Shaw - The mammoth book of losers

Karl Shaw has worked as a journalist, in advertising and in marketing. His books include Royal Babylon: The Alarming History of European Royalty; 5 People Who Died During Sex: and 100 Other Terribly Tasteless Lists; Curing Hiccups With Small Fires: A Delightful Miscellany of Great British Eccentrics; and 10 Ways to Recycle a Corpse.

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THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF

Losers

Karl Shaw

Constable & Robinson Ltd

5556 Russell Square

London WC1B 4HP

www.constablerobinson.com

First published in the UK by Robinson,

an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2014

Copyright Karl Shaw, 2014

The right of Karl Shaw to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

In the US, extract from the The Lion and the Unicorn from The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume II: My Country Right or Left, 19401943. Copyright 1968 Sonia Brownell Orwell and renewed by Mark Hamilton. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

In the UK, The Lion and the Unicorn by George Orwell (Copyright George Orwell, 1941). Reprinted by permission of Bill Hamilton as the Literary Executor of the Estate of the Late Sonia Brownell Orwell.

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication

Data is available from the British Library

UK ISBN: 978-1-78033-830-9 (paperback)

UK ISBN: 978-1-78033-831-6 (ebook)

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Printed and bound in the UK

If at first you dont succeed, try, try again. Then quit.
No use being a damn fool about it.

W. C. Fields

In 1682, the French explorer Robert Cavalier La Salle travelled the length of the Mississippi almost entirely by foot all the way to the Gulf of Mexico; he then returned to France a hero, claiming the entire valley for King Louis XIV.

La Salles discovery was a fluke he couldnt repeat. Two years later, he sailed from France with 280 men, women and children, plus 200 soldiers and sailors, having promised the king that he would establish a colony that would rival the New World riches of Spain. Only this time, when he went back to find the Mississippi, he landed by mistake on the Texas coast 500 miles west of his intended destination. He and his party tramped thousands of miles on foot looking for the river, hopelessly lost, meanwhile dying of thirst and attacks by marauding Indians.

La Salle eventually found his way back to his ship, then sailed for Canada, only to get lost again, this time finding himself back in the Gulf of Mexico, then ran his ship aground on a sandbar. He tried to find the Mississippi again on foot but, by this time, his crew down to 36 from the original 480 had had enough. They terminated La Salles career as an explorer with a bullet to his head, stripped him of his clothing and left him to die where he fell, somewhere in Texas.

History may be written by the winners, but if you manage to lose in a spectacular or consistent fashion, theres a good chance you will be remembered, too. Without losers, we wouldnt have winners. The conquest of Everest wouldnt have been glorious if someone had skipped to the summit at the first attempt; it was the horribly failed expeditions that came before it that made it special. Many must seek the goal and blow it before the achievement can be called truly heroic.

When it comes down to it, we arent even too fussed about the actual winning; the important thing is to go down fighting. So the death of Captain Scott, who lost not only the race to the South Pole but also failed to get himself and his team back alive, becomes a brave battle of the underdog against the odds. Why do it efficiently and take huskies like Roald Amundsen did when you can take ponies who will drop dead before you do? The important thing is that, in losing, Scott captured the public imagination. As Jonathan Millers squadron leader character put it in Beyond the Fringe: I want you to lay down your life, Perkins... we need a futile gesture at this stage. It will raise the whole tone of the war.

This book is about those who came close to the pinnacle of their chosen field without quite getting there. The very best, if you will, of the not very good. They are writers who believed in the power of words but spent their entire careers unable to find the right ones; artists and performers who indulged their creative impulse with a passion, if not a sense of the ridiculous, an eye for perspective or the ability to hold down a tune; people who set benchmarks for greatness then failed to follow up; experts who got it spectacularly wrong (take a bow, Lord Kelvin); scientists who had flashes of brilliance only to have them marooned in a vast sea of mediocrity, and others who got painfully close or were just robbed; businessmen who never quite knew when to quit while they were ahead; sportsmen who came close to winning, only for victory to be cruelly snatched away, winning the hearts of the nation along the way for trying very hard, despite being a bit crap.

In these pages, you will find some of historys most spectacularly ill-conceived endeavours and gloriously useless pursuits, tales of black comedy, insane foolhardiness, extraordinary bravery, breathtaking stupidity, dashing incompetence and relentless perseverance in the face of inevitable defeat. These are the efforts of those who fell short of their goal, the tragically defunct whose lives ended up on the cutting-room floor, forever assigned a second-tier rating in the chronicles of human achievement. We celebrate the men and women who were made of The Wrong Stuff we salute you for trying.

In which some explorers get lost; a man eats his boots and another man eats his crew; an imaginary mountain range is mapped; and a Scottish botanist is crushed to death by a falling bullock.