380: No Such Thing As The Virgin Mary Toast Reunion Tour

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We'll pair you with a dedicated expert for a personalized one-on-one experience.

You'll explore our curated selection of diamonds and gemstones while learning key characteristics to help you make a confident, informed decision.

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Hi, everybody.

Just before we start this week's show, we have an exciting announcement to make.

Yes, as you may have heard, we are returning to the road that leads to theaters across the UK and Ireland to perform our new stage show, Nerd Immunity.

It's going to be a live podcast.

That's going to be the second half of every show, completely different every single time.

And in the first half, there's going to be a magnificent first half comedy set starring all your favorites from the podcast.

Dan, James, Anna, all your favorite people.

Right there.

In one room.

If you would like to come along and be a part of that, do go to qi.com slash fish events and you'll find links to all the places that we're going, which starts on the 5th of October.

Tunbridge Wells, Reading, Petersborough, Exeter, Canterbury, London, Oxford, Poole, Chesterfield, Manchester, so many places we're going to.

Do check it out.

Okay, go to qi.com/slash fish events.

But before that, on with the show.

On with the show.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, Anna Toshinsky and James Harkin.

And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is Andy.

My fact is that the Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning had her spaniel stolen by London's dog Banditti on three separate occasions.

There sounded like at least two euphemisms in that sentence.

I reckon having your spaniel stolen and London's dog Bantitti.

Yep.

It's all true.

There might be some euphemisms later, actually, but no, she had a lovely little spaniel and it was called flush, flush the dog.

And

don't flush the dog.

If you're listening.

But this was a huge problem problem in Victorian London.

I say huge.

It was a medium-sized problem.

But for middle-class people who were suddenly getting dogs and showing them off and grooming them and breeding them, it was a problem because thieves realised you could steal dogs and the owners would pay quite a bit to get them back.

And poor little Flush got stolen in 1843 to order.

She paid the thieves off and they brought it back.

Then again in 1844, she paid them off again, a bit more money this time, she got it back.

And then in 1846, a third time, Flush the Dog was stolen.

At which point, Flush must have been getting used to this routine by now.

At that stage, maybe Flush preferred his other owners.

Although, I heard that it was a very, very spoiled dog, Flush, and that he would turn his nose up at any bread that wasn't buttered.

So I imagine the dog that was probably giving him buttered bread.

She wrote about him: if you were but to see him eat partridge from a silver fork, I mean, very, very over-spoiled dog.

Anyway.

What's the end of that clause?

If you were but to see him eat parture from a silver fork, what?

You pass out with envy?

I think I've...

You're so disgusted you leave the room.

I've cut it short there.

So we'll never know.

It can't have been that interesting, otherwise I would have said.

If she'd said, if you were to see him do this, you'd shit.

That's her style.

I believe it.

She claimed that he could have the capacity for literacy.

She said he recognised the letters A and B, and that maybe in the course of time, he might learn the full alphabet.

Wow.

Wow.

So he could send an SOS out at some point.

No, he could order an other C D, basically.

Anyway, well, he couldn't have done any of these things if, as the thieves threatened, they were going to cut off his head and paws and send them back to Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Very distressing, obviously.

That's what they said they would do.

Yeah, that's horrible.

No wonder she paid up.

I read a really good account of it of the third time that the dog was stolen, and she was getting on a bus, and the dog was just wandering behind her in London, clearly leashless.

And she got on the bus, turned around, looked for the dog, and it was gone.

And instead of getting off to look for her dog, she and her sister just stayed on the bus and her sister was like, well, guess there'll be a ransom note when we get back.

That's a great idea, isn't it?

If you're in the supermarket and you can't be bothered taking your kids home in the car, just wait for the ransom note.

Can I ask what kind of bus we think she was getting?

Was the 1840s, right?

Was it like a stagecoach?

It might have been a carriage.

A carriage.

An omnibus, I reckon.

An omnibus.

That's what it felt like.

It felt like she was getting on a proper bus when I read that.

I mean, it certainly wasn't a proper bus in the sense that we know it because it was like six years before proper buses were.

Or a route master.

Yeah, maybe I've read that wrong.

Maybe carriage.

Let's go, carriage, actually.

Flush the dog, he must have thought, as he was being dognapped for the third time, he must have thought, Mama Mia, here we go again.

That'll be good.

Thank you.

And do you think you sent out an SOS?

Are you giving the punchline to a joke that was set up five minutes ago?

Yeah, I think I am.

Anyway, look, the thieves were only interested in money, money, money.

That's what they wanted.

And so they sent this ransom note.

And there was a lot of dispute in the family because her father was very tyrannical.

He didn't want a ransom paid.

But there was this contact.

There was a shoemaker called Taylor.

who was the main player in the dog theft world in Victorian London.

He was involved in a huge number of these thefts.

He was usually not the guy to steal the dog, but he was the guy who would make contact and say, oh, we've come into this dog.

That's disgusting.

We've come into the possession of this dog.

Sorry, because I thought you were...

Oh, right, okay.

I find it really hard to work out exactly what happened on all these occasions because Virginia Woolf wrote a fictionalized version of Flush's dognapping, didn't she?

She wrote a biography of this dog in which there are loads of explanations of how he was taken and then how he was gotten back and stuff, which God knows what's true and what's not true.

But the best bits I find probably not true.

It's so funny.

She wrote the whole thing in 1933, or it was published in 1933, certainly.

It was quite a light book off the back of a rather heavy and serious brain-draining one she'd just written.

But it was her best-selling book to date, which must have been

infuriating.

To now, like, no, to that point in her career, it was the most successful.

Yeah,

I don't think it's currently outseving Mr.

Stanaway.

I might be wrong.

You never know.

Maybe after this podcast.

But she was like, when it first came out, she wasn't sure if she should even publish it because she thought that people would think she was like a frivolous, not very kind of.

Yeah, I mean, it's a biography of someone's dog.

Yeah, silly lady novelist was the worry she had.

She said, I must not let myself believe that I'm simply a ladylike prattler.

Well, maybe write a biography of a human being, Virginia.

Talking dog.

Was she friends with Flush?

Did she know Flush and did she know Browning?

No, no, no, the timelines didn't cross over.

Just to defend Virginia Woolf, having abused her for writing about a dog, it did have a serious message underneath, didn't it?

I think she was just worried people wouldn't get it.

So, well, this is how she defended it anyway, writing to her friend.

She was like, look, it's going to seem silly because it looks like it's a biography of a dog.

But if you read it, well, it's partly, I guess, an ode to Elizabeth Browning, right?

Who was a hero for subsequent female writers, and partly a way of descending into the depths of London and reporting on the awful poverty and social injustice there.

Through the eyes of a dog, yes, but even so.

So it was vaguely serious.

But it also featured a plot point, which I don't think was in the real life story, where the dog was almost sold to a man called Pussy.

What's this?

This part of the story was she got it from a friend of hers who initially

had an offer made from the brother of the Reverend Edward Bouvery Pusey.

I think they were saying.

Pusey is a different name to pussy.

It is a different name.

But it is

spelled in a similar way.

Very similar.

Dognapping back then was such a big thing in London.

There was a journalist called Henry Mayhew who estimated that in terms of individual dog stealers operating in London at his time, it was 141 people just going around London stealing them.

And he estimated that 45 of them did it as their main profession.

They just actively went into it.

And you can see there's sort of tables of sort of like 1841.

Dogs stolen were 43, dogs lost 521.

People charged 51.

People discharged of that 32.

They just found it really hard to bust people who were stealing the dogs.

Yeah, hang on, Dan.

How many dogs did you say stolen?

So stolen, 43, dogs lost 521.

But

I imagine that there's a blur between those two because a lot of these dog nappers got around loopholes by if they'd stolen a dog.

They would do things like make up a missing sign, which they would then show if they had the dog to a dog dealer and say, look, I found this missing poster of this dog and this is the dog.

They buy it off them and then sell it.

So technically, it was a missing dog.

The guy who stole the dog makes the poster.

Yeah, exactly.

It's a missing dog.

But then he makes the poster and then he gives it to a dog dealer and says, I've got this dog on this missing poster.

Can I sell it to you?

Yeah, he's like, Look, there's a missing poster here.

Someone's looking for this dog.

And I found the dog.

So if I just give it to you, then you'll be able to do the deal and get the money.

And just give me half the money for now.

It's fine.

That's so funny.

I still think that even a total of something like 600 dogs lost and reported stolen too,

given that there are 141 dog stealers in London, 45 of whom are doing it full-time, that is, what, about four dogs per person per year, one per quarter?

Yeah, I mean, it's a lot of holidays.

It's an astonishingly low proportion of dogs.

I don't know why we're acting like this is a lot of dogs to be stolen.

How is anyone making a profit out of this?

Well, they took their time, didn't they?

Didn't they find out with Elizabeth Barrett Browning that they'd spent two years tailing her before they took her dog?

Two years spotting.

Yeah.

Or is that, again, is that the Virginia Wolf story?

I'm not sure.

I felt like that.

The other thing is you could make some money on the side by stealing a dog, not getting the money back, but making dog skin leather gloves,

which were apparently a luxury item that people like to wear.

They're very soft on the skin.

Yeah, have we ever worn dog outside of dog skin gloves?

I've never heard of it before.

I don't know if you've seen the documentary 101 Dalmatians, but.

Yeah.

It wasn't the only dog-related trade.

This is a bit by the by now, but there was a market in 1850s London for fake dog poo.

Really?

So there were people who were collecting real dog poo for tanneries because it helped to soften and purify the leather, right?

Is fake dog poo just your own poo with some dog hairs in it?

Because it feels like probably is.

Oh, God.

Thankfully, it's just taking mortar from old walls and crumbling it into your existing dog poo to bulk it out a bit.

It's a way of making your real dog poo go further.

The people who traded in it and collected it were originally old women who got nicknamed bunters, but then men started muscling in from about the 1820s onwards.

And these dog poo collectors would walk the streets with a covered basket containing their wares and some of them would wear a black leather glove to do their collecting in.

Only some of them.

Only some of them, because the others, they didn't have a glove.

They said, well, look, it's easier to wash your hands than to clean the glove.

I think that's fair point.

Yeah, good cool.

Good cool.

I knew Anna would be the first one to say.

It was pretty exciting to hear about the fact of London being pooless because in the area that I live particularly, there is poo from dogs that are just left all over the streets.

And just the idea that it was picked up because people thought it was valuable and needing it as part of this tanning process means that Victorian London was just clean in that respect.

In that respect.

I know it's not.

Interesting theory, because I think it was also sort of thigh deep in horse manure, wasn't it?

And technically you could use that as well.

It must be really hard to find dog poo in a street that's full of horse poo.

It's like, it's almost like the 19th century equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack is finding a dog poo in a horse poo.

That was a saying, I believe that was a popular saying at the time.

A happy place comes in many colors.

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Get started today at Certapro.com.

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Contractor license and registration information is available at Certapro.com.

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We'll pair you with a dedicated expert for a personalized one-on-one experience.

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Choose from our signature styles or opt for a fully custom design crafted around you.

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Okay, it is time for fact number two and that is James.

My fact is that the Democratic Republic of Congo is planning an official parade of its first prime minister's gold tooth.

Very cool.

You've got to get front row seats for that, haven't you?

Otherwise, it's just not worth going.

Yeah, you're not going to see it from the back of the stadium, are you?

No.

So, I will quickly give you a short history of the Democratic Republic of Congo in the last 200 years to explain what's going on here.

Right.

You might remember that amusing story of Henry Martin Stanley finding Dr.

Livingston.

Oh, wow, we really are going back.

We are, we are.

Right.

So, he said, Dr.

Livingston, I presume, and he found Dr.

Livingston.

But after that, the story took a bit of a turn.

And Stanley was working on behalf of Leopold II of Belgium to create this this massive personal tract of land where he could almost farm it for ivory because there was so much ivory, so many elephants and stuff like that.

So he created this huge, huge country that was run by Leopold II of Belgium.

There was then a rubber boom because they came up with this idea of buses.

I don't know if you've heard of those Dan.

They came along in the early 20th century.

And so Leopold II of Belgium forced the population to work on his rubber plantations and literally millions of people died in terrible, terrible conditions.

In 1960, the country got its independence finally and they got a new leader called Patrice Lumumba.

So they thought he might bring the whole country together.

But there was one area called Katanga that had loads of minerals and the Belgians wanted to keep that under the control after independence because they wanted all of these minerals.

Lumumba asked the US and Europe to help to control an uprising, but US and Europe didn't help.

And so he turned to the Soviet Union.

And obviously, that sent alarm bells ringing in Europe and America.

It was an awkward time, wasn't it, between America and the Soviet Union?

It was.

It was the Cold War.

Yeah.

So, anyway, they assassinated this guy, Patrice Lumumba, and to stop any hero worship, they dissolved his body in acid, and there was hardly any bits left.

This gold tooth was remaining and was taken to Belgium by one of the people who did the crime.

And then this year, finally, they're going to get it back and they're going to have a proper parade, and it'll be kind of part of their anniversary of independence and all that kind of stuff.

I had never heard the story of Patrice Lumumba before, and it's really, obviously, it's a completely awful story, this coup against him.

And there were apparently two different plots against him.

One was CIA/slash/mI6, and one was Belgian, along with some Congolese officials as well.

Yeah, the CIA tried to kill him with some poison toothpaste.

They apparently found it difficult to get the toothpaste onto his toothbrush without being noticed, which it's so rare that toothpaste toothpaste is applied to your toothbrush without you being in front of your toothbrush

unless you're prince charles in which case it's a twice daily occurrence that right yes if the c I'm not saying they should but if the CIA wanted to knock off Prince Charles with this method he would be a sitting duck

I was just thinking it's definitely a two-man job isn't it one person to distract you so much that you don't notice that the other person sneaks into your bathroom and puts toothpaste on your toothbrush that you're holding.

But you'd turn back and you'd think, no, actually, you wouldn't think, you wouldn't think, did I put this toothpaste on the brush?

You'd just look at it and you think.

What's the other option that it's just spontaneously arrived on your toothbrush?

That doesn't make any sense.

Yeah.

They'd have to have opened the toothpaste because I would be suspicious if I hadn't got the toothpaste out of its special drawer yet to put it on the brush, if you know what I mean.

It's a tough location all round, isn't it?

Because, you know, if you're brushing your teeth, most likely you're staring into a giant mirror, which would knock out anyone's chance of sneaking up behind you.

That's a really good point.

Whose tooth do you think is the most expensive?

John Lennon's or Elvis Presley's?

Does one of them have more teeth in circulation?

I can't work out why that would be.

Oh, yeah, interesting.

Okay, this gives you a bit of a clue.

Both of these are owned by the same guy who is a tooth collector of celebrities.

Oh, okay.

This is a weird tooth fairy, dude.

I'm going to say John Lennon because there's probably more bits of Elvis Presley on the market, like his toenails and so on, that you can get access to.

I'll say Elvis, I'll say Elvis is bigger.

I think the sort of people who want the teeth will be more interested in Elvis than Lennon.

I don't know why there are more bits of um the dismembered Elvis Presley on the market than there are of apparently dismembered John Lennon.

I didn't realise their body parts were in circulation at all.

Well, I know that we know where his Elvis's wart is.

It's in a museum in America.

There's a there's remember possibly his toenail that we've mentioned.

Yes, yes.

So, you know, bits of Elvis are all over the shop.

That's a really good argument.

That's a very argument.

James, stop this interminable debate and tell us.

The answer is that Elvis Presley's dental crown was $10,000, whereas John Lennon's tooth was $31,000.

Yes.

So three times more for John Lennon.

Suck it, Murray.

But that's a crown.

That's different.

It's a crown.

Although he was the king.

Exactly.

So

they call it the king's crown.

And it was worn by Elvis Presley until he cracked it it on a microphone while performing in Las Vegas in 1971.

And eventually found its way into the collection of Michael Zuck.

And Michael Zuck also bought one of John Lennon's extracted teeth, which Lennon had given to his housekeeper.

Dot Jarlette.

Wow.

A weird move, let's say.

It's not

unless his housekeeper asks for it.

Look how much it's worth.

If you were as famous as Elvis or John Lennon, if I cut off a fingernail, if I cut a strand of hair, hand it to someone.

It's going to make them money.

You are, your whole body is worth stuff.

I think it's a wonderful present.

I've got a question about the Elvis thing, which is that you said he cracked his crown on a microphone during a gig.

Now, look, I'm not saying our gigs go like Elvis's.

I'm not saying our audiences are as raucous.

But that's quite the gig where you're shoving your microphone into your mouth to the extent it cracks a dental crown.

I don't think he was shoving his microphone into his mouth.

I think it's probably more of an accidental kind of swinging it around that it hits you in the face.

I don't think he was deep throating the microphone.

No, no, if you watch concerts, that was his style.

He sang from the back of the throat and he took that literally, so he would throw it all the way back.

Hey, just, I was looking into, because this gold tooth is a relic, and I was just looking at other political leader relics that we still have.

And have you guys heard of Chairman Mao's Mango?

No.

Is it like Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Spaniel?

This was basically during the Cultural Revolution.

There was a big fight that happened in one of the universities in Beijing, in Tsinghua University, and Mao sent 30,000 workers to try and stop all of the sort of weird groups that were breaking out and causing ruckus in China at the time.

Sent these workers to stop that, and there was a huge fight there.

The workers were not prepared for the fight because they basically came with just pictures of Chairman Mao, a little red book, whereas the other people had like bricks and spears and acid.

And so it was a huge fight.

And eventually, these workers won.

and as a reward Chairman Mao gave them 40 mangoes.

Mao never gave presents and so it was seen as a high high honor.

But the main thing was that no one in northern China at this point really knew what mangoes were.

So all of them were just staying up at night looking at it, smelling them, caressing them.

And they were thinking, we need to make sure that this mango, this special thing that he's given to us, remains with us.

And so they had it waxed and they put it in formaldehyde and they made sure that it just stayed, you know, proper.

And as a result, it got taken everywhere and everyone was looking at Chairman Mao's mango.

The Communist Party seeing this turned it into a propaganda thing.

So there was merchandise that you could buy.

Everywhere you went, there were like, you know, tin cups with mangoes on them and so on.

And it became this.

massive thing, the Chairman Mao mango.

Doesn't it slightly go against the principles held within the Little Red Book to turn your mango into merchandise?

How does Ros Mao feel about that?

I don't think it's that granular on the detail.

Yeah.

The little red book.

It probably does go against the principles, but there's a loophole, I'm sure.

Okay, it's the mango loophole.

Flog your mango around the place.

We talk about this on QI.

I don't know if it ever went out, but the question that we asked was, how mad could a mango make a mango?

Ah, nice.

Nice.

What was the answer to

how mad could a mango make a mango?

Well, the answer was the anecdote that you just told me.

Oh, was it?

That went out on QII then.

I'm familiar with a format of QI, Dan, but often there's not just like one straight answer.

It's sometimes a bit of a left-field thing.

Yeah, I should start watching that show.

There's one piece of material that's lasted a very long time, which probably you'll all be familiar with.

Oh, yeah.

And that is the Virgin Mary toast.

So, do you, can everyone, can you remember the toast, the famous toast with the face of the Virgin Mary?

Yeah, okay.

It's what it sounds like.

Yeah.

It was sort of, I think it was a big hit.

It was like the biggest celebrity of the 90s, along with the Spice Girls.

1996,

this woman was eating toast Diana Doiser and she was took a tiny bite of her toast and then realized the Virgin Mary's face was staring up at her and so she preserved it in between two bits of plastic like hard plastic and she still she should have preserved it between two pieces of cheese that would have made it an anti-sandwich and would have made it worth even more You

put it in between two slices of bread and had like a toast sandwich, which is something nice to eat, isn't it?

Isn't it?

Absolutely.

A club sandwich is kind of like that, isn't it?

Yeah, I feel like we're not going to the point of Anna's story.

I mean, I'm not sure there is a point to this story, but let's figure it out.

Apparently, she was as big as the Spice Girls.

I look forward to hearing about the reunion tour, her getting her own movie.

Well, you may be surprised.

So, none of your solutions afforded the Virgin Mary the kind of respect that Diana wanted to, because she's a devout Christian.

So, she preserved it, and she said she had like 10 years of good luck.

She won $70,000 in a casino because of this toast.

And then it was picked up by.

Is there more detail on that or not?

Yeah, whispered over her ear.

Put it all on red.

Put it all on bread.

She kept a piece of toast thinking this will bring me luck.

And then in the next decade, she won 70 grand.

If you don't think that's because of the toast, then that's your problem.

Sure.

Anyway, to earn a crust.

Oh, my God.

Anyway, it's now held by another casino, GoldenPalace.com, which is a casino known for collecting these strange modern day relics.

And they bought it for $28,000.

And is that why the house always wins?

Because they've got the ultimate sort of talisman.

Exactly.

I'm just very lucky.

As they said when they bought it off her customers will ri our customers are really going to get a kick out of seeing this sandwich.

And they actually paid for her to go on tour with it and to the Taj Mahal and to Red Square

to the to the Eiffel Tower.

Wow.

It was very nice for Diana who said she'd never been on holiday in her life.

She'd spent her life looking after her elderly parents.

Wow.

She got to do this world tour.

She

must have had a real wry smile on her face as she got off the plane.

Oh yeah, because that's the type of bread, isn't it?

Absolutely.

Maybe it was a whole grin.

There's another toothy relic that I found.

Actually, it's more of just a wonderful tooth removal than a relic.

I don't know if the tooth has been preserved, but it was from 2015.

And it was a young girl called Ellie Clay, and she had her tooth removed by javelin.

So someone stood 100 meters away and threw a javelin, and it just landed directly in her face where the tooth was.

That would have been very impressive.

They did it in reverse, the health and safety nuts.

Her father was an Olympic javelin thrower, and she had a very loose tooth.

And so they tied a bit of dental floss carefully around the tooth.

They tied the dental floss to a javelin, I guess a very long bit of dental floss, and then he just chucked the javelin

30 meters.

They made sure it was a really loose tooth before they did it, obviously, so that she didn't go flying after it.

And her whole family have these crazy methods of removing teeth.

They've done it by putting a bit of floss on the family dog's collar and then getting the dog to run off.

That was one thing they've tried.

Lots of stuff.

That actually wasn't a removal attempt.

The The dog was just stolen midway through a wall.

Okay, it is time for fact number three.

That is Anna.

My fact this week is that in the 1920s, thousands of people with the surname Drake fought a legal battle to inherit Sir Francis Drake's fortune.

Wow.

This is just an amazing scam that was pulled.

And it was based on a rumor that's basically been going around since Francis Drake died.

And he didn't really have any direct descendants.

And everyone claimed that he had a hidden fortune that wasn't inherited by anyone and that's sitting somewhere.

And fast forward to 1914.

It starts with this con artist.

There's a woman called Sadie Whittaker.

And she's going around Iowa claiming her cousin's heir to this ancient Drake fortune, which is now just worth so much because it's expected to gain so much interest over the last 300 years.

And she swindles this Iowa farmwoman out of $6,000 because she convinces her that if she buys shares in this scheme to kind of retrieve Francis Drake's lost wealth, then she'll get a cut in it.

Now, this woman's son, this poor farmwoman's son, is a guy called Oscar Hartzel, who, rather than going to defend his mother's honor and money, thinks, God, what a good trick.

I'm going to build on that.

And he joins up with them.

And Oscar Hartzel sets up the Francis Drake Association.

He writes to thousands of people across the state and across America with the name Drake saying, Francis Drake's fortune is being held by the British government, those bastards.

We've got to wrench it back.

You're probably all related to him.

You pay me some money and I'll go and get it for you.

So convincing.

It's so convincing that I feel like I want to sign up to it, despite not being called Drake.

Well, it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter that you're not called Drake.

This was his genius.

He had 70,000 people signed up, including people not called Drake.

He just opened it up.

Everyone, get in.

He expanded.

He suddenly went, hang on, people really are idiots.

I'm going to make this a bit bigger.

Who got the money in the end?

Was it the rapper?

Or

that's where it is.

That's why he can spend his money time rapping now.

It's certainly not through album sales.

I'll tell you that much.

That's unfair.

I'm sure he sells very well.

That is the most handy thing I've ever heard in my entire life.

Oh, I'm sure.

Young Drake, I'm sure he does very well for himself.

Mr.

Drake.

So

there's no money, is there?

No.

Complete nest of lies from start to finish.

Once someone dies, if they have a will, after 30 years, if you don't sort it out, then it all goes to the crown.

So there wouldn't be any money anyway, even if there was some money.

But I think in the end, it went to his

wife or his brother or something.

Like, they know where it went.

Yeah, it went to a nephew or something of his in the end.

There was nothing very exciting about it.

But everyone was so convinced that this guy was telling the truth that the FBI actually investigated what had happened to Francis Drake's money in the late 1500s.

It's just brilliant.

And like you say, concluded it had had gone to his wife and then down to some of his descendants.

But the details, the details were so convincing because he said it was worth about £100 billion.

I'm not sure whether that's in modern money or in 1930s money because that would presumably have bought America.

But one of the things he said was the entire city of Plymouth.

That happens to be part of the Drake estate.

Yeah, he said, I think he went up to 400 billion at one stage because he kind of just said different amounts all the time.

And he said that as soon as he got the money, obviously everyone would get the bit that they, you know, know, asked for, they would get a return on their money.

But he said that he was going to go back to America and he was going to buy up, I think, Missouri and

IR and a few other states.

And he was going to put a big fence around them and just live in them.

That's what he claimed.

His powers of persuasion just sound extraordinary because once he got back to America, he was taken to trial in 1933.

And yet, even though he was being held accountable for it, he still managed to get people who were subscribing to this scheme to contribute $350,000 in legal defense fund to make sure he didn't go to jail.

He did go to jail.

He got given a 10-year sentence.

And even then, still, his agents were able to claw another half million dollars from these subscribers to make sure that he was doing okay.

It is, I mean, it's kind of because it was presented as an investment.

People were told.

This is an investment to fund the legal case to fight the British government and get this money out of them, which we know is there.

And if you invest $1 for every dollar you will invest, you will get 500 back.

That was the idea.

And so, when you put it like that, it starts to sound like, oh, well, I am spending now, but it's an investment, you know.

Yeah.

And also, it sort of makes sense.

Given what we know these days about how irrationally people can act, it makes sense that it actually convinced people even more when he was convicted that what he'd said was true, because it was like, well, why has the British government turned against him like this?

Why have they put him in prison?

He's obviously onto the prison.

They want to keep people in the prison.

They're desperate to cling on to the beauties of Plymouth and they will not let it go.

But it's just like today when you get someone like Alex Jones or a conspiracy theorist, right, and then people jump down their throats, and then that makes their supporters their knee-jerk reaction is to dig down even harder and say, Well, he's definitely telling the truth.

Yeah.

So, Francis Drake?

Yeah.

I haven't really said who he is yet, just for the benefit of any listeners who are not up on there.

Drake, he was a pirate, privateer,

all-round coastal bandit,

mayor of Plymouth, briefly.

British hero or pirates, would you say?

British hero, slave trader.

It's so hard to tell where one begins and the other ends.

Most likely known.

He was the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe.

Yes, is possibly what he's most known for.

Or possibly most well known for the Spanish Armada, being the supposed head of

defeat.

Well, no, he wasn't the head of the Spanish Armada.

He was the

quite the reverse.

Yeah, yeah.

He was the tail of the Spanish Armada.

He supposedly was the head of the force that defeated it.

Yeah, I mean, like a really mixed career.

He did start out as a slave trader and then became a great English hero.

So, you know, definitely a mixed scorecard, I would say.

An English hero for the time, which basically meant he stole shed loads of money off other countries and handed it to Queen Elizabeth, which, you know,

that's how you want to make...

make a penny.

That was the benchmark in those days for an English hero.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

He seems like a very difficult man to get along with.

On one of his voyages, voyages, he

accused his second-in-command of witchcraft and had a show trial and then had his head chopped off.

Wow.

Yeah.

Doughty.

Thomas Doughty.

Not doughty enough to resist having his head chopped off, it turned out.

I doubt he thought much of that trial.

Oh, boy.

I doubt he would like to hear us talking about him in this way.

He had a sense of humour, actually, Thomas Doughty.

So perhaps he would have loved this.

Yeah, he

allegedly, once he was told that he was going to be beheaded by Drake, basically unfairly for bitching about Drake behind his back, he said, can I take communion with you first?

And then according to accounts that were pro and anti-Drake, they both took communion together and then had a great laugh and a banter and a chat about the good old days when they were friends.

And then Drake chopped his head off.

And in fact, Drake offered him, and now this is according to Drake's nephew, who wrote an account which was based on diaries of people at the time.

But apparently Drake said, look, because I feel bad about this whole unjustly beheading you thing, do you want me to shoot you instead?

Because then you will have been shot by a gentleman.

And that's nicer, isn't it?

Wow.

And Doughty said, Thanks, that's so sweet of you to offer, but I'll just go for the straight-up beheading.

Right.

It's quite a weird incident, but it's hard to tell, isn't it?

Because there are so many pro-Drake and anti-Drake bits of propaganda over the last 300 years.

Yeah.

You don't know if he was a goodie or a baddie to work for.

Yeah.

Well, there was one bad thing when they went round the world, circumnavigated the world, and they took a woman from El Salvador and she got pregnant and they dumped her on an island.

And then what you were saying about propaganda, a few years later, Shakespeare wrote The Tempest and there is a character, Sykorax, who's an African woman who is dumped on an island.

having got pregnant and there is an idea suggested probably true that Shakespeare based that on this woman Marie okay

that is interesting That's so interesting about the idea that there were superstitions and witchcraft that you were mentioning in relation to Doughty, because Drake was the kind of guy who other Spanish mariners would create these tales about as if he did have these amazing abilities.

There was all these rumors that went out around him.

There was the rumor that he possessed a magic mirror that allowed him to spy on the locations of the ships on the sea.

They just thought, how could he know where our ships were?

If they were behind him, for instance, he'd be able to spy on them.

Exactly.

They thought he had sort of contact with witches from Devon and that he could raise storms against the Spanish Armada.

Just so many of these weird tales.

There was a tale that Elizabeth Sydenham, who he was in love with, and she wanted to marry him, but the family said that this was not going to happen.

And then he went off and she got bored.

She was about to marry someone.

On the day that she was meant to marry him, a huge cannonball fell at her feet that had been fired from Drake's cannon from across the world in order to stop the wedding.

That was a story that went round.

Actually, Drake was just trying to remove a tooth, wasn't he?

Completely misinterpreted.

Imagine that if you say that line in the wedding, does anyone here have any reason?

And everyone's sort of sniggering behind their hands.

Well, I wonder if someone will say something and then a massive fucking cannonball lands in the middle of the church.

Yeah.

And she did later marry Drake.

They did get married.

But yeah, that was one of the stories.

He was full of all these abilities.

I've just got one more thing, which is another 1930s Francis Drake-based swindle.

Okay.

This was the story of a young man who went for a hike in San Francisco Bay in 1936, and he found a metal plate on the ground.

He didn't think much of it, but his friends pointed out it appeared to say Francis Drake on it.

And so he said, all right, I'll get it checked out.

He took it to a professor at the University of California called Herbert Bolton, who was a world expert on the history of the Americas.

And when Bolton saw this plate, he became unbelievably excited.

He said, this is the Drake plate.

It proves that he arrived in California.

There was a story that Drake, when he got, he reached California, he left a brass plate there with some writing on, and this looked like it.

You know, nearly 400 years later, this is a seminal piece of the history of the world.

This proves something incredible.

The spelling looked legit.

The language on it looked legit.

And this was announced with great brouhaha.

There were some people who doubted it, but it was announced as being real.

And then in 1977, there was a celebration of 400 years since Drake had reached California, and it was tested.

And it was so, so clearly a fake.

There was way too much zinc.

It had been cuffed around the edges by a metal saw, which hadn't existed at the time.

And the awful thing was, Herbert Bolton, the professor, had students

who knew how interested he was in this subject.

They had made a fake plate and they had left it for someone to find.

He had found it and he spent the rest of his life believing in it.

And the problem was he had gone public so quickly and he had got so excited that his students were too embarrassed to say, it's not real, we fake the whole thing.

So he went to his grave believing in the plate.

Oh, well, that's all right.

Then he went to his grave.

That's fine.

I guess you're right.

Yeah, yeah.

That plate is really interesting, or the idea that Drake sort of claimed that part of California for England and said, okay, this landmass is now ours.

When, of course, the Spanish were kind of working their way up through through Mexico and through that side.

Right.

The Spanish were really really annoyed about this but the lucky thing was that they ran all of the map makers or rather the map makers were mostly in like Netherlands and Belgium and stuff but they were in charge of that area and so they got all the map makers to pretend that California was an island and you know you see those old

maps where California was an island.

Well that was the Spanish basically saying this thing that's Francis Drake has claimed for England is not the whole of America.

It's just a little kind of island on the side.

Right.

So technically, if California is English property, but Plymouth belongs to the states, should we just have an exchange now and keep things the same?

I think no one can argue with that, can they?

We get California and they get Plymouth.

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Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that 20th century American science fiction works include the titles Servants of the Wank and Planet of the Knobheads.

Are we all, in a way, Servants of the Wank?

So these were legit books that were published.

Planet of the Knobheads, published in 1939, by Stanton A.

Coblins.

And in 1969, Servants of the Wank was published, and that was by Jack Vance.

I think British readers might not recognize Servants of the Wank because it got renamed in Britain because for obvious reasons.

Well it's not spelled the same.

I mean I'm not convinced we're pronouncing it right.

It very clearly to me looks like Servants of the Wank.

The Wanker?

That's just not funny.

It is.

It's spelled W-A-N-K-H.

I would say it's Wank, like with like loch.

Like Loch.

Wank.

I don't know, Anna, for someone who humorously mispronounced the perfectly ordinary name Pusey as pussy for comic effect earlier, I don't think you're going to like to stand on.

Did you read the synopsis of any of the Servants of the Wank film, for instance?

I did.

Give it to us.

It's brilliant.

A couple of humans land on a planet, and there's

loads of different groups there.

One of them are the wank.

Basically, there's a group called the Wank Men.

And the Wank Men...

are the servants of the wank.

They're the humans who are working under the wank.

Well, it's Adam Reith, isn't it?

It's this guy who crashes onto the planet and he needs to get off.

So his ship doesn't work.

So he needs to steal the wank spaceship in order to get out of there.

Is the main plot.

Well yeah, but then you've got all these four groups who are fighting against each other and you've got the wank men who it turns out have been destroying anything that the wank have been making to try and make a war between the wank and another group called the deer deer.

And when the wank find out that the wank men have been destroying all of their wank machines, then they expel the wank men from the wank cities.

And this guy who Dan's talking about gets to leave on his spaceship.

Yeah.

It's a happy ending, you might say.

Are you all right, Andy?

Oh, my God.

Well, get put that tissue away.

Look, for the listener, Andy did actually just blow his nose in the tissue.

The wank men, they serve the wank.

Yes.

What is the wank?

Well, the wank is

a group of people, and they're a war, but the wank men want to keep the status quo because they want to carry on their cushy lives looking after the wank.

And so they're kind of causing mayhem.

But actually, when the wank find out about the wank men destroying all their stuff, then they get expelled.

And Adam doesn't seem to be the first human there because there are other human wank men who are there.

They serve under the wank and they handle all the communication between the wank masters and the rest of the people who live on the planet.

Yeah.

I feel like I've gone into like a Dungeons and Dragons discussion group or something after hours or like, you know, Game of Thrones fan club spin-off.

Are we going to go through the whole plot of Wankers R Us or whoever it's called?

That's the plot.

That's the plot.

That's it.

Oh, my God.

He had to change the title in the end, as James says, when it came to Britain, because I think they thought, Anna's probably right.

The H might be pronounced differently but why we not take any risks so they changed it to I think what was another alien species on there called the chase

or the chash and the wank were renamed the wannock

so w-a-n-n-e-k

okay

imagine being the author jack vads having to go back and just one by one change wank to wannock he must be able to control h or control h or control g or whatever it is well it's 1969 We didn't have that.

Isn't it funny that it's 69?

It's just a whole nother layer that I hadn't realised until just then.

Jack Vance, author of The Wank, was a really interesting guy.

He...

Yeah, he was a fascinating author.

He wrote sci-fi all his life and amazing works of fantasy.

Huge, great works.

Pioneered the dying earth genre.

In fact, I think this work was part of his Dying Earth series.

But Vance himself was an electrician at Pearl Harbor when he was in the U.S.

Navy.

But he left.

He was discharged with prejudice.

Very bored of Navy life, and he got home a week before Pearl Harbor, Pearl Harbor, before the bombings.

So he really luckily dodged that.

Sorry, when you say he was discharged with prejudice, what is that?

So, usually, with prejudice means that it's like a final legal decision and you can't appeal it or anything like that.

So, I guess probably it might be dishonorable discharge with prejudice, which means that you're out and you can't come back.

I'm not sure.

Got it.

Yeah.

Ironically, for a man who wrote a book called Servants of the Wank, he left with a dishonourable discharge.

So,

he

after the USA ended the war, he got back into the Navy.

And this is the crazy thing.

He had very bad eyesight.

No, don't worry about it.

I run a clear.

No, no, no, no.

He got into the merchant navy by memorising an eye chart.

And that was how he got in.

Oh, really?

But you don't know what eye chart you're going to get, do you?

Are they all the same?

Must be, yeah.

What?

You're kidding.

We could all just memorize the eye chart and cheat the eye test.

Why do you want to do that?

I think there are three or four eye charts now, Alex.

And also, yeah, absolutely.

Don't cheat on your eye tests.

There's not a pass mark for the eye test.

There's no reward for passing apart from continued bad sight if you cheat.

I like to do well.

So I thought I would see if the word wank with K-H has found its way in literature any other times in history.

And so I went onto Google Books to look for instances of the word wank with W-A-N-K-H.

And I only only found two examples.

One is a book called Penciled Frown by James Gray, which is a 1925 satire about the newspaper industry.

And I'll just give you a quote:

One man made primitive sounds as he played his cards, expressive of complacent confidence in his strategies.

Wank, said the player.

Said the player in triumph.

Wank, wank, wank, wank, and wank.

At each utterance, a card was flung on the table.

Okay,

what was this word?

Never used before or since?

Just an onomatopoeic word of, you know, triumph, I think.

Right.

He's just trying to invent a new exclamation.

Yeah.

And the only other example of the word wank I can find in the whole of history of literature, according to Google Books, is from a systematic and ecological study of birds of New Guinea by Dylan Ripley, and it's about the collared brush turkey.

It says this species was common on the Tammy River in heavy evergreen forest.

Its call, wank wank,

in an ascending scale, was frequent morning and evening, and presumably more common as egg laying was in progress.

So there you are.

Wow.

Very cool.

And James Harkin's Book Club will return next month.

So I found Planet of the Knobheads a bit harder to get sort of blurb on.

I only found a few bits.

Did you guys find any?

There was.

The bit I saw was that it's the story of newlyweds Jack and Marjorie Wainwright, who are big stars in the scientific world, and then they get kidnapped by aliens.

They get taken to this knobhead planet, and they meet high knobule.

And there's just a line that was put in there, which I can't tell.

Someone was writing a blurb, but then added this line.

I think it might be an extract.

It's a line that just says, in about a week, I had recovered from most of the effects of the knob operation.

So

little hints as to what happens in the plot, but not too sure.

Did you read sort of like

the digest?

Was this the blinkest digest of knobheads you got?

The word knobhead originally meant like the end of a cane or you know, the end of a screw, for instance, any kind of knobby bit on the end of the knee.

Well, if you see the aliens in it, they look very robotic and they have giant knobs on their head, and so hence the knobheads.

So, we talked about science fiction, the origin of science fiction, on our comic relief marathon, but I don't think we've mentioned it here.

So Hugo Gernsback is the person who coined the term science fiction.

He's sort of thought of as the father of science fiction.

He founded a magazine in the 1920s devoted to it.

It's called Amazing Stories.

And the Hugos are the awards that are named after him, science fiction awards.

In the early days, he referred to it as scientific, and then it became science fiction over the years.

But he hated the Hugo Awards because he he thought that they didn't award science fiction.

So basically, the first nine winners of the awards, he said only one of them was an actual piece of science fiction.

All the rest were fantasy.

He was very strict about what it was.

It has to be, it has to have three components.

It has to have charming romance.

It has to have thrilling adventure.

And it has to have scientific facts.

Wow, because two of those things have nothing to do with science fiction.

Not according to Hugo, the creator of sci-fi, I'm afraid.

Yeah, but it sounds like he didn't know what it was nine times in a row.

So I think I'm on the side of the award organizers to be fair to him I think he was on your side Dan and he said these don't contain enough scientific facts so he wanted them to be educational like 25% of each science fiction book should be educational

hey you know um so famous science fiction writers Isaac Asimov has to be right up there in the top five really and he's famous for the three laws of robotics but do you guys know how many actual laws there there are in the three laws of robotics?

Well, I've read those books.

I robot books, right?

And I thought it was like, first one is they can't do any harm.

And the second one is something like, unless there's danger's going to happen to a human, then they can do some harm or something.

And I can't remember what the third one was.

Yeah, exactly.

A robot may not injure a human being is the first one.

There's more to that.

A robot must obey the orders given by human beings, except when such orders would conflict with the first law.

That's right.

And then the third law, a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law.

So those were the three and he revised them a few times.

Sorry, can I just ask, are these the three laws within a piece of fiction?

What's the laws?

Where are they applying?

Basically, he wrote all these stories that basically use those three laws as your trick and every single one of the stories has uses those as a trick, don't they?

I think.

Yes.

Got it.

Yeah, exactly.

He just created the sort of the rules of sci-fi for robots with this.

So he revised them a a number of times during his lifetime, but then he decided to add another law, but obviously very annoying to have to rewrite it and call it the four laws of robotics.

So he managed to do it.

He added the fourth law in by going backwards.

So there's a zeroth law of law.

Yeah, that's standard, I think.

There's a zeroth law of thermodynamics as well in science.

That's the equivalent of going back and changing wank to wannock all the way through, isn't it?

Yes.

Yeah, exactly.

So there's actually four laws in the three laws of robotics, and that fourth one is: a robot may not harm humanity or, by an action, allow humanity to come to harm.

A high bar to clear.

I read about the first ever sci-fi convention.

Yes, so this was a fundraiser by a man called Dr.

Herbert Tippetts, who was the founder of London's West End Hospital and School of Massage and Electricity.

And he'd read this book by Edward Bulwer-Lytton called Rill the Power of the Coming Race.

And he thought what a great idea I will set up a little convention

where people can dress up as characters from this book and it'll make us a load of money for my hospital.

And so he did.

He spent an absolute ton of money setting it up.

There was magic shows.

It was kind of like an Egyptian style bit of sci-fi.

So everyone dressed in all these Egyptian garbs, sometimes in ancient Greek clothing.

Everyone got these little glasses of Bovril because there was a magic fluid called Vrill in this book.

And the company that was making beef extract drinks decided to rebrand and call themselves Bovril in honor of this amazing book.

People could go along.

There was a demon dog who could read minds that you could go and see.

There was all sorts of stuff happening.

But then basically it didn't go according to plan.

There was a critic writing in the magazine Truth who said said a more humiliating display of witless and puerile fantasticalities was never designed.

Wow.

And everyone basically hated it.

It was supposed to run for three days.

It actually ran for five days, but not because everyone wanted to go.

It was just because so few people went that they wanted to get one or two more people through the door so they could make some of their money back.

And the guy lost £1,600

rather than making any money for his hospitals and declared himself bankrupt.

Such a shame.

That whole thing, it feels like it's an argument for the fact that we never developed time travel in our history because obviously time travelers would all want to go to the first ever sci-fi convention because that would be an amazing thing.

And that guy would have coined it in if we ever...

That sounds like a really good kind of meta sci-fi story, doesn't it?

Of all the time travelers going back there.

I think that's probably the real reason they extended it for two days because they think in the future we're going to have to up the capacity limit here for when all the time travelers come back.

Yeah, and they had this whole thing.

They had an opening ceremony where they had Prince Henry and Princess Beatrice of Battenberg come and do the official opening, and they were accepting donations right from the get-go as soon as they announced the opening, where people who were representatives of organizations would approach them and they would drop purses filled with donations in front of them.

So it looked like, oh, the money's coming in.

This is a huge success.

And one of the things they discovered afterwards, when money was not being made and all the things had gone wrong, is that the purses that were being dropped were all props, and there was nothing in there.

And so they didn't even have that to rely on.

Yeah, come on, Battenbergs.

They should have just done a cake sale.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

James at James Harkin.

Andy at Andrew Hunter M.

And Anna.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our website, no such thingasafish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there.

Also, do check out the dates for our upcoming tour.

We're back on the road.

We'd love to see you there.

But until then, we'll be back again next week with another episode, and we'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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