QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance

by John Lloyd

  Adolf Hitler, it seems, took a very different view. In 1934, Anthony Eden went to meet him in Berlin. Eden was then the British cabinet minister responsible for the League of Nations and hoped to find common ground with Hitler by reminiscing about the old days (they had fought in opposite trenches at Ypres in the First World War). Eden described him as ‘reasonable, charming and affable’, but the Führer only wanted to talk obsessively about one thing: Eton.

  Hitler was convinced Britain owed its victory in the First World War to strategic skills acquired at Eton. Eden, an Old Etonian himself, disagreed. He pointed out that the Eton College Officer Training Corps was a shambles.

  His protests were in vain: one of the first things Hitler did after the outbreak of the Second World War was to arrange for Eton to be bombed.

  Two bombs fell on the school. One shattered all the glass in the college chapel; the other narrowly missed a library full of boys studying. There were no reported casualties. When parents asked for the pupils to be moved to a safer location, the Headmaster, Charles Elliott, refused. If London’s poor couldn’t leave London, he said, Etonians wouldn’t leave Eton.

  Eton College was founded in 1440 by Henry VI. Called the ‘King’s College of Our Lady of Eton beside Wyndsor’ it was originally intended as a charity school, providing free education for seventy poor students using scholars from the town as teaching staff. Henry VI lavished upon it a substantial income from land, and a huge collection of priceless holy relics – including alleged fragments of the True Cross and the Crown of Thorns.

  Today Eton has 1,300 pupils and 160 masters and the annual school fee is £29,682. The Officer Training Corps still exists and the current British Prime Minister is a former member of it. By his own account, David Cameron’s favourite song is ‘The Eton Rifles’ (1978), a scathingly anti-public school composition by The Jam.

  STEPHEN When the railway was being built through that particular part of Buckinghamshire, who was it that said, ‘We won’t have a station here?’ What school is nearby?

  ROB BRYDON Oo-oh, erm … It’s Eton.

  STEPHEN Eton College, of course, is there, and yes, they thought the boys would be tempted to go into London and visit prostitutes and so on.

  BILL BAILEY ‘I’d like a Prostitute Super-Saver, please!’

  JIMMY CARR [baffled expression] ‘But this prostitute seems to be a woman.’

  Which revolution ended the First World War?

  The German Revolution of November 1918. It’s much less well known than the Russian Revolution of 1917, but the repercussions were just as significant.

  By the middle of 1918, most Germans knew they had lost the First World War. So when Admiral Franz von Hipper (1863–1932), commander of the German battlecruisers at the Battle of Jutland, proposed a last do-or-die engagement with the British Navy, the reaction was less than enthusiastic and several ships mutinied. Although the revolt was short-lived, it persuaded the German High Command to rescind the battle order and return the fleet to Kiel.

  There, convinced they were back in control, the authorities arrested forty-seven of the mutineers. Local union leaders, outraged by the treatment of the sailors, called for a public demonstration. On 3 November, several thousand people marched through Kiel under banners demanding ‘Peace and Bread’. The military police opened fire on the march and seven protestors were killed.

  Within twenty-four hours there was a mass uprising of soldiers, sailors and workers all over Germany, demanding an end to the war, the abdication of the Kaiser and the establishment of a republic. At this point, most states in the German Federation still had individual royal families but, in less than a week, they had all abdicated in favour of democratically elected Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils.

  In Berlin Friedrich Ebert (1871–1925), leader of the Social Democrats, the main left-wing political party, was worried that this might spark a communist revolution along Russian lines, plunging the country into civil war. To appease the rebels, he asked the Kaiser to abdicate. By this time even the troops on the Western Front were refusing to fight, but the Kaiser refused. Exasperated, the liberal Chancellor of the Reichstag, Prince Max von Baden, took matters into his own hands and sent a telegram announcing the Kaiser’s abdication.

  The Kaiser promptly fled to the Netherlands where he remained until his death in 1941. Baden resigned and, on 9 November, Ebert declared a republic with himself as Chancellor. The Armistice was signed two days later.

  Ebert then tackled the revolutionaries, who wanted the entire mechanism of the old state abolished. In early 1919 the newly formed German Communist Party provoked armed insurrections in many German cities. Ebert had them brutally suppressed by the army. To the Left Ebert was now a traitor, and the militaristic Right hated him just as much for signing the infamous ‘war guilt’ clause in the Treaty of Versailles.

  On 19 January 1919 Ebert established a new constitutional government, not in Berlin but at Weimar, the base of the great writers Goethe and Schiller and the spiritual home of German humanism. For the next fourteen years the Weimar Republic battled political instability and hyperinflation caused by punishing war debts. In one year, between 1921 and 1922, the value of the German Mark fell from 60 to 8,000 against the dollar. The German Revolution that had ended the First World War created the chaos out of which Nazism was born.

  Which country suffered the second highest losses in the Second World War?

  The worst were in the USSR. The second worst were in China.

  The Soviet–German war of 1941–45 was the largest conflict in human history. When Hitler sent three million troops into the Soviet Union, he expected a quick victory. Four years later, an estimated 10 million Soviet troops and 14 million Soviet citizens had died. The Germans lost over 5 million men too: it was in Russia that the outcome of the Second World War was really decided.

  It was a vast theatre, fought over thousands of square miles. The Red Army were untrained and hopelessly underequipped in the early stages of the war, with infantry often pitted against tanks. The initial German advance was swift, destroying countless towns and villages, and wrecking the infrastructure of agriculture and industry. This left millions of Russians homeless and hungry. As the German advance became bogged down, the troops were ordered to show no mercy, systematically butchering prisoners and civilians alike.

  It was a very similar set of factors that produced the war’s second largest death toll. Very little is known in the West about the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45, yet even the lowest estimates suggest 2 million Chinese troops and 7 million civilians died. The official Chinese death toll is a total of 20 million.

  The Japanese invaded China in 1937 to provide a buffer between themselves and their real enemy, the USSR. China had no central government: much of it was still controlled by warlords and Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalists and Mao Zedong’s Communists hated each other almost as much as they did the Japanese. Chinese troops were pitifully short of weapons and modern military equipment (some still fought with swords) and they were no match for the disciplined and ruthless Imperial Japanese army.

  The invasion turned into the greatest, bloodiest guerrilla war ever fought. Both sides pursued horrific scorched earth policies, destroying crops, farms, villages and bridges as they retreated, so as to deny their use to the enemy. Widespread famine and starvation were the result. As in Russia, a lack of military hardware was made up for by the sheer numbers of Chinese willing to fight and die. And, by the end of the war, 95 million Chinese were refugees.

  Early on in the conflict, after capturing Chiang Kai-Shek’s capital, Nanking, Japanese troops were sent on an officially authorised, six-week spree of mass murder, torture and rape that left 300,000 dead. Over the course of the war, 200,000 Chinese women were kidnapped to work in Japanese military brothels. Another 400,000 Chinese died after being infected with cholera, anthrax and bubonic plague dropped from Japanese aircraft. But, no matter how appalling the casualties, the Chinese refused to give in.

  A
ll Japan’s military forces surrendered after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In China Mao Zedong’s Communist Party swept to power. In 1972 Mao expressed his gratitude to the Japanese prime minister, Kakuei Tanaka. ‘If Imperial Japan had not started the war,’ he said, ‘how could we communists have become mighty and powerful?’

  Which nationality invented the ‘stiff upper lip’?

  It wasn’t the British. Unlikely as it may sound, it was the Americans.

  To keep a stiff upper lip is to remain steadfast and unemotional in the face of the worst that life can throw at you. Though long associated with Britain – and especially the British Empire – the oldest-known uses of the term are all from the USA, beginning in 1815. Americans were going around with ‘stiff upper lips’ in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and in the letters of Mark Twain (1835–1910) and it was only towards the end of the nineteenth century that the expression first appeared in print in Britain. By 1963, when P. G.Wodehouse published his ninth Jeeves and Wooster novel, Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves!, the phrase, if not the concept, had become almost entirely humorous.

  The idea behind the expression is that a trembling lip is the first sign you’re about to start crying. Why it should be the upper lip, in particular, that needs to be stiff is not clear. It may be because the saying originated in an age when most men wore moustaches, which would make shakiness more obvious in the upper lip than in the lower one; or perhaps ‘stiff bottom lip’ just sounded odd, like some obscure naval flogging offence.

  Is a stiff upper lip good for you? That depends on whose research you choose to believe. Cancer Research UK recently published a survey conducted by the University of Leeds that showed that British men were 69 per cent more likely to die of cancer than women. This is due in part, they claimed, to men adopting ‘a stiff upper lip attitude to illness’: in other words, they ignore persistent symptoms and refuse to have regular check-ups.

  On the other hand, psychologists in the USA, studying the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, found that – contrary to their expectations, and to popular belief – people who ‘bottled up’ their feelings suffered fewer negative mental and physical symptoms than those who were keen to talk openly about their experiences.

  In Victorian times, the ‘stiff upper lip’ had a practical application: it was attached to a German contraption called the Lebensprüfer (‘Life-prover’). This was a device intended to prevent premature burial. Wires were clipped to the upper lip and eyelid of someone who had apparently died. A mild electrical current was sent through their body and, if the patient’s muscles twitched, you knew not to bury them quite yet.

  What did George Washington have to say about his father’s cherry tree?

  We don’t know. We don’t even know if his father had a cherry tree.

  The story of Washington and the cherry tree was entirely the invention of a man known to Americans as ‘Parson’ Weems, who wrote and published the first biography of the first US President just months after he died in 1799.

  In Weems’s tale, the six-year-old George Washington was given a small axe as a present and amused himself with it for hours in the garden of the family’s plantation, Ferry Farm in Stafford, Virginia. One day George went too far and hacked the bark off his father’s favourite cherry tree, condemning it to death. Though his father, Augustine Washington, was furious,George confessed at once: ‘I can’t tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.’ George’s honesty so impressed his father that he gave him a hug and congratulated him on ‘an act of heroism that is worth a thousand trees’.

  It’s a good story, but it appears in no other accounts of Washington’s life and was never mentioned by Washington himself. Even Weems was evasive about his sources: ‘I had it related to me twenty years ago by an aged lady, who was a distant relative’ was as far as he was prepared to go.

  Mason Locke Weems (1756–1825) was born in Maryland but studied medicine and theology in London. Ordained by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1784, he returned to America to take services at Pohick church in Virginia. Both George Washington and his father had once been members of the governing body there and Weems later falsely inflated his role into ‘Former Rector of Mount Vernon’, Washington’s country estate nearly 10 kilometres (6 miles) from Pohick.

  In 1790 a shortage of cash forced Weems to leave the ministry and become an itinerant bookseller. He cut an eccentric figure riding through the southern states, peddling his wares at fairs and markets. He was part preacher and part entertainer, talking up the quality of his merchandise as if delivering a sermon, then pulling out his fiddle for a rousing finale.

  When Washington died, Weems had been working on his biography for six months. He wrote to a friend that ‘millions are gaping to read something about him. I am very nearly prim’d & cock’d for ’em.’ The outpouring of grief at the President’s death (some people wore mourning clothes for months afterwards) confirmed Weems’s view that what the American people needed was a heroic yarn, not a balanced political biography. Washington’s modesty, his refusal to join a political party, his adoption of the homely ‘Mr President’ as his title, his rejection of a third term in office – all needed a mythic context that Weems’s fantasy supplied.

  A History of the Life and Death, Virtues and Exploits of General George Washington (1800) was one of the first American best-sellers, appearing in twenty-nine editions by 1825, and finding a place next to the Bible in almost every farm in the land. Although it’s the source of most half-truths told about Washington, it’s also the book that confirmed him as the ‘Father of his Country’.

  How many men have held the office of President of the United States?

  Forty-three. (Not forty-four, as Barack Obama claimed at his inauguration.)

  Barack Obama is the forty-fourth president of the USA, but only the forty-third person to become president. This is because Grover Cleveland held the position twice – with a four-year break in between – making him both the twenty-second and the twenty-fourth president of the United States.

  Stephen Grover Cleveland (1837–1908) was the only Democrat in an otherwise unbroken fifty-year run of Republican presidents from 1860 to 1912. Almost no one has a bad word to say about him. ‘He possessed honesty, courage,firmness, independence, and common sense,’ wrote one contemporary biographer. ‘But he possessed them to a degree other men do not.’

  In the 1888 presidential contest Cleveland should have been elected for a second consecutive term. He actually polled more votes than John Harrison, but Republican electoral fraud in Indiana cost him the election. As she left the White House, Cleveland’s young wife Frances – at twenty-one the youngest ever First Lady, and the only one to have been married in the White House – told her staff: ‘I want you to take good care of all the furniture and ornaments in the house, for I want to find everything just as it is now, when we come back again.’ When asked when that would be, she said: ‘We are coming back four years from today.’

  Which is just what happened. In the 1892 campaign, universally considered the cleanest and quietest since the Civil War, Grover Cleveland beat President Harrison by a landslide. He decided not to fight for a third term, which he was then still allowed to do. (President Roosevelt served for four consecutive terms from 1932–44.) It wasn’t until the 22nd Amendment to the US Constitution was passed in 1951 that presidents were limited to a maximum of two terms.

  Cleveland died in 1908. His last words were: ‘I have tried so hard to do right.’

  He is the only president to appear on two different $1 bills.

  Despite putting a cross next to the name of the candidates on the ballot paper, the American people do not directly elect their president and vice-president. This is done a month after the popular vote by a ‘college’ of 538 state electors, allocated according to the size of the state’s population: California (55) and Texas (34) have most; Vermont (3) and Alaska (3) the fewest. This system
dates back to the beginning of the Union and was adopted because George Washington hoped it would reduce the amount of divisive party politics.

  It’s not perfect. The ‘electors’ have no power: they are a constitutional formality, pledged to vote for whichever candidate wins the popular vote in their state. Just as in British general elections, where votes don’t always translate into seats, so in America. As long as a candidate wins the eleven biggest states they can be elected president with fewer votes overall. This is how Cleveland lost in 1888 and how George W. Bush defeated Al Gore in 2000.

  STEPHEN Barack Obama is currently known as the forty-fourth, just as Bush was known as the forty-third, but … but theyaren’t. Bush was the forty-second and Obama is the forty-third. Do you know why this is?

  SEAN LOCK One of them was invisible?

  Which country ritually burns the most American flags?

  The USA.

  Every year, the Boy Scouts of America and military veteran organisations like the American Legion burn thousands of US flags between them.

  This is because Section 176(k) of the US Flag Code (a set of rules on the correct treatment of the Stars and Stripes) provides that: ‘The flag, when it is in such condition that it is no longer a fitting emblem for display, should be destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning.’ Flag burnings (or ‘retirements’, to use the official term) are usually held on Flag Day, 14 June.