Barmy Brits an Enduring Part of English Psyche

Every August, men calling themselves Rebecca don women’s clothes and dash through the Welsh hills before tearing down a gate.

From time to time, a farmer in western England fires a pig carcass from a homemade version of the catapults used to besiege castles in medieval times.

On a road south of London, motorists guffaw as a man storms past at 60 miles an hour on his motorized couch, a lamp flapping in the wind.

Crackpots? To others, maybe.

The British, of course, aren’t alone. Just ask the more than 80 Americans from 11 states who converged on a Delaware soybean field in November with an array of bizarre catapulting contraptions to compete in the nation’s annual pumpkin-tossing contest.

In Britain, however, eccentric behavior is considered part of the national psyche.

“Without understanding eccentricity, no one can claim to understand the British,” Daily Mail gossip columnist Nigel Dempster says in the foreword to “Eccentric Britain,” a new guidebook to this quirky little isle by Benedict le Vay.

After five years of research, Le Vay has come up with a dizzying array of mad marquesses, batty buildings, far-out festivals and what he calls “the bizarre cheese-rolling, black pudding-throwing, coal-carrying, gate-smashing contests” so beloved by the British.

“To the world-weary traveler, the global village means a McDonald’s sameness being inflicted everywhere,” says Le Vay. “And yet the British eccentric has proved peculiarly resistant to this process.”

Perhaps it’s because, as Conservative Party leader William Hague noted last year, eccentrics are not only tolerated, but “often we put them on a pedestal.”

Eccentrics regularly show up in the literature: the gang of oddball Brits who endured the rigors of Papa Doc’s Haiti in Graham Greene’s novel “The Comedians,” for instance, or the devoted pig breeder Lord Emsworth and his scalawag brother, the Hon. Galahad Threepwood, in P.G. Wodehouse’s stories.

Many of the great eccentrics hail from the upper classes because being truly eccentric requires money and the freedom to follow your foibles.

In his book, Le Vay explores a tradition of mad aristocrats going back centuries.

Take the fifth Earl of Portland in the 18th century, a man so shy that he dug a series of private subterranean rooms underneath his stately home, Welbeck Abbey near Nottingham in central England. The estate, now an army college, includes Europe’s largest ballroom and a riding school, neither of which was ever used.

The eighth Earl of Bridgewater regularly entertained a dozen immaculately dressed-up dogs at his table every day. Servants fed them off silver platters and fixed napkins around their necks.

The current Marquess of Bath is known as the “Loins of Longleat” for his racy love life--a clever play on the fact that part of the Longleat estate is home to the family’s collection of lions.

Lord Bath, who dresses in loud printed caftans, has painted salacious murals on the walls of his stately home and openly maintains a succession of “wifelets”--mistresses--in addition to his French wife, Anna Gael.

Edinburgh psychologist David Weeks interviewed more than 1,000 oddballs over a 10-year period in both Britain and the United States and concluded that “classic, full-time eccentrics” number only about one in 10,000 people.

Typically, they embrace strangeness, flout convention, reject conformity and thrive on imagination, Weeks says. Often, they’re natural rebels.

In a telephone interview with the Associated Press, Lord Bath said he “wasn’t going to go along with the values I had been fed” at prestigious Eton College and Oxford University. “I have invented my own morals and values, and now I am living them. That is something I am proud of.”

The same goes for the Screaming Lord Sutch (he changed his name from plain David Sutch), who before his death in 1999 regularly ran for election as the Monster Raving Loony candidate, wearing a battered top hat and flamboyant leopard prints.

But many other perfectly ordinary Britons have been known to succumb temporarily to battiness, particularly if it has historic roots.

Take those “Rebeccas” in the southern Welsh village of Mynachlog-ddu, who reenact the riots of 1843 when bands of local men dressed as women smashed down hated toll gates. The original rioters took their name from the biblical character, who was sent by her father to become Isaac’s wife with the words, “Let thy seed possess the gates of those that hate thee.”

Then there are the residents of Haxey, in eastern England, who every Jan. 6 chase 13 women’s hoods through the frozen fields. And all because 700 years ago, one Lady de Mowbray had her wind-whipped hood restored to her by 13 gallant farm workers.

On Easter Monday, the burghers of Hallaton in central England participate in the annual Hare Pie Scramble and Bottle Kicking, which developed in 1770 when someone gave a local churchman a piece of land on condition he provided residents with hare pies, bread and ale.

To this day, pieces of hare pie are hurled to a good-natured mob, who then march in procession behind the bronze sculpture of a hare for a rugby-like game with residents of neighboring Medbourne. This involves kicking three small wooden barrels across the goals, which are streams a mile apart.

In his book, Le Vay also gives details of bizarre competitions, including one that involves rolling large cheeses down a hill, and points out some of Britain’s many bizarre place names: A few hours in the car will take you from Crackpot to Nowhere, via Ugley and Nasty. And he highlights Britain’s many strange buildings, from odd follies to crooked towers and leaning gatehouses.

Louis J. West, professor of psychiatry at UCLA, says it is difficult to define eccentricity because eccentrics don’t seek treatment. “Generally speaking, they’re not unhappy and they’re not out of touch with reality,” he says.

Weeks believes eccentrics actually suffer lower levels of stress “because they do not feel the need to conform.” With few exceptions, the subjects in his study “were happy, even joyful, people, and their joy was infectious,” he says.

Lord Bath concurs: “Yes, you could call me a happy man. Shrinks shy away from me.”

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A Calendar of Craziness

January: Jan. 6, or nearest Saturday, people of Stoke Gabriel in southern England “wassail,” or sing, to apple trees and perform ancient dances to ensure fertility of apple crop.

February: Saturday in late February, 6:30 p.m., giant paper moon floated on canal at Slaithwaite, West Yorkshire, then pulled out by women in memory of smuggling legend.

March: March 1, children of Lanark in southern Scotland gather at St. Nicholas Church for “Whuppity Scourie,” in which each child dashes around church three times clutching ball of paper on string, then scrambles for pennies thrown by local bigwig.

April: Easter Monday, World Coal Carrying Championship in Ossett, West Yorkshire. Coal workers vie to be first to carry 110 pounds of coal uphill from Royal Oak pub to maypole on main street nearly a mile away.

May: Various dates, contestants attempt to catch cheese rolled down hills of Gloucestershire, southwestern England. Runners and spectators sometimes injured by bouncing 8-pound Double Gloucester cheeses.

June: Saturday in early June, Ye Olde Royal Oak Inn at Wetton in Derbyshire hosts World Toe Wrestling Championships.

July: Second Saturday, at Peel on Isle of Man, men in horned helmets reenact attack by raiding Norsemen.

August: Second Saturday, Burry Man, covered head to toe in burrs and wearing flowered hat, stalks South Queensferry on Scotland’s Firth of Forth collecting money and whisky. Tradition may have originated as fertility figure, pagan scapegoat or fishermen’s good luck charm.

September: Saturday nearest to Sept. 18, Gurning Championships at Egremont in Cumbria, northern England, in which contestants pull faces.

October: Wednesday late in month, lawyers present hazel rods, six large horseshoes and 61 nails at High Court in London, payment of 700-year-old rents on properties in southern England and capital.

November: Nov. 5, residents of Shebbear in southern England ritually turn giant boulder that legend says was dropped by devil on way to harm village. Deliberately discordant peal of bells rung to drive Old Nick away.

December: Christmas Day, people of Kirkwall in Orkney Islands stage “Uppies and Doonies,” fast-running game with 200 people on each side that degenerates into four-hour brawl.