Читать книгу The Great Cat Massacre - A History of Britain in 100 Mistakes - Gareth Rubin - Страница 23

John Patten was Education Secretary in John Major’s Cabinet from 1992 to 1994. His career came to an end when, not stopping to think it through, during a fringe meeting at the Conservative Party conference, he publicly described Birmingham’s head of education, Tim Brighouse, in somewhat unusual terms. To be precise, he stated: ‘Birmingham has put this nutter in as their chief education officer. I fear for Birmingham children with this madman let loose wandering round the streets, frightening the children.’

The teachers of Birmingham duly had a whip-round, raising more than £25,000, which enabled Brighouse to sue for libel. He won substantial damages, which he donated to charity, using some of it to set up the University of the First Age, which encourages children to partake in extra-curricular activities.

As well as putting a dent in the government’s plans to centralise the education curriculum and reposition it along more traditional lines, the affair forced Patten to resign from government and vacate his seat at the next election. Don’t worry, though, he was made a peer as compensation.

His wife, Louise, is the granddaughter of the replacement second officer on the Titanic, Charles Lightoller, who was responsible for many of the deaths that night by misinterpreting the order of ‘women and children first’. Getting the wrong end of the stick, he put only women and children in the lifeboats and cast them away even if there were many empty seats that could have been filled by the waiting men – at one point, he ordered 30 men out of a lifeboat at gunpoint, thus condemning them to a pointless death. Don’t worry, though, he managed to find a seat for himself and lived to a ripe old age.

* In fact, the Sharps’ main claim to fame at that time was that they and their six siblings would occasionally sail up rivers on a barge playing music (Granville liked the kettle drums). One such gathering can be seen in a famous family portrait by Johann Zoffany. In ‘The Family of William Sharp: Musical Party on the Thames’, Granville holds up some sheet music for his sister playing the harpsichord, while William, a French Horn enthusiast, can be seen standing at the back, waving his hat.

Some time after completing the work, Zoffany was ship-wrecked off the Andaman Islands and was forced to eat one of his fellow sailors. The historian William Dalrymple writes in his book White Mughals: ‘Zoffany may thus be said with some confidence to have been the first and last Royal Academician to become a cannibal’, yet Dalrymple provides no evidence for this somewhat sweeping claim.

* Castlereagh was, for instance, perhaps the only member of a nineteenth-century Cabinet to challenge and fight another member of the Cabinet to a duel over a point of foreign policy, having fought Lord Canning with pistols on Putney Heath on 21 September 1809. Supposedly, Canning followed the gentlemanly convention of the time of firing his pistol into the air – in order to maintain the honour of having fought, but without the danger of actually hurting his opponent – while Castlereagh took careful aim but still only managed to hit Canning in the thigh, somewhat surprising him.