England Made Them Meet Garech Browne, the Guinness Heir Whose Father Raised Pigs in Their Drawing Room

QUIRKS BY NATURE England Made Them Meet Garech Browne, the Guinness heir whose father raised pigs in their drawing room. And Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society. And the Marquis of Bath, with 64 mistresses he calls “wifelets.” Tim Walker captures a cross section of proud standard-bearers in Britain’s long tradition of eccentricity as Christopher Hitchens explains why his native land often seems like one big Monty Python skit. byChristopher Hitchens You might well think that it is easy to write about eccentric English people. “An embarrassment of riches” is a phrase that leaps to mind. After all, “England is the paradise,” as George Santayana wrote, “of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies and humors.” But before making one’s selection, one has first to appreciate that the entire place has something batty, squiffy, potty, and loopy about it. For a start, Santayana’s remarks on the English appear in his work entitled “The British Character.” So, what is this country actually called? If you come from France or Sweden, you can say so when asked, and that’s it. But if you come from an odd-shaped and rain-lashed little archipelago in the North Sea, you can answer “England” (unless you are Scottish or Welsh) or “Britain” (unless you are from the six counties of Ulster). The actual title of the country is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which is really the name not of a place but of a distinctly odd 17th-century political compromise. Artist Peter Armstrong at his Brixton flat, which is wallpapered with clippings from newspapers and magazines. Photographs by Tim Walker. The naming business helps to write eccentricity into the very landscape itself. Villages are called Piddletrenthide, for example, or Botus Fleming, or East (and West) Wittering, or Upper (and Lower) Slaughter. When I was a lad we lived in a little village in Devon called Crapstone, and I yearned to move so that my school-mates would stop teasing me about it. And we did move—to a village in Sussex called Funtingdon, which somehow wasn’t as much of an improvement as I’d hoped. Of course, not all of these names are pronounced as they are spelled: that would make it too easy. Looking for the town of Leominster? Remember, please, when asking directions to specify “Lemster.” Daventry? Simply say “Daintree.” And, just to make visitors feel even more at home and at their ease, the English themselves—especially the upper-crust ones—have family names that bear no relation to their spelling at all. Marjoribanks, for example, is “Marchbanks.” Featherstonehaugh is “Fanshawe.” Cholmondeley is “Chumley.” And so forth. Just to keep people on their toes, it has been decided that the English (or British, or what you will) should have an absurdity at the very apex of their well-worn arrangements. Accordingly, an elderly lady of German descent is the head of the Church, the state, and the armed forces (being, as far as I know, the only colonel of any English regiment to be married to the colonel of another English regiment), and just as she came by her job when her own father expired, so her son will inherit these same responsibilities when she, too, is promoted to a higher realm. Meanwhile, everyone agrees to say “the Royal Mint” (where the money is actually coined) and “the national debt” (where the money vanishes into infinity). Her Majesty the Queen has been recently photographed wringing the neck of a wounded pheasant on one of her many estates, and has a husband who has to walk several paces behind her when she appears in public (and for all I know, though there are those rather difficult children, in private). The great thing is that nobody in England/Britain/Albion/the U.K. appears to find any of this odd. Why should they? It’s not as if the telephone numbers and area codes for the nation’s different towns were the same length. Where on earth would be the fun in standardizing something like that? There are various forms of English mania and oddity, and they tend to be more notorious among the upper classes, if only because true eccentricity requires some leisure time, and some money, for its cultivation. But a national weirdness, shared across all classes, has to do with the strong preference for animals over people. The country boasts, for example, a Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. It also has, but in a somewhat lower register, a National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The façade of national reserve has crumbled a bit in the past few decades, though reticence and understatement are still prized, but if you want to see the English become emotional, speak to them about foxes and pheasants and horses and pigs and deer. Alexander Waugh’s memoir of the four generations of writers and novelists in his family tells heart-rendingly of his grandmother who, even when her son lay in the hospital, wanted most of all to be back with her cows. I knew of a man, more of a squire than an aristocrat, who when taken ill would summon a country vet to attend to his wants. “Because,” he roared, “the man knows how to make a diagnosis without asking a lot of bloody stupid questions.” View Tim Walker’s photos of England’s eccentrics. The Marquis of Bath, with crocodile, at his estate, in Longleat, Wiltshire. This is where love for animals shades off into slight misanthropy, which is also a highly developed English trait. It used to be, and in many cases still is, the practice to pack off the children of the better-heeled to boarding schools at the age of eight, thus freeing up their parents to spend more quality time with the livestock. Just to keep it interesting, the system that warehoused these children was called the “public school” system, if only because it was exclusively privately financed. But I do not want to give the impression that misanthropy is confined solely to the toffs. John Fothergill, the celebrated landlord of the Spread Eagle Inn in the Oxfordshire town of Thame (pronounced “Tame”), would sometimes add an unspecified charge of a few pounds to the bill. If any of his guests queried it, they would be gruffly told that it was “Face Money.” And if they persisted in asking, they would have it bluntly explained to them by Mr. Fothergill that he charged extra for those customers whose faces he didn’t care for. Apparently, nobody ever refused to pay. In his memoir, An Innkeeper’s Diary, Mr. Fothergill detailed numerous other standoffs with his clientele. Of what is this reminding you? Why, surely, of Basil, the genial host of Fawlty Towers. The great achievement of John Cleese, and of the Pythons in general, is to take the British at their most bland and conformist (in pet shops, offering hospitality, donning bowler hats for a day at the office) and then to tear off the false whiskers and show the heaving morass of giggling, cackling lunacy that churns beneath. Something of the same effect is achieved by Mr. Bean and in, for example, Withnail and I: a tranquil urban or rural scene gives way to a sudden display of barking oddballism. I used to go to Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park on a Sunday afternoon (once or twice with my own soapbox on which to stand) and inhale the pure air of unfiltered British raving. There they all were: the group that could prove that the English were the lost tribe of Israel, and the rival sect that could explain the secrets of the middle pyramid. Of course there are nut-bags like this in every society, but rarely are they offered such a special piece of prime real estate—just by Marble Arch in this case, and not far from Buckingham Palace—specially dedicated to their soothing recreational needs. During his sojourn in London, Lenin would go there to help perfect his English: I’d give a lot to know how he sounded, having learned from this crew, when giving a speech in that language. In 1933, Dame Edith Sitwell decided to publish a study called The English Eccentrics. I can’t think what gave her the idea. Her father, Sir George Reresby Sitwell (son of Sir Sitwell Sitwell), maintained a country retreat named Renishaw Hall, near the Derbyshire town of Eckington. A sign at the entrance made the following heartfelt request: “I must ask anyone entering the house never to contradict me or differ from me in any way, as it interferes with the functioning of the gastric juices and prevents my sleeping at night.” This atmosphere of mild—if pronounced—megalomania was dimly policed by a faithful butler, unimprovably named Henry Moat: a christening that would not have disgraced a P. G. Wodehouse manservant. The imperturbable Moat saw quite a few things in his time, which included his master’s invention of a miniature revolver for the special purpose of shooting Artist Grayson Perry—here in West London—wore a crinoline dress to accept the 2003 Turner Prize, which he won for his pottery; he and his wife, psychotherapist Philippa Fairclough, have one daughter. Dame Edith, raised in a fairly tough school, decided to go after bigger game than her father had. In her pages we can meet Captain Philip Thicknesse, an adventurer in the Jamaican slave trade and a man who claimed to have lived on terms of intimacy with the Creek Indians, and who on his demise, in 1792, revenged himself upon an heir he considered disloyal by deciding in his will to “leave my right hand, to be cut off after my death, to my son Lord Audley.” Dame Edith—one notices the peculiarity of that title almost as soon as one writes it—formed the opinion that “eccentricity exists particularly in the English, and partly, I think, because of that peculiar and satisfactory knowledge of infallibility that is the hallmark and birthright of the British nation.” If one did not have additional reasons to think so, one might there and then decide that Dame Edith was a crazy old bat to rank with the best of them.

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