I have, I suppose, what you’d call an addictive personality and it’s most evident (these days, anyway) in my interests. If something really catches my fancy, then I have to learn as much as I can about it. Naturally, over the years, my interests have changed, waxed and waned: I no longer have an abiding interest in football, for example. Currently, my obsessions if you will are pre-Victorian cricket (circa 1750-1825), Jack the Ripper, silent films, the real Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid, the poet A.E. Housman, family history and, of course, The Beach Boys. The latter will have their own entry in due course, but for now I’ll swiftly explain the others.
Pre-Victorian cricket: a simple one, as one of the leading players of that era, William “Silver Billy” Beldham, was Farnham born and bred. He was, by common acclaim during his first class career (1781-1821), pretty much the best batsman of his era, posting scores which even today would be thought excellent but which back in the day were outstanding. His greatest performance was in 1794 for Surrey against England, scoring 72 & 102 in a 197 run win and for good measure bowling two and making a catch. Such was his prowess that in his later years, between sixty and seventy he was actively barred from playing in county matches! He died in 1862, aged 96, and is the only 18th century cricketer of whom there is a photograph (granted taken when he was in his nineties).
Jack the Ripper: not, you’ll be relieved to hear for any practical purposes but because I loves me a good mystery. Who was Jack? No-one knows, and probably no-one will ever know now. We know who he certainly wasn’t – Druitt, Tumblety, Sickert, Gull – but none of the remaining candidates are entirely convincing. My own preference, or rather least worst guess, would be George Chapman/Seweryn Antonowicz Kłosowski, but I firmly subscribe to leading Ripper researcher Don Rumbelow’s view: “come the Day of Judgement, when all things shall be known and Ripperologists call for Jack to step forward and say his name, we shall all look at each other and say “WHO?“”
Silent films: most folk think of silents as the jerky slapstick comedies of the Keystone Kops and Charlie Chaplin, which does the genre a huge disservice, for many of the silents of the 1910s and 1920s were astonishing films. Robin Hood, Metropolis, Sunrise (one of the most visually sumptous films I’ve ever seen), The General, Intolerance, Broken Blossoms… the list is lengthy.
Butch Cassidy: the now-iconic 1969 films opens with a titles stating “not that it matters, but much of what follows is true” – and it was. Butch & Sundance were real people, Robert Parker and Harry Longabaugh, and pretty much the only thing the film jazzed up was the ending. They did die in an obscure Bolivian village, but at the hands of maybe four soldiers, not the entire Bolivian cavalry. What amazes most people is when it all happened: most of their robbieries were in the late 1890s and they died in 1908.
A.E. Housman: famous for the poem collection A Shropshire Lad (1896), which title is considerably better than The Poems of Terence Hearsay, I think. The poems themselves are mostly short and concerned with nature, war, loss and the nature of war and loss, and were thus hugely popular in both the Boer and First World Wars. It’s not been out of print since and still speaks to anyone who will listen. Oddly, he wrote most of the book in Highgate, North London before ever setting foot in Shropshire. Never mind, his portrayal of “the land of lost content” was still hugely evocative. And of course, it’s about Shropshire…
Family history: I’ve been researching my family tree since 1996, and it’s a fascinating pastime. My family has no great merit – I’m pretty much the most “famous” person in it! – but that doesn’t make it any the less interesting. Of late the pace has slowed somewhat but it’s a rare week goes by without me doing some digging.
So there you go, a swift trot through all bar one of my current major interests. Divine what you will from them.
