Consistently Eccentric History

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...

We are delving into the world of civil rights this week to meet a man who inadvertently contributed to the single most important moment in Gay rights history. Peter Wildeblood was a man happy to keep his public and private lives irreconcilably separate. A successful journalist with many friends he had no reason to think that the regressive anti homosexuality laws still on the statute books would e...

This week we are looking into the origins of the Great British detective by following one of the pioneers of the new form of policing through his groundbreaking career. Johnathan 'Jack' Whicher was considered the gold standard for investigating in the early Victorian period. However at a time when a man's home was his castle, how far was Whicher willing to go to get his man.* With special guest ap...

This week Evie is learning all about how women gained the right to vote in the UK (as well as how they lost the right in the first place). It is a tale of steadily increasing tension with an inspiring cast of characters and a surprise twist-ending that no one could have predicted. With special guest appearances from Winston Churchill and the Daily Mail (neither of whom come off well). Deeds Not Wo...

This week we are entering the world of British Folklore to look at some of the many accounts of supernatural Black Dogs that have troubled good God-fearing people since at least the middle of the 14th Century. So prepare for tales of blood, flame, mind-bending terror and a lord of darkness seemingly obsessed with building civic infrastructure. Guest Host: Ollie Green Hosted on Acast. See acast.com...

To start the new year we are dipping a toe into the world of the late-Georgian/ early-Victorian world of the travelling menagerie. Caravans of cages that offered the people of Britain their only opportunity to see animals from different continents. Possibly the most successful of these pre-zoo proprietors was George Wombwell, a man who traded in a shoe making business in Soho to start his own trav...

For a special extra-long Christmas episode come with us into the swashbuckling world of Colonel Thomas Blood. A protestant Irish landowner who was determined to keep alive his family legacy. Claiming things he hadn't technically been entitled to by cosying up to whoever was in power at the time. But when the powers that be took away his lands and titles Thomas decided that he would just cut out th...

This week we are discussing the most deadly disease of the 1800s and the self-made doctor from the poorest part of York who set out to defeat it. John Snow may have been born into filthy conditions but he grew up to be a poster boy for clean living. A vegetarian teetotaller who regularly attended church, he seemed like the kind of guy you would listen to when he suggested that contaminated water m...

It's time to book passage on a steamship (of questionable reliability) this week, as we follow in the wake of Isabella Bird, a Victorian travel writer for whom staying at home was literally bad for her health. Born into a rich family Isabella would almost certainly have lived as a respectable, if boring, upper-class Victorian housewife, but luckily for her she developed a spinal tumour and was pre...

This week we are learning all about the relative nature of mental illness with Joshua Norton. A man born in Kent who decided to promote himself to Emperor of the USA after an unfortunate incident with Peruvian Rice. Join us as we travel from the UK to South Africa and beyond before settling in San Francisco to look at how one of the most liberal cities in America was happy to accept the rule of an...

This week we discuss what happens when former siblings-in-law have a disagreement, and access to hundreds of warships. Following the death of Queen Mary, her former husband, King Philip of Spain, was determined to continue the enforcing of Catholicism in England by moving on to Mary's half-sister (and new Queen) Elizabeth. When she rebuffed his advances, he did not take it well. Leading to a decad...

We are venturing into Essex this week to explore the tale of the most haunted house in England! Borley Rectory may have only been build in the mid Victorian era but it's holy custodians were convinced that it was a hotbed of paranormal activities. Join us as we discover ghostly nuns, spectres in dressing gowns and all manner of poltergeist shenanigans over the course of nearly a century. Featuring...

We are heading off to warmer climes this week. To the island of Trinidad, in order to meet Ulric Cross, a man who can claim to have both helped to preserve and dismantle the British Empire. After seeking adventure as part of the RAF in WWII, Ulric yearned to reinvent himself as a lawyer. Struggling for opportunities in England he accepted an invite to head over to West Africa to help in the proces...

We are going a bit more in depth than the rhyme everyone knows this week to give Evie a primer on the love life of our most corpulent King. Six wives in less than six decades on the planet, Henry was a marrying machine. But were any of the marriages good? And more importantly why does Evie insist that he once married a woman called Amber Lynn? Guest Host: Evie Heathcote Hosted on Acast. See acast....

Thomas Briggs was an old banker who will go down in history as the first person who was murdered on a train in the UK in 1864. But who killed him? Why did they do it? And what pair of amazing Met Detectives could be relied upon to crack the case whatever it took? Tune in this week to find out the answers to all of these questions and more. Guest Host: Emma Heathcote Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/...

Following on from last week we complete the alphabet (mostly) with tales including the snobbiest man England has ever produced, a prolific poisoner and yet another elderly fraudster! *Warning - There is discussion of suicide in this episode* Guest Host: Ollie Green Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Over the next few weeks Consistently Eccentric HQ is moving, so to tide you over we are doing a collection of mini stories about eccentrics throughout history in a two part special. 24 stories in alphabetical order (I couldn't find a good one for X or for Z at short notice) So settle in for 12 stories including: An avid fan of funerals, a terrible murderer, an elderly fraudster and an attempted as...

We are taking a trip back to the 1300's and the aftermath of the plague this week, to talk about how the decimation of the English population impacted on the working classes. While you would expect that there being few workers for many jobs would push up wages, the King and his nobles decided that they didn't want to pay more so they instead introduced laws to force the working class to accept a r...

This week I am joined by Ang and Mel from 'Dissecting Medical History' to talk about a pair of executioners working in London at the time of Henry VIII. Needless to say they were never short of work, or variety, from a monarch who sent tens of thousands of people to their deaths during his 36 year reign. What kind of impact does a lifetime of torturing and killing have on the human mind? Well, nee...