Barking Mad

1 ANSWERS

1. Saba
   

   Prussian Field Marshal Prince Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, a hero at Waterloo, was convinced that she was pregnant with an elephant, fathered on him by a French soldier.
   
   French poet Gérard de Nerval used to take a lobster for a walk on the end of a length of ribbon through the Palais Royal gardens in Paris. Not surprisingly, he ended up hanging himself from a lamp-post.
   
   Terrified of meeting people, the fifth Duke of Portland built an elaborate network of tunnels beneath Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire through which his carriage could pass in secret. So that he wouldn’t have to talk to anybody, each door in his house was fitted with two letter-boxes – one for incoming mail and on for outgoing messages. Only his valet was allowed near him. In the event of illness, the Duke’s physician had to wait outside while the valet took his master’s pulse.
   
   In the 10th century, the Grand Vizier of Persia took his entire library with him wherever he went. The 117,000-volume library was carried by camels trained to walk in alphabetical order.
   
   Motor manufacturer Henry Ford was obsessed with diet. He campaigned for synthetic milk, insisting that cows were on the verge of obsolescence because they were unhygienic. He maintained that eating sugar was tantamount to committing suicide since its sharp crystals would cut a person’s stomach to shreds. And he was such an advocate of soya beans that he once wore a suit and tie made from soya-based products.
   
   In the later years of his life, Sir Ralph Richardson used to ride to the theatre on his motorcycle with his pet parrot, Jose, perched on his shoulder.
   
   Wealthy English landowner William Beckford took a flock of sheep with him on a trip to Portugal – to improve the view from his window.
   
   Henrietta Howland Green was the meanest woman in the world. She inherited a $6 million fortune from her father and became such a successful money-lender that she kept a balance of over $31,400,000 in one bank alone. Yet she lived in a seedy Brooklyn apartment in which the heating remained switched off even in the depths of winter. She never bothered to wash and for lunch ate nothing more than a tine of dry oatmeal which she heated on a bank’s radiators. Her meanness extended to her family. Her son had to have his leg amputated because of her delay in finding a free medical clinic. When she died in 1916, she left an estate worth $95 million.
   
   Father Denham of Warleggan in Cornwall positively hated people. He surrounded the rectory with a high, barbed-wire fence and further alienated his flock by painting the church red and blue. When parishioners stopped attending his services, he replaced them with cardboard cut-outs and continued to preach to those each week. He led a Spartan life. There was no furniture in the rectory and, right up until his death in 1953, his diet consisted of just nettles and porridge.
   
   Roman Emperor Caligula made his horse Incitatus a consul.
   
   Eminent scientist Henry Cavendish was painfully shy. He built a private entrance to his London house so that he could come and go without meeting anyone, and used to communicate with his servants by notes only. On one occasion, he was so disturbed after bumping into a maid on the staircase that he immediately ordered the building of another staircase.
   
   Frenchman Michel Lotito, known as Monsieur Mangetout, specialises in eating glass and metal. His diet included supermarket trolley, TV sets, aluminium skis, bicycles, beds, plates, razor blades, a coffin, and even a Cessna 150 light aircraft.

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