WORLD FAMOUS PEOPLE AND THEIR MISCELLANEOUS MADNESS

Simeon Ellerton

Ellerton was a Durham message-carrier who, on his return journeys from delivering messages, would pick up stones from the side of the road and bring them home in a bag on his head so that he could build himself a cottage out of them. After a few years he had enough and did so. After the cottage was built, however, he found he had spent so many years with big weights on his head that he found it strange to walk without them, so he continued going about the place to the end of his days with a heavy bag on his pate. When asked why he kept a bag of stones on his head he always gives the same answer “To keep my hat on”. It doesn’t seem to have done him any harm either as he was deemed to be over a hundred years old when he died in 1799.

Sir Boyle Roche (1743-1807) 

This Irich MP and chamberlain to the vice-regal court frequently got the sense of things mixed up when he was giving speeches. He was given to utterances like ‘The cup of Ireland’s miseries has been overflowing for centuries and is not yet full, and ‘All along the untrodden paths of the future I see the footprints of an unseen hand’. He’s also credited with being the originator of the phrase, ‘What has posterity ever done for us?’ 

William Spooner (1844-1930)

This colourful oxford lecturer is most famous for his confusion with words, often transposing the initial sounds of words e.g. ‘You have hissed my mystery lectures’. He was also prone to absent-mindedness and once wrote a note asking a friend to visit him urgently, and then added a P.S. stating, ‘I have dealt with the matter: please do not come’. On other occasion, he asked a man to come to dinner ‘to meet Casson’. The man replied that he was Casson, and the indefatigable Will replied, ‘Never mind, come all the same’.

At a wedding once he said it was ‘kistomary to cuss the bride’, and on another occasion informed a friend he was going to London on the ‘town drain’. Even more abusively, he referred to Queen Victoria as ‘The queer old dean’, which might have been a more apt description of Dr Spooner himself.

Sir George Reresby Sitwell (1860-1943)

Antiquarian and Genealogist, father of Edith and Osbert, this classic English eccentric once had his herd of white cows stenciled in a blue Chinese pattern to improve the prospect from the terrace at his family home, Renishaw Hall, in Derbyshire. Another time he was spotted crawling round the grounds on all fours, trying to work out how the lawn would look if he lowered it by a few feet.

Godfrey Hardy (1887-1947)

Hardy was one of Britain’as finest mathematicians, but he was even more notable for his habit of watching cricket- his favorite hobby- with four or more layers of clothes on him. He called this his ‘anti- God’ apparel. His logic was that the Deity was malign if He existed at all and wouldn’t get much pleasure out of causing it to rain while Hardy was protected against it. In this way he ensured the day would stay dry.

J.B.S Haldane (1892-1965)

When this willfully eccentric socialist and scientist of Scottish descent was asked if he believed in ESP., he saisd ghe thought it was ‘ a gross invasion of one’s privacy’. He moved to India in 1957 because, he said, after 60years he was fed up wearing socks (although it was actually in protest over the Suez crisis). He tried to get the ‘No Smoking’ signs in railway carriages replaced with ones saying ‘No Perfume’.

William Stratchey

The uncle of author Lytton Strachey spent five years in India in the 19th century. He believed so strongly that the only accurate clocks in the world were those in Calcutta that when he returned to England from that country he kept all the clocks and watches in his home at Calcutta time, which was six hours ahead of GMT. For 56years afterwards he made it a practice to get up in the middle of the night, and go to bed at tea-time.

Sir Tatton Sykes

Nineteenth-century British aristocrat who had many behavioural quirks, one of which was a penchant for entering people’s houses through the back door rather than the front. Consistent to a fault, he made his tenants enter their own houses in this manner as well. 

Tony Hancock (1924-68)

The comedian used to bring the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica with him when he went on holiday. The set was as important a piece of baggage to him, according to one colleague, as his toothbrush.

Ruth van Herpen

This Dutch woman kissed a €17,000 painting by American artist Jo Baer in an Oxford Museum in 1977 ‘to cheer it up because it looked so sad ‘. A court ordered her to pay €1000 damages because her lipstick was ingrained in the canvas.

William Cheetey

Cheetey, an Ontario man, bought eight freezers in the 1960s, packing each one of them with three cubic feet of snow, a substance to which he was so attached he wanted to preserve it for posterity.

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