Great British Eccentrics

England may be a small country but it seems to have more true eccentrics than many larger countries.  The old aristocracy supplied many of the most bizarre ones, because to have a really odd lifestyle you require a large personal fortune and the arrogance to ignore the reactions of your fellow countrymen.

William John Cavendish Scott Bentick, the fifth Duke of Portland for example, was  a very shy man, didn't like meeting people and banned them from his home, Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire.  He went one step further, he decided he would live underground and began to build a series of subterranean rooms.  An underground ballroom was built and a billiard room so big it could house a dozen billiard tables.  These rooms and various others were connected by 15 miles of tunnels.  One tunnel, a mile and a quarter long, connected his coach house to Worksop Railway Station.  This made it possible for him to travel in a blacked-out carriage to the station where his carriage was then loaded on to a railway truck.  When he reached his London home in Cavendish Square his servants were sent away as he climbed from his coach and rushed in to the privacy of his study.

Lord Rokeby decided that he would like to spend all his life, near or in water.  He spent hours in the sea off the Kent beaches, and his servants often had to drag him out on to dry land, unconscious. As he got older, at his home Mount Morris near Hythe he had a vast tank built with a glass top, had it filled with water and spent nearly all his life floating in the water.  He grew the most enormous beard, it hung down to his waist and spread out on the surface of the water.  All his meals were taken in his pool, to the embarrassment of his family.  His obsession with water was so great that had drinking fountains installed wherever he could and drank great quantities every day.  He lived to be 88, so he was a good advertisement for the health giving properties of water!

Lord North was another remarkable eccentric.  He married in September and spent his honeymoon in the Caribbean.  When he returned with his new American wife to Burgholt House in England in October, he announced to his wife that he was going to bed.  His wife was very surprised when he remained in bed for many days and was shocked to be told by a manservant that Lord North always stayed in bed from October 9th until March 22nd.  A large 25 foot dining table was brought into Lord North's bedchamber so that he could entertain people to dinner during these months.  Lord North's explanation for this bizarre behaviour was that no Lord North had got out of bed from October to March since his ancestor had lost the American Colonies!

Francis Henry Egerton, the eighth Earl of Bridgewater preferred dogs to people. He had no time for women, and he declared that dogs were better behaved than gentlemen.  The dogs ate with him every day.  The huge table would be laid for twelve and the dogs led in, each with a clean, white napkin around their necks and servants would serve them off silver dishes, one servant to each dog. Boots were his other obsession. He wore a new pair every day and at night he ranged them round his walls and used them as a calendar.

Another animal lover was Baron de Rothschild.  His superb chateau in Buckinghamshire was home to many.  He drove a carriage drawn by four zebras and in the house lived his tame bear that used to slap women guests on the bottom!  He gave an important political dinner for Lord Salisbury and when the twelve guests were seated at the table, they noticed that each had an empty chair beside them.  Just before the meal, twelve  immaculately dressed monkeys walked in and sat down in the empty seats.

Lord Cornbury, the third Earl of Clarendon, was Queen Anne's cousin.  His eccentricity took yet another form. The Queen made him her representative as Governor of New York and Jersey in America.  he took it all very seriously and decided that as he represented a woman, he would dress as a woman.  At the opening of the New York Assembly in 1702 he wore a blue-silk gown and satin shoes and carried a fan!  His wife did not have a very happy time in America as all the money was spent on his clothes.  He took to wearing the most sumptuous decorated hooped gowns in silk and as there was no money left for her, his wife had to resort to stealing to clothe herself!  He was ordered to return to England in 1708 but continued to dress as a woman and managed to remain a favourite of the Queen.

William Beckford aged 10 in 1770 inherited £1 million and several plantations in Jamaica.  His income was £100,000 a year, an immense sum in the 18th century.  He became obsessed with building, large buildings with towers were his speciality.  However he was an impatient man and couldn't wait to see his projects finished.

In 1794 he decided to build a Gothic abbey at his Fonthill Estate in Wiltshire.  He was so impatient he couldn't wait for proper foundations to be dug so the abbey was built on foundations suitable for a much smaller building.  500 men were involved and he plied them with great quantities of beer, in the hope that they would work faster.  After six years the magnificent abbey was complete with a spire 300 feet high.  A gale blew up and the spire snapped in two.  Beckford gave orders to start on a new tower immediately.  Seven years later, the new tower was finished.  Beckford lived in the abbey with just one servant, a Spanish dwarf but every day his dining table was laid for 12 and the cooks ordered to prepare food for twelve.  Beckford had vowed he would eat his Christmas dinner in his new abbey's kitchen.  He did, but as soon as he had finished the meal, the kitchen collapsed!  Little remains of Fonthill Abbey today.

© E.P.C

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