Consistently Eccentric History

150 Episodes of Consistently Eccentric History! After nearly four years of talking about the weirder bits of history I have finally relented and agreed to give Emma a full episode of nothing but cats cats cats. Specifically a motley collection of eight moggys who have held the prestigious role of Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office over the past nearly 100 years. It is a story full of scandal which...

This week we are looking at how the English were out of sync with the rest of Europe for nearly 200 years because of a refusal to accept that a pope might be right about something. The history of identifying where in the yearly cycle you are is an interesting one and, for the most part, one that has been defined by a move to ever greater accuracy over the centuries. That was until a minor adjustme...

This week we are talking about a princess born in the midst of a civil war and whose future plans had to change on an almost yearly basis. Despite the constant uncertainty, the potential marriages to foreign princes and the deaths of most of her family members, Elizabeth of York managed to remain in England and eventually managed to help end the war with the power of love.... .... well, arranged m...

This week we are talking about a man who dealt with his grief in a particularly extreme manner. Former petty London Criminal Edward Low was a man of extremes, which is why he responded to the untimely death of his wife by becoming a pirate and engaging on a three year campaign of death and destruction. Capable of extreme cruelty which he would justify with a very idiosyncratic moral code Ned Low p...

We are over in the North East of England today to meet a radical preacher and sometime asylum inhabitant, Jonathan Martin. A man who was never backwards in coming forwards about his views on the state of the Christian Church. Born into a nomadic family, Jonathan consoled himself by convincing himself that his life would be in service of a greater purpose. While this allowed him to cope with extrem...

A day late but with double the content, this week we are discussing two sisters who married the King of England (luckily it was not the same king each time, or we might have needed a Jerry Springer style intervention) in order to shore up the position of their father Charles, the mad king of France. However despite both Isabella and Catherine doing the dutiful thing it was a later decision by Cath...

This week we are delving into the murky world of espionage during the interwar years, with a tale about a man who took advantage of the fact that the emerging intelligence services were not actually sure how to run a spy network effectively. Arthur Owens, a Welshman with a chip on his shoulder, was a man who wanted money and was not in the least bit concerned about the amount of treason he might n...

For our first episode of 2024 we are talking about a son of William the Conqueror who couldn't help but to sabotage his own chances of inheriting all the lands his father had fought for Robert Curthose, the oldest son and heir to William, was a young man with a chip on his shoulder. This was partly due to his derogatory nickname, but also due to the fact that his father made it clear that he wasn'...

No official episode this week as we are busy celebrating the holidays. However for those of you who love to know what goes on behind the scenes, please enjoy this bonus conversation with Jack when we stumble upon the story of the first official transatlantic swim attempt. See you for more official new episodes in 2024. Guest Host: Jack Heathcote Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more info...

It is a very Merry Christmas from all at Consistently Eccentric, as this week we talk about how the festive season has been celebrated in Britain over the past 10,000 or so years. Beginning in the Neolithic, join us for a whistle stop tour of how a pagan celebration of renewal developed into the unstoppable juggernaut of presents and overeating that we enjoy today. Just watch out for the hot cockl...

This episode we are venturing into outer space to discuss a very British UFO encounter in 1950s Scotland. While our American cousins had been seeing aliens regularly for almost a decade, the British had been much less willing to disclose any extraterrestrial encounters. That was until pulp fiction writer and amateur astronomer Cedric Allingham spotted a saucer while walking on the Scottish coast....

This week we are heading to the other side of the world for a story of how the British desire for tea accidentally led to the creation of a truly unique city. After forcing China to give up Hong Kong for the grave offence of having tried to stop traders from the East India Company smuggling opium into the country a plan to extend the newly British territory led to a small area in Kowloon being ess...

This week we are discussing one of the lesser known Queen consorts of England, Catherine of Braganza. Promoted to princess status at the age of 2 thanks to her dad's efforts to kick the Spanish out of Portugal, little Catherine was destined to be Queen of France. But plans change and new alliances suddenly left Catherine with the prospect of having to sail across the channel to a wet little island...

This week we are talking about beer, so naturally I have a guest host on board who hates the stuff. The development of porter in Georgian Britain led to a boom time for brewers across the country including the Meux family, who were able to become fabulously wealthy supplying the people of London with the means to forget their troubles. Unfortunately the chasing of profit above all else does not si...

This week we discussed what it takes to become a saint, and it was so exciting that I did it twice. That is to say that I thought I had recorded the episode with Emma, but it turns out the recording had cut out after 15 minutes, so we had to re-record with Ollie stepping into the breach. And what a story it is! covering over 500 years and thousands of miles we follow the four men (possibly 5) who...

This week we are going back to a story we told before releasing our first episode back in August of 2020. The Loch Line was a shipping company set up by two idealistic Scotsmen who wanted to recreate the golden age of sail ships in the grime of Victorian Britain. But while their cause was noble, their business sense (and ability to choose competent captains) left much to be desired. It is less a c...

This evening we invite you to join us for a tale of blood and death as we discuss one of the more unique execution methods ever used in England. A head chopping machine with a lovely view of the nearby brook, the Halifax gibbet was essentially a business sponsored initiative to reduce the amount of cloth theft in the local area. An obscenely over the top (though arguably very successful) method of...

This week we are discussing a man who could be described as the perfect example of a truly British eccentric. Sir Patrick Moore's enthusiasm for astronomy was a passion so intense that he was able to create a 50 year television institution based on the sheer force of his personality alone. A man who believed that the truth should never get in the way of a good story, he was more than happy to cont...

WE'RE BACK! ... and ready to get rolling with the new series of episodes by introducing Evie to the concept of family history via the story of a fellow Heathcote made good. Hailing from the same area of Derbyshire as the forefathers of Consistently Eccentric, Gilbert Heathcote was the eldest of a set of very industrious brothers who raised the bar for the concept of social mobility. To the point t...

This week we are trying to satisfy Emma's need for transport based history by talking about Claude Grahame-White, an early aviation engineer who loved to design planes, oh so many planes. Convinced that planes were the key to future wars, Claude launched a one man crusade (sponsored by the Daily Mail) to ensure that the British would be the premier European force when it came to air power. Despite...

In the second part of our discussion of the Darien scheme we cover the voyage to South America and the experiences of the would-be settlers once they arrived. This is a tale of incompetence and bad luck conspiring together to create a the perfect conditions for misery. Even the endless naive optimism of William Paterson is no match for the sheer amount of reality that the expeditions experienced o...

This week we have a story so big that we will not be able to get through it all in one sitting. The tale of William Paterson and his dream of setting up a trading colony on the isthmus of Darien. He was not bothered by the fact that he had never visited the place. By the fact that he could not get anyone to invest outside of Scotland. By the open hostility of the English East India Company and the...

This week we are dabbling in the world of organised religion to discuss a dissenting Christian Lay-preacher who is remembered to history for a singularly grizzly reason. Starting out as a middle-class draper with all the advantages of a private education and tonnes of family connections it seemed like Edward Wightman would be living life on easy street (or as easy as it could be in Elizabethan Eng...

Many English people erroneously think that the last invasion of mainland Britain took place in 1066. While this was indeed the last successful invasion it was not the last time a military leader managed to get boots on the ground. That honour goes to William Tate, an Irish-American working on behalf of the French to invade England in order to support republicanism in Ireland at the end of the 18th...

John O Gaunt was a man who was loyal to a fault. As the third son of King Edward III he spent most of his life dutifully doing whatever his father, his brother or even his Nephew (King Richard II) wanted him to do. Naturally this led to him being hated by the people of England and always seeming to be quite unhappy. Eventually he decided that if he would never be king of England he may as well try...