No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As The Virgin Mary Toast Reunion Tour

Episode Date: July 2, 2021

Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss 19th century dogbandittis, uncommon methods for removing a tooth, and the greatest knobheads in Science Fiction. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hi everyone, just before we start this week's show, we have an exciting announcement to make. Yes, as you may have heard, we are returning to the road that leads to theaters across the UK and Ireland to perform our new stage show, nerd immunity. It's going to be a live podcast. That's going to be the second half of every show, completely different every single time. And in the first half, there's going to be a magnificent first half comedy set starring all your favorites from the podcast. Dan, James, Anna, all your favorite people. Right there. In one room. If you would like to come along and be a part of that,

do go to QI.com slash fish events and you'll find links to all the places that we're going, which starts on the 5th of October, Tumberidge Wells, Redding, Petersburg, Exeter, Canterbury, London, Oxford, pool, Chesterfield, Manchester, so many places we're going to. Do check it out. Okay, go to QI.com slash fish events.

But before that, on with the show. On with the show. Hello. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, Anna Tashinsky and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is Andy. My fact is that the Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning had her spaniel stolen by London's dog banditti on three separate occasions. Does sound like at least two euphemisms in that sentence? I reckon having your spaniel stolen and London's dog banditti sounds. It's all true. There might be some euphemisms later actually, but no, she had a lovely little spaniel and it was called flush, flush the dog.

But don't. Don't flush the dog. If you're listening. But this was a huge problem in Victorian London. I say huge. It was a medium-sized problem. But for middle-class people who were suddenly getting dogs and showing them off and grooming them and breeding them, it was a problem because thieves realized you could steal dogs. And the owners were paid quite a bit to get them back.

And poor little flush got stolen in 1843 to order. She paid the thieves off and they brought it back. Then again in 1844, she paid them off again, a bit more money this time. She got it back. and then in 1846 a third time flush the dog was stolen at which point flush must have been getting used to this routine by now at that stage maybe flush preferred his other owners although i heard that it was a very very spoiled dog flush and that he would turn his nose up at any bread that wasn't buttered so i imagine the dog nappers probably weren't given him she wrote about him if you were about to see him eat partridge from a silver fork

I mean very, very over-spoiled dog. Then what? What's the end of that clause? If you were but to see him he part you from a silver fork, what? You pass out with envy? You're so disgusted you leave the room. I've cut it short there. So we'll never know.

It can't have been that interesting. Otherwise, I would have said, if you were to see him do this, you'd shit. That's her style. I'd believe it. She claimed that he could have the capacity for literacy. She said he read. recognize the letters A and B, and that maybe in the course of time he might learn the full alphabet.

Wow. So he could send an SOS out at some point. No, he could order an ABBA CD, basically. Anyway, well, look, he couldn't have done any of these things if, as the thieves threatened, they were going to cut off his head and pause and send them back to Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Very distressing, obviously. That's what they said they would do. Yeah, that's horrible.

No wonder she paid up. I read a really good account of it of the third time that the dog was stolen, and she she was getting on a bus and the dog was just wandering behind her in London, clearly leashless, as she got on the bus, turned around, looked for the dog, and it was gone. And instead of getting off to look for her dog, she and her sister just stayed on the bus. And her sister was like, well, guess there'll be a ransom note when we get back. That's a great idea, isn't it? If you're in the supermarket and you can't be bothered taking your kids home in the car, just wait for the ransom note.

Can I ask what kind of bus we think she was getting? Was it like a stagecoach? It might have been a carriage? A carriage. An omnibus, I reckon. An omnibus. That's what it felt like. It felt like she was getting on a proper bus when I read the report.

I mean, it certainly wasn't a proper bus in the sense that we know it because it was like six years before proper buses were being. Yeah, maybe I've read that wrong. Maybe carriage. Let's go carriage, actually. Flush the dog. He must have thought. as he was being dognapped for the third time.

He must have thought, Mama Mia, here we go again. Oh, very good. Thank you. And do you think he sent out an SOS? Are you giving the punchline to a joke that was set up five minutes ago? Yeah, I think I am. Anyway, look, the thieves were only interested in money, money, money.

That's what they wanted. And so they sent this ransom note. And there was a lot of dispute in the family because her father was very tyrannical. He didn't want a ransom paid. But there was this content. there was a shoemaker called Taylor, who was the main player in the dog theft world in Victorian London. He was involved in a huge number of these theft.

He was usually not the guy to steal the dog, but he was the guy who would make contact and say, oh, we've come into this dog. That's disgusting. We've come into the possession of this dog. Oh, sorry, because I thought you meant, oh, right, okay. I find it really hard to work out exactly what happened on all these occasions because Virginia Woolf wrote a fictionalized version of Flush's dog napping, didn't she? She wrote a biography of this dog in which there are loads of explanations of how he was

taken and then how he was gotten back and stuff, which God knows what's true and what's not true, but the best bits I find probably not true. It's so funny. She wrote the whole thing in 1933, or it was published in 1933, certainly. It was quite a light book off the back of a rather heavy and serious brain-draining one she'd just written. But it was her best-selling book to date, which must have been, yes, infuriating. To now. No, to that point in her career, it was the most successful. Yeah, I don't think it's currently outselling Mrs. Stalloway. I might be wrong. You never know, maybe after this podcast.

That's true. But she was like, when it first came out, she wasn't sure if she should even publish it because she thought that people would think she was like a frivolous, not very kind of. Yeah, I mean, it's a biography of someone's dog. Yeah, silly lady novelist was the worry if she had. She said, I must not let myself believe that I'm simply a lady like prattler. Well, maybe write a biography of a human being, Virginia. Talking dog. Was she friends with flush?

Did she know flush and did she know Brown? No, no, the timelines didn't cross over. Just to defend Virginia Woolf, having abused her for writing about a dog, it did have a serious message underneath, didn't it? I think she would just worry people wouldn't get it. So, well, this is how she defended it anyway, writing to her friend. She was like, look, it's going to seem silly because it looks like it's a biography of a dog. But if you read it, well, it's partly, I guess, an ode to Elizabeth Browning, right, who was a hero for subsequent female writers,

and partly a way of descending into the depths of London and reporting on the awful poverty and social injustice there. Through the eyes of a dog, yes, but even so. So it was vaguely serious. But it also featured a pot point, which I don't think, was in the real life story where the dog was almost sold to a man called pussy. This is part of the story was she got it from a friend of hers who initially had been, had an offer made from the brother of the Reverend Edward Buevery Pusey. Oh, Pusey is a different name to Pussy.

It is a different name. But it is spelled in a similar way. Very similar. Dog napping back then was such a. The big thing in London, there was a journalist called Henry Mayhew who estimated that in terms of individual dog stealers operating in London at his time, it was 141 people, just going around London, stealing them. And he estimated that 45 of them did it as their main profession.

They just actively went into it. And you can see there's sort of tables of sort of like 1841, dogs stolen, where 43 dogs lost 521, people charged 51. people discharged of that 32. They just found it really hard to bust people who were stealing the dogs. Yeah. Hang on, Dan. How many dogs did he say stolen? So stolen 43. Dogs lost 521. But I imagine that there's a blur between those two because a lot of these dog nappers got

around loopholes by if they'd stolen a dog. They would do things like make up a missing sign, which they would then show if they had the dog to a dog dealer and say, look, I found this missing poster of this dog. and this is the dog, they bide off them and then sell it. So technically, it was a missing dog. The guy who stole the dog makes the poster. Yeah, exactly. But then he makes the poster and then he gives it to a dog dealer and says,

I've got this dog on this missing poster. Can I sell it to you? Yeah, he's like, look, there's a missing poster here. Someone's looking for this dog. And I found the dog. So if I just give it to you, then you'll be able to do the deal and get the money. And just give me half the money for now. It's fine.

That's so funny. I still think that even a total of something. something like 600 dogs lost and reported stolen too, given that there are 141 dogs dealers in London, 45 of whom are doing it full time. That is what, about four dogs per person per year, one per quarter? Yeah. I mean, that's a lot of holidays. It's an astonishingly low proportion of dogs. I don't know why we're acting like this is a lot of dogs to be stolen. How is anyone making a profit out of this? Well, they took their time, didn't they? Didn't they find out with Elizabeth Barrett Browning that they'd spent two years tailing her before they took her dog. Two years spotting.

Yeah. Or is that again, is that the Virginia Woolf story? I'm not sure. I can't work out. The other thing is you could make some money on the side by stealing a dog, not getting the money back, but making dog skin leather gloves, which are apparently a luxury item that people like to wear. They're very soft on the skin. Yeah. Have we ever worn dog outside of, dog skin gloves. I've never heard of it before. I don't know if you've seen the documentary 101 Dalmatians, but... Yeah. It wasn't the only dog-related trade. This is a bit by the buy now.

But there was a market in 1850s London for fake dog poo. Really? So there were people who were collecting real dog poo for tanneries because it helped to soften and purify the leather, right? Is fake dog poo just your own poo with some dog hairs in it? because it feels like probably is. Oh, God. Thankfully, it's just taking mortar from old walls

and crumbling it in to your existing dog poo to bulk it out a bit. It's a way of making your real dog poo go further. Ah. The people who traded in it and collected it were originally old women who got nicknamed Buntas, but then men started muscling in from about the 1820s onwards. And these dog poo collectors would walk the streets

with the covered basket containing their, wears and some of them would wear a black leather glove to do their collecting in. Others, only some of them. Because the others, they didn't have a glove. They said, well, look, it's easier to wash your hands than to clean the glove. I think that's a fair point. Yeah, good cool. Good call.

I knew Anna would be the first one to say. It was pretty exciting to hear about the fact of London being poo-less, because in the area that I live, particularly, there is poo from dogs that are just left all over the streets. And just the idea that it was picked up because people thought it as valuable and needing it as part of this tanning process means that Victorian London was just clean in that respect. In that respect, I know it's not. Interesting theory, because I think it was also sort of a thigh deep in horse manure, wasn't it? And technically you could use that as well. It must be really hard to find dog poo in a street that's full of horse poo. It's almost like the 19th century equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack is finding a dog poo in a horse poo. That was a saying, I believe that was a popular saying at the time. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James.

My fact is that the Democratic Republic of Congo is planning an official parade of its first Prime Minister's gold tooth. Very cool. You've got to get front row seats for that, haven't you? Otherwise, it's just not worth going. Yeah, you're not going to see it from the back of the stadium, are you? No. So, I will quickly give you a... short history of the Democratic Republic of Congo in the last 200 years to explain what's going on here.

Right. You might remember that amusing story of Henry Martin Stanley finding Dr. Livingston. Wow, we really are going back. We are, we are. So he said, Dr. Livingston, I presume, and he found Dr. Livingston. But after that, the story took a bit of a turn. And Stanley was working on behalf of Leopold II of Belgium to create this massive personal tracts of land, where he could almost farm it for ivory

because there was so much ivory, so many elephants and stuff like that. So he created this huge, huge country that was run by Leopold II of Belgium. There was then a rubber boom because they came up with this idea of buses. I don't know if you've heard of those done. They came along in the early 20th century.

And so Leopold II of Belgium forced the population to work on his rubber plantations and literally millions of people died in terrible, terrible conditions. In 1960, the country got its independence finally, and they got a new leader called Patrice Lumumba, so they thought he might bring the whole country together. But there was one area called Katanga that had loads of minerals, and the Belgians wanted to keep that under the control after independence because they wanted all of these minerals. Lumumba asked the US and Europe to help to control an uprising, but US and Europe didn't help. And so he turned to the Soviet Union, and obviously that sent alarm bells ringing in Europe and America.

It was an awkward time, wasn't it, between... American, the Soviet Union. It was. It was the Cold War. Yeah. So anyway, they assassinated this guy, Patrice Lumumba. And to stop any hero worship, they dissolved his body in acid. And there was hardly any bits left.

This gold tooth was remaining and was taken to Belgium by one of the people who did the crime. And then this year, finally, they're going to get it back. And they're going to have a proper parade. And it'll be kind of part of their anniversary of independence. Right. I had never heard the story of Patrice Lumumba before and it's really, obviously, it's a completely awful story, this coup against him.

And there were apparently two different plots against him. One was CIA slash MI6 and one was Belgian, along with some Congolese officials as well. Yeah, the CIA tried to kill him with some poison toothpaste. They apparently found it difficult to get the toothpaste onto his toothbrush without being noticed, which it's so rare that toothpaste is applied to your toothbrush without you being in front of your toothbrush. Unless your Prince Charles, in which case, it's a twice daily occurrence.

Is that right? Yes. I'm not saying they should, but if the CIA wanted to knock off Prince Charles with this method, he would be a sitting duck. I was just thinking, it's definitely a two-man job, isn't it? One person to distract you so much that you don't notice that the other person sneaks into your bathroom and puts toothpaste on your toothbrush that you're holding. But you'd turn back and you'd think, no, actually you wouldn't think. you wouldn't think, did I put this toothpaste on the brush?

No. You'd just look at it and you'd think... What's the other option that it's just spontaneously arrived on your toothbrush? That doesn't make any sense. Yeah. They'd have to have opened the toothpaste because I would be suspicious if I hadn't got the toothpaste out of its special draw yet to put it on the brush, if you know what I mean. It's a tough location all round, isn't it?

Because, you know, if you're brushing your teeth, most likely you're staring into a giant mirror, which would knock out anyone's chance of sneaking up behind you. That's a really good point. Um, whose tooth do you think is the most expensive, John Lennon's or Elvis Presley's? Um, does one of them have more teeth in circulation? I can't look out why that would be. Oh, yeah, interesting. Okay, this gives you a bit of a clue. Both of these are owned by the same guy who is a tooth collector of celebrities. Oh, okay. Wow. This is a weird tooth fairy, do.

I'm going to say John Lennon, because there's probably more bits of Elvis Presley. Presley on the market, like his toenails and so on, that you can get access to. I'll say Elvis. I'll say Elvis is bigger. I think sort of people who want the teeth will be more interested in Elvis than Lenin. I don't know why there are more bits of the dismembered Elvis Presley on the market than there are apparently dismembered John Lennon. I didn't realize their body parts were in circulation at all. Well, I know that we know where his Elvis's wart is. It's in a museum in America. There's a, remember possibly his toenail that we've mentioned. So, you know, bits of Elvis are all over the shop.

That's a really good argument. James, stop this interminable debate and tell us. The answer is that Elvis Presley's dental crown was $10,000, whereas John Lennon's tooth was $31,000. Yes. So three times more for John Lennon. But that's a crown. That's different. It's a crown, although he was the king.

Exactly. So they do, they call it the king. King's Crown. And it was worn by Elvis Presley until he cracked it on a microphone while performing in Las Vegas in 1971. And eventually found its way into the collection of Michael Zuck. And Michael Zuck also bought one of John Lennon's extracted teeth, which Lennon had given to his housekeeper. Dot Jarlett. Wow. A weird move, let's say. It's not. It's not. Unless his housekeeper ask for it. Look how much it's worth. If you were as famous as Elvis or John Lennon, If I cut off a fingernail, if I cut a strand of hair, hand it to someone.

It's going to make them money. You are, your whole body is worth stuff. I think it's a wonderful present. I've got a question about the Elvis thing, which is that you said he cracked his crown on a microphone during a gig. Now look, I'm not saying our gigs go like Elvis's. I'm not saying our audiences are as raucous. But that's quite the gig where you're shoving your microphone into your mouth to the extent it cracks a dental crown. I don't think he was shoving his microphone into his mouth.

I think it's probably more of an accidental kind of swinging it around that it hits you in the face. I don't think he was deep throating the microphone. No, no, if you watch concerts, that was his style. He sang from the back of the throat and he took that literally, so he would throw it all the way back. Hey, just I was looking into, because this gold tooth is a relic and I was just looking at other political leader relics that we still have. And have you guys heard of Chairman Mao's mango? No. Is it like Elizabeth Barrett Browning Spaniel?

This was basically during the Cultural Revolution, there was a big fight that happened when one of the universities in Beijing and Tsinghua University. And Mao sent 30,000 workers to try and stop all of the sort of weird groups that were breaking out and causing ruckus in China at the time. Sent these workers to stop that. And there was a huge fight there. The workers were not prepared for the fight because they basically came with just pictures of Chairman Mao, a little red book, whereas the other people had like

bricks and spears and acid. And so it was a huge fight and eventually these workers won. And as a reward, Chairman Mao gave them 40 mangoes. Mao never gave presents. And so it was seen as a high, high honor. But the main thing was that no one in northern China at this point really knew what mangoes were. So all of them were just staying up at night, looking at it, smelling them, caressing them. And they were thinking, we need to make sure that this mango, this special thing that he's given to us remains with us. And so they had it waxed and they put it in formaldehyde and they made sure that it just stayed, you know, proper. And as a result, it got taken everywhere and everyone was looking at Chairman Mao's mango. The Communist Party seeing this turned it into a propaganda thing. So

there was merchandise that you could buy. Everywhere you went, there were like, you know, tin cups with mangoes on them and so on. And it became this massive thing, the Chairman Mal Mango. Doesn't it slightly go against the principles held within the Little Red Book to turn your mango into merchandise? How does that now feel about that? I don't think it's that granular on the detail. Yeah. It's a little red book. It probably does go against the principles, but there's a loophole, I'm sure.

Okay, it's the Mango loophole. Flog your mango around the place. We did talk about this on QI. I don't know if it ever went out, but the question that we asked was, how mad could a mango make a mango? Ah, nice. Nice. What was the answer to how? How mad could a mango make a mango? Well, the answer was the anecdote that you just told.

Oh, was it? That went out on QI, did it? I don't know if it was the format of QI, Dan, but often there's not just like one straight answer. It's sometimes a bit of a left field thing. Yeah, I should start watching that show. There's one piece of material that's lasted a very long time, which probably you'll all be familiar with. Oh, yeah. And that is the Virgin Mary Toast. So can everyone, can you remember the toast, the famous toast with the face of the Virgin Mary?

Yeah, okay. It's what it sounds like. Yeah, it was sort of, I think it was a big hit. It was like the biggest celebrity of the 90s along with the spice girls. 1996, this woman was eating toast, Diana Doyser, and she took a tiny bite of her toast and then realized the Virgin Mary's face was staring up at her. And so she preserved it in between two bits of like hard plastic. She should have preserved it between two pieces of cheese. That would have made it an anti-sandwich and would have made it worth even more. You could have put it in between two slices of bread and had like a toast sandwich,

which is something that you'd still eat, isn't it? Absolutely. A club sandwich is kind of like that, isn't it? Yeah, I feel like we're not going to the point of Anna's story here. I'm not sure there is a point to this story, but let's hear it out. Apparently she was as big as the spice girls. I look forward to hearing about the reunion tour and her getting her own movie. Well, you may be surprised.

So none of your solutions afforded the Virgin Mary the kind of respect that Diana wanted to because she's a devout Christian. So she preserved it and she said she had like 10 years of good luck. She won $70,000 in a casino because of this toast. And then it was picked up by...

Is there more detail on that or not? Yeah, whispered over her ear. Put it all on bread. Put it all on bread. She kept a piece of toast Thinking this will bring me luck And then in the next decade She won 70 grand

Okay If you don't think that's because of the toast Then that's your problem Sure It's a good way to wear the crust Oh my God Anyway, it's now held by another casino Golden Palace.com

Which is a casino known for collecting These strange modern day relics And they bought it for $28,000 Is that why the house always wins? Because they've got the ultimate sort of talism in there. Exactly. It was very lucky. As they said, when they bought it off her, customers are really going to get a kick

out of seeing this sandwich. And they actually paid for her to go on tour with it. And to the Taj Mahal and to Red Square. To the Eiffel Tower. Wow. It was very nice for Diana, who said she'd never been on holiday in her life. She'd spent her life looking after her elderly. parents. She got to do this world tour. She must have had a real

wry smile on her face as she got off the plane. Oh yeah? Because that's the type of Brad, isn't it? Absolutely. But maybe it was a whole grin. There's another toothy relic that I found. Actually, it's more of a just a wonderful tooth removal than a relic. I don't know if the tooth has been preserved, but it was from 2015 and it was a young girl called Ellie Clay and she had her tooth removed by javelin. So someone someone stood 100 meters away and threw a javelin and it just landed directly in her face where the tooth was. That would have been very impressive.

They did it. They did it in reverse, the health and safety nuts. Her father was an Olympic javelin thrower and she had a very loose tooth. And so they tied a bit of dental floss carefully around the tooth. They tied the dental floss to a javelin, I guess a very long bit of dental floss. And then he just chucked the javelin 30 meters. They made sure it was a real furtivelellan. really loose tooth before they did it, obviously,

so she didn't go flying after it. And her whole family have these crazy methods of removing teeth. They've done it by putting a bit of floss on the family dog's collar and then getting the dog to run off. That was one thing I've tried. Lots of stuff. That actually wasn't a removal attempt.

The dog was just stolen midway through a wall, isn't it? Okay, and it's time for fact number three. That is Anna. My fact this week is that in the 1920s, Thousands of people with the surname Drake fought a legal battle to inherit Sir Francis Drake's fortune. Wow. This is just an amazing scam that was pulled. And it was based on a rumor that's basically been going around since Francis Drake died.

And he didn't really have any direct descendants. And everyone claimed that he had a hidden fortune that wasn't inherited by anyone and that's sitting somewhere. And fast forward to 1914. starts with these con artists is a woman called Sadie Whittaker, and she's going around Iowa claiming her cousin's heir to this ancient Drake fortune, which is now just worth so much because it's expected to gain so much interest over the last 300 years. And she swindles this Iowa farmwoman out of $6,000 because she convinces her that if she buys shares in this scheme to kind of retrieve Francis Drake's lost wealth, then she'll get a cut in it.

Now this woman's son, this poor farmwoman's son, is a guy called Oscar Hartzell, who rather than going to defend his mother's honour and money, thinks, God, what a good trick. I'm going to build on that. And he joins up with them. And Oscar Hartzell sets up the Francis Drake Association. He writes to thousands of people across the state that across America with the name Drake saying Francis Drake's fortune is being held by the British government, those bastards. We've got to wrench it back. You're probably all related to him. You pay me some money and I'll go and get it for you. It's so convincing. It's so convincing that I feel like I want to sign up to it, despite not being called Drake and stike. Well, it doesn't matter. Doesn't matter that you're not called Drake.

This was his genius. He had 70,000 people signed up, including people not called Drake. He just opened it up. Everyone, get in. He expanded. He suddenly went, hang on, people really are idiots. I'm going to make this a bit bigger. Who got the money in the end? Was it the rapper? Or that's where it is. That's why you can spend his money time rapping now. It's certainly not through album sales. I'll tell you that much. That's unfair. I'm sure he sells very well. I've ever heard in my entire life. Oh, I'm sure, young Drake, I'm sure he does very well for himself.

Mr. Drake. So there's no money, is there? No. Complete nest of lies from the Tox of Finish. Once someone dies, if they have a will, after 30 years, if you don't sort it out, then it all goes to the crown. So there wouldn't be any money anyway,

even if there was some money. But I think in the end, it went to his wife or his brother or something. Like, they know where it went. Yeah, it went to a nephew or something of his in the end. there was nothing very exciting about it. But everyone was so convinced that this guy was telling the truth that the FBI actually investigated what had happened to Francis Drake's money

in the late 1500s. It's just brilliant. And like you say, concluded it had gone to his wife and then down to some of his descendants. But the details, the details were so convincing because he said it was worth about 100 billion pounds. I'm not sure whether that's in modern money or in 1930s money because that would presumably have bought America. But one of the things he said was the entire city of Plymouth.

that happens to be part of the Drake state. So, yeah, he said, I think he went up to 400 billion at one stage. Because he kind of just said different amounts all the time. And he said that as soon as he got the money, obviously everyone would get the bit that they, you know, asked for, they would get a return on their money. But he said that he was going to go back to America and he was going to buy up, I think, Missouri and Iyer and a few other states. And he was going to put a big fence around them and just live in them.

That's what he claimed. His powers of persuasion just sound. extraordinary because once he got back to America, he was taken to trial in 1933. And yet, even though he was being held accountable for it, he still managed to get people who were subscribing to this scheme to contribute $350,000 in legal defense fund to make sure he didn't go to jail. He did go to jail. He got given a 10-year sentence. And even then, still, his agents were able to claw another half million dollars from these subscribers to make sure that he was doing okay. It is. I mean, it's kind of

because it was presented as an investment. People were told this is an investment to fund the legal case to fight the British government and get this money out of them, which we know is there. And if you invest one dollar, for every dollar you'll invest, you will get 500 back. That was the idea. And so when you put it like that, it starts to sound like, oh, well, I am spending now, but it's an investment, you know. Yeah.

And also, it sort of makes sense, given what we know these days about how rationally people can act, it makes sense that it actually convinced people even more when he was convicted that what he'd said was true because it was like well why has the British government turned against him like this why have they put him in prison he's obviously onto them they want to keep Plymouth they're desperate to cling on to the beauties of Plymouth and they will not let it go but it's just like today when you get someone like Alex Jones or a conspiracy theorist right and then people jump down their throats and then that makes their supporters their knee jet reaction is to dig down even harder and say well he's definitely telling the truth. So Francis Drake? Yeah. Who we haven't really said who he is yet, just for the benefit of any listeners who are not up on their Drake.

He was a pirate, privateer, all-round coastal bandit, mayor of Plymouth, briefly. British hero, or pirates, would you say? Oh, British hero, slave trader. It's so hard to tell where one begins in the other end. Most likely known, he was the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe is possibly what he's most known for.

Or possibly most well known for the Spanish Armada being the supposed head of... Yes. Not of that. No, he wasn't the head of the Spanish Armada. He was the opposite of that. Quite the reverse. Yeah, yeah. He was the tail of the Spanish Armada.

He supposedly was the head of the force that defeated it. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, like a really mixed career. It did start out as a slave trader and then became a great English hero. So, you know, definitely a mixed scorecard, I would say. An English hero for the time, which basically meant he stole shed loads of money off other countries and handed it to Queen Elizabeth, which, you know, that's how you want to make a penny. That was the benchmark in those days for English hero, yeah, yeah, absolutely. He seems like a very difficult man to get along with.

On one of his voyages, he accused his second in command of witchcraft and had a show trial and then had his head chopped off. Wow. Oh, yeah. Doughty. Thomas Doughty. Not doughty enough to resist. having his head chopped off. Well, I doubt he thought much of that trial.

Oh, boy. I doubt he would like to hear us talking about him in this way. He had a sense of humour, actually, Thomas Doughty. So perhaps he would have loved this. Yeah, he allegedly, once he was told that he was going to be beheaded by Drake, basically unfairly for bitching about Drake behind his back, he said, can I take communion with you first? And then, according to accounts that were pro and anti- Drake,

they both took communion together and then had a great laugh and a banter and a chat about the good old days when they were friends and then Drake chopped his head off and in fact Drake offered him and now this is according to Drake's nephew who wrote an account which was based on diaries of people at the time but apparently Drake said look because I feel bad about this whole unjustly beheading you saying do you want me to shoot you instead because then you will have been shot by a gentleman and that's nicer isn't it wow and doubting you. He said, thanks, that's so sweet if you to offer, but I'll just go for the straight-up beheading. It's quite a weird incident, but it's hard to tell, isn't it? Because there are so many pro-drake and anti-drake bits of propaganda over the last 300 years. You don't know if he was a goody or a baddie to work for. Yeah. Well, there was one bad thing when they went round the world, second navigated the world, and they took a woman from El Salvador, and she got pregnant, and they dumped her on an island.

Oh. And then what you're saying about propaganda, a few years later, Shakespeare wrote The Tempest, and there is a character, Sycorax, who's an African woman who is dumped on an island having got pregnant, and there is an idea suggested, probably true, that Shakespeare based that on this woman Mara. Wow. That is interesting. That's so interesting about the idea that there was superstitions and witchcraft that you were mentioning in relation to Doughty, because Drake was the kind of guy who other Spanish mariners would create these tales about as if he did have these amazing abilities. There was all these rumors that went out around him.

There was the rumor that he possessed a magic mirror that allowed him to spy on the locations of the ships on the sea. They just thought, how could he know where our ships were? If they were behind him, for instance, he'd be able to spy on the movie. Exactly. They thought he had sort of contact with witches from Devon and that he, He could raise storms against the Spanish Armada. Just so many of these weird tales, there was a tale that Elizabeth Sidnam, who he was in love with, and she wanted to marry him, but the family said that this was not going to happen.

And then he went off, and she got bored. She was about to marry someone. On the day that she was meant to marry him, a huge cannonball fell at her feet that had been fired from Drake's cannon from across the world in order to stop the wedding. That was a story that went around. It was actually Drake was just trying to remove a tooth, wasn't he? That's completely misinterpreted. Imagine that.

If you say that line in the wedding, does anyone here have any reason? And everyone's sort of sniggering behind their hands. I wonder if someone will say something and then a massive fucking cannonball lunch in the middle of the church. Yeah. As she did later marry Drake. They did get married. But yeah, that was one of the stories. He was full of all these abilities.

I've just got one more thing, which is another 1930. he's Francis Drake-based swindle. Okay. This was the story of a young man who went for a hike in San Francisco Bay in 1936, and he found a metal plate on the ground. He didn't think much of it, but his friends pointed out it appeared to say Francis Drake on it. And so he said, right, I'll get it checked out. He took it to a professor at the University of California called Herbert Bolton,

who was a world expert on the history of the Americas. And when Bolton saw this plate, he became unbelievably excited. he said this is the Drake plate. It proves that he arrived in California. There was a story that Drake, when he reached California, he left a brass plate there with some writing on, and this looked like it. You know, nearly 400 years later,

this is a seminal piece of the history of the world. This proves something incredible. The spelling looked legit. The language on it looked legit. And this was announced with great brouhaha. There was some people who doubted it, but it was announced as being real. And then in 1977,

there was a celebration of 400 years since Drake had reached California and it was tested and it was so, so clearly a fake. There was way too much zinc. It had been cut around the edges by a metal saw which hadn't existed at the time. And the awful thing was Herbert Bolton, the professor, had students who knew how interested he wasn't this subject. They had made a fake plate and they had left it for someone to find.

He had found it and he spent the rest of his life believing in it. And the problem was he had gone public so quickly and he had got so excited that his students were too embarrassed to say, it's not real, we fake the whole thing. So he went to his grave believing in the plate. Oh, well, that's all right. Then he went to his grave. Yeah, that's fine.

I guess you're right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That plate is really interesting, or the idea that Drake sort of claimed that part of California for England and said, okay, this landmass is now ours, when, of course, the Spanish were kind of working their way up through Mexico and through that side. Right.

The Spanish were really, really annoyed about this. But the lucky thing was that they ran all of the map makers. Or rather, the macmakers were mostly in like Netherlands and Belgium and stuff, but they were in charge of that area. And so they got all the map makers to pretend that California was an island. And you know you see those old maps where California was an island. Well, that was the Spanish basically saying, this thing that's Francis Drake's claim for England is not the whole of America.

it's just a little kind of island on the side. So technically, if California is English property, but Plymouth belongs to the states, should we just have an exchange now and keep things the same? I think no one can argue with that, can they? If we get California and they get Plymouth. It's a win-win, guys. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that 20th century American science fiction works include the titles,

servants of the wank and planet of the knobheads. Aren't we all in a way? Servants of the Wank. So these were legit books that were published. Planet of the Knobheads published in 1939 by Stanton A. Koblants. And in 1969, Servants of the Wank was published. And that was by Jack Vance. I think British readers might not recognize servants of the wank, because it got

renamed in Britain because for obvious reasons. Yeah. Well, it's not spelled the same. I mean, I'm not convinced we're pronouncing it right. It very clearly to me looks like servants of the wank. The wanker? That's just not funny.

It is. It's spelled W-A-N-K-H. I would say it's wankh, like with like loch. Like loch. I don't know, Anna, for someone who humorously mispronounced the perfectly ordinary name Pusey as pussy for comic effect, I don't think you've got to like to stand on. Did you read the synopsis of any of the servants of the wank down, for instance?

I did. Give it, give it to us. It's brilliant. A couple of humans land on a planet, and there's loads of different groups there. One of them are the wank. Basically, there's a group called the wank men. And the wank men are the servants of the wank, but the humans who are working under the wank. Well, it's Adam Wreath, isn't it? It's this guy who crashes onto the planet, and he needs to get off. so his ship doesn't work, so he needs to steal the wank spaceship in order to get out of there,

is the main plot. Well, yeah, but then you've got all these four groups who are fighting against each other, and you've got the wank men who, it turns out, have been destroying anything that the wank had been making to try and make a war between the wank and another group called the dear-deer. And when the wank find out that the wank men have been destroying all of their wank machines, then they expel the wank men from the wank city. and this guy who Dan's talking about gets to leave on his spaceship. Yeah.

It's a happy ending, you might say. Are you all right, Andy? Oh, my God. We'll get put that tissue away in. Look, for the listener, Andy did actually just blow his nose of the tissue. The wank men, they served the wank. Yes. What is the wank?

Well, the wank is a group of people. and they're on war, but the wank men wants to keep the status quo because they want to carry on the cushy lives looking after the wank. And so they're kind of causing mayhem. But actually, when the wank find out about the wank men destroying all their stuff, then they get expelled. And Adam doesn't seem to be the first human there because there are other human wankmen who are there. They serve under the wank, and they handle all the communication between the wankmasters and the rest of the people who live on the planet. I feel like I've gone into

like a Dungeons and Dragons discussion group or something after hours or like, you know, Game of Thrones fan club spin-off. Are we going to go through the whole plot of Wankas are us or wherever it's called? That was the plot. That's the plot. That's it. Oh my God. He had to

change the title in the end, as James says, when it came to Britain because I think they thought Anna's probably right. The H might be pronounced differently, but why don't we not take any risks? So they changed it to, I think, what was another alien species on there called the chaish or the chash. And the wank were renamed the Wannick. So W-A-N-N-E-K.

Okay. Imagine being the author, Jack Vads, having to go back and just one-by-one change wank to Wannick. He must be able to control H or control H or control G or whatever it is. Well, it's 1969. We didn't have that. Isn't it funny that it's 69? It's just a whole other layer that I hadn't realized until just then. Jack Vance, author of The Wank, was a really interesting guy.

He... Yeah, he was a fascinating author. He wrote sci-fi all his life and amazing works of fantasy, huge great works, pioneered the dying earth genre. In fact, I think this work was part of his dying earth series. But Vance himself was an electrician at Pearl Harbor when he was in the US Navy. But he left. He was discharged with prejudice.

very bored of Navy life and he got home a week before Pearl Harbor, Pearl Harbor, before the bombings. So he really luckily dodged that. Sorry, when you say he was discharged with prejudice, what is that? So usually with prejudice means that it's like a final legal decision and you can't appeal it or anything like that. So I guess probably it might be dishonorable discharge with prejudice, which means that you're out and you can't come back. I'm not sure. Got it. Yeah. Ironically, for a man who wrote a book called Servants of the Whank, he left with a dishonorable discharge.

After the USA entered the war he got back into the Navy and this is the crazy thing. He had very bad eyesight. No, no, no, no, no. He got into the Merchant Navy by memorizing an eye chart and that was how he got in.

Oh, really? But you don't know what eye chart you're going to get, do you? Are they all the same? Must be, yeah. What? You're kidding. we could all just memorize the i-chart and cheat the eye test. Why do you want to do that? I think there are three or four eye charts now, Anna,

and also, yeah, absolutely, don't cheat on your eye test. There's not a pass mark for the eye test. There's no reward for passing, apart for a continued bad sight if you cheat. I like to do well. So I thought I would see if the word wank with KH has found its way in literature any other times in history. And so I went on to Google books

to look for instances of the word. word wank with W-A-N-K-H and they only found two examples. One is a book called Penciled Frown by James Gray, which is a 1925 satire about the newspaper industry and I'll just give you a quote. One man made primitive sounds as he played his cards, expressive of complacent confidence in his strategies. Whank! said the player in triumph, wink, wank, wank, wank, and wank.

and each utterance a card was flung on the table. Okay, what was this word, never used before or since? It's just an automatic way word of, you know, triumph, I think. Right, he's just trying to invent a new exclamation. And the only other example of the word wank I can find in the whole of history of literature, according to Google Books, is from a systematic and ecological study of Birds of New Guinea by Dylan Ripley, and it's about the collared brush turkey. It says this species was common on the Tammy River in heavy evergreen forest.

It's called, wank, wank, in an ascending scale, was frequent morning and evening, and presumably more common as egg laying was in progress. So there you are. Wow. Very cool. And James Harkins' book club will return next month. So I found planet of the knobheads a bit harder to get sort of blurb on. I only found a few bits.

Do you guys find any? No. The bit I saw was that it's the story of newlyweds Jack and Marjorie, Wainwright, who are big stars in the scientific world. And then they get kidnapped by aliens. They get taken to this knobhead planet. And they meet high nobule. And there's just a line that was put in there, which I can't tell.

Hell, someone was writing a blur, but then added this line. I think it might be an extract. It's a line that just says, in about a week, I had recovered from most of the effects of the knob operation. So, you know, little hints as to what happens in the plot, but not too sure. Did you read sort of like the digest? Was this the blinkest digest? The word knobhead originally meant like the end of a cane or, you know, at the end of a screw,

for instance, any kind of knobby bit on the end of the end of it. Well, if you see the aliens in it, they look very very. very robotic and they have giant knobs on their head. And so, hence, the knobheads. So we talked about science fiction, the origin of science fiction on our comic relief marathon. Oh yeah. But I don't think we've mentioned it here. So Hugo Gernsback is the person who coined the term science fiction. He sort of thought of as the father of science fiction. He founded a magazine in the 1920s devoted to it. It was called Amazing Stories. And the Hugo's of the awards that are named after him science fiction awards.

In the early days, he referred to it as scientifician, and then it became science fiction over the years. But he hated the Hugo Awards because he thought that they didn't award science fiction. So basically, the first nine winners of the awards, he said only one of them was an actual piece of science fiction, all the rest of a fantasy. He was very strict about what it was. It has to be, it has to have three components,

it has to have charming romance, it has to have thrilling adventure and it has to have scientific facts. Wow, because two of those things have nothing to do with science fiction. And not according to Hugo, the creator of sci-fi, I'm afraid. Yeah, but it sounds like he didn't know what it was nine times in a row. So I think I'm on the side of the award organizers. To be fair to him, I think he was on your side, Dan, and he said these don't contain enough scientific facts.

So he wanted them to be educational. Like 25% of each science fiction book should be educational. That's a high bar to clear. 25%. Hey, you know, so famous science fiction writers, Isaac Asimov has to be right up there in the top five, really. And he's famous for the three laws of robotics. But do you guys know how many actual laws there are in the three laws of robotics? Well, I've read those books. I robot books, right? And I thought it was like, first one is they can't do any harm. And the second one is something like, unless there's dangers going to happen to a human, then they can do some harm. something and I can't remember what the third one was. Yeah, exactly. A robot may not injure a human being is the first one. There's more to that. A robot must obey the orders given by human beings except when such orders would conflict with the first law. That's right. And then the third law,

a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law. So those were the three and he revised them a few times. Sorry, can I just ask, are these the three laws within a piece of fiction? What's the laws? Where are they apply. Basically, he wrote all these stories that basically used those three laws as your trick, and every single one of the stories uses those as a trick, don't they, I think. Yes. Yeah, exactly. He just created the sort of the rules of sci-fi for robots with this. So he revised them a number of times during his lifetime, but then he decided to add another law, but obviously very annoying to have to rewrite it and call it the four laws of robotics. So he managed to do it. He added the fourth law in

by going backwards. So there's a zero law. That's, yeah, that's standard, I think. Like there's a zeroth law of thermodynamics as well inside. That's the equivalent of going back and changing wank to wannock all the way through, isn't it? Yes, yeah, exactly. So there's actually four laws in the three laws of robotics. And that fourth one is a robot may not harm humanity

or, by an action, allow humanity to come to harm. A high bar to clear. I read about the first ever sci-fi convention. Oh, yes. This was a fundraiser by a man called Dr. Herbert Tippett, who was the founder of London's West End Hospital and School of Massage and Electricity. And he'd read this book by Edouad Bullwletton

called Rill the Power of the Coming Race. And he thought, what a great idea. I will set up a little convention where people can dress up as characters from this book and it will make us a load of money for my hospital. And so he did. He spent an absolute ton of money setting it up. There was magic shows. It was kind of like an Egyptian style bit of sci-fi. So everyone dressed in all these Egyptian garbs, sometimes in ancient Greek clothing. Everyone got these little glasses of bovril because there was a magic fluid called Ril in this book. And the company that was making beef extract drinks decided to re-bril. brand and call themselves Bovril in honour of this amazing book. So cool.

People could go along. There was a demon dog who could read minds that you could go and see. There was all sorts of stuff happening. But then basically it didn't go according to plan. There was a critic writing in the magazine Truth who said, a more humiliating display of witless and puerile fantasticalities was never designed. Wow. And everyone basically hated it.

It was supposed to run for three days. They actually ran for five days, but not because everyone wanted to go. It was just because so few people went that they wanted to get one or two more people through the door so they could make some of their money back. And the guy lost £1,600 rather than making any money for his hospitals and declared himself bankrupt.

Such a shame. That whole thing, it feels like it's an argument for the fact that we never developed time travel in our history because obviously time travelers would all want to go to the first. ever sci-fi convention because that would be an amazing thing and that guy would have coined it in if we ever event time travel. That sounds like a really good kind of meta sci-fi story of all the time travellers going back there. I think that's probably the real reason they extended it for two days because they think in the future we're going to have to up the capacity limit here for when all the time travellers come back. Yeah. Yeah and they had this whole thing. They had an opening

ceremony where they had Prince Henry and Princess Beatrice of Battenberg come and do the official opening and they were accepting donations right from the get-go as soon as they announced the opening where people who were representatives of organizations would approach them and they would drop purses filled with donations in front of them. So it looked like, oh, the money's coming in, this is a huge success.

And one of the things they discovered afterwards when money was not being made and all the things had gone wrong is that the purses that were being dropped were all props and there was nothing in there. And so they didn't even have that to rely on. Come on, Battenbergs. Because I should have just done a cake sale.

Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland, James. At James Harkin. Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. And Anna. You can email podcast.com. Yep. Or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing or our website. No such thing as a fish.com. All of our previous episodes are up there. also do check out the dates for our upcoming tour. We're back on the road. We'd love to see you there. But until then, we'll be back again next week with another episode. And we'll see you then. Goodbye.