The Mammoth Book of Losers

by Karl Shaw

  9 Still on sale today. According to the publishers’ blurb, “This quirky and fascinating book allows us to get inside the mind of an intelligent, highly respected man who just happened to believe in fairies.”

  10 She continued her attack on Barry Pain in the preface to her next novel Delina Delaney by branding Pain a “clay crab of corruption” and a “cancerous irritant wart” and suggested that he was antagonistic because he was secretly in love with her.

  11 Notice what he didn’t do there? Use the letter “e”.

  12 It was, however, thought to have been the inspiration for Monty Python’s legendary “Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook” sketch, including the notable line: “Drop your panties, Sir William – I cannot wait until lunchtime.”

  13 August 1896 was a bumper year for tragic stage accidents. At the Novelty Theatre, London, during the final moments of the first performance of Sins of the Night, Wildred Moritz Franks stabbed his fellow actor Temple E. Crozier to death, then with the words “Now my sister is avenged” made his exit from the stage. The audience, not realizing that a fatal blow had been struck, applauded generously. Franks said later he didn’t know how he had mistaken the murder weapon for a “prop” dagger.

  14 Although reviews describe a scene in which a bandage-wrapped paraplegic rises from his wheelchair to kick a man dressed as a moose in the crotch, mysteriously, this episode does not appear in the original script.

  15 “One exclamation mark too far,” said the critic Mark Steyn.

  16 A mercifully short version is available on YouTube.

  17 In 1988, Lemmy Chipower, a magician from Chingola, Zambia, charged his audience to watch him being buried alive. Two and a half hours later, they dug him up, finding him very dead. Hs wife noted: “Something must have gone wrong.”

  18 Although he was a hopeless painter, Haydon also wrote many letters, journals and diaries and, even in his lifetime, people recognized his talent as a writer and wished he had stuck to that. “Let Mr Haydon rather write than paint,” wrote a Morning Post critic in 1841. “His pen is sometimes his friend; his brush is always his enemy.”

  19 A Banvard exaggeration. His painting was actually 12 feet high and 1,300 feet long and was eventually expanded to about half a mile.

  20 There is no record of what became of Banvard’s epic panorama. According to various accounts, it was either cut up and used as stage scenery or shredded to insulate local houses.

  6

  Disorder in Court: Criminal Losers

  In which some burglars find crime doesn’t pay; a judge turns cannibal; a gun-slinging outlaw steals a bunch of bananas; Mr Carlton is seduced by a “Staffy”; and God gets a motoring ticket.

  Most Inept Executioner

  Richard Arnett became London’s hangman in 1719 after the incumbent, William Marvel, had himself been hanged for stealing ten silk handkerchiefs. Arnett turned up so late for his first appointment that, when he finally arrived, the crowd showed their displeasure by throwing him in a pond. The three condemned men were returned to Newgate Prison while Arnett received medical attention.

  Arnett was once supposed to hang two felons, but turned up dead drunk and accidentally tried to hang two priests who had come to administer last rites to the prisoners. When he eventually got round to hanging the right people, the platform collapsed and Arnett and two officials fell ten feet to the ground, landing in a heap on top of the two prisoners; he had forgotten to secure the bolt that held the platform together. He also turned up late for the hanging of the gang leader Jonathan Wild at Tyburn in 1725, giving Wild’s pickpockets plenty of time to relieve the spectators of their watches and wallets. Arnett received another ducking.

  London’s eighteenth-century chief executioner John Thrift, though, was considered the most incompetent man ever to have held that position. Thrift, a convicted murderer, set free on condition that he did the government’s dirty work as an axeman, was completely unsuited to the job. He was extremely volatile, unsure with the axe and liable to bursting into tears at inappropriate moments, and couldn’t stand the sight of blood.

  When he was called upon to execute the Jacobite rebel Lord Balmerino at the Tower of London in 1745, he fainted, then lay on the ground sobbing while onlookers tried to persuade him to get on with it. When Thrift finally took up his axe, he took five blows to sever Balmerino’s head. Although Thrift never quite got he hang of it, he somehow managed to blunder and hack his way through a seventeen-year career. His clumsiness made him such a public hate figure that, when he died in 1752, a mob pelted his funeral entourage with stones and dead cats.

  “There will never be a bigger plane built.”

  Boeing engineer, after the first flight of the 247, a twin-engine plane that held ten people.

  The Defence Rests . . . in Peace

  During the Civil War era, the US Congressman Clement Vallandigham enjoyed a career as prosperous and successful lawyer until a court case in 1871. He was defending Thomas McGehan, accused of shooting another man dead in a bar room brawl. While cleverly demonstrating how the murder victim could have inadvertently shot himself, Vallandigham grabbed a pistol he thought was unloaded, re-enacted the event for the benefit of the jury . . . and shot himself dead in the process.

  Having proved his point, his client was acquitted.

  “Space travel is utter bilge.”

  Richard Van Der Riet Woolley, upon assuming the post of Astronomer Royal in 1956.

  Least Accurate Sentencing by a Judge

  Justice is not only blind but also hard of hearing. At Cardiff Crown Court in 1999, Alan Rashid was charged with making a death threat. After two days of evidence, his legal team were quietly confident that their client would be acquitted.

  When the judge, Justice Michael Gibbon, asked the jury foreman to state their verdict, the foreman replied “not guilty” but, as he spoke, one of his fellow jurors coughed loudly, drowning out the word “not”.

  Judge Gibbon, mistakenly believing that the jury had just found the defendant guilty, admonished Mr Rashid for the error of his ways and sentenced him to two years’ imprisonment.

  The jurors were puzzled by the sentence, but assumed that perhaps Rashid was being sentenced for some other offence from an earlier hearing. On the way out of court, one of the jurors paused to ask a court usher casually why Rashid had been sent down. It was only then that the penny dropped; the bewildered defendant, who minutes earlier was facing a lengthy jail sentence, was called back to the dock and told that he was free to leave after all.

  “Too far-fetched to be considered.”

  Editor of Scientific American, in a letter to Robert Goddard about his idea of a rocket-accelerated aeroplane bomb, 1940 (German V2 missiles rained down on London three years later).

  Most Inappropriate Summing Up

  In 1997, Judge Joseph Triosi was presiding over a hearing in Pleasants County courtroom in West Virginia, at which the defendant, twenty-nine-year-old William Witten, charged with grand larceny, was refused bail.

  As Witten was leaving the courtroom, he was heard to call the judge a “fucking arsehole”. Triosi removed his robes, stepped down from the bench, walked up to the defendant, bit the tip off his nose, then spat it on to the courtroom floor.

  The judge, who was said to have a history of erratic courtroom behaviour, resigned shortly afterwards. Attorney Steven Jones, representing Witten, noted, “I worry about what might have happened if he [Triosi] had had a gun with him at the time.”

  “Defeat of Germany means defeat of Japan, probably without firing a shot or losing a life.”

  US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1942

  Most Inept Wild West Outlaw

  Little Al Jennings always dreamed of becoming a famous outlaw, despite being inconveniently born very much on the right side of the law into a highly respectable family in Kiowa Creek, Oklahoma – his father, J. D. F. Jennings, was the local judge.

  In the mid-1890s, the pint-sized cowpoke (five foot one inch with his boots on) began
his career as an outlaw when he and his and brother Frank acquired some fake US marshal’s badges and used them to collect “tolls” from gullible trail herders moving their cattle through Oklahoma. They were later joined by several members of the Doolin Gang – Little Dick West, and Morris and Pat O’Malley – and under Al Jennings’ leadership planned to rob trains. On 16 August 1897, they stopped a southbound Santa Fe train at Edmond. After two unsuccessful attempts to dynamite the safe, they gave up and rode off, cursing their bad luck.

  A few nights later, they attempted a variation on this tactic when Al Jennings tried to flag down another train by standing directly in the middle of the railroad track, holding a lantern and waving a red flag. The engineer simply ignored him and kept his hand on the throttle. As the train roared forward, Jennings leaped for his life to avoid being run over. The train raced on into the night as Jennings and the rest of his gang stood looking on.

  A few days later, Al and his brother Frank rode alongside a fast-moving Santa Fe train, fired their six guns in the air and instructed the engineer to stop. The engineer leaned from the window of his cabin, gave them a cheery wave and went on his way. The Jennings brothers chased after the train until their horses were exhausted, then watched as their prey steamed into the distance.

  On their next job, they tried to stop a train by piling up railroad ties across the tracks. Unfortunately, they had picked a moonlit night and the train engineer could see the pile of ties and the waiting horsemen from a mile away. Instead of slowing down, the engineer set the locomotive at full throttle and simply ploughed through the obstacle.

  As train robbing was turning out to be unprofitable, they decided to try their hand at robbing an express mail office. The outlaws surrounded the office and peered through the windows to see if it was manned. The express agent, seeing faces masked with bandanas popping up at his windows, picked up the phone and called the local sheriff. Within minutes, a posse of armed men was heading for the office. The gang fled empty handed.

  Next, they tried their hand at robbing a bank, but made the mistake of selecting a branch near their home town and where everyone knew them. The surprise element of the raid was also compromised by Al Jennings’ habit of shooting his mouth off about his schemes in advance. The bank was expecting him and, when he and his gang arrived, they were quickly surrounded and forced to flee, again empty handed.

  They went back to robbing trains. Next was a raid on a southbound Rock Island passenger train on 1 October 1897. Al and Frank Jennings, Little Dick West and the O’Malley brothers found the train stopped at a water station eight miles south of Minco. This time, Al had made sure he brought plenty of dynamite with him. He inserted a long fuse into one stick, lit it, and placed the dynamite next to the safe, then the outlaws leapt from the baggage car and ran for safety. A few seconds later, the car blew up, sending a shower of debris in all directions. When the smoke cleared, there was no baggage car, but the safe had remained intact. The train robbers made off with an assortment of valuables taken from the passengers, including a jug of whisky, a pair of new boots and a bunch of bananas.

  Four weeks later, they held up the Crozier and Nutter Store in the town of Cushing in Payne County. The robbery netted the gang a grand total of $15. It was the last straw for Little Dick West and the O’Malleys, who rode off in disgust.

  It was, in fact, the last successful robbery for the Al Jennings gang. A marshal in Muskogee, Oklahoma, got a tip-off that the Jennings boys were in a covered wagon moving through his territory. He tracked down the wagon and found Al and Frank Jennings hiding under some blankets. They surrendered without a shot being fired. At this point, their criminal careers had netted them less than $200 apiece.

  Frank Jennings was sentenced to a five-year term in Leavenworth. Al, the criminal mastermind of the Jennings gang, was sent to the federal prison at Columbus, Ohio, to serve a life term, but was freed after five years, pardoned by President Theodore Roosevelt who happened to be an old friend of his father, Judge Jennings. Two years later, Al married a lady named Maude who had taken to visiting him in prison. He always referred to her as “the little woman”, although she stood at least six inches taller than him.

  Regardless of his bumbling efforts as an outlaw, in his own mind Al Jennings was a gunslinging desperado of some repute. In prison, he met a writer, William Sydney Porter, imprisoned for embezzlement, who wrote under the pseudonym O. Henry. Al regaled Porter with stories about his exploits. Whether or not Porter was taken in by his yarns is moot, but he used them to create a character called “The Cisco Kid”.

  After his release, Al Jennings headed for California and settled in Hollywood, where he continued to pose as a dangerous gunslinger who had been involved in over twenty gun fights. A typical anecdote began: “When I was fourteen, I was standing around Dodge City with Bat Masterson and the boys. An actor wearing a stovepipe hat got off the train. Bat pulled his gun and said, ‘I’ll plug that hat.’ He fired and the man fell dead. ‘Guess I shot too low,’ said Bat.”

  Jennings claimed he robbed more trains than Jesse James and killed more men than Billy the Kid and described himself as the “the fastest gun on the range”. “I always shot ’em in the throat so they couldn’t talk back,” he would say. His biggest claim to fame was that he was a quicker draw than James and had once outgunned him in a gunfight; in spite of the fact that James was already dead at the time Jennings claimed this contest took place. He was vague about the identities of his other shootout victims, “in case somebody might start digging that old trouble up and making something out of it again”. In fact, no records exist of him ever having killed anybody.

  In 1914, he ran for Governor of Oklahoma, pledging, “If elected, I promise to be honest for a year, if I can hold out for that long.” He was soundly beaten, and the experience caused him to grumble, “There’s more honesty among train robbers than among some public officials.”

  Al Jennings wrote two books about his mythical life as an outlaw which were the basis of a film biopic called Al Jennings of Oklahoma, and he went on to carve out a career as technical consultant, screenwriter and minor character actor in around a hundred films about the old Wild West. If only he had been as tall as his tales, he could have been a leading man.

  Least Successful Display of Impartiality by a Juror

  In 1997 at Luton Crown Court, Judge Alan Wilkie QC ordered a retrial for a man accused of smuggling crack cocaine. During the original trial, a juror, Shane Smyth, had shouted at the defendant, “Why don’t you plead guilty? You are fucking guilty!”

  “Nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners will probably be a reality in ten years.”

  Alex Lewyt, president of vacuum cleaner company Lewyt Corp., in the New York Times in 1955

  Most Incompetent Assassin

  In 1878, Max Hödel, a 31-year-old plumber and part-time anarchist from Leipzig, set out to shoot the German Emperor Wilhelm I in Berlin. It probably wasn’t a good idea therefore, a few days before the attack, to book himself a photo session with a Berlin portrait photographer and to pose with his new revolver, cheerfully informing the cameraman that the photo would soon be worth a fortune because he would be world-famous within the week.

  Hödel’s target, the Emperor, was a sprightly if slightly eccentric eighty-one-year-old who tempted fate by being so predictable in his daily routine that Berlin tourist guidebooks could even list the exact time he could be seen looking out of his palace window. On 11 May 1878, Wilhelm was making his routine daily trip in an open carriage from his palace in Berlin along the Unter den Linden, with his daughter Louise. Hiding in the cheering crowd, armed with his pistol, Hödel struggled to get a good vantage point. As the Emperor’s coach approached, he found his line of fire inconveniently blocked by a street vendor, a Mrs Hauch, who was selling drinks to the crowd from her water wagon. As Wilhelm’s carriage passed by, Hödel shoved her out of the way and took aim with his gun. The woman, annoyed by Hödel’s rudeness, shoved back just as he was pulling the trigger, cau
sing his gun to fire harmlessly wide. Hödel clubbed her over the head with the butt of his revolver and pushed his way to the front of the crowd.

  He fired a second time, again shooting well wide of his target, then ran into the street to get a better aim. Along the way, he fired on another bystander who tried to stop him, but again missed. Hödel dropped to his knees in the middle of the road, gripped the gun with both hands combat-style, steadied his aim then fired at the Emperor again. By this time, to everyone’s astonishment, Wilhelm was standing up in the carriage to get a better view of what was going on. Hödel fired again, completely missing his target for the fourth time, then gave up and took flight, pursued by several onlookers. As he ran, he turned and fired on the chasing pack, again hitting no one. The emperor’s driver and another man called Kohler cornered him in an alleyway and a violent struggle ensued in which all three men were badly hurt. Kohler died two days later from internal injuries.

  At his trial, Hödel told a packed courtroom that his failed regicidal assault was in fact a suicide attempt; he’d planned to blow his own brains out in front of the Emperor to bring his attention to the plight of the poor. When confronted with the testimonies of scores of eyewitnesses, including the pistol-whipped Frau Hauch, he thought better of it and changed his plea to guilty.

  The penalty for attempted regicide was beheading by axe. On 16 August 1878, Hödel faced the axeman after eating two steaks and drinking a bottle of wine. His head bounced twice before it came to rest.

  Only a couple of weeks after Hödel’s miss, a second unsuccessful attempt on the Emperor’s life was undertaken by another incompetent gunman, Karl Nobiling. When the police moved in arrest him, Nobiling put the revolver to his own head and pulled the trigger. The bullet penetrated his skull, but incredibly did not kill him outright. As Nobiling was sped away to prison hospital in a green, open-topped police van, the driver, keen to get his passenger to his destination before he bled to death, drove his van under a low bridge, breaking the driver’s neck and killing him instantly. Nature didn’t take its course with Kaiser Wilhelm for nine more years.