Anecdotes
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Anecdotes’
A gentleman travelling home from London by train reached his destination carrying more than he set out with.
In 1830, the world’s first intercity passenger line began running steam-hauled trains between Liverpool and Manchester. Half a century later, Richard Pike compiled a collection of vignettes about life on the ever-growing railway network, some about engineers and locomotives, others about the surprising things that could happen in a railway carriage.
Sir Nicholas L’Estrange recalls two astonishing eyewitness accounts of the resourcefulness the fox.
The following two tales are given to us as eyewitness accounts of the astonishing resourcefulness of the fox, using careful planning and employing tools to get what he wants. Author Sir Nicholas L’Estrange found such tales of foxy ingenuity difficult to believe, but King James I (r. 1603-1625) was altogether less suspicious.
When William Shakespeare agreed to be godfather to Ben Jonson’s baby boy, he forgot that he would have to think of a gift for his christening.
The Englishman of the sixteenth century enjoyed a good pun (and many a bad one). This particular example doesn’t work unless you know beforehand that ‘lattin’ or ‘latten’ is an alloy of copper and zinc resembling brass, used to make affordable tableware; and also that it was customary to give babies at Baptism twelve silver spoons, with handles in the shape of the Twelve Apostles.
Charles Villiers Stanford found it necessary to play dumb on a visit to snowy Leipzig.
Composer Sir Charles Villiers Stanford has been reminiscing about his time in Germany, and the devotees of ‘Mensur’, academic fencing. They were nothing if not courageous, taking a baffling pride in the scars; but they hung like a sword of Damocles over the heads of the merely careless, as Stanford discovered for himself on a visit to Leipzig in 1875.
A sportsman and an officer lays a wager that he can make a trigger-happy Irishman go barefoot in public.
It is a familiar scene: the legendary gunslinger in the saloon, the young upstart ragging on him, and a table of fellow-gamblers urging the reckless boy to think better of it. In this case however, it all took place in a coffee-house in Georgian London, and the upstart was a middle-order batsman for the MCC.
A doctor is wondering how to apologise for being drunk on the job, when he receives a letter from his patient.
George Fordyce (1736-1802), an eminent Scottish physician on the staff at St Thomas’s Hospital in London, did not often make house calls — not, at any rate, twice at the same address. But Samuel Rogers, a friend of Byron, recalled one occasion when luck was very much on his side.