The Mammoth Book of Losers

by Karl Shaw

  11 Kanakuri also competed in the 1924 Olympics, where he failed to complete the race again.

  12 At least there weren’t any problems with the Olympic torch relay, for the simple reason that there wasn’t one. It was a ritual invented by the Nazis for the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

  13 Sutcliffe’s method for working out fixtures involved a chequerboard of 924 red and white squares, each club being allocated a different number each season. Apparently, the only mistake he ever made was once to mix up Sheffield Wednesday with Sheffield United. His method, which was a closely guarded secret, was taken on by his son and continued to provide fixtures until 1967, when the process was computerized.

  9

  Close, but No Cigar: A Litany of Losers

  In which the Antichrist fails to win a seat in Parliament; Madame Steinhal gets lockjaw; the Loch Ness monster loses an election; and Captain Cook finds himself the main course in a Hawaiian buffet.

  Most Failed Election Candidate

  Commander Bill Boaks (1921–86), war hero and road safety campaigner, was the most unsuccessful parliamentary candidate in British election history.

  His first candidacy was in the 1951 general election when he fought Walthamstow East as an independent candidate for the Association of Democratic Monarchists Representing All Women. He had intended to stand against Prime Minister Clement Attlee in Walthamstow West, but accidentally put his name down for the wrong seat. In the event, Boaks received 174 votes out of 40,001 cast.

  His political label changed several times over the years, but it was the issue of road safety that engaged him most, if not exclusively; he also stood for a ban on fireworks and the removal of homosexuals from public office. In one election, he stood as the Trains and Boats and Planes candidate, a cunning plan to sway floating voters by adopting the title of a contemporary pop song, but eventually settled for Public Safety Democratic Monarchist White Resident. He justified the name on the grounds of “that’s exactly what I am”. After securing the nomination for a seat, he claimed that he would often approach a “black”, give him £1 and invite him to find another 149 people willing to do the same so that he could stand as a “Black Immigrant” but there were no takers.

  Boaks cycled around the target constituency wearing a large cardboard box daubed with various slogans, mostly about road safety. Later, he traded his bike in for a white van painted with black stripes and a large mast and sail on the top. He championed the cause of pedestrians to have the right of way at all times, reinforcing his point by deliberately holding up traffic at zebra crossings. He once stopped his van outside Wembley Stadium just before the start of an England-Scotland match and refused to move until all 100,000 football fans had crossed the road in front of him. Even more recklessly, he sat in a deckchair in the fast lane of the Westway, the raised section of the A40 dual carriageway in London. He was subsequently convicted of two counts of obstructing the highway, although he appealed against both convictions on the grounds that it was his right to stop his car at any time “to offer courtesy to any road user”. His appeal was dismissed.

  Frustrated at his general lack of success as a defendant, Boaks decided to try his luck as a prosecutor. In the 1950s, he launched a series of private prosecutions against public figures who had been involved in road accidents, including the wife of Prime Minister Clement Attlee. Lady Attlee was a notoriously accident-prone driver and the survivor of nine car crashes in thirteen years, prompting nine Boaks prosecutions.

  When Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, drove his Rover into a Ford Prefect owned by a Mr Cooper of Holyport, Berkshire, Boaks issued a summons against the Queen, as Prince Philip’s passenger, for aiding and abetting. In these, as in his electoral campaigns, Boaks was unsuccessful. The litigant was unfazed: “Cars kill impartially,” he noted. “I don’t care whether the driver is a duke or a bloody dustman.” Subsequent attempts by Boaks to prosecute the Conservative Deputy Prime Minister Rab Butler and Princess Anne for road traffic offences also came to nothing.1

  In 1958, he applied for the vacant post of Chief Constable of Berkshire and was disappointed not to get an interview; at the time he was simultaneously attempting to prosecute the Home Secretary as the accomplice of a police officer who was driving him to the House of Commons and, according to Boaks, had committed six traffic offences in Parliament Square.

  As well as his strongly held views on road safety, Boaks had radical views about transport in general, which he vented under the guise of the British National Airways National Heliport Network and Central London Airport and Aerodrome Association. Specifically, he wanted to get rid of planes and replace them with helicopters. In February 1961, he applied for planning permission to build a heliport in his garden, despite the fact that he was completely broke and didn’t own a helicopter or a garden big enough to house one.

  The low point of his political career came in 1982 when he contested the Glasgow Hillhead by-election and gained five votes, the fewest ever recorded in a modern British Parliamentary election. What made this defeat even more remarkable was that he needed the support of at least ten voters to get his name on the ballot paper in the first place. Boaks remained optimistic in defeat. “Had I been elected,” he said, “I think I would have become the next prime minister.”

  Over a period of thirty years, Bill Boaks contested twenty-one general elections and by-elections without coming close to winning a seat. Ironically, he died as a result of head injuries sustained in a traffic accident.

  Least Perceptive Electorate

  In November 2000, Missouri governor John Ashcroft lost his bid for re-election to the US Senate when his opponent Mel Carnahan clinched victory by about 49,000 votes out of more than 2.3 million ballots cast. Missouri voters hadn’t spotted that their man Carnahan had died in a plane crash thirty-eight days earlier.

  In 2009, the voters of Missouri were at it again. When the town of Winfield went to the polls, they gave their recently deceased mayor Harry Stonebraker a fourth term with a landslide 90 per cent of the vote. According to the New York Daily News, Stonebraker’s death from a heart attack had made him considerably more popular.

  “Forget it, Louis, no Civil War picture ever made a nickel.”

  Irving Thalberg’s warning to Louis B. Mayer regarding Gone with the Wind

  Least Successful Diplomatic Mission

  In 1842, a British envoy, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Stoddart, was sent to Bukhara in Central Asia (modern-day Uzbekistan) to negotiate with the ruling Emir Nasrullah Khan. Stoddart’s mission was to convert the Emir to the benefits of Christianity and British-made goods.

  The Emir, known throughout Asia as “The Butcher”, was not a man to be messed with, having assassinated his own father and four brothers for the throne. Unfortunately, Stoddart was unschooled in the subtleties of Eastern diplomacy. Contrary to local custom, he rode into the Emir’s castle on horseback rather than walking, then floored an attendant instead of offering the customary sign of submission. Worse, he was not bearing gifts or letters from Queen Victoria, only a note from the governor-general of India. The Emir made the Englishman wait half an hour. Stoddart was so annoyed that, when finally introduced, he refused to bow; instead, he drew his sword and told the Emir to “eat shit”.

  The Emir had the Englishman thrown into a thirty-foot-deep, vermin-infested hole called “the Bug Pit”, accessible only by a rope lowered down through a hole in the centre of the ceiling. Into this hole the prison guards daily poured doses of scorpions, sheep ticks, rodents and raw offal. Stoddart was left to languish in this pit alone for a year. His nerve cracked only once, when the executioner climbed down a rope into the pit with orders to behead him unless he converted to the Islamic faith. Stoddart became a Muslim on the spot. Unfortunately, this did not signal any improvement in his living conditions.

  In September 1840, a would-be rescue mission rode into town in the shape of a young British officer, Captain Arthur Connolly of the Sixth Bengal Tiger Cavalry. Connolly was a graduate o
f Rugby School, immortalized in Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Cultural sensitivity was not Connolly’s strong point, either. When he complained about the treatment afforded to his countryman, the amused Emir had him thrown into the pit to keep Stoddart company.

  For two long, horrific years, the two men were slowly eaten alive by bugs, until, in the jailer’s own words, “masses of their flesh had been gnawed off their bones”. Their only break was when they were occasionally brought to the surface for a series of mock executions. Finally, the sadistic Emir got tired of this mind game and, on 24 June 1842, the two lice-ridden men were dragged from the spit, forced to dig their own graves in the public square and were then beheaded, before a cheering crowd, on charges of spying for the British Empire.

  Their fate remained a mystery for some time until friends of Stoddart and Connolly had a whip-round and funded an expedition to look for them, in the form of a Jewish-born Christian missionary Rev. Joseph Wolff. He reached Bukhara in 1845 only to discover that the two men had long since been executed.

  At least Wolff did not repeat Stoddart’s mistakes. He prostrated himself before the Emir, crying “Allah Akbar” about thirty times instead of the proscribed three, then presented his gifts – three dozen copies of Robinson Crusoe in Arabic and several cheap watches. He was only spared the same fate as Connolly and Stoddart because the Emir couldn’t stop laughing.

  Worst Inaugural Speech

  Some American presidents are remembered for delivering brilliantly memorable inaugural addresses. Franklin Roosevelt’s in 1933, during the depths of the Great Depression, proclaimed, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”. John F. Kennedy in 1961 challenged fellow citizens with the words: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”

  William Henry Harrison’s inaugural address, delivered on 4 March 1841, was the longest ever at more than 8,000 words. It took more than two hours to deliver, in the middle of a snowstorm. Much of the speech dealt, inexplicably, with ancient Roman history. It bored the freezing crowd but, for the new president, it was fatal. As a show of bravado, the sixty-eight-year-old Harrison didn’t wear a hat or coat while delivering his seemingly endless oration. A month later he died of pneumonia, setting a new record as the first American president to die in office.

  “We know, on the authority of Moses, that longer ago than 6,000 years the world did not exist.”

  Martin Luther, German leader of Protestant Reformation

  Least Successful Prediction of an Election Outcome

  In 1948, according to the overwhelming predictions of pollsters across the nation, the “unstoppable” Republican candidate Thomas Dewey stood poised to defeat the incumbent Harry Truman to become the thirty-fourth President of the United States of America.

  The New York Times announced: “THOMAS E. DEWEY’S ELECTION AS PRESIDENT IS A FOREGONE CONCLUSION”. LIFE magazine ran a cover photo of Dewey beneath the headline: “THE NEXT PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES”. On election eve, Dewey asked his wife, “How will it be to sleep with the President of the United States?”

  “A high honour,” she replied, “and quite frankly, darling, I’m looking forward to it.”

  The next morning, the news arrived that Truman had won. His victory was such a surprise that the Chicago Daily Tribune had already printed a premature “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN” headline. When the Deweys sat down for breakfast, Mrs Dewey said, “Tell me, Tom – am I going to Washington or is Harry coming here?”

  “There will be no C, X or Q in our everyday alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary.”

  Ladies Home Journal article, “What May Happen in the Next 100 Years?” (1900)

  Least Successful Election Campaign

  In 1995, thirty-six-year-old David Griffiths was expelled from the Twickenham branch of the Conservative Association after telling a meeting of its members that he favoured the death penalty for all crimes, that homosexuals should be encouraged to commit suicide and that people who claim social security should gun each other down in the street.

  Griffiths returned to politics a year later when he ran for the Twickenham seat in the 1996 General Election as “the Antichrist”. He said that he had been aware that he was the Antichrist for some time, but had kept quiet about it in case it damaged his career in the Conservative Party.

  “The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse’. There is no evidence that people want to use these things.”

  John C. Dvorak, technology writer for the San Francisco Examiner, 1984

  Least Dignified Exit from Office by a French President

  In 1899, Felix Fauré, 58-year-old President of France, died suddenly and unexpectedly at the Presidential residence the Elysée Palace in the arms of Marguerite Steinheil, his mistress of two years.

  It wasn’t her arms he was in, exactly. It was widely reported that Fauré’s aides heard screams and broke down the door to find him seated on a sofa while his mistress was fellating him. Madame Steinheil went into in a state of trauma-induced lockjaw when she realized that her blowjob had just killed le président. After freeing the hysterical mistress, the fallen leader was placed back in his bed with his hands folded over a crucifix.2

  “[They] might as well try to light London with a slice from the moon.”

  English chemist William H. Wollaston, on gas lighting, date unknown

  Least Dignified Exit from Office by a French President: Runner-Up

  When Paul Deschanel was elected President of the French Third Republic in January 1920, his aides couldn’t help noticing that his approach to protocol veered far from the traditional. When a delegation of schoolgirls presented him with a bouquet, he tossed the flowers back at them one by one. Later, he received the British Ambassador to France stark naked apart from the ceremonial decorations of his office.

  On 23 May, the French president was travelling by train near Montargis when he fell through the window of his train after having taken some sleeping pills. He was found, wandering in his pyjamas and covered in blood, by a rail worker, who took him to the nearest level-crossing keeper’s cottage. Deschenel struggled for some time to convince them that he was the President of France. The stationmaster’s wife told news reporters, “I knew he was a gentleman because he had clean feet.” It was several hours before the president’s staff realized that he was missing.

  As if falling from a moving train wasn’t quite embarrassing enough, a few weeks later Deschanel walked out of an important meeting straight into a lake, fully clothed.

  His resignation offer was accepted on 21 September 1920, seven months after he took office, and he was subsequently hospitalized in a nursing home.

  “It’s a bad joke that won’t last. Not with winter coming.”

  Coco Chanel, designer, on the miniskirt, 1966

  Most Creative Excuse for Losing an Election

  David James, Conservative MP for the constituency of Brighton Kemptown, lost his seat in the 1964 general election after a record seven recounts, by just seven votes, to Labour’s Dennis Hobden, the first ever Labour MP for a Sussex constituency.

  James, who was also the founder of the Loch Ness Monster Information Bureau, had spent most of the three-week election campaign in Scotland on his annual hunt for “Nessie”. He was blamed for his party’s defeat because Labour went on to win the election with a two-seat majority that was soon whittled down to one in a by-election.

  This is thought to be the only occasion Nessiteras rhombopteryx has been blamed for losing a British general election.

  “Whatever happens, the US Navy is not going to be caught napping.”

  Frank Knox, US Secretary of the Navy, three days before Pearl Harbor was attacked, 1941

  Shortest Time in Office

  1. Pope Urban VII was the shortest-serving Pope in the history of the Catholic church, only managing to hang on to his job for thirteen days in 1590 before dying from malaria before his official instalment. But in that time, he was still abl
e to pass the world’s first smoking ban, threatening to excommunicate anyone who “took tobacco in the porchway of or inside a church, whether it be by chewing it, smoking it with a pipe or sniffing it in powdered form through the nose”.

  2. Sweyn Forkbeard was King of England for just five weeks until he fell off his horse in 1014, to be succeeded by his son Cnut.

  3. In 1998, the Russian president Boris Yeltsin sacked his prime minister and cabinet and declared that he was going to be prime minister from now on. A few hours later, he changed his mind.

  4. William Pulteney, the First Earl of Bath, became prime minister on 10 February 1746. He resigned two days later because nobody wanted to join his cabinet.

  5. On 1 February 1908, the Portuguese royal family were riding in an open carriage through Lisbon when thirty-year-old Manuel Buica shot at them at pointblank range, killing King Carlos. His two sons, Crown Princes Luis and Manuel, drew their own pistols and returned fire. Buica turned his gun on twenty-one-year-old Luis and discharged several more bullets. Manuel was saved by his mother Queen Amelie, who shoved a bouquet of flowers into Buica’s face just as he was taking aim. Crown Prince Luis Filipe had the shortest reign of any monarch, surviving his dead father by just twenty minutes.

  Dead as a “Didus Ineptus”

  Everyone was rude about the poor old dodo. The name may have originated from the Portuguese “doudo” which means foolish or simple; or maybe it was the Dutch when they colonized the island where it was discovered in 1644. Their word “dodaars” means either “fat-arse” or “knot-arse”, referring to the bird’s ungainly appearance. Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy, mockingly called it “Didus ineptus”.