QI: The Book of General Ignorance - the Noticeably Stouter Edition (49 page)

Panama.

One of the last acts of Scotland, before the 1707 Act of Union joined it to England and Wales to form Great Britain, was an ill-fated attempt to colonise the isthmus of Darién.

The scheme was dreamt up by William Paterson, the founder of the Bank of England. He saw an opportunity to establish a trading post in Central America which could act as link between the riches of the Pacific and the trading nations of Western Europe.

The English quickly ruled themselves out as partners. They
were at war with France at the time, and did not want to risk angering the Spanish (who had claims on Panama). When the government heard of the scheme, it barred Englishmen from investing. Paterson decided to gather all his funding north of the border. Such was the Scot’s enthusiasm that he raised £400,000 in six months, a vast sum equal to a third of the total collective assets of the nation. Almost every Scotsman who could put his name to £5 invested.

In 1698, the first fleet of five ships set sail from Leith, arriving in November. They were woefully underprepared and ill-informed. The land they had hoped to turn into New Caledonia was an un-farmable, mosquito-infested swamp. The Indians had no use for the crates of wigs, mirrors and combs they had hoped to trade. The English colonies in the region were barred from trading with them and the Spanish were implacably hostile.

Within six months, 200 of the 1,200 settlers had died of malaria and other tropical diseases and the death rate had reached ten a day. As well as the backbreaking work of trying to drain a swamp, all their supplies had spoiled and by the beginning of the summer they were each trying to live on a pound of maggot-infested flour a week. The news of an imminent Spanish attack was the final straw. Only 300 people made it back to Scotland.

The Darién Venture was an unmitigated disaster for Scotland. It shattered morale and left the economy almost £250,000 in debt. Seven years later, the country was forced to sign the Act of Union with England. The popular consensus was that the English had refused to help in order to humiliate Scotland and make union inevitable. Much of the support for the Jacobite cause over the next forty years can be traced back to the horrors and shattered aspirations of Scotland’s lost colony.

As for Darién, it remains a pretty inhospitable place
covered with dense jungle. Even the Pan-American highway, which will eventually connect Alaska in the north to Argentina in the south, is forced to break for the Darién Gap.

Ecuador.

They first appeared in Europe and North America in the early nineteenth century where they were called ‘panama’ hats because they were exported through shippers based in Panama.

In England, they were chosen as perfect summer headgear by the royal family, and quickly became indispensable accessories for sporting and outdoor social occasions. When Queen Victoria died in 1901, the black band was added in her honour.

In the Americas, the hats were standard issue for the men digging the Panama Canal. President Theodore Roosevelt visited the site in 1906 and was photographed wearing one. The panama’s fame was assured.

The hat’s origins are ancient: ceramic figures wearing curious headpieces have been discovered on the Ecuadorian coast and date back to 4000
BC.
Some archaeologists believe that the weaving skills needed to make a panama were acquired through contact with the Polynesian people of the Pacific, famous for their woven flax. The first Spaniards were so unnerved by the material’s translucent quality that they believed it was vampire skin.

The modern hats date back to the sixteenth century and are made from the woven fibres of the ten-foot-tall panama-hat palm, the
jipijapa
or
toquilla
(its scientific name is
Carludovica 
palmata
). They are mostly produced in the town of Cuenca, although the finest examples come from the towns of Montecristi and Biblian.

The time it takes to make a panama hat varies enormously. The
toquilla
can be harvested only five days a month, during the moon’s final quarter, when the palm fibre holds less water, making it lighter and easier to weave. A skilled weaver can extract a fibre that is as fine as silk. A low-grade hat can be knocked out in a matter of hours, whereas a top quality, or
superfino
, hat can take five months to finish and sell for
£
1,000.

In 1985 the Conran Foundation nominated the panama hat as one of the ‘100 best designs ever’ for an exhibition at the V&A.

Ecuador is named after the Spanish word for ‘equator’. As well as hats, it is the world’s largest exporter of bananas and balsa wood for model aircraft.

St Patrick (
c
.385–461) is the patron saint of Ireland but he wasn’t born there, nor was he of Irish stock.

He was a Briton, from the north or west of the country. His birthplace is traditionally given as
Bannavem
or
Bannaventa
Taberniae.
This has long been thought to be a lost settlement near the Severn or in Pembrokeshire, but a recent and convincing suggestion is the village of Banwell in Somerset.

While still a teenager Patrick was abducted and taken to Ireland as a slave. After six years he escaped to the Continent, where he became a monk. Eventually, following a vision, he returned to Ireland to Christianise it.

Ireland isn’t short of home-grown saintly talent, however.

St Brendan (?486–?578) was from County Kerry. Born near Tralee, he was ordained a priest in 512. A famous traveller, he is believed by many to have reached America centuries before Columbus, who didn’t.

*

 St Columba (521–97) was born into the Irish nobility. After many years wandering round Ireland, preaching and founding monasteries, at the age of forty-two he settled on Iona from where he and his monks converted the Picts to Christianity.

*

 St Kevin (?498–618) was also born of noble Irish parents and destined for the priesthood. Instead he became a hermit. A blackbird famously laid an egg in his outstretched hand and he kept perfectly still until the baby bird hatched.

*

 St Malachy (?1094–1148) was appointed abbot of Bangor, County Down and bishop of Connor by the age of 30, and became archbishop of Armagh. According to legend, he had a vision of all the popes. If his prophecy is correct, the present pope, Benedict XVI, will be the last but one.

*

 St Oliver Plunket (1629–81) was born in County Meath, educated by the Jesuits in Rome and appointed archbishop of Armagh and primate of all Ireland in 1669. In 1678 an English conspirator, Titus Oates, implicated him in a plot to kill Charles II. Plunket was found guilty of treason and hanged at Tyburn, mercifully dying before he could be drawn (disembowelled) and quartered.

*

 St Bridget (?453–?523), the abbess of the first Irish women’s community which she founded at Kildare, was noted for the miracle of transforming her used bathwater into beer for visiting clerics.

Irish.

Despite his reputation as one of England’s greatest generals, Arthur Wellesley, the 1st Duke of Wellington, was unarguably an Irishman.

He was born in Dublin in 1769 into the Wesley family, whose seat was Dangan Castle, near Trim in County Meath. He later married into one of Ireland’s most notable families, the Longfords, and served in the Irish parliament in 1790.

If further proof were needed of his nationality, there is also his decision to play for the All Ireland team in the first recorded game of cricket played in Ireland in August 1792. Their opponents were a team from the local British garrison in Dublin. The Duke notched up a distinctively unimpressive total of six runs from his two innings.

The Duke’s grandfather, the 1st Baron Mornington, was called Richard Colley, but assumed the surname of Wesley after inheriting the estates of a distant relative. While the Colleys had been in Ireland for several centuries, the Wesleys were wealthier and could claim that their ancestor had arrived in Ireland as Henry II’s standard-bearer. In 1798, the Duke and his family changed their names to Wellesley, just because it sounded grander.

Debate about the Duke’s Irishness was widespread during his lifetime. It is often claimed that he repudiated his link to Ireland by saying that ‘A man can be born in a stable, and yet not be an animal.’ However, there is no evidence he ever said this: it probably originated as scurrilous court gossip.

Wellington remained as proud of his connections with Ireland as the Irish were of him; a monument 62.5 metres high (205 feet) stands in Phoenix Park in memory of his achievements.

The other quote that he famously didn’t say was: ‘The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.’ It was first attributed to the Duke four years after he died in a work of Catholic propaganda by the French historian, Count de Montalembert.

It’s worth pointing out that when Wellington briefly – and unsuccessfully – attended Eton, the school had no playing fields and he was a pupil noted for his lack of enthusiasm for, or talent at, games.

Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. The expression ‘Prime Minister’ was first officially used in 1905 just five days after he became one. Before then the term had been one of abuse.

Sir Robert Walpole, generally recognised as the first
de facto
Prime Minister, never used the word: he and his successors
were ‘First Lords of the Treasury’. This included Campbell-Bannerman until 10 December 1905, when – in the first official use – a Royal Warrant placed the ‘Prime Minister’ in order of precedence after the Archbishop of York.

Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1836–1908) was born Henry Campbell. The name Bannerman was added in 1871, as a condition to his inheriting his uncle’s estate. After succeeding Arthur James Balfour, who resigned in 1905, Campbell-Bannerman became Britain’s first official Prime Minister. His unusually strong cabinet included two future Prime Ministers (Asquith and Lloyd George) and he led the Liberals to a landslide victory in the 1906 General Election.

More radical than liberal, he supported women’s suffrage and Irish devolution; introduced the Old Age Pension; improved the lot of the poor; denounced British ‘barbarism’ in the conduct of the Boer War; arranged self-government for much of South Africa; and pushed through the Trade Disputes Act in 1906 which gave unions considerable freedom to strike.

In 1907, the year after the election, he had a heart attack, followed by a second one in 1908, after which he resigned in favour of Asquith. Just over two weeks later, he died at No. 10 Downing Street.

His last words were: ‘This is not the end of me.’

Once upon a time every schoolboy’s hand would have shot up and the class would have shouted ‘Rowland Hill in 1840, Sir!’ in unison. Not these days.

This isn’t such a disaster, because those clever-clogs were
wrong. William Dockwra had already established the London Penny Post 240 years earlier. It handled packets up to one pound in weight, there were several deliveries a day, and items were also delivered to addresses within ten miles of London for an extra charge of one penny. In 1683, Dockwra was forced to surrender his business to the government-operated General Post Office, a monopoly controlled by the Duke of York, later King James II.

In 1764, Parliament authorised the creation of Penny Posts in any town or city of the UK. By the beginning of the nineteenth century several were in existence. In 1840, Rowland Hill’s Uniform Penny Post was established throughout the UK, and soon afterwards postage could be prepaid with the adhesive stamp known as the Penny Black. In 1898, the Imperial Penny Post extended the rate throughout the British Empire.

There are several candidates for the first true postal service. Egyptian pharaohs had an organised courier system as early as 2400
BC
. The envelope was invented in Assyria around 2000
BC
: both letters and envelopes were made of pottery. Cyrus the Great (568–528
BC
), the founder of the Persian Empire, had a swift courier service that greatly impressed Herodotus. Confucius (551–479
BC
) wrote: ‘News travels faster than the mail,’ so presumably the Chinese had one around that time too.

The word ‘post’ comes from the Latin
posita
, ‘placed’, from the verb
ponere
, ‘to place’. The Roman postal service was two-tier: first class went by horse and second class by ox-cart. The word ‘mail’ comes from Old French
male
, a wallet or bag

The Postmaster General in 1840, Lord Lichfield, criticised Hill’s scheme as ‘wild and visionary’ but it was an immediate success, especially with Queen Victoria. She liked the profile portrait of her on the Penny Black so much that she ordered that the same image be used on all subsequent issues of the
stamp for the next sixty years.

The first philatelist surfaced within a year of the first stamp being issued: a young woman who advertised in
The Times
for sufficient stamps to cover her bedroom walls. Because the UK was the first to issue them, British stamps have the unique distinction of not carrying the name of the issuing country.