids (which wasn’t, as it happens, at the Pyramids), and the battle of the Nile (which wasn’t at the Nile). As well as 55,000 troops, Napoleon brought with him
155 civilian experts known as ‘savants’. It was the first professional archaeological expedition to the country.

When he returned to France after Nelson sank his fleet, the Emperor left behind his army and the savants, whose work continued. They produced the
Description de l’Egypte
, the first accurate picture of the country to reach Europe.

Despite all this, Egyptian guides at the Pyramids today still tell tourists that the Sphinx’s nose was ‘stolen by Napoleon’ and taken back to the Louvre in Paris.

The most likely reason for the missing organ is the action of 6,000 years of wind and weather on the soft limestone.

The famous monument in Piccadilly Circus was erected in 1892 to commemorate the work of Lord Shaftesbury, the Victorian philanthropist.

Designed by the sculptor, Sir Alfred Gilbert, it represents Anteros and stands for, ‘reflective and mature love, as opposed to Eros or Cupid, the frivolous tyrant’. Anteros was the younger brother of Eros.

This complicated idea never caught on. Because of the bow and the nudity, and people’s generally shaky grasp of classical mythology, everyone assumed it was Eros (known to the Romans as Cupid), the Greek god of love.

As a result, a counter-rumour was spread by those wanting to protect Shaftesbury’s reputation, claiming the memorial was, in fact, the Angel of Christian Charity (Greek,
agape
), a rather obscure, but less racy, alternative.

Whatever its name, the statue was technologically groundbreaking, as it was the first in the world to be cast in aluminium.

The use of a nude figure on a public monument was controversial, but it was generally well received. The
Magazine of Art
described it as ‘… a striking contrast to the dull ugliness of the generality of our street sculpture’.

Old London hands tell you that the memorial used to stand bang in the middle of Piccadilly Circus, aiming its bow down Shaftesbury Avenue (‘he
buries
his
shaft
in Shaftes-bury’). During the Second World War the statue was removed for safe-keeping. When it was returned, so the story goes, the whey-faced bureaucrats of the London County Council decided to move it to one side and point it down Lower Regent Street instead.

This isn’t so. It was certainly removed, but it has
always
pointed down Lower Regent Street, because Gilbert designed it to face the direction of Shaftesbury’s home in Wimbourne St Giles, Dorset.  

He certainly didn’t play the fiddle, which wasn’t invented until the fifteenth century.

The other charge was that Nero sang a song about the burning of Troy while Rome burned in
AD
64, implying that he had set fire to the city himself in order to do so.

In fact, when the fire broke out, he was more than 56 km
(35 miles) away at his seaside holiday home. When told the news, he raced back to Rome and took personal charge of the fire-fighting efforts.

The suspicion that he wanted to burn down Rome may have arisen from his stated ambition to redevelop the city. He eventually managed to shift the blame on to the Christians.

As to what Nero actually did: he was a transvestite who loved acting in women’s clothes, singing, playing music and having orgies, and he had his mother killed. He was very proud of his musical abilities; his dying words are reported to have been ‘What an artist the world is losing in me!’

According to some, he generally accompanied himself on the
kithara
(related to the lyre) but he also played the bagpipes.

Dio Chrysostom, a Greek writing around
AD
100, noted: ‘They say that he can write, carve statues, play the
aulos
both with his mouth, and also with the armpit, a bag being thrown under it.’

Early in the sixth century, Procopius, a Greek historian, mentions that the bagpipes were the instrument of choice of the Roman infantry while the trumpet was used in the cavalry.

Nero also invented ice cream (runners brought mountain snow flavoured with fruit juice) and his personal poisoner Locusta was history’s first documented serial killer.

Locusta means ‘lobster’ or ‘locust’: Latin uses the same word for both.

Absurd as it may seem, death by asteroid is almost twice as likely.

It is estimated that a large asteroid (nowadays known as a Near Earth Object or NEO) hits the Earth once every million years. Statistically, this event is now well overdue.

A ‘dangerous’ NEO is one more than 2 km (1.2 miles) in diameter. The shock of the impact would be equivalent to one million megatons of TNT. If it happened, the death toll would be in excess of a billion, so the chances of you personally dying in any given year are one in six million.

The chance of being killed by lightning in the UK in any given year is about one in ten million, roughly the same as being bitten by an adder.

Lightning is a giant electrical spark, with a brightness equivalent to 100 million light bulbs going on and off. Some strokes reach a peak current of 100,000 amps and 200 million volts creating a temperature of 30,000 °C, five times hotter than the surface of the Sun. A bolt of lightning travels at speeds of up to 100 million feet per second, or over 115 million kph.

Each ‘flash’ is really composed of several strokes, each lasting less than a millionth of a second. Because they are so short, the energy value of lightning is limited – a single stroke would only generate enough energy to run an average household for a day. Lightning strikes the Earth more 8 million times every day, or about fifty times every second.

Strikes are commonest in coastal areas, occurring at a rate of about two per square kilometre per year. They don’t seem to do much damage: the electricity dissipates rapidly across the surface of the sea and whales have been observed to sing quite happily through ferocious electrical storms.

Human beings, on the other hand, are struck by lightning ten times more frequently than they ought to be under the laws of chance.

Men are struck by lightning six times more often than women.

Between three and six Britons and a hundred Americans are killed by lightning every year, many of them because they are carrying portable lightning conductors about their person – golf-clubs, carbon-fibre fishing rods and underwired bras.

If caught in a thunderstorm in the open, the safest position is well away from any trees, crouching down with your bottom sticking up in the air.

Five.

Despite destroying 13,200 houses, 87 churches, 44 Livery Halls and over 80 per cent of the city, fewer than half a dozen deaths were recorded.

The dead were: the maid of the baker who started it; Paul Lowell, a Shoe Lane watchmaker; an old man who rescued a blanket from St Paul’s but succumbed to the smoke; and two others who fell into their cellars in an ill-fated attempt to rescue goods and chattels.

The true death-toll may never be known. John Evelyn talks of the ‘stench that came from some poor creatures’ bodies’, and modern forensic evidence suggests that, given the intense heat, some corpses would almost certainly have been vaporised and thus not recorded.

However, the leisurely pace of the fire (it burned for five days) made it relatively easy for people to evacuate, and the five cited remain the only definite casualties.

The authorities’ response to the fire wasn’t overly speedy. The Lord Mayor, Thomas Bludworth, went back to bed on the first night claiming ‘a woman might piss it out’ and Samuel Pepys found time to safeguard his valuables by burying a ‘large
parmazan cheese’ in his back garden.

In the previous ‘Great Fire’ of London (in 1212), 3,000 people died, and in the two years prior to 1666, the plague had killed 65,000. The fire stopped the plague by destroying the black rats and their breeding grounds but the cost of the damage was estimated at
£
10 million. With the entire annual income of the City of London running at
£
12,000, these costs would, theoretically, have taken 800 years to pay off.

Over 100,000 people lost their homes. Many of them camped out in a shanty town at Moorfields, or built shacks near their burned-out properties. But such was the speed of the rebuilding that by 1672 almost all had been rehoused.

The fire started in the King’s bakery run by Thomas Farynor in Pudding Lane. Farynor denied this at the time and a deluded French watchmaker called Robert Hubert claimed he did it. Although it was evident to judge and jury that he couldn’t have done, they hanged him anyway. His corpse was torn apart by an angry mob, suspecting a Popish plot.

Justice wasn’t finally done until 1986, when the Worshipful Company of Bakers claimed official responsibility and apologised for the fire.