QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance

by John Lloyd

  Just one torpedo was all that was needed to sink the ship, 13 kilometres (8 miles) off the coast of Ireland, on 7 May 1915. She went down in eighteen minutes with the loss of 1,198 lives – including over a hundred children, many of them babies. One survivor recalled swimming through crowds of dead children ‘like lily-pads on a pond’.

  On being rescued from the wreck, the hapless Captain Turner remarked, ‘What bad luck – what have I done to deserve this?’ Only 239 bodies were recovered, a third of whom were never identified. Among the dead were 128 Americans.

  The British, and the pro-war faction in America, were delighted by the effect that this proof of Germany’s ‘frightfulness’ had on US public opinion. The Germans, under the pressure of international outrage, promptly abandoned their ‘sink on sight’ strategy. (It wasn’t re-adopted until January 1917, by which time Germany knew that war with the US was inevitable.)

  Though President Woodrow Wilson’s government refused to be swept into the war by popular anger, the military significance of the atrocity is not in doubt.

  Some historians even argue that, by forcing Germany to suspend ‘sink on sight’ at a crucial stage of the conflict, the sinking of the Lusitania gave the Allies a strategic advantage that determined the outcome of the whole war.

  When America did finally declare war in 1917, the US army recruited under the slogan ‘Remember the Lusitania!’

  Which radio play first made people think the world was coming to an end?

  It was the BBC’s Broadcasting the Barricades (1926). The work of an English Catholic priest, it inspired Orson Welles to adapt H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds for radio in 1938.

  On 16 January 1926 Father Ronald Knox interrupted his regular BBC radio show to deliver a news bulletin, complete with alarming sound effects. Revolution had broken out in London, he announced. The Savoy Hotel had been burned down and the National Gallery sacked. Mortar fire had toppled the clock tower of Big Ben and angry demonstrators were roasting the wealthy broker Sir Theophilus Gooch alive. ‘The crowd has secured the person of Mr Wurtherspoon, the Minister of Traffic, who was attempting to make his escape in disguise. He has now been hanged from a lamp post in Vauxhall.’

  It should have been obvious it was a spoof. For one thing, Knox was a famous satirist who had once written a scholarly essay claiming that Tennyson’s In Memoriam was the work of Queen Victoria. Listeners who missed the BBC’s announcement of the programme as a ‘burlesque’ should have guessed it was a joke on hearing that the leader of the uprising was a Mr Popplebury, Secretary of the National Movement for Abolishing Theatre Queues.

  But this was only eight years after the Russian Revolution. Many upper-and middle-class people believed a communist takeover of Britain was imminent and took the ludicrous reports seriously. Women fainted and hundreds of people phoned police stations for details of the anarchy. The following day, as luck would have it, snow prevented newspapers reaching many rural areas, confirming the impression that civilisation had, indeed, come to an end.

  The BBC rushed to offer its ‘sincere apologies for any uneasiness caused’ and the press (which for commercial reasons was deeply hostile to radio) lost no time in exaggerating the depth of the ‘unease’ with headlines like ‘Revolution Hoax by Wireless: Terror caused in villages and towns’. The BBC’s Director General, Lord Reith, calmly totted up the complaints (249), compared them to messages of appreciation (2,307), and declared the show such a success that he wanted more of the same. Knox later obliged with a programme about an invention to amplify the sounds of vegetables in pain.

  Ronald Knox (1888–1957) was the top classicist of his year at Oxford. Though his father and both his grandfathers had been Anglican bishops, he was inspired by G. K. Chesterton to convert to Roman Catholicism and became a respected theologian. Like Chesterton, Knox was also a prolific and successful writer of crime fiction. In 1928, he published ‘The Ten Commandments for Detective Novelists’. They included: ‘All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course’; ‘Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable’; ‘The detective must not himself commit the crime’; and, more mysteriously, ‘No Chinaman must figure in the story’.

  The New York Times smugly reported Knox’s Broadcasting the Barricades with the words: ‘Such a thing as that could not happen in this country.’ Twelve years later Orson Welles was to prove them entirely wrong.

  What did US bankers do after the Wall Street Crash of 1929?

  Only two people jumped to their death, and neither were bankers.

  The prosperity of the 1920s encouraged millions of Americans to buy stocks and shares by using the value of the stock they were buying as collateral to borrow the money they needed to buy the stock itself. It was a classic economic bubble, and it finally burst on ‘Black Thursday’, 24 October 1929, when 14 billion dollars were wiped off the value of shares in a single day. Panic selling was so rapid that the New York Stock Exchange was unable to keep pace with the transactions as they were made.

  Within hours, the legend had started: reporters were running around Wall Street chasing stories about ruined investors leaping out of skyscrapers. The following day’s New York Times reported that ‘wild and false’ rumours were spreading across America, including the popular belief that eleven speculators had already killed themselves, and that a crowd had gathered when they mistook a man working on a Wall Street rooftop for a financier about to jump.

  Comedians immediately started telling gags about the supposed jumpers, with Will Rogers tastefully noting that ‘You had to stand in line to get a window to jump out of.’

  None of it was true. Though there was a lot of panic and uncertainty, a fortnight after the Crash, New York’s Chief Medical Examiner announced that suicides for the period were actually down on the previous year. John Kenneth Galbraith, the economist, corroborated this in his authoritative history, The Great Crash (1954), which concluded: ‘The suicide wave that followed the stock market crash is also part of the legend of 1929. In fact, there was none.’

  A detailed study of suicide records of the time, carried out in the 1980s, confirmed this. In New York, between 1921 and 1931, jumping from a high place was the second-most frequent method of suicide. Between Black Thursday and the end of 1929, a hundred suicide attempts, fatal or otherwise, were reported in the New York Times. Of these, only four were jumps linked to the crash, and only two were in Wall Street.

  The two who actually did jump in Wall Street did so in November. Hulda Borowski, a fifty-one-year-old bond clerk, was said to be ‘near exhaustion from overwork’, while George E. Cutler, a successful wholesale greengrocer, became frustrated when told that his attorney was unavailable to see him, and leapt from the seventh floor of the lawyer’s building.

  In general, recessions do lead to suicide, though. A 30 per cent rise in the suicide rate was noted in the US and Britain during the Great Depression that followed the 1929 crash, and that pattern has been repeated in more recent downturns. A study of twenty-six European countries published in The Lancet in 2009 found a 0.8 per cent rise in the number of suicides for every 1 per cent increase in unemployment.

  In the wake of the financial crash of 2008, American psychologists have even invented a term to describe the phenomenon. They call it ‘econocide’.

  Who was the first American to be buried in Britain?

  Pocohontas. She was buried in the churchyard of St George’s Church, Gravesend in 1617, aged twenty-two. She was also the first Native American to be baptised a Christian, to learn English and to marry an Englishman.

  Pocahontas was born at Werowocomoco, near what is now Richmond, Virginia. The English translated her name to mean ‘Bright Stream between Two Hills’ but, in her native language, it seems it was a childhood nickname meaning ‘Little Wanton One’. Her real name, like the other children’s, was a secret known only to the tribe. Hers was Matoax, ‘Little Snow Feather’.

  She was the daughter of Wahunsunacawh, the Supreme
Chief of the Powhatan Confederacy, an alliance of Algonquin tribes who lived around Chesapeake Bay. This was the area the English first settled when they established the new colony of Virginia in 1607. Pocohontas’s father, known as ‘The Powhatan’, had ten daughters altogether, and he was about sixty when the English arrived.

  When Pocohontas was ten, a hunting party led by the Powhatan’s brother captured an English soldier and leading colonist called John Smith (1580–1631). According to his account, the little girl intervened to save his life, and he went on to become president of the Virginia colony.

  At first, partly owing to Pocohontas’s popularity with the settlers, relations with the Powhatans were good. But the situation deteriorated and, in 1610, the first Anglo-Powhatan war broke out. Pocahontas was kidnapped and held hostage.

  Four years later, as part of the peace settlement, she was married off to an English widower, John Rolfe (1585–1622), the first man to export tobacco to England from Virginia. It was a political marriage. Rolfe wrote that he was ‘motivated not by the unbridled desire of carnal affection but for the good of this plantation, for the honor of our country, for the Glory of God, for my own salvation’. The teenage bride’s views are not recorded.

  Baptised a Christian and renamed Rebecca, Pocahontas moved to England in 1616, living in Brentford with her husband, their son, Thomas, and a retinue of Powhatans. She appears to have been used as a kind of walking advert for the Virginia Company to show potential colonists and investors how charming the native Americans could be. For the last year of her life, she was famous. The Powhatans were a sensation at court, where Pocahontas was presented as a foreign royal, ‘the Indian princess’. The diminutive King James I made so little impression on her that his status had to be explained to her afterwards.

  A year later, the Rolfes boarded a ship to return to Virginia, but Pocahontas became gravely ill (possibly of smallpox), was taken ashore, and died. Her last words to her husband were: ‘All must die. It is enough that the childe liveth.’

  Though the Powhatan were dispossessed of most of their lands within a few years of her death, ‘the childe’ survived. Thomas’s many descendants include Nancy Reagan and Wayne Newton, the Las Vegas entertainer, who is trying to recover Pocohontas’s remains from Gravesend for reburial in Virginia.

  Is there any part of Britain that is legally American soil?

  Yes. It’s the John F. Kennedy Memorial overlooking Runnymede, the meadow on the banks of the Thames where King John signed Magna Carta in 1215.

  The acre of ground on which the memorial stands was a gift to the United States of America from the people of Britain in 1965. Formerly owned by the Crown, it is the only bit of Britain that is American territory.

  Contrary to popular belief, the grounds of foreign embassies are not the sovereign territory of their state, nor are they beyond the law of the land in which they sit. The reason for the confusion is that nationals of the host country may not enter embassies without permission: refugees sometimes use them for this reason. If the authorities believe something illegal is going on inside the building, they have to wait for suspects to leave before arresting them. This doesn’t apply to an ambassador or other diplomat, however, who can refuse arrest by claiming diplomatic immunity.

  All diplomats in their host countries are immune in this way. The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations states that they can’t be arrested or criminally prosecuted by the host country for any violations of local law. The most the host country can do is to expel them, declaring them persona non grata (literally ‘a person no longer welcome’). However, the diplomat is still covered by the laws of his home country and may be prosecuted under those laws when he returns home. The home country can also waive immunity for its own diplomats, leaving them open to prosecution by the host country.

  The US Embassy is currently in Grosvenor Square in London (though it is shortly due to move to a new location in Wandsworth).

  When the US government recently attempted to buy the freehold of the Grosvenor Square site from their landlord, the Duke of Westminster, he said that he would let them have it if the Americans returned to him the State of Virginia, confiscated from his ancestors during the War of Independence.

  Which was the first film to star Mickey Mouse?

  It wasn’t Steamboat Willie, released on 18 November 1928 – even though the Walt Disney Company still celebrates this date as Mickey’s official birthday.

  There were two Mickey Mouse cartoons made earlier that year. The first was Plane Crazy. In it, Mickey tries to emulate the American aviator Charles Lindbergh (1902–74) by building a plane. He spends much of his first flight trying to force a kiss on Minnie Mouse, eventually causing the plane to crash-land. The second, The Gallopin’ Gaucho, was a topical parody of The Gaucho (1927), starring matinée idol Douglas Fairbanks Junior (1909– 2000). The film was set in a bar in the Argentine pampas, where Mickey smokes, drinks, dances a tango and fights the evil outlaw Black Pete to win the affections of the saucy barmaid, Minnie.

  Both these films show a much raunchier Mickey than the saintly character he became. But they weren’t widely distributed and didn’t do well at the box office. Walt Disney (1901–66), and his friend and chief animator Ub Iwerks, had previously enjoyed great success with a series of shorts featuring their first animated character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Universal Studios was the distributor for Oswald, but when Disney asked for a bigger budget, the studio demanded a 20 per cent budget cut instead and Disney walked out – without the rights to Oswald, and without his staff: only Iwerks joined him.

  The two men decided to go it alone. They tried out cartoon dogs, cats, horses and cows but eventually Disney found inspiration in the pet mouse he’d once kept, growing up on a farm in Missouri. ‘Mortimer Mouse’ was renamed ‘Mickey’ at the suggestion of Disney’s wife Lillian. In the first two shorts, Mickey was only slightly different (for copyright reasons) from Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, which may be why he didn’t catch the public imagination.

  Disney’s solution was to make the kind of technical leap forward which would become a hallmark of his films. For his third Mickey Mouse short, Steamboat Willie, he recorded a synchronised soundtrack. Given that the first talkie, The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson, had been released only a year earlier, this was a remarkably bold move. Steamboat Willie was not only the first cartoon with a fully synchronised soundtrack: it was the first use of a soundtrack for a comedy. It was snapped up by a distributor and audiences loved it. Within a year Mickey Mouse was the most popular cartoon character in America.

  Walt Disney went on to become the most awarded filmmaker of all time, winning a record twenty-six Oscars from a total of fifty-nine nominations. Mickey Mouse remained his talisman throughout and from 1929 to 1947 he voiced his most famous creation himself. As one employee put it: ‘Ub designed Mickey’s physical appearance, but Walt gave him his soul.’

  Disney’s life wasn’t the wholesome, happy one he liked to portray. Addicted to sleeping pills and alcohol, he suffered from bouts of compulsive hand-washing, impotence and insomnia, which put his relationship with Lillian under great strain. He once remarked, only half-jokingly, ‘I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I’ve ever known.’

  What was Dan Dare’s original job?

  He was a vicar. The legendary comic-strip hero started life as an Anglican priest: Chaplain Dan Dare of the Interplanet Patrol.

  From 1950 to 1969, ‘Dan Dare’ was the lead strip in the Eagle. It sold more than 750,000 copies a week – unprecedented for a UK comic both before and since – and Dan Dare merchandise saturated the toy market in a way that wasn’t matched until the advent of Star Wars and Harry Potter.

  The Eagle was the brainchild of an Anglican priest and former RAF chaplain, Reverend Marcus Morris (1915–89), and a young graphic illustrator called Frank Hampson (1918–85). In 1949 Morris wrote a piece in the Sunday Dispatch attacking the importation of horror comics from America: ‘Morals of little girls in plaits and boys wit
h marbles bulging in their pockets are being corrupted by a torrent of indecent coloured magazines that are flooding bookstalls and newsagents.’ What was needed, he said, was a popular children’s comic where adventure is once more ‘a clean and exciting business’.

  Hampson and Morris’s first co-creation was a strip featuring a tough East-End vicar called Lex Christian for the Empire News. However, the sudden death of the paper’s editor meant it never ran, so Morris conceived a whole comic, which Hampson’s wife christened the Eagle, after the shape of the traditional church lectern. The first two pages of the new magazine introduced a revised version of Lex Christian, now set in the future. Enter Chaplain Dan Dare of the Interplanet Patrol, complete with dog collar.

  With Arthur C. Clarke as scientific adviser, Chad Varah (founder of the Samaritans) as script consultant and Hampson’s revolutionary use of a studio of artists working from a huge library of photos, diagrams and 3-D models to create realistic blueprints for each frame, the Eagle idea found an enthusiastic publisher in Hulton (owners of the Radio Times). It was Hulton’s eleventh-hour intervention that spared the children of Britain their first comic strip about a priest. The company felt that ‘Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future’ was a more commercial proposition and Hampson and Morris eventually agreed. Produced on the dining table of Frank Hampson’s council house in Southport, the launch issue sold close to a million copies.