The Great Cat Massacre (18 page)

Upon the King’s pronouncement, the market caught its breath for a minute and many of the investors in the South Sea Company took a second to think. On 3 June, so many turned up at Exchange Alley to sell their shares that the price began to plummet – but then the directors of the company stepped in to buy up all that was being sold and spread a few more rumours, sending the price rocketing once more.

The voices of the killjoys were growing, however. One MP wrote to the Lord Chancellor saying: ‘Various are the conjectures why the South-Sea directors have suffered the cloud to break so early. I made no doubt but they would do so when they found it to their advantage. Their most considerable men have drawn out, securing themselves by the losses of the deluded, thoughtless numbers, whose understandings have been overruled by avarice and the hope of making mountains out of mole-hills. Thousands of families will be reduced to beggary. The consternation is inexpressible – the rage beyond description and the case altogether so desperate that I do not see any plan or scheme so much as thought of for averting the blow.’

The pin that burst the bubble was the news that the
directors themselves had realised that it was time to book a one-way ticket out of there, and they were selling their own shares. Once more the price fell like a stone and the ordinary investors finally took the time to enquire what it was that the company actually did that could make any money. When their polite questions were met with blank looks, they too began to panic-sell their stocks. Thousands were bankrupted as the price totally collapsed. Violence erupted, the directors were attacked in the streets and the government believed riots were on the way. Everyone knew that something, definitely, had to be done; they just had no idea what it was. In order to effect the unknown cure, the King was summoned back from holiday in Germany, evidently none too pleased.

Strangely, the satirist Tobias Smollett wrote: ‘Such an era as this is the most unfavourable for a historian … no reader of sentiment and imagination can be entertained or interested by a detail of transactions such as these, which admit of no warmth, no colouring, no embellishment; a detail of which only serves to exhibit an intimate picture of tasteless vice and mean degeneracy.’ Tasteless vice and mean degeneracy being two of the most interesting aspects to human behaviour, it must be left to the reader to decide if Smollett’s argument is valid.

Fury took over Parliament too. Lord Molesworth declared that there was only one fair and humane punishment for the directors of the company: they should be sewn into sacks and thrown into the Thames. The Postmaster General, James Craggs, MP, who had acted as an advocate for the company, was accused in Parliament of
dishonesty; in front of the entire House he challenged anyone who suspected him to a duel. Molesworth pointed out that it would be difficult to fight the entire House of Commons at the same time, and, even though he was over 60, he would take Craggs up on the challenge if he would like to step outside.

Petitions were received from all over the empire demanding the guilty men be punished without mercy, and both Houses of Parliament launched investigations. The public outcry led to five of the directors being arrested, and the company treasurer might have been next, had he not grabbed the accounts books and fled to Calais in disguise, hotly pursued by an edict from George I demanding any country he entered should give him up or face a King’s wrath. A reward of £2,000 was offered for his capture. It was an incredible about-turn – there was still frenzy, but it was no longer a frenzy of speculation, it was a frenzy of blood-lust. In order to prevent any guilty MPs escaping, the doors to the Commons were all locked and the keys placed on the table in the chamber.

John Aislabie, the Chancellor of the Exchequer who had spoken in support of the South Sea Company, fared especially ill. It was discovered that he had been bribed and he was not only forced to resign, but actually imprisoned. When the House of Commons unanimously resolved to throw him in the Tower of London, houses throughout London lit their lights in celebration. The crowd who assembled to jeer at him being jailed left him in few doubts as to their feelings towards him as they burned his effigy on a bonfire. It was like a holiday.

Walpole, as it happens, might have felt just a twinge of sympathy since he himself had spent three months in the Tower in 1712, charged with corruption when he was Secretary at War.

Examination of the company books showed industrial quantities of fraud. Bribery was more common than ordering biscuits, figures were simply made up and changed from time to time as the company felt like it; pages had been torn out and entire books burned.

In the wake of the scandal, there was a run on the Bank of England. The terrified response from its managers was to instruct the cashiers to make things as difficult as possible for anyone trying to take money out. The cashiers therefore only paid out in sixpences, and frequently ‘forgot’ where they were so had to start counting again from the beginning. In this way, they kept the queues so long that many people simply gave up trying to withdraw their cash. Larger sums were, however, secretly handed out to friends of the directors, who loudly and ostentatiously paid them back into their accounts at the cashier’s desk numerous times, to create an image of confidence and block up the queues to prevent genuine account holders from getting their money out.

As the terror gave way to misery, Walpole forced the government to take some responsibility, and a scheme was created that sorted out some of the mess. But it only left creditors with up to a third of their money; and, ever since, the debacle has stood as a warning to those who would believe the stock market can be a one-way bet.

Lord James Stanhope (cousin of the aforementioned
Charles) probably fared worst of all. On 4 February 1721 he was accused in the Lords of sharing the guilt for the debacle. He defended himself, but developed a headache, which 24 hours later turned into a stroke that killed him. But he wasn’t the only one to die – Craggs expired the day before he was to be examined by the Commons investigation committee, possibly at his own hand. All the property he had amassed over the previous few years, amounting to £1.5m, was confiscated by the Crown. Aislabie was relatively lucky, eventually being released, after which time he retired to concentrate on gardening, producing a famous water garden at his stately home in Yorkshire, and providing Britain’s first obelisk, which he placed in Ripon’s Market Square.

Hugh Dalton, Labour’s Chancellor of the Exchequer for the important post-war Budget of 1947, was a charmingly trusting soul. He was wending his merry way through the Palace of Westminster to the House of Lords chamber – where the Commons were actually sitting while bomb damage to their own chamber was being repaired – to reveal the government’s financial policy for the coming year, when John Carvel, a terribly nice young chap who wrote for the
Star
, stopped him on his way and asked what was going to be in the Budget. Not seeing how it could possibly hurt to reveal one of the closest-guarded secrets in government to a journalist, he told
him: ‘No more on tobacco, a penny on beer, something on dogs and [football] pools but nothing on horses…’

Dalton seemed to think that Carvel was asking out of mild curiosity. Carvel then scampered to the nearest phone and called it in to his newsdesk. A special edition of the
Star
was on the newsstands before Dalton had finished his speech to the House. He might as well have not sat down at the end of it – he was forced to resign almost immediately for spilling the beans to a reporter.

During the 1960s, Britain’s trade deficit reached crisis point. Things were getting worse by the day and the government brought in painful austerity measures to bring the figures out of the red and into the black. They hurt the populace, reducing living standards, but it was felt they were necessary.

Then, in 1969, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Roy Jenkins, announced the Treasury had been getting its sums wrong for the previous six years. It had been underestimating Britain’s export trade by 2–3 per cent each year, thus cheating the taxpayer out of about £1bn in total and causing pointless hardship.

In 1973 Tony Benn was in charge of the Department of Energy. He knew what he wanted – he wanted a staggeringly big hole to be dug in Scotland. That hole was supposed to
capitalise on Britain’s burgeoning North Sea oil industry by becoming a site to build large concrete oil platforms.

Instead of digging up somewhere that deserved it, Ben thought the perfect place for a massive hole would be overlooking the picturesque Loch Fyne on Scotland’s west coast. Not only was it a beautiful place, which would be wonderfully ruined, but it also had very poor road communication and the outlet from the loch to the sea was not, in fact, deep enough to accommodate any oil platform, whether or not it was made of concrete.

Benn had also hugely overestimated demand for the platforms, which would carry price tags of around £250m, and, adding insult to injury, the oil industry was on the way down. So, no one wanted the platforms and absolutely no one wanted the really big hole.

By 1976, the hole had cost £11m to dig, and another £3m had been spent on building a village for the 700 workers involved in the project. It cost another million to fill it in again and became known as ‘Benn’s Black Hole’. Tony Benn became a figure of fun for the whole country, further lowering any chance he might have had of ever leading the Labour Party.

CHAPTER 6

SCIENCE

T
he study of science means grappling with the unknown. Sometimes it is literally staring into space and hoping to spot a star. But scientific knowledge is interlinked, which means that ignorance in one field can lead to revelation in another as the explorer stumbles in the dark. That’s why a number of scientific errors have turned out for the good – the discovery of penicillin, cat’s eyes, or the false positive of Piltdown Man, which advanced a correct theory even though it was based on false evidence. So even a hoax can sometimes make people believe the truth.

One of Britain’s finest philosophers and scientists, Francis
Bacon died from a cold he developed while stuffing a chicken with snow in order to explore freezing food. Had he wrapped up more warmly, Britain might have been a world leader in food preservation technology.

Gulliver’s Travels
is a remarkable piece of work. Outstanding as a work of satire, it is also strikingly dull to read. But at one point its author, Jonathan Swift, does something quite extraordinary – he makes an astronomical discovery that would only be recognised as correct well over a century later.

In part three of
Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon and then a Captain of Several Ships
(aka
Gulliver’s Travels
), Swift describes the people who live on Laputa, a flying island. He writes: ‘They have made a Catalogue of ten Thousand fixed Stars, whereas the largest of ours do not contain above one third Part of that Number. They have likewise discovered two lesser Stars or Satellites, which revolve about Mars’.

The Laputians were Swift’s caricature of the gentlemen of the Royal Society. Those real-life learned gentlemen scoffed at the writer’s ignorance, however, because they knew that Mars had no moons (i.e. satellites).

Then, 151 years later, an American astronomer working at the US Naval Observatory announced that Mars had two moons. So, Swift had been right – it was just a mystery as to how on earth he knew.

Over the years, people came up with many theories as to how Swift had been aware of this obscure astronomical fact but the answer is that it is down to the poor anagram skills of a German stargazer. In 1610, the illustrious astronomer Johannes Kepler received a letter from the yet-more-illustrious Galileo Galilei. It read: ‘Smaismrmilmepoetaleumibunenugttauiras’.

He was not entirely bemused by this word, for in those days scientists would often send each other anagrams. In order to protect their discoveries, when they suspected they had found something, they would write it as an anagram and send to a friend, the letter’s date being recorded. In the meantime, they could further test their theories. If another scientist then claimed to have found the same thing, the code could be deciphered to prove that the first scientist had formulated the hypothesis by the date of the letter.

But Kepler was an impatient sort and set about trying to unscramble the letters. Eventually he worked out that they meant ‘
Salue umbistineum, geminatum, Martia proles’
– at least they did if he ignored one letter – which means ‘Hail, twin companionship, children of Mars’.

It fitted with Galileo’s previous research, discovering moons left, right and centre – he had built a telescope that had been the first to observe four moons around Jupiter, for instance. And it was all pretty handy, because Kepler had already postulated from mathematical models that Mars had two moons. He therefore had no qualms about announcing the discovery to the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II.

The news spread like wildfire among the moon-curious societies of Europe. Rudolf II wanted personal assurance that the find was true. He therefore asked Galileo for confirmation. The astronomer was a bit embarrassed by the request and felt bound to point out that Kepler had mis-deciphered the anagram. It actually read: ‘
Altissimum planetam tergeminum observavi’
– ‘I have observed the most distant planet to have a triple form’. He had, in fact, discovered that Saturn had rings around it – although his primitive telescope could only show the rings as adjuncts to the body of the planet.

Swift heard about Kepler’s mistake and, wanting to satirise such foolish astronomers, created his Laputians with the same delusion spawned of arrogance. It was mere accident that his joke was the truth – although, Cassandra-like, no one took it as fact, and for more than a century Mars’s moons drifted undiscovered.

No one is sure when the narcotic effect of the juice of the opium poppy was first discovered, although Sumerian records from 7,000 years ago speak of it and Homer’s heroes ate the poppy. It was in the eighteenth century, however, that wealthy Britons began using the stuff at their doctors’ insistence.

Thomas Dover was one of those medical men. He became a household name for Dover’s Powder, a compound heavily reliant on opium that was supposed to
cure colds and fevers by inducing strong sweats in the patient and was commonly available right up until the 1960s. At least by then the proportion of opium in the medicine had been reduced from the absurdly dangerous levels prescribed by Dover himself.

The problem was that the doctors of Dover’s era didn’t realise how quickly the body develops resistance (and addiction) to opium, so the doses simply got higher and higher. Dover did, however, note the unfortunate habit of his patients to die: ‘Some apothecaries have desired their Patients to make their Wills and Settle their affairs before they venture on so large a Dose as I have recommended. As monstrous as they may represent this I can produce undeniable Proofs, where a Patient of mine has taken no less a Quantity than a Hundred grains and yet has appeared abroad [out and about] the next day.’ A hundred grains would normally be enough to knock a Roman legion out cold for an afternoon.

On the bright side, had opium, taken in the form of laudanum (a cocktail of opium and alcohol), not been the doctors’ pain reliever of choice, Thomas de Quincey wouldn’t have taken it to ward off toothache while a 19-year-old student at Oxford in 1804, and Britain would have missed out on his gripping memoir
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater,
which describes how his life spiralled downwards as addiction took hold. In the book, his days become minutes counted until the next drop of laudanum. It’s not all bad news, though: while his work purports to warn of the dangers of opium, it also makes it sound quite good fun – after all, it led to De Quincey
knocking up a prostitute in Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage in the Lake District.
*

But opium wasn’t just for poets – the little scamps in the nursery also had a taste for it. Dalby’s Carminative medicine, for instance, was sold especially for ‘infants afflicted with wind, watery gripes, fluxes and other disorders of the stomach and bowels’. Its list of ingredients included not just opium, but also ‘Rectified spirits of wine’ and ‘Oil of peppermint’ to give it that child-friendly taste.

Bleeding patients was once the most popular treatment for the sick, with the doctors of the day rarely stopping to ponder why their patients tended to end up white and dead rather than up and playing tennis.

In July 1823 Lord Byron headed off to fight for Greek independence from the Turkish occupation fully expecting the Greeks to be toga-clad citizen-philosophers sitting about quoting Plato and enjoying orgies, rather than the group of slack-jawed goatherds he actually found. And worse was to come – he developed malaria as a side effect of the unpleasant conditions.

The doctors who attended him were certain that the way forward lay in opening up one of his major veins and literally watching the life drain out of him. ‘Trust us,’ they told him. ‘It’s sure to help.’

History records the club-footed romantic maniac as replying: ‘Come. You are, I see, a darned set of butchers. Take away as much blood as you will, but have done with it.’

Surprising all, the first session of bloodletting seemed to make him worse. So they tried again. Twice. Contrary to all medical expectations, Byron died three days later, aged 36.
*

The first operation in Europe under general anaesthetic (ether, to be precise) took place on 21 December 1846 at the University College London Hospital when Robert Liston amputated a man’s infected leg. Of course, amputation with or without anaesthetic wouldn’t have been necessary, had Liston not caused the infection in the first place.

The man, a butler, had come to him with the broken limb. There was a minor infection but pus was draining from it and it would probably have healed soon enough. Liston, however, had other ideas. He made an incision in the leg, into which he pushed his fingers to have a bit of a feel around. Afterwards, he closed the wound, but soon the whole leg was infected: the only thing to do was cut it off.

At least Liston was just the man for an amputation. He was famous for his speed – holding what was probably a world record for having taken off a leg in under two and a half minutes. Unfortunately, that occasion hadn’t gone entirely to plan: the patient died of gangrene; also, his young assistant lost three fingers when Liston accidentally hacked them off (he too died of gangrene); and a distinguished surgeon who was observing the operation died of a heart attack when Liston unintentionally slashed through his clothes. It was an exceptional operation, both for setting a world record and registering a mortality rate of 300 per cent.

It’s not often that a plumber’s slapdash workmanship kills his employer, but Queen Victoria’s husband was one of those rare victims.

Prince Albert just loved engineering. He enjoyed seeing things built, knocked down, set sail or burrowed underground. It’s ironic, then, that it was the poor installation of the sewers at Windsor Castle that killed
him. According to the Lord Chamberlain at the time, the drainage pipes from the toilets and baths had been a bodge job, resulting in bad smells: ‘The noxious effluvia which escapes from the old drains and the numerous cesspools still remaining is frequently so exceedingly offensive as to render many parts of the castle almost uninhabitable,’ he wrote.

It certainly was for Albert, who, in 1861, contracted typhus from it and died.

The Queen, however, refused to accept this medical diagnosis of her husband’s death. She put it down to the fact that her idiot eldest son, Bertie, had recently lost his virginity. This had happened unexpectedly when he had visited an army barracks and some of the officers had arranged for an actress, Nellie Clifton, to join him in his bed. Nellie, a popular girl, then blabbed all about it to the papers. When Bertie’s father read the reports he lost all sense of proportion, accusing his son of treason and apparently suffering sleepless nights at the very idea of Nellie falling pregnant (as if a royal bastard was something unusual). He wrote a letter to Bertie suggesting that, even if Nellie became pregnant by another man, she would claim the child was the Prince’s and drag his name ‘before the greedy multitude’, forcing him to reveal ‘the disgusting details’ of their night-long affair.

‘O, horrible prospect … and to break your poor parents’ hearts,’ he wailed. A few weeks later, he died. According to his hysterical wife, although the doctors pointed to the fairly obvious symptoms of typhus, the Queen knew it was really from a broken heart.

Percy Pilcher … It’s a name on everyone’s tongue. Well, it might have been had Percy not flown his hang glider straight into the ground on 30 September 1899. Because if he hadn’t done that, he could instead have shown off his latest invention: an aeroplane.

Although his name sounds more like a music hall act, Percy Pilcher was actually a pioneer of flight. Having created and flown a number of hang gliders (which he dubbed ‘the Bat’, ‘the Beetle’ and ‘the Gull’), in 1896 he registered a patent for what is unmistakably a design for a powered flying machine. By the summer of 1899, he had designed an engine that would have worked and produced four-horse power of thrust. At the time in the American Colonies, the Wright Brothers were only just thinking about gliders, but Pilcher – the People’s Prince of Planes – was building the engine that would make Britain the home of powered flight.

On 30 September his triplane was complete and ready to take off. The first ever powered flight was to be in a muddy field in Leicestershire in front of a gathering of garrulous guests. And then: disaster! A problem with the crankshaft meant there would be no demonstration of the fabulous flying machine. What could they do? The afternoon would be a wash-out.

But Percy was nothing if not a showman. So he offered to demonstrate his hang glider, the
Hawk
, instead. Sadly for the aviation industry, he ploughed straight into the ground and died two days later from his injuries. His plane never made it off the ground.