The Great British Eccentric

What the buggery bollocks am I going to write about tonight? For close on nine months now, every Thursday night, I have sat down at my computer with no idea of what to put in my blog, but after a while something has come to me. Tonight, I am sitting here like a great pudding, head full of mince, don’t have two neurones to rub together. I could tell you about the time my dad crashed his car into a mobile fish and chip shop when he was plastered (he was very popular down the police station because he hadn’t actually killed anybody yet). But I have regaled you quite enough about the old fellow. Actually, here is one more story about him and then I’ll shut up. One day, the cat was sitting by the fire, enjoying the warmth and oblivious to the fact that one of her ears was inside out. My mum said, ‘Tony, fix that cat’s ear, for God’s sake. It’s driving me mad, looking at it.’ My dad grabbed the cat and turned her other ear inside out too.

Which raises the subject of eccentricity.

In the early to mid-1980’s I worked at the MRC Clinical Research Centre at Northwick Park Hospital. A good friend and colleague there was the late Doug Altman, who became quite a guru in the world of medical statistics. On one occasion, I can’t remember the context, we had a discussion about great British eccentrics. The top three that came to mind were Spike Milligan, Vivian Stanshall and Ivor Cutler.

Everyone knows about Spike Milligan. Vivian Stanshall was the singer in The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, a whole troupe of ecccentrics, and was responsible for some of the funniest lyrics ever. These include ‘The Intro and the Outro,’ in which the band members start to play a jazzy little tune, coming in one by one, and Stanshall introduces each player and his instrument. However, it carries on after that with increasingly unlikely and incongruous contributors, John Wayne on the Xylophone, Robert Morley on guitar, Princess Anne on sousaphone, and so on. My favourite was ‘Lord Snooty and his pals, tap dancing’.

On the same album as that, there was ‘Look out, There’s a Monster Coming’, a calypso about a man who takes up increasingly bizarre activities and purchases to improve his appearance and image. Towards the end, there is the line, ‘To lose excess weight, off comes my left leg…’

Ivor Cutler was a Scottish, Jewish (two racial stereotypes for the price of one, as Arnold Brown used to say) poet and musician, although those descriptions don’t go half way to defining his astonishingly strange output. I simply cannot do justice to it by description. Just have a listen to this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnx8qcbRIL8

I saw him perform at The Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh in the 1980’s and laughed my head off. I suppose everyone has their own idea of Ivor’s unique quality. For what it is worth, here is mine. He had the ability to make a song or a monologue or a poem seem like a child was making it up as he or she went along. And this is genius. As Flann O’Brien said, ‘Who has the intelligence of a child? You? Or you?’

More recently, other British eccentrics come to mind: John Otway, Billy Jenkins. Why no women, one might ask. Well, there are great female British eccentrics. The actor Miriam Margolyes and the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood are two of the more famous examples.

But there are others who are not household names. Stella Mitchell is the collector and owner of the magnificently unselective museum, The Land of Lost Content, in Shropshire. Billed as a museum of popular culture, it is four floors crowded to the point of claustrophobia with mostly twentieth century clutter. Hornby Dublo train sets, gas meters and telephones of various vintages, a tremendously non-PC collection of smoking materials, lipsticks galore… When we visited there on a family holiday about ten or fifteen years ago, Stella Mitchell took our money at the door and announced proudly, ‘There are toilets on the ground floor and on the top floor. Belt and braces.’

Another female eccentric was the late Josephine Austin. She was a poet, and a very big-hearted, larger-than-life woman who ran the Hastings Poetry Festival as a benevolent dictator. Her eccentricity is evidenced by the fact that she recruited me to spout (I was a pompous twit in those days) at the Hastings festival two years in a row, 1983 and 1984, apparently learning nothing from the first experience.

Let me tell you about one more great British eccentric, JL Carr. Carr was a Yorkshireman, born Joseph Lloyd Carr to a strongly Methodist family in Carlton Miniott, near Thirsk. He failed the eleven plus twice, but later became an intelligence officer in the RAF during the second world war, was an inspired primary school headmaster in Kettering, and wrote an eclectic and strange batch of novels. These include The Harpole Report, a very funny chronicle of a year in which a primary school teacher is promoted to acting headmaster. The story is told in the form or letters, memos and a practice that no longer survives, the headmaster’s log. There are a number of what seem highly unlikely and hilarious episodes, confrontations with drunken parents, stand-offs with the school caretaker, having the children put messages in a bottle and throw them in a nearby river and then getting into trouble with the authorities for littering, washing unwashed children… It was only on reading Byron Rogers’ biography of Jim (for some reason he ditched the Joseph) Carr, The Last Englishman, that I realised that many of these episodes had actually occurred when he was head of Highfields primary school in Kettering. Former pupils and members of staff have confessed to some embarrassment on recognising themselves in the book.

Members of staff also reminisced that life in Carr’s school was full of surprises. He would decide at a moment’s notice that today was Sports Day. The events were not the usual ones. They would include arithmetic races, where blackboards were set up on the field and runners would have to complete a sum before they could continue in the race. When his little school won a local football championship, he hired a bus and had the team driven round the housing estate which formed his school catchment in a victory parade. He continually called fire drills and would occasionally lock classroom doors for these to see how imaginatively the teachers would react.

He resented some aspects of his very devout non-conformist Christian upbringing. Once, on being asked about his attitude to religious education, he replied, ‘God loves mathematics, well taught.’ I really like that.