56: No Such Thing As A Killer Tomato

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Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with Anna Czaczynski, James Harkin, and Andy Murray.

Once again, we have gathered around the microphone with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, Shazinski.

Yeah, my fact is that for 200 years after tomatoes made it to England, they were grown almost entirely for ornamental reasons.

Because they didn't want to eat them?

Because they were just waiting for them to be ripe.

It's not ready.

It's still red.

Wait for it to be green.

I think, well, they're yellow.

I think the first tomatoes that were brought over were yellow, and that's why they're called pomodore in Italian, I think.

It's like yellow apples or something.

Anyway, yeah, people thought they were poisonous.

And this was for, well, there are a number of explanations for why people thought that.

I think the most likely one is that they were botanically identified as being belonging to the nightshade family.

And people knew that other members of the nightshade family, deadly nightshade, were poisonous.

So they were botanically advanced enough to work out what family tomatoes belong to, but not botanically advanced enough to say these things are obviously harmless, you can eat them.

So there's another theory that they were actually poisoning people, isn't there?

And the idea behind that is that they had pewter plates which contains lead and the tomatoes have acid in them, and the acid would release the lead out of the pewter plates and would give people lead poisoning.

So, that was one theory.

Yes.

Although I think pewter plates mainly belong to wealthy people, but I reckon if they thought they were part of the nightshade family, there may be a few rich people got ill from that.

That would have meant.

Can I say my favourite theory?

Go on.

No, no, this was a big one during the day.

They thought someone noticed, I believe it was Ralph Waldo Emerson, in fact, noticed that there was a worm that was going into his tomato, and he thought that it was the worm that was poisonous that it was poisoning the actual tomato and so it was a green tomato worm wasn't it yes yeah exactly and it's just great because a bit of hysteria was created out of people thinking that it was this thing there's uh someone who described it as a poisonous as a rattlesnake they were saying you know stay away from this thing uh and there's a wonderful quote dr.

Fuller said that there is a new enemy to human existence.

And then he said that if you were bitten, that you would die.

And then someone else pointed out that it wouldn't hurt a flea, so it wasn't actually as dangerous.

But for a while, they thought it was this worm, which is pretty cool.

Yeah, I think tomatoes were just starting to get over their bad reputation, and suddenly these worms were opted up.

And there was such hysteria.

There's this story that's told that's so brilliant, and there's no first-hand record of it, but it was reported in newspapers in the 19th century.

And it's that it was in Salem.

It was at the old county courthouse in Salem.

It was 1820.

And this guy called Colonel Johnson had decided it was getting ridiculous that everyone thought tomatoes were poisonous.

and he was going to prove to people that they weren't.

And so he stood on the steps of Salem Courthouse and he ate this whole bowl of tomatoes in front of this huge crowd.

And the witness reports, apparently, according to newspapers that reported it later, said that women were screaming and fainting as they watched him do what they thought was suicide in public.

Do you know what the Latin name for tomatoes is?

It's lycopersicon, which means wolf peach.

How cool is that?

Yeah.

Why?

Do we know why?

No.

Well, I don't.

Maybe it's because when they go moldy, they get that grey fur.

Yes, and they also start hunting in packs.

And a few of them can bring down a fully grown moose.

It's actually no wonder people were so afraid of them for so long.

Yeah.

Well, there was the Attack of the Killer Tomatoes movie, wasn't there?

There was that factual documentary, yes.

The Return of the Killer Tomatoes was George Clooney's first movie.

On First May.

He'd been in a few things before, but that was his first main break.

Wow.

Well done, George.

And the first Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, there was a helicopter crash, which is in there at the start, and it was a real crash.

And it was a rented helicopter, and it went down.

Fortunately, no one was killed.

But the crash cost them $60,000, which used up more of the budget than all other aspects of the film combined.

Wow.

Whoa.

At least they got the footage.

Did you guys know that George Clooney, 10 years, exactly 10 years before he started being the star of ER, was the star of a hospital drama called ER with dots after the E and the R.

Really?

Yeah.

What?

Yeah.

It does kind of feel like there was some kind of admin mix-up, doesn't it?

It really does.

Got the cast list and got the wrong caste list, the old one.

It's like, yeah.

Yeah, someone, Robert De Niro, was meant to get the part in ER.

I have a news story which I also wanted to share with you.

This is from 2013 from the BBC.

A man caught with a prostitute in his car told police she was there to show him where to buy tomatoes.

Is that a euphemism?

This is in the West Midlands.

I could have told him where to get tomatoes in the West Midlands.

There's a nice big Morrison's in Wolverhampton.

Yep.

Well, he could have saved £20 and a £400 fine from Walsall Magistrates' Court.

Ah, Walsaw, yeah, I don't know that as well.

Police reaction was amazing.

PC, one of the police from Walsall Police, said,

I've heard some excuses before, but in the 10 years I've been a police officer, I've never heard a curb crawler covering up his crimes by claiming to be buying tomatoes.

Our officers in the courts saw through his lies.

Well done, Scooby.

That's another crime solved.

I've, over the last few years, developed a new taste for tomato juice on planes.

It is supposed to taste better.

Yeah.

Than like other things that you would try on the aeroplanes would taste worse, but actually tomato juice like Bloody Marys and stuff are supposed to be still okay.

Yeah, why is that?

Well, your taste buds obviously go down.

So tomato juice, because of the thickness, kind of and for other reasons, I'm sure, retains the full full taste.

But they did a massive test of it in a simulation where they had passengers come on to a simulated flight.

And that wouldn't work, really, because surely it's the altitude that makes a difference.

Yes, exactly.

So actually, the whole study brought no conclusive results.

But the reasonings, they asked all the passengers, why did you go for it?

And one of the main results, which is exactly what I did, is that you see the person ahead of you, or two people ahead of you, going, tomato juice, and you go, oh, I might have a tomato juice.

And that was genuinely one of the main results that they got from the bottom of the base.

Hang on.

So they think that it just happens that the people in the front row tend to order tomato juice.

Someone orders it and it spills down.

But surely we have to work out why that first person always ordered tomatoes.

Because they were at the back of a previous flight where someone offered them tomato juice.

So one person once happened to order tomato juice, and since then it's been a constant domination.

Hang on, sometimes the trolley comes from behind you on a plane.

Yeah.

Oh, you're talking about an economy.

Right.

I didn't know they had trolleys back then.

Another theory about the tomato juice thing is that, I can't believe this, but is that the noise of the plane affects how you perceive flavour?

Wow.

But you've genuinely experienced the tomato juice thing.

On planes, it's my main topic of conversation.

If there's someone I don't know next to me, I'm like, oh God.

Yeah, someone with a tomato juice on it.

And they're going, excuse me, are there any spare seats?

I don't mind going back to economy.

Tomatoes.

Are they a fruit or a vegetable?

They are a fruit.

They are, so botanically, they are a fruit, but legally, they are a vegetable.

And that was a precedent set in 1887 because some guy called John Nix was trying to import a bunch of tomatoes.

And he was saying, These are botanically a fruit, and so I should now have to pay the vegetable tariff on them because there wasn't the same tariff for fruits.

And the courts decided that they wanted him to pay that tariff, so they declared that tomatoes are a vegetable, and he had to pay up.

And that's it.

The judge said, in the common language of the people, whether sellers or consumers of provisions, all these are vegetables which are grown in kitchen gardens and which, whether whether eaten cold or raw, are like potatoes, carrots, parsnips, turnips, beets, cauliflower,

cabbage, celery, and lettuce, usually served at dinner in with or after the soup, fish, or meats, which constitute the principal part of the repast and not, like fruits, generally as a dessert.

And I must admit, I didn't realise how long that was going to be.

I can't help thinking that guy got turned down in his job as a chef and went on.

So, other things that were not used for eating originally, the Romans didn't really eat butter.

They did have it, but they didn't really eat it.

What did they do with it?

They would rub it on themselves.

If they had a burn, for instance,

they would use it for medical reasons.

The Germans had it and they did kind of eat it more, but they didn't eat it all the time.

They used it for hair dressing.

And Herodotus says that the Thracians ate it, but but the Greeks thought that they were weird for eating it.

So like back in the olden days, hardly anyone at butter.

Did it happen when the first Roman who got a burn on his lips put it on there?

Went, this is delicious.

Wait a second.

Or when they burnt their toast, presumably.

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Okay, time for fact number two, and that's my fact.

My fact this week is that NASA is planning on giving the moon a moon, which is very exciting.

Explain yourself.

Okay, so basically, NASA is going to...

It's quite an ambitious idea, and in theory...

No, no kidding.

But they are going for it.

So it's not, you know, it is NASA.

It's not like some college kids.

They've got it planned for us.

Is it going to be a smaller moon than the current size moon?

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

So the idea is that in 2020, they're going to launch...

a probe that's going to go to a passing asteroid.

They're going to land on the asteroid and lassew around it or using a kind of knapsack bag of a sort of gigantic scale, take a boulder off it, then head back to our moon and then leave that boulder at a point where it can orbit the moon and then they can mine the asteroid for everything, learn more about what asteroids are made up of and so on.

It's hugely ambitious, but it's in the slot.

So I don't think moons can really have moons.

Well, our moon can't really.

It could have one for a short amount of time, but eventually the orbit would decay.

And that's because the movement of the earth and the movement of the Sun would kind of give tidal forces that would kind of decay the orbit.

How long do you think they could have it for?

I think they could have it for a fair amount of time, a good few years, but it wouldn't last forever.

That's quite cool, though.

We're going to live in a period where the moon has an orbiting moon.

But it is weird, like, if you look at NASA's schedule for its upcoming seasons,

it does have a few planned projects that you just go, have I read an April Fool's page?

And I checked the date this time, and I haven't.

Because they're doing the planning of going to Venus with these balloons that are going to sit and kind of create a little balloon city that they can do observations from.

It's really weird.

They're working on a city made out of huge balloons in the clouds of Venus, which will allow astronauts to explore the planet without venturing onto the hostile surface.

That's from a science website.

It's amazing.

Yeah.

I read another one from 2020.

This is a mission called the Asteroid Impact Mission.

And they're going to send a probe up to an asteroid called Didymus.

And the asteroid Didymus has a moon called Didymoon.

Just like those days.

Yeah.

The naming conventions are great.

And they officially encourage you not to name them after your pets.

But I don't know how strictly the rules are enforced, basically.

Are we talking about asteroids?

Yes.

Asteroids and actually lots of planetary bodies.

But they instituted the rule relatively recently.

But the first one that came to their attention, which they didn't like, was a guy who named an asteroid Spock.

He named it Mr.

Spock, but it wasn't after Mr.

Spock, it was after his cat who was called Mr.

Spock.

Presumably, the cat was called Mr.

Spock after Mr.

Spock.

Yes, but the asteroid was technically being named after a cat.

That's so good.

And in the 19th century, people would name them after their mistresses and racy things like that.

And they said, yeah, we don't want that either.

Well, my mistress was called Mr.

Spock.

That's what I called her anyway.

Just like with the idea of names being odd.

Check out the name for this Venus one.

It's called the High Altitude Venus Operational Concept.

And it's not a very good name, but it actually breaks down into havoc.

Is that what you want to be naming a serious NASA mission?

Exactly.

Is that a balloon one?

Yeah, yeah.

This is at proposal stage at the moment, but it is being proposed by NASA to NASA.

Well, surely NASA's going to accept it.

Guys, I think this is a brilliant idea.

Well, thank you, NASA.

No problem, NASA.

Just the idea of naming something havoc, though.

Yes, we're doing our central high-altitude operational system, the project Chaos.

Yeah.

Or Mayhem.

Or certain death.

I found something really nice about just speaking of asteroids and things orbiting each other.

So you all know that Pluto was downgraded from being a planet in 2006 to being a

dwarf planet.

The decision could have gone another way because the International Astronomical Union met up, and according to a draft definition of planets, its moon,

Charon, or Sharon, could have been upgraded to being a planet.

Sharon is just a pretentious Sharon, isn't it?

Let's be honest.

Sorry, it's Moon Sharon.

It's Moon Sharon.

Sharon is someone's named after their mistress, haven't they?

And Pluto, presumably, after their pet.

That must have been a good day's work.

The guys will never work it out.

But yeah, there would have been a binary pair of planets because they orbit a center of gravity which is outside both of them.

It's a point of space between the two of them.

So they're both constantly orbiting that point.

There's a great moon that I saw called Mimaz, and it looks exactly like the Death Star from Star Wars.

It looks exactly like it.

It's so cool.

Or it looks like a 3D squeezable boob.

That's the other thing it looks like.

Sorry, aren't boobs just 3D squeezable boobs?

Yeah, no, no.

Normally, you have to specify if a boob is 2D or not squeezable.

NASA is looking, so it's looking to employ people, I suppose.

It's looking for people who are willing to stay in bed for 70 days.

And it'll pay them $18,000.

But yeah, this is to see what effects long periods of having to stay still, like you often would have to in a spaceship or something, has on the body and has on a loss of muscle and bone and cardiovascular function.

Like hypersleep?

It's like hypersleep, except you'd be awake and bored, but earning good money.

Well, that's it's a new thing called pteronauts, where you can have a whole career at NASA as an Earth astronaut.

A terror naut.

So you just hang here and you do all the things that they're prepping astronauts to do, including laying in bed.

I can just see the husband at a party going, I'm an astronaut, and the wife next to him going, you're an Earth astronaut.

Terranaut.

I looked up a list of things that are on the moon.

Yeah, that we have left there.

Okay.

Because lots of things have crashed into there over the years.

It's a huge amount.

It's about the weight of a blue whale.

So golf balls is famously up there.

Golf balls, there's also a javelin.

Is there?

Yeah.

When Alan Shepard made his golf shot, his colleague threw a it was an improvised javelin.

It was apparently a star from a solar wind experiment, but he threw it as a javelin.

And I have a theory that it might be the longest javelin throw ever was made on the moon.

How far did it go?

Well there isn't data, but.

Well the world record of javelins probably just over 100 meters, probably about 106 meters, something like that.

But you do need data, Andy.

I don't like with World Records, the way it works is, I mean, you have to provide an actual number rather than saying, I reckon.

It's just my pet theory.

I can't prove it, but I do believe it.

Also, on the moon, there are, they call them defecation collection devices, and there are five of those.

That is a jazz dot word for a toilet attendant, isn't it?

But Zeldrin, on the way back, he's like, oh, God, has anyone got two quid?

I can leave the stone.

That's the terrible thing.

They live on tips, and there's very little to come by on the moon.

And there are ten urine bags which are divided into urine collection assembly small and urine collection assembly large.

And there are also six bags which are just called emesis, which actually means vomit.

But they were too polite to say vomit bags.

Wow.

Yeah.

I read the other day that Buzz Aldrin actually brought a book to the moon.

In case he got bored?

Exactly.

Oh, he's going to be sat in the toilet.

He's going to do stuff.

Yeah, he brought a book to the moon.

What was the book?

It was a biography of a pioneer of rockets.

So someone who was building rockets, and I can't remember his name, but yeah.

Speaking of emesis in space, they've been...

NASA has been developing ways of getting alcohol into space or

tentatively.

Smuggling it up.

At the moment, you're not allowed.

Yeah, well, at the moment, you're not allowed alcohol in space.

But the Russians take it up, don't they?

Yes, they do.

Do they?

Secretly, they were bringing up vodka.

The weird thing is, they only actually took vodka up because it went so well with the tomato juice, which just tastes so much better in space.

John Glenn said.

I've once he had tomato juice, and everyone's copied him ever since.

Yeah, sorry, go on.

Yeah, so sorry, they've developed like a powdered sherry, NASA tried out, and they decided to test this out by recreating a zero gravity test and putting people in the test flight.

And as soon as the astronauts who were in this test flight smelt the sherry, they all vomited.

So they haven't perfected it yet.

I actually think that the Australians have developed a beer to take to space.

And so far as I know, it's the only contribution to space that the Aussies have made.

The Italians are taking an espresso machine up, aren't they?

And the South Koreans came up with their space kimchi.

Oh, yeah.

So, like, a lot of different countries, like, do their specialism, and I guess Australia's this beer.

Yeah.

America has SpaceX.

Australia has 4X.

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Back to the podcast.

Okay, time for fact number three, Andrew Hunter Murray.

My fact is that the man who played Sherlock Holmes spent the First World War dressed as a tree.

Which man?

Well, exactly.

Benedict Kummerbach.

No, not.

Benedict Kumbach was not, as far as I know, intimately involved in the First World War with him.

No, you're saying he's a coward.

Yes.

Giraffe Dodger.

And I can say that all alright, because I know that he won't fight me over it.

This was Basil Rathbone, who was one of the first people to become extremely famous playing Sherlock Holmes, who played him in a lot of films.

Yeah, he's kind of he's one of those guys who I know about, and I remember his face, but until his name is said out loud, if you just said name the Sherlock Holmes guy, I wouldn't be able to name him.

But he did like 16 movies, 200 radio plays.

Yeah, yeah.

And he was also in the First World War, the Second World War.

Playing a tree.

He fought on the Western Front, and his brother was killed in 1918.

And he did these incredibly dangerous patrols where during daylight, he and other men would basically camouflage themselves as trees and walk very, very slowly or crawl towards the German trenches.

If you're crawling, are you going as a tree that's fallen down, I guess?

Yeah, I suppose so, yeah.

It's such an interesting concept, the idea of the tree being

a spying mechanism for war.

Because this did happen.

The Germans built a 25-foot-tall tree out of metal.

They cut down a real tree, put up a fake tree, put a man in it, and later on the British overtook the same area, and they didn't notice for seven months that the tree was not real.

We wouldn't, unless you went up inside it.

I mean, they were designed, they were photographed and sketched by botanical experts, weren't they?

So that then they'd go and photograph the correct tree and then they'd bring the sketches and photographs back to base.

And they'd be designed to look exactly like the tree that they'd replaced.

In the autumn, did you have to kind of drop your fake leaves?

Do you think?

Yeah.

You would have to, wouldn't you?

You would have to.

Or you'd have to have someone climb up and paint them painstakingly brown over a period of weeks

and then remove them one by one to seem natural.

But these so these are two different types of tree disguise we're talking about, right?

So

these trees we're talking about were more common, I think, which were trees that you'd put snipers or like observational posts up inside, whereas Basil Rapin, I think, was a moving tree.

Dressed as a tree.

He really was he?

He was just a one, he was a tiny tree.

Like there's a Charlie famous Charlie Chaplin movie where he's dressed as a tree and he hits soldiers as they come by.

He was, I think he was Charlie Chaplin's mentor.

So maybe that's where Charlie Chaplin got the idea.

So you're saying Charlie Chaplin dressed as a tree in one of his films?

Yeah, he did.

It's a very famous one.

Wow.

He was very laconic about it.

He just said, we brought back an awful lot of information and a few prisoners, too.

That was it.

He did a few of these patrols.

He didn't spend the whole war dressed as a tree.

Imagine being captured by a tree.

So he, as I think Dan said, he sort of volunteered to do this because his brother had died.

And I think it seems like maybe he lost respect for his own life.

He was devastated at his brother's death.

But he had, or thought he had, a premonition of his brother's death because he wrote in his journal one night that he'd woken up at one o'clock in the morning.

It was June the 4th, 1918, and suddenly he woke up in bed and thought of his brother and started crying, and he didn't know why.

And then he later found out that exactly that time was when his brother had been killed.

He wrote a fantastic letter to his family.

If I read it, I'll read a little bit of it to you.

Dear all, B's letter arrived this morning along with some other things and a parcel from Aunt Elfrida, which looked very promising but proved to contain nothing but woolen underwear of such gigantic proportions I am at a loss for words.

We have managed to fit three men inside a single pair.

I wonder if this is the intention.

You must inquire and discover if Auntie E made them herself.

I think they will make excellent tents.

Do not tell her that.

Just a bit of nicer.

So these huge giant tree structures, they actually had almost, I guess, like foxholes that you would enter them through.

You'd go underneath them and go into them.

They were really tall.

They were very, very tall trees.

I really like, just on a bit of nominative determinism, that one of the guys who sketched one of the trees that's held in the Imperial War Museum, his name was Leon Underwood.

Oh, that sounds like Leon Underwood.

That's fantastic.

And Basil Rathbone's second wife was called Branch.

That was her surname.

Really?

Yeah.

So you get fake trees around these days, which are mobile phone masts, don't you?

Have you seen these?

I really know.

So probably in the 90s or something, they built a load of mobile phone masts around the UK, and to make them look better, they decided to disguise them as trees.

But what they had to do at the same time was build other trees around them, so it made it look more like a little copse or a forest or whatever.

Now, the problem is, what they didn't realize is that the mobile masts that look like trees, of course, didn't grow, but the trees did grow.

And so now you have loads and loads of masts with just trees all around them, and you can't get a signal out of them.

And apparently, there's about 10,000 masts in the UK around with trees completely around them that you can hardly get any signal out of them.

In 2007, a man tried to rob a bank in New Hampshire dressed as a tree.

The article about this said that it was, despite the lack of other trees with which to blend in,

he was in a branch.

Oh, nice.

And it was on Elm Street as well,

the branch of the bank.

Perfect.

The police later found someone who recognised him from CCTV.

Do you think that there might be CCTV footage of, say, half an hour before the actual robbery of him in a fancy dress shop going, Do you have any balaclavas?

And the guy going, sorry, we're all out, mate.

We do have a tree constant.

Oh, damn it.

All right.

Yeah, if you're going to rob a bank, dress up as something that you'd find in a bank, like a person.

That seems like the smartest thing.

Or a biro on the little stand, because then you can get really close to the counter without anyone noticing.

But then you're chained to the counter forever.

That's true.

Yeah.

Yeah, don't go too method on it.

So, Rathbone, he was the archetypal

Sherlock Holmes.

Yes.

And he was also often a villain in other movies that he did.

And he apparently is a really, really great swordsman.

He pr might be the best ever swordsman that Hollywood ever brought out.

But he would always lose because he was always the villain.

And there was only one time he won a duel on screen in his whole career.

And it was when he played Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet.

And he got an Oscar nomination for it.

Oh, really?

Was that just kind of a sort of pity thing because he'd had to lose so many jewels?

Yeah, maybe.

The first Sherlock Holmes film was in 1900 and it was called Sherlock Holmes Baffled.

Basically, this guy who's supposedly Sherlock Holmes walks into his drawing room to find that he's been burgled and then he sees the villain and he's about to shoot him and then the villain just disappears.

And it was like just a way of showing trick photography at the time.

Oh, cool.

In the Wikipedia thing of what happens in the movie, it says at the very end, at this point, the movie ends abruptly with Holmes looking baffled.

Do you think it was only at that point that the audience went, oh, the title, that makes sense.

Good reveal.

Just one more thing that we used for camouflage in the First World War.

The French used a horse carcass disguise.

Okay.

So there was a real horse which was dead on the battlefield, and they replaced it with, I think, a Papier-Mâché one, but possibly something a bit more robust than that.

But they made a fake horse carcass, left it on the battlefield, and the man crawled inside under cover of darkness and was able to observe any German troop movements.

And he had a telephone wire in there so he could report back.

They also used camel dung as camouflage.

This was Jasper Maskelaine, who was a magician.

And according to his memoirs, which we're not 100% sure, we believe, but according to his memoirs, they had to mask a load of tanks which had been painted green because they were going to be used in Europe, but actually they were being used in Egypt, so they needed to be sand coloured.

And in order to make them sand coloured, they painted them in putrid Worcester sauce, flour, and camel dung.

Wow.

Wait, his name was Maskelaine.

Yeah.

And he had to mask a line of tanks.

Wow.

Normative determinism gets everywhere.

Gets everywhere.

We also used to use paper-mache heads, didn't we?

During trench warfare, so they'd make a whole bunch of paper-mache heads.

This sounds like possibly the most fun part of what wasn't a very fun thing to do, which was fight in the trenches.

And then you just like stick the paper-mache heads up above the parapet and hope that they all got shot.

And then

you would see where the snipers were firing from.

Is that the idea?

Or where their guns were?

Yeah, or you just, it would just be like misdirection.

It would just be like they'll think now that they've defeated us because they've just shut all our heads off.

I was reading during World War II as part of ways of disguising

one of the big problems, obviously German U-boats, they didn't know when they were going to come up.

And if

a U-boat saw a battleship, they'd be inclined not to come up because they know the battleship had the capability to just mow them down.

So

what they used to do was they used to disguise their battleships as cruisers, as public member cruisers.

And they would all dress up.

All the soldiers, the sailors would dress up as just people who were just on a holiday and guys would dress as girls and they'd be hugging on the on the so the U-boat would see them come up come towards them and suddenly all the guns would come out and then they would take down the U-boat.

So once they had seen a U-boat, as in they were trying to lure it a bit closer, they had a whole rigmarole of what to do.

So they would start running around the deck as like panicked civilians basically.

And some of them would fall over and some of them would jump into a lifeboat and then leave someone behind by mistake and he would be s screaming at the road saying, Come back, come back

All the sailors who wanted to be an Amdram but had never didn't have the chance because they were at sea

applied for this particular mission.

And what's the motivation for this sinking?

I just want to know.

It apparently worked.

Apparently, 14 U-boats were sunk as a result of this

ploy.

Do you know that some U-boats came fitted with planes?

So they were genuinely U-boats which had little aircraft hangars on top of them, which could be sealed, obviously.

But when they surfaced,

they would open the hangar and send up a little plane.

Like Thunderbirds.

Yeah, and it would observe the sea all around, because obviously it's really good for observation.

And then it would land ideally near the submarine because they'd have to sort of tug it back in and then put it in the hangar.

So it lands on skis or something.

Yeah, exactly.

And you lasso.

It can land on water.

And then you, yeah.

How cool is that?

That's very cool.

Yeah.

I love those things.

I've got one last thing before we move on.

Basil Rathbone didn't actually like playing Sherlock Holmes.

It became the bane of his life because everyone just, it was total typecasting.

Everyone wanted him to be Sherlock Holmes.

It's a bit like Colin Doyle, how he wants it to be.

Exactly.

Exactly like Conan Doyle.

And he even talked about it, saying Conan Doyle killed him off, but I can't, you know.

And at the end of his career, though, he said to his wife, Why don't you write a Sherlock Holmes play?

And she did.

And it closed after three nights.

Apparently, it wasn't that good.

But if you look at his IMDb, among his last movies ever made are two that I really like called Hillbillies in a Haunted House and The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini.

Wow.

Okay, time for our final fact of the show, and that is James Harkin.

My fact this week is that Abraham Lincoln used his stovepipe hat to keep important documents hidden.

Was this before the invention of the briefcase?

I imagine it was.

I don't know.

When was the briefcase invented?

I don't know, but why was he using his hat?

That feels like they would fall out.

Do you know how it worked?

Yeah, I think it was in the lining.

I think he had a little pocket in there that he'd be able to keep things in.

So these were his top hats?

Yeah, the top hat thing that he's really famous for wearing.

It seemed like he used the top hat as a bit of a gimmick because he was six foot four anyway.

And this top hat would give him an extra like seven, eight inches.

So he would be by far and away the tallest person in any room.

Yeah.

And also it was always slightly shabby, which apparently was supposed to like suit his frontier image.

And there was a story that he was shot by someone and it hit his hat and it knocked his hat off, but he survived.

And everyone thought, oh, well, the hat saved his life.

But actually, what it meant was that he was always much easier to spot because he had a big hat and it was easier for people to see him.

If they wanted to shoot him, they'll just aim at the hat.

Yeah, and he, because this was the year before he was actually assassinated.

He was riding on his horse.

His hat just gets knocked off.

The horse goes insane, rides off.

One of his people go back to find the hat and they find this big

gun hole through it.

And he didn't believe that it was someone trying to kill him.

He just thought it was a mistake.

Yeah, he thought it was a mistake.

He thought someone had let off a gun in a distance, shooting, attempting to shoot some wild animals.

A wild hat.

A wild hat.

The day that he was assassinated,

there was found on his desk the documents which

proposed to put the Secret Service into being, which proposed to make the Secret Service be a thing.

And the Secret Service, obviously now, the purpose of the Secret Service is to protect the President and to try and save his life and stop him from being assassinated.

What's that?

He started it?

He started the Secret Service, yeah.

Actually, weirdly, at the time, the Secret Service was to solve fraud and money laundering cases and stuff like that.

They're going, bad first day.

The man who shot Lincoln was John Wilkes Booth, but the man who shot him was a guy called Boston Corbett.

Have you heard of him?

He was the most strange and interesting person.

He was a hatter, and he was genuinely a mad hatter.

Did he?

Was the reason that he shot him because he had shot at the wearer of one of his precious hats?

It feels like it's some kind of hat-related vengeance.

It does, doesn't it?

I don't think it was.

He had previously castrated himself with a pair of scissors.

They samurai scissors.

History.

I hope so for his sake.

But yeah, and he then went for a walk before going to hospital to think about what he'd just done.

So just let's go to the assassination scene for a second.

John Wilkes Booth, you're mentioning.

So an interesting connection is that Tony Blair's wife, Cherie Blair, was originally Cherie Booth.

She is directly related to John Wilkes Booth.

Really?

Yeah, she's a fourth removed cousin, I believe.

And so she has a connection there.

More interestingly, I think, for the purpose of this podcast, on the night that Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth, another person was injured in the commotion that followed.

And it was a guy called Major Henry Rathbone, who

is related directly to Basil Rathbone.

Wow.

Wow, really?

Yeah.

And he later died of the wounds that he suffered from that night from a stabbing wound.

That's my blood.

And that was Basil Rathbone's distant relative.

Oh, wow.

The other thing is, you know, the assassination of JFK.

The Grassy Null.

Yeah.

That was Basil Rathbone, dressed as a Grassy Null.

And on the night he was assassinated, Lincoln had been drinking tomato juice because he was very high up in the theatre, and at that altitude, tomato juice tastes better.

Well, he was six foot far, so he probably did taste better.

There were some hats in the Georgian period, I think.

This is according to Lucy Worsley, who's just written a book about that period, that were never intended to be worn on the head.

They look like

I think that kind of disqualifies him from being a hat.

They were referred to as hats.

They were those bicorn hats, which are like the, they've got too long, pointy sides.

They're hats that sailors wear.

They were made to be held under the arm on formal occasions.

They were impossible to wear off the head.

There were other types of bicorn hat that were designed to be collapsible in the 19th century, which I quite like.

And there was one hat designed which is called the opera hat, which was collapsible so that when you went to the opera, you wouldn't be obscuring people's vision.

So that was when they were big top hats and they were spring-loaded so that you could just collapse them.

And then you'd sit on them.

You'd sit on this flat collapsed hat on your opera chair.

Spring-loaded.

Spring loaded.

I don't know if they're.

They're very dangerous.

Yeah.

What if the spring went off while you're sitting on it?

Everyone's bouncing around in theater.

Jacking a book.

My date's just been lobbed over the balcony.

President Mabuto of Zaire banned all leopard prince hats from his country, except for his own.

Oh, so it wasn't on animal rights grounds?

No, he was the only one allowed to wear it.

And he also made a law saying that television in Zaire could not mention anybody but him by name.

What?

That must have made a lot of dramas very difficult.

Or the weakest link.

So, who do you think is the weakest link?

I think it was that guy.

Which guy?

That guy.

That guy.

Or University Challenge.

Second along on the top deck.

That is unbelievable.

How long was that?

When did he die?

He must have died about 10 years ago.

How would he be introduced to people?

Mabuto,

this is a guy on television.

It's only on TV, right?

Oh, only on TV.

What wasn't the law in the whole country?

We better call our next child Mabuto as well.

What should we call this asteroid?

Name it after my mistress, Mabuto.

Just other famous hats.

I really like John Wayne's hat.

Oh, yeah.

He had a Stetson.

Wore it all the time.

Everyone thought it was to cultivate this constant image of a wild western kind of cowboy.

Loved his hat so much, not wanting to take it off, that he actually had his car, which was a Pontiac station wagon.

He had the roof raised so that he could fit his Stetson in when he was sitting.

And they still have that car.

I saw an image of it.

It looks really cool.

I went to the hat museum in Stockport, and they reckon that one of the reasons that hats went out of fashion is because of the motor car, because you couldn't wear it inside the car because the roof was too low.

But when they went out of fashion, no one could really believe it.

Newspaper reports of 1948 bemoaned the fact that there was a new fashion of bareheadedness.

And the hat industry did some research, and they found that 84% of women preferred men in hats.

So they couldn't believe that people had stopped wearing them because they were so attractive.

I think they still, I'd like to see a poll of women now what they think of men wearing hats.

I reckon still most women would say they prefer men wearing hats.

We kind of fetishize that Mr.

Darcy top hat look, don't we?

Yeah, but I think

in the context of being in 1814 or whatever it was.

Do you think if someone actually walked into the bar wearing a Mr.

Darcy hat, you'd think

I'm not so into this as I thought.

It's very hard to wear any hat other than a beanie hat or a baseball cap, non-ironically, without seeming like you're trying to dress up like you're in the 40s.

I'm not sure you could get away with a baseball cap.

No, you're absolutely right.

You're absolutely right.

Babe Ruth always kept a cabbage leaf in his hat underneath his cap to keep him cool.

And there there was a South Korean baseballer called Park Myung Kwan who also kept frozen cabbage leaves under his cap to keep him cold.

But he wasn't really supposed to.

There wasn't really a rule, but it was kind of seen as not very good because it was performance-enhancing cabbage.

Yes, exactly that.

Exactly that.

After leaves fell out twice live on television, they came up with a new rule, and now players may only wear cabbage leaves by presenting a doctor's note in advance.

And which doctor are you gonna?

Which serious doctor is gonna sign something to that effect?

Only doctors who are in the pocket of big cabbage will do that.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thanks so much for listening.

If you want to get in contact with any of us about the things we've said over the course of this podcast, we're all on Twitter.

I can be gotten on at Schreiberland.

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I can be gotten on at eggshaped.

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You can got me on at Andrew Hunter M.

M.

Adda.

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Yep.

And if you go to no such thing as a fish.com, we've got all of our previous 55 episodes up there for you to listen to.

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We're going to be back again next week with another episode.

Thanks for listening.

Goodbye.