...and ‘Buster’ Crabb’s day

Press, 19 April 1980, Page 17

...and ‘Buster’ Crabb’s day

Jeremy Beadle’s Today's The Day. By Jeremy Beadle. W. H. Allen, 1979. 737 pp. Index. $15.70. (Reviewed by Barry Holland)

Today is the day that Commander; Lionel “Buster” Crabb disappeared; the day a counterfeit Count Von Attems landed in Sydney, took its society by storm, and to the cleaners for $60,000; Duryea’s automobile made its. first successful run; Benjamin Disraeli died; and “the man who never was,” the decoy body of a fake British officer, set about fooling the Germans in World War 11. This is a sample of the offerings from a book sub-titled “A Chronicle of the Curious” which is dedicated to the odd, entertaining, and the unashamedly bizarre, according to its compiler. Mr Beadle also says that “with the possible exception of some hearsay evidence and the occasional apocryphal anecdote clearly indicatea in the text, everything. « . is-true” or as true as could be ascertained. Mr Beadle admits that his tales are a little strange and often even incredible. They are. Captain J. Hedley fell out of an aircraft at 1500 ft only to finish up sitting on the .tail of .the machine as a result of the slipstream; Empress Anne of Russia made an out-of-favour prince, Michael Golitsyn, marry a particularly ugly girl, built them an ice palace with an ice bed, and left them naked to celebrate their wedding night; and while the body of author Thomas Hardy was cremated, his heart was grabbed and presumably eaten by a cat before it could be buried m the Stinsford churchyard. These are just a few of the book’s stories. Its pages are crowded with famous or freak people, their births and deaths, strange stories about animals or aviation, tales of U.F.O.s and plenty of stories about death — more than 100 on death in various forms such .as hanging, assassination, decapitation, murder, and suicide. Mr Beadle’s book is entertaining, often bizarre, and has occasional

touches of fairly rustic humour, Above all it is a gossipy book with stories of the type one may welt hear in a pub, which raises the question of accuracy. At times, it seems, .the tala grows in the telling. Possibly the. best example of this ,is the book’s own items on the Wild West killer John Wesley Hardin which improve Hardin’s body count — and drop his age by a year — as “Today’s the Day” progresses. This makes the reader have slight, but nagging doubts about the accuracy of the book’s colourful anecdotes.

This is a pity when one reads that George Washington grew marijuana, Napoleon’s haemorrhoids may have helped distract him from winning at Waterloo, and a medical journal claim that the treadle sewing machine may have aphrodisiac properties. “Today’s the Day” has a good index, not so good illustrations, and seems quite steeply priced for what it offers. It is an ideal book to add spice to bar* room conversations and to perhaps start an argument, but not the best for settling one.