From the Ridiculous to the Sublime

By Andy Courtney

from pre-history to recent times there have been many strange or unusual events which, despite being largely lost to public memory or watered-down into legend, folklore or myth, still retain the factual integrity and substance that can both fascinate and excite one’s curiosity. This is a collection of stories of such events – each story seemingly unrelated other than being entirely true, and that is why, as the saying goes, they are often stranger than fiction. The stories are about life’s oddities, passions, hate, death and survival, violence and heroism and much more, in fact, all manner of different recollections that have little else in common other than they are all, in their own right, interesting and, in some cases, quite remarkable.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andy Courtney
• Release date: Nov 8, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301949854

Andy Courtney

Author of "From the Ridiculous to the Sublime" a collection of amazing stories from around the world, Andy Courtney puts his wide knowledge of unusual facts down to a lifetime of diverse and eclectic interests. Throughout his life Andy's pursuits have included shooting small-arms and cannon, game and sport fishing, antique collecting, classic cars, specialist engineering, world-wide travel, sailing, writing and art, giving him a unique perspective of life. Now retired, he has indulged his eccentricity in this, his latest book, and hopes it will provide enjoyment to those amongst us who share his fascination with the oddities of life.

Book preview

FROM THE RIDICULOUS TO THE SUBLIME

Andy Courtney

SMASHWORDS EDITION

* * * * *

PUBLISHED BY:

Andy Courtney on Smashwords

From the Ridiculous to the Sublime

Copyright © 2012 by Andy Courtney

Thank you for downloading this eBook.

I hope you enjoy the contents as much as I enjoyed researching and writing it.

LEGAL: NOTICE

All contents copyright © 2012 by Andy Courtney. All rights reserved. No part of this document or the related files may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means (electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Limit of Liability and Disclaimer of Warranty: The publisher has used its best efforts in preparing this book, and the information provided herein is provided as is. No representation or warranties are made with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaims any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose and shall in no event be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damage, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

Any trademarks, service marks, product names or named features are assumed to be the property of their respective owners, and are used only for reference. There is no implied endorsement if any of these terms have been used

Every effort has been made to secure permission to use illustrations that are subject to copyright laws. In some instances we have been unable to trace the origins of certain illustrations and therefore must assume they are exempt from copyright.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

A Monkey Employed to do a Man’s Job

A Man of Very Strange Taste

The Other Douglas Bader

Flatulence in Art Form

A Mid-Atlantic Ice Fortress

The Cannibals of Scotland

The Honeyed Corpse

A Winged Beast

The Art of the Duel

Tangled Rat Kings

The End of an Empire

The Elephant Hanged for Murder

Dried Split Peas

Upside Down Burials

Recommendations for cannibalism

An English Oskar Schindler

The Curse of James Dean

The Best Car in the World

The Unacceptable Face of Baden-Powell

Penny Farthings

Small Men in Iron

The Rope’s End

The Box Tunnel Mystery

A Rude Giant

The Destroying Angel of Death

Madame de Guillotine

Unnatural Selection

Dangling at 9,000 Feet

The Duke of Suffolk’s Mummified Head

Appalling Popes

Headline Howlers

The First Great Car Race

Incendiary Bats

Needle in a Haystack

London’s Own Eiffel Tower

The Secret Loss of an Aircraft Carrier

Imperial versus Metric

Plunging Earthwards

Insults

Hitler’s Nightmare Weapon

Artificial Gnashers

The Navy’s Discarded Hero

The Infancy of Aerial Warfare

Nostradamus’s Last Laugh

Edward and Eleanor

The Red Army is on its Way!

Facing the Most Terrifying Man-Eaters in the World

Unusual Deaths

Napoleon in the Nude

What will they say about you after you've gone

King Louis I of England?

Sea Monsters do exist!

The World in a Tomb

Pardon my French!

Body Parts for Keepsakes

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition

Fabulous Wealth

Criminals’ Last Laugh

A badly needed Victory

From Samurai to Sewing Machines and Steam Trains

One-man Artillery

Spontaneous Human Combustion

How Ladysmith got its name.

The Irish Hangwoman

Blown from a Cannon

Oh, ‘tis my delight of a shiny night….

When Darkness Descended on London

The Shortest War in History

A Brute of a Car

It was this big!

A Disappearing Race

A Murderer’s Grand Send Off

A Misunderstood Weapon

Speeding Motorists’ Sweet Revenge

Britain’s Highest Award – a Chinese takeaway

Scuttling Britain’s Naval Heritage

Criminal Treatment

The Secret Code of Equestrian Statues

The Oddities of the Elephant

Japan’s Intercontinental Paper Balloon Bombs

Why Drive on the Left?

A Submarine with a Steam Engine?

Victorian London’s Leaping Devil

Underwater Gnomes

When Invincible Ships Clash

The Great White Hunter

Rocket Man

The Jersey Devil

Sweet Fanny Adams

The Forgotten Inventor & his Deadly Steam Gun

A French Monkey Hanged

Remodelling Goldfish

Britain’s Dodgy Drug Dealing Past

Born to Run

Napoleon Preserved

The Passing of the Passenger Pigeon

On Opposite Sides of the Law

Pigeon for the Pot

A Gruesome Charnel-House

Sex the Royal Way

The Emperor of the United States

A Ravenous Wolf at large in England

The Presidential Desk made from a British Ship

The American Leaper and Diver

A Cure for Sea Sickness

An Englishman in an Iron Mask

Swallowed by a Whale?

Insanity on the High Seas

The Luckiest Man in the World?

And yet another baboon story

The Great Thames Disaster

Porcine Peculiarities

Dear Old Winnie

The National Lottery – Elizabethan Style

‘Ready when you are Mr DeMille’

The Sad Shooting of Chunee

Flo, the Human Hobbit

Two Centuries of the Chunnel

Sharks and the Indianapolis

Big Boys’ Toys

Ballooning to Disaster

*****

FROM THE RIDICULOUS TO THE SUBLIME

*****

INTRODUCTION

From pre-history to recent times there have been many strange or unusual events which, despite being largely lost to public memory or watered-down into legend, folklore or myth, still retain the factual integrity and substance that can both fascinate and excite one’s curiosity. This is a collection of stories of such events – each story seemingly unrelated other than being entirely true, and that is why, as the saying goes, they are often stranger than fiction. The stories are about life’s oddities, passions, hate, death and survival, violence and heroism and much more, in fact, all manner of different recollections that have little else in common other than they are all, in their own right, interesting and, in some cases, quite remarkable.

A Monkey employed to do a Man’s Job

Two characters, one a strange legless human being and the other a baboon with unbelievable human attributes, combine in a story set in the early days of the railway in South Africa during the nineteenth century.

The man, James Edwin Wide, was a railway guard at a small settlement named Uitenhage, which lay along the newly opened Cape Government Railways route between Cape Town and Port Elizabeth in the south-eastern region of South Africa. But few called Wide, an unmarried man in his late twenties, by his real name; he was known simply as ‘Jumper’ from his rather peculiar manner of carrying out his job. Wide had a reckless habit of checking each truck in turn by jumping from one to another even while they were in motion. Alas, one day in 1877, when he was leaping across between trucks, he landed on some canvas, slipped, and fell between the moving vehicles onto the track. The wheels sliced off both of his legs beneath the knees.

In those days before antibiotics and pain killers Wide suffered terribly from his injuries and came close to death, but, even as he began his recovery, another problem arose, how to feed and house himself. He was no longer employable by the railway company, and desperately needed work. To recover some of his mobility he whittled two artificial legs – peg-legs – out of scrap wood and lashed them to his stumps with leather straps so that he could hobble along. After pleading with the railway company to take him back he was finally given a job as a signalman, operating from a signal box about half a mile from his small cottage. To avoid the agonies of walking there and back on his peg legs, he improvised a four wheeled trolley on which he could push himself along the railway track.

Then a strange thing occurred. One Saturday when Wide was in the town of Uitenhage, a wagon drawn by a long team of oxen pulled into the market place. The Voorloper, - the oxen leader – was, amazingly, not a man but a fully grown baboon, walking upright on its hind legs. Wide pushed through the crowd that gathered around the spectacle and approached the monkey’s owner who explained that the baboon, named Jack, had been captured at an early age, been trained to do many tasks, and had proven to be unusually intelligent. Jumper Wide immediately thought that if the baboon could be trained to drive a full team of oxen, it could quickly learn to push him back and forth to work each day on his railway trolley and he begged the owner to sell the beast to him. Reluctant at first, but no doubt sympathetic to Jumper Wide’s severe disability, the owner finally agreed to part with his monkey protégé and Jumper Wide thereby obtained what was to become a life-long partner of the most extraordinary merit.

The task of pushing Jumper Wide on his trolley to work in the morning and back home in the evening, proved little challenge to Jack the baboon, who soon learned, with chattering glee, to leap onto the trolley on downhill stretches and even to lift the trolley on and off the rails at the end of each journey. Before long the monkey was recovering abandoned railway sleepers for firewood – tumbling them end over end to get them back home – sweeping up around the house, carrying out the rubbish and even guarding the property by terrifying any unwanted callers. For this Jack expected not only his daily feed, with the occasional candle as a treat, but a large tot of Cape Smoke brandy every evening. If his owner forgot his evening drink, the baboon would sulk the entire next day and refuse to do any work.

But, stiffened with his daily beverage, Jack the baboon worked enthusiastically and soon started to take over Jumper Wide’s duties as signalman. He quickly learned that four blasts from the whistle of an approaching locomotive meant that the driver needed to refuel, and Jack would rush into the signal box, fetch the key which unlocked the points to gain access to the coal sheds, and pass it to the driver. Then Jack learned to respond to other signal blasts, faultlessly changing the points as each train arrived and departed, and became a source of amazement and entertainment to townsfolk and rail passengers alike.

But then, inevitably, someone complained. A notable lady passenger, appalled at sight of a monkey operating equipment on which her and her fellow passengers’ safety depended, kicked up a fuss and demanded that such impropriety was stopped, before someone was killed.

The railway company, faced with an official complaint that demanded immediate and responsible action, sacked the legless signalman and told him and his monkey to leave, but Jumper Wild was having none of it. He argued that the baboon was quite clearly up to the task and that his reliability had been proven without doubt and demanded that Jack was put to the test. More from amusement than reason the authorities agreed and arranged for a locomotive driver to give a series of whistle blasts, covering the entire and complex range of signals that would normally be passed to a signalman, to test the monkey’s reactions. On each signal Jack operated the appropriate levers, changing points faultlessly and even double-checking that the signals responded to the lever changes. When the whole test was complete the authorities were so impressed that they actually took the monkey into their employment , and he became ‘Jack the Signalman’ complete with workers’ rights, employee number and food allocations in lieu of pay. No doubt he also received the essential daily ration of brandy from the company as well.

Jack, this unusually talented baboon, died from tuberculosis in 1890 and needless to say, his legless human partner, Jumper Wide, was inconsolable at the loss. It is not hard to imagine even nowadays what the loss of such a singular, affectionate and willing companion must have meant.

And if you find this story hard to believe you can actually find the baboon’s skull in the Albany Museum in Grahamstown, but if even better proof is needed there survives a faded photograph of the signal box at Uitenhage. It shows, on the left of the photograph, Jumper Wide standing erect on his peg legs and wearing his signalman’s peaked cap and waistcoat, and, on the right, the trolley he used to get to, and from, work each day. In the centre, standing upright and operating the signal levers is Jack, a ferocious looking baboon. And to demonstrate that he could do the task of working the levers without even looking what he was doing, he is revealing his skill with his latest trick – urinating with faultless accuracy down a crack between the floorboards!

The legless Jumper Wide and Jack the baboon

***

Did you know? It is said that eating cheese just before going to bed can give you nightmares and, for this reason, Salvador Dali ate vast quantities of camembert sandwiches just before he retired. He hoped that his disturbed dreams would conjure up weird images that could further his eccentric artwork. The camembert inspired him in at least one instance – he painted a cheese sandwich!

***

A Man of Very Strange Taste

Living in the first half of the 19th century, the Dean of Westminster, the Very Reverend William Buckland, was one of Britain’s foremost geologists and palaeontologists. He was a contemporary of Charles Darwin and had, as did most other great minds of the day, a broad range of scientific interests but none was as singularly strange as his fascination for gastronomic research. He would literally eat anything in the name of scientific experiment and often felt his task was to eat his way through the entire animal kingdom. He ate all manner of exotic and peculiar animals, some of which had died at zoos, some of which had actually been buried and were, at his insistence, dug up so he could try their flesh. He ate such things as elephant’s trunk, leopard, porcupine, kangaroo and hedgehog and then he advanced his research to less tasty morsels, slugs – both boiled or sautéed – earwigs and mice en croute. The worst thing he had every tasted, he once said, was boiled mole, but revised this opinion when he tried a bowl of stewed bluebottles. This curiosity in what things tasted like was to reach an unparalleled height – or low, whichever way you regard it – when, at a dinner party he displayed to his guests a fascinating curiosity he had purchased – the embalmed heart of King Louis XIV of France. The tomb of King Louis – the Sun King – had been plundered during the French Revolution and the preserved heart had found its way into the hands of Lord Harcourt who sold it on to William Buckland as a curio. Suddenly Buckland’s inquisitive passion for gastronomy got the better of him and declaring ‘I have eaten some strange things, but never the heart of a king’ he promptly popped it into his mouth, chewed a few times and swallowed it!

Gourmand Extraordinaire – The Very Reverend William Buckland

***

Would you belive it? The 1930’s novel ‘Gadsby’ written by Earnest Vincent Wright (not to be confused with F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby) contained 50,000 words without a single use of the letter ‘e’.

***

The Other Douglas Bader

Most people are familiar with the story of Douglas Bader, who courageously overcame the disability of the loss of both legs in a terrible flying action to resume a career in the Royal Air Force and to become one of the most highly-regarded British fighter pilots in the Second War World. But there was another pilot, whose story almost paralleled that of Douglas Bader; a man who also lost both legs in a flying accident yet fought his way back to become a distinguished flyer. In many ways his story is even more harrowing that that of Douglas Bader.

Colin Hodgkinson was born in Wells in the south west of England in 1920, the son of a larger-than-life country squire who was Master of the Mendip Hunt, a big-game hunter and twice-decorated pilot in the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War. It was from him that the young Hodgkinson gained his passion for excitement and adventure and, most importantly, a dream to become a pilot.

In 1938, after a period as a cadet at the Nautical College in Pangbourne, Hodgkinson joined the Fleet Air Arm as a midshipman and underwent pilot training on the aircraft carrier Courageous. He soon notched up 20 hours flying and had flown solo when, one day, while practicing blind flying with an instructor in a Tiger Moth over Gravesend, a fateful accident happened. Hodgkinson had been wearing a hood over his head, to practice flying solely with the aid of his instruments, when he collided with another training aircraft doing exactly the same thing. The Tiger Moth crashed from 500 feet, killing the instructor and seriously wounding young Hutchinson. He suffered severe wounds to his face and his legs were so badly shattered that first one and then later, the other, had to be amputated.

It was during a long period of recovery in hospital that Hodgkinson met the renowned doctor Sir Archibald McIndoe who had set up what became known as his Guinea Pig Club, a specialist plastic surgery unit at the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead, which treated the horrendous burns and crash injuries being incurred by an increasing number of RAF pilots. Hodgkinson joined the unit and was so inspired by the cheerful determination of the many other dreadfully disfigured pilots that he decided he would follow the courageous example set by Douglas Bader, and fly again despite his artificial legs.

And, as with Bader, his determination won through. By the autumn of 1942 he had transferred from the Fleet Air Arm into the Royal Air Force and his dream of flying Spitfires became a reality. But unlike Bader he had other difficulties to overcome. He had dreadful bouts of claustrophobia and harboured a fear of flying which he had to force himself to overcome each time he took to the air. He also became obsessed with a fear of having to ditch in the English Channel and packed his hollow artificial legs with ping-pong balls in the hope that they would keep him afloat should he end up in the ‘drink’. On one occasion, taking his aircraft to up to 30,000 feet he suddenly heard what he though was the clatter of machine gun fire and took evasive action before realising that it was the noise of the ping-pong balls exploding in the reduced atmosphere.

Hodgkinson, nicknamed ‘Hoppy’ shot down his first enemy aircraft, a Focke-Wolfe 190, off the end of Brighton Pier, and then in August 1943 while part of a Spitfire escort for US B26 bomber returning from a raid on an airfield near Evreux, north-west of Paris, the group was attacked by more than fifty Focke-Wolfe 190’s. Saving his Wing-Commander ‘Laddie’ Luca, by neatly shooting down a German fighter right on his tail, Hodgkinson was commended for contributing to the shooting down of five of the enemy during the desperate fight back to the coast.

Like Bader, Hoppy Hodgkinson was to end up crashing in occupied France and being taken prisoner-of-war by the Germans. The cause, on a high altitude weather reconnaissance flight in November of 1943, was the failure of his oxygen supply, which led to him blacking out and crashing in flames in a field. Badly injured, he was pulled free by two farm labourers and taken by stretcher by German Guards. After 10 months in a prisoner-of-war camp his disabilities were deemed so incapacitating that he was repatriated as being of no further military use to his country. But another spell with the celebrated Archibald McIndoe in the Guinea Pig Club saw him flying again before the end of the war at Filton, near Bristol.

When the war ended, Hoppy Hodgkinson was released from the RAF but resumed flying in jet aircraft with the Royal Auxiliary Air Force in the 1950’s and went on to become a very successful businessman. He died in 1996 in the Dordogne in France, aged 76, leaving us an inspiring example of British courage and perseverance over some of the worst adversities that man can suffer.

Colin ‘Hoppy’ Hodgkinson

***

The classical Greek playwright and dramatist, Aeschylus, who lived around 500 BC, was killed when an eagle dropped a tortoise on his head. The bird was following its normal habits for cracking open the hard shell of the reptile by dropping it from a great height but unfortunately Aeschylus got in the way.

***

Flatulence in Art Form

Joseph Pujol, a Frenchman born in Marseilles, had an extremely unusual talent – an ability so unique that no one in his day or ever since has been able to replicate it without mechanical assistance or trickery. Pujol’s skill was that he could fart on demand – repeatedly, musically, and thankfully without the obnoxious side effects normally associated with the act. And at one stage, under the name of Le Petomane, which roughly translates to ‘The Fartiste’, he gloried in star-billing at the finest variety halls in France and even gave private performances to Princes and Crowned Heads of Europe.

Imagine how his act must have astonished his first major audience. The scene is the famous Moulin Rouge in the Montmartre district of Paris and the house is full, eagerly awaiting the next, enigmatic act on the programme. A slender Frenchman with a bushy moustache and formally attired in a rather old fashioned red coat, black silk breeches and holding white gloves for an air of elegance, approaches centre stage. With a deadpan expression, he raises a finger as if to command attention and the audience, unaware of what form the act will take, reacts in silent anticipation. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen‘, he says with intense seriousness, ‘I have the honour to present to you a session of Petomanie!’ The audience reactions are at first perhaps of nervous agitation, and then one imagines, they turn to a mixture of astonishment, embarrassment and not a little fascination as Le Petomane explains that he can break wind at will and – he adds with a wry smile to allay the audience’s concern – without any malodorous airs.

Then, in the identical manner in which a bird impressionist of the period would solemnly announce each bird species before imitating its call, Le Petomane would start his impressions. A delicate fart from a little girl would raise an embarrassed chuckle, then a fart from a mother-in-law would start the laughter. A tiny ‘peep’ from a nervous bride on her wedding night, would be followed by a long rasping fart from the less-inhibited girl on the morning after. He would imitate thunder, a full ten-second rip of a dressmaker tearing a length of calico, then bawl a command to the artillery to fire their guns and emit a thunderous sphincterous roar, by which time the audience was in an uproar. The act progressed with the addition of a rubber tube, and with one end discreetly inserted into his anus he would smoke a cigarette fitted in the other end, and when that was done, replace it with a flute and play a few simple melodies. Finally he would use his flatulence to blow out some of the gas footlights at the edge of the stage and end in communal singing. It brought the audience to an uproar. Chests ached with the convulsions of laughter, tears ran down cheeks, and tight corseted ladies fainted at this phenomenal act. It was an incredible, unbelievable, success!

One may wonder how Pujol came to discover this unusual talent. Well, as a young boy he went swimming in the sea and found, much to his horror, that as he dived under water, his backside acted in strange ways, drawing up and expelling large amounts of salt water with little abdominal effort. The poor lad and his horrified mother went to the doctor who declared nothing medical was amiss, and the unsettling experience was largely forgotten until Pujol grew into a young man and was conscripted into the army. Sharing the memory of his peculiar hydraulic attributes one day with his mates, they asked to see it done and he obliged by drawing up water through his anus and expelling it in a veritable fountain, much to everyone’s mirth. Before long he changed his party-piece from water to air and Le Petomane was born. An act was developed which was to take him from the musical-halls of Marseilles, to Toulon, Bordeaux and eventually, in 1892, to the world-famous Moulin Rouge in Paris.

His sensational act there drew enormous attendances, frequently larger than the great Sarah Bernhardt enjoyed at the height of her career, and it fascinated fin-de-siecle bourgeois France with its outrageous combination of respectability and coarse bodily functions. The King of Belgium received a discreet private performance as to, it is believed, did other members of European royalty, including the future King Edward VII.

Eventually Pujol got too big for his boots, fell out with the manager who successfully sued him for an unauthorised performance, and so he left and set up his own variety house, the Theatre Pompadour. He took his success with him, and topped the bill right through until France was plunged into war in 1914.

No-one could equal his abdominal and anal attributes. His ex-employer tried to steal his thunder, so to speak, with a ‘Woman Petomane’ who Pujol easily exposed as a fraud who used bellows strapped between her legs. Others tried but none could assimilate his act by natural means and Pujol disproved them all.

Eventually, alas, both Pujol and his audiences tired of his act and, with two of his beloved sons disabled from the War, he retired first to Marseilles and them to Toulon, to run a successful bakery and a biscuit factory. He died in 1945 at the age of 88, the head of a large family. With him died his singular ability.

Le Petomane amusing his audience

***

The practise of saluting originated from knights who would raise their visors to reveal their faces to people they met.

***

A Mid-Atlantic Ice Fortress

Winston Churchill once said that Britain came far closer to losing the Second World War through the Battle of the Atlantic than it ever did with the Battle of Britain. Escalating losses of allied merchant shipping through U-Boat attacks threatened the very ability of these islands to continue to wage war and made surrender a startling possibility. So concerned was Churchill that in 1942, by which time a total of over 3,000 allied merchantmen carrying essential supplies lay on the bottom of the Atlantic, he demanded ideas, no matter how radical, how far fetched or expensive, to reduce the losses. He knew he desperately needed to do something or all would be lost.

Now enters the scene, Geoffrey Nathaniel Pyke, a strange man who straddled the narrow divide between genius and madness. He was not unknown for having applied his mind to political and military matters before with questionable sanity. In the First World War he had a plan to send dispatches back from Germany to the Daily Chronicle, but was caught and nearly shot as a spy, then in the Spanish Civil War he came up with the idea of sidecars for Harley Davidson motorcycles that could take hot food to the front line and bring wounded soldiers back. More peculiar were his ideas in the Second World War, while working for the British Combined Operations think-tank, for the destruction by British Commandos of the heavily guarded Romanian oilfields. He suggested dogs which would bark and so drive away the guards, who would think they were wolves; sending in dogs with brandy casks around their necks so the guards would get blind drunk; and then manning imitation fire engines that would be called to small local fires and turn them into blazing infernos by spraying then with incendiary fluids rather than water.

Better still was Pyke’s plans for a motorised sledge that could tow a torpedo. He had a vision that it could be driven slowly uphill enticing the Germans to give chase and then, when at the top of the slope, the torpedo could be released to roll down and blow up the pursuers. As if to give this idea further credibility, he said the sledges could be disguised from their real purpose by having a sign in German to ‘keep clear’ as they were Gestapo secret death-rays, or – better still – that they were ‘Officers’ Latrines for Colonels only’, so keeping ordinary German soldiers away. Every German soldier, of course, obeyed orders and instructions to the letter.

Pyke’s solution to the problem of the sinkings by U-Boats was to counter the lack of air cover in mid- Atlantic, where convoys sailed unprotected in the vast area between the limit of fighter cover from either American or British land bases. He came up with an idea for a mid-Atlantic landing strip, from where fighters could operate to cover what the German U-boat commanders had come to regard as their ‘killing grounds’. And underlying Pyke’s solution was a new material – frozen sawdust. He found that saturated sawdust, when frozen, made a very strong, tough material that thawed slowly because of the inherent insulation properties of the wood. He took along a sample to Lord Louis Mountbatten, the Head of Combined Operations, and explained that, with this new material – Pykecrete, as he called it – he could cast a huge aircraft carrier, so large that it was virtually a floating island, that could be sited in mid-Atlantic and accommodate a hundred, or even two hundred, Spitfires, along with all the pilots, mechanics and spares to keep them serviceable. Just a tiny refrigeration plant would be needed to offset the slow rate at which it thawed and, what was more, the strength of the material was such that it was impervious to attack. A torpedo or enemy shell would merely chip a lump out of it, which could be quickly repaired by freezing the very salt water in which it floated.

Mountbatten was impressed and he took the idea straight to Churchill. The story is that when he called on the Prime