On May 8th 1854 the remarkable, Robert Barclay Allardice, known as “ the celebrated pedestrian“,died.
The Barclay family which founded Barclays Bank were descended from this 2nd Laird, he married Sarah Ann Allardice, a descendant of Robert II of Scotland and of the Earls of Airth, Menteith, and Strathearn. In recognition of the nobility of his wife’s family, Robert Barclay thenceforth took the surname of Allardice.
Several of the Barclay family were noted for unusual strength. The 1st Laird of Ury known as “Robert the Strong” was reputed as one of the strongest men in the country at the time of the English Civil War, and Robert’s father was himself a noted pedestrian, who once walked 510 miles from the Ury Estate in Aberdeenshire, to London in 10 days, this would have been no mean task given there were no tarmac roads back then.
Oor “Captain” Barclay’s most notable achievement was walking 1,000 miles in 1,000 hours to win a bet!!
While still at Cambridge University, Robert undertook to walk from Fenchurch street, London to Birmingham via Cambridge, a distance of 150 miles, which he covered in two days in December 1799, to visit relatives. A few days later he made the return journey via Oxford in a similar time.
Most of Barclay’s later walks, like the 1,000 mile one, were due wagers with Robert Fletcher, the “Daft Laird” His feats include, 1801 he walked 110 miles in 19 hr 27 min in a muddy park, 1802 walking 64 miles in 10 hours, and this one makes me chuckle, in 1805 he walked 72 miles between breakfast and dinner, in 1806 he walked 100 miles over “bad roads” in 19 hours and then in 1807, 78 miles on hilly roads in 14 hours.
I mentioned the wagers, and while his walks were extraordinary, he lost a lot of money to the Daft Laird and is described as throwing away good money after bad.
He is considered the father of the 19th century sport of pedestrianism, a precursor to racewalking, he was inducted into the Sport Scotland Hall of Fame in 2002
Barclay met his end on the 8th May 1854, dying of paralysis a few days after being kicked by a horse.
There is an excellent lengthy page all about Robert Barclay Allardice, “Captain Barclay”, his family and of course his wagers on the link below, however the date of death on this article is given as May 1st, rather than the 8th as on wiki.
‘La Maison De Celle-Qui-Peint’ (which literally translates as 'The house of The-One-Who-Paints’) was created by Danielle Jacqui, who uses the property as her home and studio. The house is located in Roquevaire, which is often dubbed the 'city of painters’, 30km north of Marseille.
Hello. We started this blog in March last year and now we’re really close to finding out why every single day is BRILLIANT. So we’d just like to say a huge thank you to everyone who has read, liked and re-posted our sometimes excessively long ramblings. It’s been a lovely thing to reach so many people across the world from our small corner of rural North Yorkshire. If we make it, and I think we might, there will be three more posts after this one. If you’re not completely fed up with us pestering you every day about things that happened ages ago, you can also find this blog on Wordpress, along with a short explanation of how it came about, and in which we reveal which of us has actually written all of this on the ’about’ page.
Why March 12th is BRILLIANT
Hester, Queen of the Desert
Today is the birthday of Lady Hester Stanhope. She was born in 1776, the eldest child of Charles, the 3rd Earl Stanhope, at Chevening in Kent. Hester was an adventurous traveller, deeply eccentric and self-styled Queen of the Desert. In her late twenties, she lived at Downing Street where she acted as hostess for her cousin, William Pitt the Younger, who was then Prime Minister. She acted as his secretary and sat at the head of his dinner table making witty and intelligent conversation. Hester was in her element, but it didn’t last. Pitt died in 1806 and she was left homeless, but with a tidy pension of £1200 a year from the government in recognition of her services.
She lived for a time in Montagu Square in London and then moved to Wales. In 1810 she was advised by her doctor to make a trip to the Continent, for the sake of her health. She would never return. She travelled with her private physician and later biographer, Dr Charles Meryon. They stopped off in Gibraltar, where she picked up another travelling companion, a wealthy young Englishman called Michael Bruce. Although he was twelve years younger than her, they were soon lovers, much to the disappointment of Dr Meryon. From there, they travelled on to Malta, Greece and Constantinople. Here, she met with the French Ambassador. She had a mind to go to France and ingratiate herself with Emperor Napoleon. She thought if she could find out what made him tick, she could return to Britain with information that could lead to his overthrow. It was a mad plan and luckily the British government got wind of it and stopped her.
With nothing better to do, she and her swelling entourage decided to head for Egypt. On the way, they were shipwrecked off the island of Rhodes. Everyone lost their luggage and it led to Hester spending the night in a rat-infested windmill with a bunch of drunken sailors for company. Separated from her belongings, she had to find other clothes. Rather than wear a veil, she chose to dress in a robe, turban and slippers. When they eventually arrived in Egypt, she bought a purple velvet robe, embroidered trousers, a waistcoat, a jacket and a sabre. She found men’s clothes preferable and dressed that way from then on.
In Alexandria, she and her party set about learning Turkish and Arabic. The East was now in her blood and they pressed onwards to Lebanon and Syria. On the way, she met with many important Sheiks, some of whom would have been very dangerous enemies. They had never seen anything quite like her before and she seems to have been well received. Some accounts tell of how she was hailed as a princess, but it also seems possible that they all thought she was a bit mad and that just going along with her would be the polite thing to do. When she reached Damascus in 1812, she insisted on entering the city unveiled and on horseback, both of which were forbidden, but she seemed to get away with it.
The following year, she visited the ruined desert city of Palmyra. It had once been ruled by Queen Zenobia who had led a revolt against the Roman Empire in the third century. No European woman had ever seen the city before. It was a week’s ride away from Damascus over a wasteland that was ruled by dangerous Bedouin tribes. She made the journey dressed as a Bedouin and took with her a caravan of twenty-two camels. The people of Palmyra were impressed by her courage and gave her a crown of palm leaves. She was a bit carried away by this and later wrote: “I have been crowned Queen of the Desert. I have nothing to fear…I am the sun, the stars, the pearl, the lion, the light from heaven.”
In case you’re worried that her story is about to end with her being cruelly slain in a lonely desert, rest assured, it does not. Her end is not a happy one, but she has a few years to go yet. After that, she returned to Lebanon where she lived in several places before settling in a remote and abandoned monastery. Her lover returned to England in 1813, her doctor, in 1831. On her travels, she had come by a medieval Italian manuscript that said there were three million gold coins hidden under the ruins of a mosque at Ashkelon on the coast. She gained permission from the Ottoman authorities to excavate the site in 1815. It would be the first archaeological excavation in Palestine. Hester found no gold. What she did find was a seven foot tall headless marble statue. The thing she did next would horrify all later archaeologists and you probably won’t like it either. She had the statue smashed up and thrown in the sea. Apparently, she did this because she didn’t want to be accused of smuggling antiquities, although why she couldn’t just have left it there in one piece is beyond us.
At home in Lebanon, she became fascinated with astrology and alchemy. A fortune teller in London had once told her that she was destined to go to Jerusalem and lead the chosen people. She started to believe in the prophecy about an Islamic Messiah figure called ‘Mahdi’, and that she was destined to become his bride. She even owned a sacred horse that she believed he would ride on. It was born with a deformed spine. There was a prophecy which said that he would ride on a horse that was born saddled, and the animal’s sharply curved spine was, she thought, just like a Turkish saddle. She named the horse Layla and it was soon joined by a second horse named Lulu who she would ride alongside the Mahdi when he came for her.
Despite her eccentricities, she was generous with her hospitality. Any European traveller was well received and, when civil war broke out in the area, she gave shelter to hundreds of refugees. She fed and clothed them and, even though it nearly bankrupted her, never turned anyone away. The monastery at Djoun, which was her final home, was a hilltop house with thirty-six rooms full on secret passageways and hidden chambers. There, she kept thirty cats that her servants were forbidden to touch. In her old age, she was deeply in debt and became more and more of a recluse. Her servants resorted to stealing from her because she could not pay them. Then, in 1838, the government cut off her pension in order to pay her creditors. She sent her servants away and walled herself up in her house with her cats. She died there alone in 1839. Sad.
Hello. We’ve been writing this blog every day for a little over eleven months now. As it was our intention to find out why every single day of the year is BRILLIANT, we’re almost there and it seemed appropriate to have some sort of countdown. If we make it, there will be eighteen more posts after this one. You can also find this blog on Wordpress, along with a short explanation of how it came about, and in which we reveal which of us has actually written all of this on the ’about’ page. Thank you all for reading, liking and reposting.
Why February 26th is BRILLIANT
Condimental
Today we want to tell you about William Kitchiner. He is one of those people who’s date of birth is lost in the mists of time, but it was probably some time in the 1770s. We do know that he attended his last party on this day in 1827. It always feels a bit odd to be commemorating a person’s death on this blog, rather than their birth, unless they were completely awful. But we can tell you that he’d had a really lovely evening with his friends.
William Kitchiner was the son of a coal-merchant who left him a large fortune, maybe £60,000 or £70,000. So he could do pretty much what he wanted with his life. He liked music, he was very fond of telescopes, but the things that he really enjoyed most were cooking, sharing his food with friends and writing about it. He wrote a book called ‘The Cook’s Oracle’, in 1822, which was a best seller in both the United Kingdom and the United States. Most of the six hundred or so recipes in his book had been prepared by him personally. He cooked them and he did the washing-up afterwards. He also tested them out at a weekly club he called his 'Committee of Taste’ at his home in Warren Street, Camden. His book contains not only recipes but general tips on household management: how to preserve foods, look after your pans properly and where to buy the best nutmeg graters. He was also considered rather an eccentric man, particularly in respect to time-keeping.
William’s invitations were highly prized but you needed to be punctual. He had dinner at five and supper at half past nine. Arrive late and you would probably find you were locked out. His reasoning was that, whilst it was okay for people to be hungry for a little while if the meal wasn’t quite ready, once the dinner was prepared it could easily be ruined if it was not served immediately. He even suggested that families should synchronise all their clocks and watches to make sure this did not happen. If you tried to stay too late, you would suddenly find yourself out on the street at 11pm with your hat and coat. Fail to respond to his invitation within twenty four hours and he would assume that you weren’t coming. Fail to come up with what he considered to be a proper excuse and he would think you were very rude and probably wouldn’t invite you back. He seems to have had only three acceptable excuses: being detained by the law, visiting the doctor or being dead. Interestingly, being dead did not excuse the host from providing the promised meal. In that case, he would have a stand in host in the form of either a friend or his executor. William took his food very seriously.
Manners were terribly important to him, in his book he says: “Good manners have often made the fortunes of many, who have nothing else to recommend them: Ill manners have often marred the hopes of those who have everything else to advance them.” which is very sound advice. As long as you observed his time-keeping rules, behaved well and ate what you were given, it sounds like a fun evening. He was always careful, when introducing his guests to one another, to point out what it was that they had in common and to sit like-minded people together. We read that, on at least one occasion, he greeted his guests by playing a chorus of 'Hail the Conquering Hero’ on the piano whilst playing the kettle drums with his feet.
He wasn’t particularly bothered about whether his chosen guests were considered respectable and he didn’t much care what people thought of him, so long as they didn’t find him rude. He lived with a woman who wasn’t his wife and they had a son who they had sent to Charterhouse, which in case you don’t know is a very posh school indeed. He was no snob, as we mentioned, he had inherited his fortune from his father, who had begun life carrying coal on the London Docks and he is described as 'splendidly indifferent to social disgrace’ which is lovely. He invited Mary Shelley at a time when most people thought she was a dreadful embarrassing mess. He also invited Theodore Hook, who was renowned for his practical jokes but had been arrested for debt. Our post about him has been the most popular by far, so if your bored today and haven’t read it, you might want to check out ’The Berners Street Hoax’.
Many of his recipes are of his own invention. He had a particular fondness for gravies, sauces and condiments in general. He had a box of 28 condiments, all numbered and ordered, that he kept in his kitchen and that could also be put on the table for people to help themselves. He called it his 'Magazine of Taste’. He had a smaller version that he used to take with him to dinner parties. One of his concoctions, Wow-Wow Sauce, has gained some notoriety, not because it’s nice, but because it appears in Terry Pratchett’s 'Disc World’ novels. His book seems once to have contained a recipe for turtle soup which we couldn’t find as it has been omitted in later editions because it was so difficult and expensive to prepare. Instead he tells us he has used the space for more condiment recipes. There is however a recipe for 'mock’ turtle soup which, if you’ve looked at your 'Alice in Wonderland’ properly, you’ll know is made from the head of a calf. In case you can’t be bothered with all that he also includes a recipe for 'mock’ mock turtle soup.
We weren’t very impressed with his ideas for cooking vegetables. He tells us that carrots will take between 1½ and 2½ hours to cook. For cucumber, he suggests frying it and then boiling it. If you wanted a salad, he recommends a book by someone else entirely. There is definitely one of his vegetable recipes that you will have tried though. He invented potato crisps.
As well as his famous cookery book he also wrote about how to choose the right opera glasses in a book called 'The Economy of the Eyes’. He also wrote books titled: 'The Art of Invigorating and Prolonging Life’, which you should probably ignore because he died at about the age of fifty-one. Also, in its sixth edition, it was published with an extra section 'The Pleasure of Making a Will.’
Today we want to tell you about Robert Coates. We don’t know when his birthday was, but we do know that he died on this day in 1848, after being run over by a Hansom cab outside the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane at the age of seventy-five. Robert was the son and heir of a sugar planter and was born in Antigua some time in 1772. Robert was a most flamboyant amateur actor. He was also a terrible actor, and it made him famous.
Robert was educated in England and became enamoured of amateur dramatics after he returned to Antigua in the West Indies. In 1807, after his father died, he inherited the estate and a huge collection of diamonds, which he also loved. He returned to England and settled in Bath, where he lived as a ‘gentleman of fashion’. By 1809, he was acting at the Royal Theatre, Bath, though it seems no one paid him to do so. He particularly loved Shakespeare and made his debut as Romeo. He designed the costume himself. It consisted of a flowing sky blue cloak with sequins, red pantaloons, a muslin shirt worn with a huge cravat, a long wig that Charles II would have been proud of and white hat with ostrich plumes. He also wore diamonds. Lots and lots of diamonds. What’s more, he had had his costume made rather too small, which made him move awkwardly and also the pantaloons split part way through the performance. But it wasn’t just his costume that was comical. He also forgot his lines, ad-libbed, stopped in the middle of the balcony scene to take snuff, and then offer it to the audience and at the end, he tried to open Juliet’s tomb with a crowbar.
This title role was his favourite, it was one he would revisit often. It led to him being given the nickname 'Romeo Coates’ His performances were always sell-outs. People went to see him just to see if he was bad as everyone said. He was not above repeating his favourite scenes during a play. As Romeo, he might die three or four times. On one occasion he caused a lot of hilarity when he took out a handkerchief to dust down the stage and arrange his hat as a pillow before he lay down to die. The laughter, the abuse, the cat calls that accompanied his performances often drowned out his actual words. It’s hard to say whether he actually knew he was bad and just didn’t care or whether he was doing it all on purpose.
He certainly bore the abuse he received in good humour. Even when he received an invitation to a ball given by the Prince Regent. He dressed in his finest clothes and presented himself at Carlton House, only to find that the invitation had been a forgery and he had to go away again. The Prince felt terrible about it when he heard and really felt that Robert ought to have been let in anyway because everyone would have enjoyed his company. In fact, he felt so bad that he invited Robert to come along afterwards and have a look at the decorations which were still up. Robert was delighted and said that he would love to see the preparations that had been made for the honoured guests, of whom he had almost been one. The forger turned out to be Theodore Hook, who we mentioned several weeks ago as the perpetrator of the Berner’s Street Hoax. The joke fell rather flat in this case and probably even Theodore thought he’d been quite mean, because he was always quite apologetic when ever it was mentioned.
After moving to London, he soon became a well recognised figure. Particularly as he used to go about in furs, whatever the weather. But it was really the carriage he had made for himself that truly made him stand out. No one else had anything quite like it. It is described as shaped like a scallop shell and 'a beautiful, rich lake colour’ which we can only assume means crimson lake, a dark pinkish red. It had his own heraldic device on the side, a crowing cockerel, with the motto 'While I live, I’ll crow’. It also had at least one silver plated crowing cockerel on it. It was drawn by two white horses.
Of course, he acted in London. He appeared frequently at the Haymarket Theatre. He usually appeared as part of a benefit performance. For this he earned, or perhaps gave himself, his preferred nickname 'The Celebrated Philanthropic Amateur’. The manager knew he would be guaranteed a full house when Romeo Coates was on the bill. In fact, they would often have to turn people away. At one of his performances, several audience members had to be treated for 'excessive laughter’. People who had to act with him had a difficult time, because they had to work round what ever he happened to do. Once, when his Romeo was about to die a third time, Juliet had to put an end to it by stepping up and saying. “dying is such sweet sorrow, that he will die again until tomorrow.” His tour of the provinces proved equally popular, as were the impersonations given of him by comedians. Sadly, his popularity declined and he was forced to retire from acting, in public at least, around 1816.
He married, moved to France for a time and then back to London. On February 15, 1848 he was leaving the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane when he realised he had forgotten his opera glasses, which he had borrowed from a friend. He stepped down from his carriage to fetch them and was hit by a speeding Hansom cab. Rather than stop, the driver ran right over him and sped away. He was never caught. Robert died six days later from his injuries.
Today is the birthday of Jeremy Bentham, who was born on this day in 1748 in Houndsditch in London. Bentham trained as a lawyer but never practised. He is remembered as a philosopher, a social reformer and a rather eccentric gentleman. But he is probably best known for having his body on permanent display at University College London.
Jeremy advocated separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the right to divorce and the decriminalisation of homosexuality. He believed what people got up to in private needn’t bother anyone else. He was against slavery, the death penalty, physical punishment in general and cruelty to animals. He spent a good deal of his life trying to build a prison of his own design, that he called the ‘Panopticon’. It was to be a circular building with the cells arranged around the perimeter. The idea was that all the prisoners could be observed from a central area by a single person. Jeremy was so sure it would work, he was prepared to do the job himself. Finding a place to build it was really the main problem. No landowners really wanted a prison on their property, or anywhere near their property. He became rather bitter about it and he saw how the rich and powerful can conspire against the wider public interest for their own selfish reasons. He called it 'sinister interest’.
Central to his beliefs was the idea that: “…it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong”. By happiness, he means that the pleasure outweighs the pain. To decide whether a decision is good or bad you must decide who will be affected by it and how. For something to be good it must give the most amount of pleasure and the least amount of pain to the most people. Anything that mostly causes more pain than pleasure would be a bad idea. This pretty much follows the teachings of Epicurus, who we wrote about last month. Jeremy Bentham is known as the father of Utilitarianism. The reason he was against physical punishment and cruelty to animals was that he believed that it tended to make the people who carried out the punishments or hurt the animals more cruel. He believed that anyone or anything that had the ability to suffer should not be hurt without reason.
Jeremy was remarkably fond of animals, particularly cats. He owned a cat who he named Sir John Langborn. As the cat became more sedate in his old age, he became Reverend John Langborn and later still was conferred with a Doctor’s degree. His friends looked forward to the cat being made a Bishop, but the Reverend Doctor John Langborn died before he made it that far. He was also fond of mice and his dinner guests could often hear them scratching in the drawers at the dining table. Though he admitted that it was: “difficult to reconcile the two affections”. When out and about in town he was inclined to trot everywhere and is sometimes credited with having invented jogging. His guests would sometimes find themselves 'whisked’ round the garden before dinner in what he referred to as an “ante-prandial circumgyration”. His eccentricity with names was not confined to cats, when out walking he took a stick which he named either 'Dapple’ or 'Dobbin’, or perhaps he had two sticks with different names. He also owned a teapot called 'Dick’. It was a sacred teapot that only he was allowed to use. He had inherited it from a servant. It was brought in after dinner and set on top of a lamp where it would sing, which actually makes it sound as if it might have been a kettle rather than a teapot. His friend and executor said, 'Many an odd phrase did Dick give birth to: “Has my Dick begun his song? Then take him off his perch” and “Take Dicky down: he is in a passion” ’.
He was oddly interested in preserving the human body. When he was in his twenties he asked a doctor friend to get him a human head so he could have a go at preserving it. He once wrote a letter to London City Council asking if he could replace the flowers in his garden with mummified corpses. This was an idea he expanded in his book 'Auto-Icon, Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living.’ in which he suggested bodies could varnished and made into garden ornaments. Jeremy Bentham was, at his own request, destined to become an Auto-Icon. He left very specific instructions about what was to be done with his body. His skeleton was to be preserved, dressed in his clothes and seated in his chair to make it look as though he was thinking. His head was to be preserved and set in place with two glass eyes that he had carried about in his pocket for the six months before he died. Then he was to be put in a glass cabinet that could be wheeled out whenever his friends wanted to commemorate him. Everything went as planned until it came to preserving the head. That didn’t go too well and the result was a bit scary looking. So a wax head was made and they used some of his real hair on the scalp. For many years the real head sat between his feet, but in his current resting place, at University College London, it became rather a target for student pranks and was often stolen. So now it has been locked away for safe-keeping.
Jeremy Bentham’s Auto-Icon is still on display in the main building of the college, though he is occasionally taken to attend meetings. He is recorded in the minutes as 'present but not voting’. You can visit an online 360° rotatable version of him here. He has a walking stick between his knees. We’ve no idea if it is Dapple or Dobbin.
“So I think this is the best costume for today,” thought Miss Deluxe Splendid.
“I think I will wear one of Miss Spoons’ feathers at a jaunty angle on my own head, and then I will cavort around, peeping in a melancholy tone, as though nothing is different. That would be the right thing to do today.”
Okay in my house we have a strange tradition. My mother builds this beautiful Christmas village.
It wraps all around our house through the rooms and under the trees and it’s wonderful.
Every year she hides the Christmas Vampire
This started when I was a very small got child and spread to all of my friends, including my best friend from elementary school who I just so happened to grow up and marry. Now that we have grown up and moved nearly 600 miles away we still always go home for a week at Christmas for multiple reasons, including the Christmas Vampire.
Needless to say we still partake and things have gotten heated.
Stay tuned for the epic conclusion and to see my husband and father in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s sooty costume when I find the Christmas Vampire First!
Happy Haunting!
Dad has no fricken clue how to trash talk and I don’t trust him in the slightest.
The saga continues. Mom hasnt finished the village yet and it’s starting to get to her….
Hahahaha, I mean I love this on multiple levels. But what really threw it over the top was the mom’s anxiety over the world-building and city design being right. I feel you vampire-hiding mom, I feel you.
can I just say that the Christmas Vampire is infinitely preferable to the Elf on the Shelf
Christmas town looks amazing, how much is the rent?
My mom has started constructing the village, and she would like you to know that the rent in the Christmas village is pay what you can and it can be in Christmas cookies. This village is very anti capitalist and when the Walmart moved in (my dad bought her a ceramic walmart) the villagers protested (read this as my mom made teeny tiny picket signs and stuck them to villagers hands)
OP was the picket successful did they run the walmart out of town? I need to know. I am so concerned. Does the vampire live in town? Is he a beloved yet eccentric member of the populace, or do the townsfolk live in fear of him? Does his bat have a warm place to sleep during winter?
The picket is on going. This year they are all socially distanced. The vampire lives on the mountain in an old house. No one fears him but there is a story every year. 2 years ago he frightened the carnival worker who operated the merry go round, gave him a heart attack and he was in the hospital! The vampire was so scared he fled and there was a man hunt (because everyone was afraid for their friend and also insurance) …. My mom might be insane his bat is always with him and has a wing of the house to himself
I love this
For every one asking the protestors have changed their target in the village this year
