The Great Cat Massacre (16 page)

In 1885 Parliament passed the Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act – commonly known as ‘The Blackmailer’s Charter’. It tightened the laws against male homosexuality to the point where liking flowers in the presence of another man was enough to have you thrown into gaol for a good long time. Under the amendment, anything that could be described as ‘indecency between males’ was now illegal, whereas previously it had only been sodomy that was proscribed. Female homosexuals, of course, could go at it like rabbits – the chaps had no problem with that.

But it was also a time when aesthetes – many of whom were well known to like a bit of the other – were in fashion. Chief among them was Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, whose comedies with social bite were the toast of London. Despite being married with children, his proclivities were well known. His real problem was his obsession with the pompous little twerp Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas. Douglas was 15 years younger than Wilde, but introduced his mentor to the rough trade on London’s streets.

Although they could be prosecuted at any moment, Wilde believed his fame would protect him, and that ‘the Treasury will always give me 24 hours to leave the country’. But Douglas’s father, Lord Queensbury
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, didn’t quite see it like that. Outraged by the relationship between the playwright and his son, he decided to publicly harass
Wilde. When he left his (misspelled) calling card at Wilde’s club, the Albemarle, he wrote upon it: ‘To Oscar Wilde, posing as a Somdomite’.

Incensed by this blatant truth, Wilde decided to sue for libel. Of course, it is difficult to win a libel case when everyone knows that an allegation is 100 per cent true. Also, it somehow didn’t occur to him that by launching the action he would be putting together a case file of sworn witness testimonies that he had been engaged in regular criminal activities and presenting them to the prosecuting authorities literally tied up in ribbon. And, since it would be a public trial, the government would no longer be able to turn a blind eye even if it wanted to.

Had Wilde laughed off the ‘posing as a Somdomite’ slur, or simply fumed to his friends and gone home, he would never have had to sit in a trial where more than ten young male prostitutes described what Wilde and Douglas had done to them. Throughout, Wilde and Douglas came across as arrogant and thoroughly unpleasant. Within hours of the judge throwing out Wilde’s case, he was arrested. The testimonies of the boys in the case Wilde had brought were all the evidence the Crown needed to successfully prosecute him. As a result, he spent two years in Reading Gaol before emigrating to France, where he was ignored by Douglas and died of syphilis.

Had he remained as a journalist at
The San Francisco Examiner,
Rudyard Kipling might never have won the
Nobel Prize for Literature. But the editor sacked him, saying: ‘I’m sorry, Mr Kipling, but you just don’t know how to use the English language. This isn’t a kindergarten for amateur writers.’

In 1889 nutty businessman Sir Edward Watkin decided what London really needed wasn’t clean drinking water, but a massive metal tower to rival the one in Paris.

Watkin’s Folly, as it was soon to become known, was planned for Wembley, an otherwise quiet and unassuming area of west London with no idea what it was about to be lumbered with. The reason for pitching an enormous and pointless tower there was that Watkin also happened to be chairman of the Metropolitan Railway – which, by coincidence, terminated in Wembley. He really thought that if he could convince most of London that what they wanted to do with their Sunday afternoons was trek out, week after week, to some place they had never heard of to look at a 358m-high pile of junk, he could make some cash out of it.
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Watkin held an architectural competition to find the right design. One, ominously, was based on the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and another very classy one sported a 1/12-scale model of the Great Pyramid of Giza,
envisioned as a ‘colony of aerial vegetarians, who would grow their own food in hanging gardens’.

For some reason, Watkin thought this design quite mad, and went for one that was really just a rip-off of the Eiffel Tower – only a tiny bit taller, to teach the French a lesson. For some reason, it also contained Turkish baths – which was just what you might expect up a big metal pole. His builders cleared the area and created a park to surround the tower, which they set about constructing. But they had barely reached 70m when the engineers noticed that they had made a bit of a mess-up: the foundations were shifting about in a most worrisome manner and construction was halted before it all fell on someone’s head. It wasn’t long before the scheme was abandoned altogether. The stump of the tower remained in situ until 1907 when its owners blew it up with dynamite.

Fifteen years later, the government was casting about for somewhere to build a national sports stadium, which was to be the centrepiece of the British Empire Exhibition. They noticed that Watkin’s men, having created a pleasant park, had made the site of his somewhat foolish tower the perfect place for the Wembley Stadium.

Liverpudlians are endlessly fascinating on the subject of their home team. Which team that is, however, is controversial, because Everton were the original residents of the Anfield Football Stadium. It was a rent dispute with
one of their financial backers, John Houlding (later to become mayor of Liverpool), that led to them being evicted. On 15 March 1892 Houlding set up his own club, Liverpool FC, really just to spite them.

Since the first modern Olympic Games of 1896, marathons had been 26 miles long. But when the 1908 Games were held in London the course was set from Windsor Castle to the White City Stadium. On the day of the race, Princess Mary was holding a birthday party for her daughter – also named Princess Mary – and, keen to curry favour with someone who might just know someone who could get them a knighthood, the Olympic organisers said they would be delighted to begin the race from underneath the nursery window so the little cherubs could be bored by the sight of eight skinny men limbering up for a bit of a jog.

This presented a quandary, however, because it meant the race would end some distance from where the rest of the royal family would be sitting in the stadium. So, yet again, the lickspittle lackeys offered to move the race for the mild comfort of the Windsors. The finishing line was placed in front of where the royals would be seated, making the distance 26 miles 385 yards, and it has stuck.

On that day, the first to cross the finishing line was Italian pastry chef Dorando Pietri. But as he entered the stadium he was suffering from heat exhaustion and seemed confused by the fact that the finishing line was
not where he expected it to be. He fell twice and had to be picked up and helped. When American John Hayes crossed the line moments later, it was decided that Pietri should be disqualified on the grounds that he had, in fact, been carried across the line.

Curiously, one group who never got to see the beginning, let alone the end, of the race was the Russian shooting team. Russia was working on the Julian Calendar, rather than the Gregorian one, which most countries had adopted some time before. They turned up for their events two weeks late, by which time everyone else had gone home.

Highclere Castle, an incredible neo-Gothic pile in Berkshire which sports gargoyles, turrets and Latin inscriptions, is the country seat of the Earls of Carnarvon – the most famous of whom, the fifth earl, George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, jointly discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun with Howard Carter in 1923.

In 1988 another discovery was made in Highclere itself by the sixth earl, Henry George Alfred Marius Victor Francis Herbert. According to his son, the seventh earl, Henry George Reginald Molyneux Herbert: ‘My father was doing an inventory of the contents of the house when his butler said, “My Lord, there are also some Egyptian items which haven’t been listed.” My father said, “No, no, there aren’t – they’re all in either Cairo or New York.”’

The butler, who had been at the house since 1936, took the earl to a disused doorway, blocked off by furniture, which led from the smoking room to the drawing room. In the thickness of the wall between two doors were two hidden panels opened by a tiny key that the butler remembered seeing when the house was opened up again after the Second World War. ‘And there, inside, were the remnants of my grandfather’s amazing collection.’

It was a row of old cigarette tins holding a total of 300 items from the 3,000-year-old tomb of King Tut. For half a century the world had only had half the great treasure of the Pharaoh because the fifth earl had failed to mention the priceless personal collection before he fell off the twig. The butler had known about them because he came across them by chance, and looked in on them from time to time, but decided they were none of his business and presumed the present earl knew about them. So he didn’t say anything. They should have been in the British Museum but, for 65 years, these artefacts had been lost.

According to the seventh earl, his grandfather probably hid them away because of the famous curse of Tutankhamun. ‘I think my grandfather was a superstitious man,’ he said. ‘Normally he was the biggest raconteur ever; he loved to be the centre of attention. But the one subject he scarcely ever talked about was Egypt. And not only did he not talk about it, he locked all the Egyptian artefacts away out of sight – I think it was because he didn’t want to be reminded of them.’

After the death of the fifth earl in 1923, his widow, Almina, also made something of an error when, a few
months after her husband’s death, she married one Lieutenant Colonel Onslow Dennistoun and unwittingly became mixed up in one of the most exciting divorce cases Britain had ever seen.

Dennistoun had divorced his previous wife, Dorothy, in Paris in 1921. Their settlement said that he would financially support her as soon as he was able to do so, so long as she did not go to court to secure the payments. Not quite understanding this agreement, Dennistoun had not only failed to pay her anything, but, by the time he wed Almina, he had, in fact, borrowed £952 from Dorothy. And he was no struggling poet living in a garret – according to Dorothy, he was actually living it up in an elegant flat without a care in the world. So, in 1925, she took the case to court. Dennistoun really should have settled, because what was about to come out in open court was really juicy.

Since before the Great War, it seemed, Dennistoun had been pimping his wife. To be precise, he had lent her to General John Stephen Cowans, the Quartermaster General, on a sort of hire-purchase agreement in exchange for promotion within the Army. Dennistoun and Cowans agreed in writing what favours Cowans could expect from Dorothy, and what favours Dennistoun would receive from the Army in return. As a result, Dennistoun became Governor of Jamaica, where he could enjoy the sunshine, and Cowans got to enjoy Dennistoun’s wife. At the Treaty of Versailles, Dennistoun was Cowans’s deputy, which must have made for interesting dinner-table conversations.

All of this, of course, Dennistoun denied when it came
to court. However, he admitted everything when letters between himself and Cowans outlining the arrangement were produced.
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The Dennistoun case was reported around the world. The middle classes of the day loved the daily reports of these bed-hopping aristos and perhaps glanced at their dreary, monogamous, worn-out spouses and felt a certain pang of jealousy. Dorothy Dennistoun was awarded very substantial damages – America’s
Time Magazine
reported the figure of $30,000 – and the lurid details so embarrassed the Establishment that Parliament introduced laws to limit reporting of divorce proceedings.

In 1924 Evelyn Waugh was depressed. He had had to drop out of Oxford after poor academic results meant his scholarship had been cancelled, he was unemployed and the publisher to whom he had sent his novel was not impressed. Worst of all, he was living in Wales. He had no option, he decided, but to take his own life.

Waugh went to the nearby beach where he took off all his clothes, left a farewell note for his family and swam out
to drown himself. But he had chosen the wrong beach. After being attacked by a swarm of jellyfish, he swam back as quickly as he could. English literature was the beneficiary.

The eminent novelist Arnold Bennett died of typhus on 27 March 1931 following a trip to Paris. He contracted the disease from a glass of local tap water, which he had drunk to prove that it was safe.

The
Queen Mary
cruise liner was originally to be named the
Queen Victoria.
When one of the company directors, Sir Thomas Royden, informed George V that the firm had decided to name the liner ‘after the greatest Queen this country has ever known’, the King was elated. ‘Oh, my wife
will
be pleased!’ he replied.

The case of John Christie and Timothy Evans is one of the most famous miscarriages of justice in British history. In 1950 Evans was hanged for the murder of his wife and daughter but, after his execution, it was discovered that his neighbour, Christie, was a serial killer and had probably murdered them. This event was a major factor in the ending of capital punishment in Britain.

It also gave us one hilarious TV series.

In the early 1960s Frank Soskice was a Labour MP who signed a petition demanding a posthumous pardon for Evans. When, in 1964, he was elevated to the post of Home Secretary, he was presented with the very petition he had signed, yet chose not to grant the pardon he himself had demanded. This hypocrisy inspired the writers of
Yes Minister
to create a series about untrustworthy politicians and devious civil servants.