by
lee954
@ 07 Dec. 2006 - 05:42:12
We British [or at least, the upper classes] are renowned for our eccentric behaviour. Here are two examples I've found - neither of whom I've come across before.
Lord Berners (1883 - 1950)
Lord Berners (Gerald Tyrwhitt), a product of Eton, is a truly great example of the English eccentric. He was a distinguished diplomat, writer and composer, and also indulged in unorthodox collecting. In this particular case it was other people’s calling or visiting cards. The reason for this was as unusual as the collection itself. When he loaned his house in Rome to friends, he would select from his collection the cards of the most notorious bores in London society. His butler in Rome was then instructed to deliver one or two of the cards each day. By this means the guests would spend much of their holiday diving for cover every time they heard someone at the door!
At Faringdon House he kept whippets, which were decorated with diamond collars, and his doves were dyed in various pastel shades – harmless vegetable dyes actually provided in 1937 by Vera Sudeikina, later to become the wife of Stravinsky - a tradition I am pleased to say, repeated each Easter by the National Trust.
The notice on the door reads, 'It is requested that all hats be removed'.
Notices around the Faringdon estate read:
Dogs will be shot: cats will be whipped –
although of course they weren’t.
In 1935 he constructed the Faringdon Folly, a 140-foot tower of his own design in the parkland surrounding his home. When asked what purpose it served he explained: ‘The great point of the tower is that it will be entirely useless’. To discourage anyone who thought of one obvious use for it, he put up a notice reading:
Members of the public committing suicide from this tower do so at their own risk.
The Faringdon tower - a wonderful folly; well preserved, and absolutely no reason for its existence except to be itself. People laugh at follies, but in architecture and building they are the equivilant of the most useless theorems of pure mathematics (the kind of mathematics that G. H. Hardy loved), or the most abstract poetry.
Even when he was a well-known public figure, Lord Berners adopted the most bizarre methods of keeping other passengers out of his railway carriage. At each stop he would don a black skull-cap and spectacles, lean out of the window and beckon invitingly to potential invaders. This was normally quite effective, but if some adventurous spirit remained undeterred and insisted on joining him he had another trick up his sleeve. He produced a large clinical thermometer every few minutes and took his own temperature, studying each reading with increasing gloom. Needless to say, the intruder usually left at the earliest opportunity!
Lord Berners also trained a parrot to walk across the floor of Faringdon Hall beneath a bowler hat, so that it seemed to visitors that the hat was moving about by itself. This did not bother his aged mother in the least, as by then she probably knew her son's proclivities fairly well. A biography was published in 1999, 'Lord Berners: The Last Eccentric' by Maurice Amory.
Lord Berners was undoubtedly talented. When he wished to paint a portrait of a horse however, he did not bother to go to the stables – the horse came into the house! He had a small clavichord installed in the rear of his Rolls Royce to enable him to compose while on long journeys.
The Hon. Maurice Baring (1874 - 1945)
A contemporary of Lord Berners, the Honourable Maurice Baring, was a member of the famous banking family, poet, diplomat, essayist, war correspondent and a noted ‘leafomaniac’. Baring did not collect books, he collected pages from books. If he came upon an interesting passage he would simply tear out the page and paste into a notebook. It should be said that at least his habit was confined to his own books and not volumes from the local library. However, once he had extracted what he wanted he simply gave the books away. Every time he moved house he gave away his entire library and started again. No doubt the recipients were somewhat bemused to find several of the pages missing from each of the volumes…
In fact Maurice Baring took this carefree attitude to all of his posessions, not only his own library. On one occasion while travelling by train on the continent, he was chatting with a friend while trying to put his new overcoat into his suitcase. Finding that is would not fit inside, he threw it out of the window – then continued his conversation…
He was fond of non-sesequitorial humour, and once bought some postage stamps in Florence, insisting that they be 'freschi' (fresh) since 'they were for an invalid'.
Baring was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1909, which he described as 'the only action in my life which I am quite certain I have never regretted'. It does seem to be a guarantee of eccentricity, if G.K. Chesterton and Evelyn Waugh are anything to go by. In his last years he owned a blue budgerigar named Dempsey, who would perch on his bald head whilst he talked with somewhat disconcerted visitors.
He died in 1945, eleven days before Christmas, and a friend wrote of him, 'I cannot but believe that at the General Resurrection Maurice Baring...will be the most warmly greeted of the greatest number and variety of his fellow creatures from every country and continent...'
