English Eccentrics and Their Bizarre Behaviour by David Long

Author:David Long
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Bisac Code 1: HIS000000
ISBN: eBook ISBN: 9781844688685
Publisher: Remember When
Published: 2009-09-18T16:00:00+00:00

CHARLES WATERTON (1782–1865)

The creature creator

With an interest in wildlife and the money to indulge it, Charles Waterton returned from his travels in South America where, having encountered such exotica as chameleons, lemurs, sunbirds and alligators, he conceived a plan to create what was perhaps the world’s first ever nature reserve.

Waterton didn’t call it that, of course, but having ‘suffered and learnt mercy’ whilst recovering from yellow fever he had become firmly opposed to the destruction of any wildlife. This itself was something of an eccentricity in an age when hunting, shooting and fishing were meat and drink to country squires such as he, but returning to Yorkshire (and keen to keep the wildlife in and the poachers out) Waterton spent a fortune building three miles of high stone wall around his Walton Hall estate.

The cost of this, some £9,000 (two or three million pounds in our own debased currency) Waterton claimed to have saved by giving up wine, and by eating little more than dry toast and watercress. After his wife died, he started to sleep on the floor as well (and for 35 years used a wooden block for a pillow) and was frequently seen walking around his park barefoot or sitting in tree tops reading Latin verse.

Keen to encourage wildlife to thrive, Waterton installed artificial nesting boxes – a world first and his own innovation – as well as importing rare owls from Italy in the hope they would breed. He also instructed his forester to leave any hollow logs or branches lying in the park to provide nesting places for lesser species.

Waterton took things further still inside the Hall with his collection of household pets including an albino hedgehog, a duck without the usual webbed feet, a species of toad collected in Brazil, and a three-toed sloth. Sometimes he would also pretend to be some species or other himself, dropping down onto all fours and nipping at visitors’ ankles as they waited in the hall.

At one point, Waterton kept a vampire bat in his bedroom in the hope it would bite him so that he could write up the symptoms. But unfortunately, and despite his best efforts – he routinely slept with one temptingly unstockinged foot poking out from under the covers – the bat decided to bite a servant instead and the experiment was judged a failure.

Clearly Waterton’s respect for these animals didn’t extend as far as the grave, however, and whenever one of his rare pets died he would have it stuffed, mounted and put on display. Once he even dissected a gorilla on the dining room table before the port came round, and occasionally, if he felt the resulting pieces of taxidermy were insufficiently exotic, he would mix and match parts from many different animals in order to make up something of his own.

Examples of this included the ‘Noctifer’, which reportedly combined bits of an eagle owl with those from a bittern, the ‘Nondescript’ (a dried howler monkey which looked disturbingly like an Eskimo

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