Christmas day – once you’ve read out the jokes from your crackers, do the family run out of things to talk about? This year, you can dazzle them with some fascinating facts. They come from my Little Book of Berkshire, but they are guaranteed to enthral even the even the farthest-flung relative. To add to the excitement, they are in no order whatsoever ...
Slough’s car industry (what do you mean ‘what car industry?’) gave us one of the fastest and one of the slowest cars ever seen on our roads. The Le Mans-winning Ford GT40 was built in the town. So too was the Citroen Bijou – basically a Citroen 2CV with a heavy glassfibre body, said to be capable of about 45 m.p.h. on a good day (a 0-60 figure was obtainable only by pushing it off a tall building).
Berkshire’s first recorded football match took place in 1598 at North Moreton. It was rather uninhibited. One of the participants, a priest called Ould Gunter, was said to have murdered two of the opposition with a dagger – marking your opponent really meant something in those days. As far as we know, he did not even get shown a red card for it.
One of the alleged inspirations for Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street, was said to be a man called Jarman, landlord of the Ostrich Inn, Colnbrook. He would get his more affluent guests drunk, tuck them up in his best blue room, then tip them from their beds, through a trapdoor into a vat of boiling water. He was hanged for fifteen counts of murder by this means, though he boasted that the real number was around sixty.
Celebrity ghost-spotters can do no better than to visit Windsor Castle. Among the many aristocratic ghosts encountered there over the years are Elizabeth I, George III, Charles I (reunited with his head after death) and Queen Victoria. Henry VIII is said to walk the battlements, disappearing through a solid wall where a door used to be.
The commonly named Bloodless Revolution of 1688, when William of Orange drove the unpopular James II out of the country, was anything but bloodless in Reading. A pitched battle was fought in the streets of the town, between William’s Dutch troops and Irish mercenaries hired by James. The locals even joined in, firing on the Irish from the upper storeys of their houses. About fifty-three of the Irish were killed in the battle.
That’s quite enough excitement for one Christmas. Perhaps you’d better go and have a lie-down in a darkened room.
Stuart Hylton is the author of The Little Book of Berkshire. He has twenty books to his credit on subjects as diverse as motoring, the Home Front in the Second World War, the 1950s, battles and nostalgia. He was born in Windsor and now lives in Reading, Berkshire.