Oh What A Time... - #104 Lost Property (Part 2)

Episode Date: March 31, 2025

This is Part 2! For Part 1, check the feed!This week we’re trawling through history’s lost property bin to examine a bunch of famous things that went missing. We’ve got a load of Academy Awards, Lawrence of Arabia’s lost manuscript and Queen Victoria’s lost statue.Plus - did human happiness significantly degrade once jogging was invented? Although it does seem to have done wonders for a certain namesake in San Quentin prison. If you’ve got anything to add on this or anything else, do email: [e-mail] you fancy a bunch of OWAT content you’ve never heard before, why not treat yourself and become an Oh What A Time: FULL TIMER?Up for grabs is:- two bonus episodes every month!- ad-free listening- episodes a week ahead of everyone else- And much moreSubscriptions are available via AnotherSlice and Wondery +. For all the links head to: ohwhatatime.comYou can also follow us on: X (formerly Twitter) at @ohwhatatimepodAnd Instagram at @ohwhatatimepodAaannnd if you like it, why not drop us a review in your podcast app of choice?Thank you to Dan Evans for the artwork (idrawforfood.co.uk).Chris, Elis and Tom xSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to episodes of Oh What A Time early and ad free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. is simple. Bel Air Direct. Insurance simplified. in ancient Rome. From maniacal monarchs to Soviet spies to the history of milk. And we ask the questions other history shows are too chicken to. How would you feel about consummating your marriage in front of your in-laws in medieval Britain? No thanks. How would your puny little arms fair as part of the crew on a Viking longboat? And would you be up for a night out to see a sapient pig in Victorian London?

This is Oh What A Time, the podcast that the Times newspaper described as very funny, if less scholarly than it rivals, probably fair. This podcast is guaranteed to make your life better, by reminding you that things in the past were so much worse. That's Oh What A Time available every Monday and Tuesday on Wondry, with two bonus episodes every month on Wondry+. Hello, this is part two of Lost Property. Let's get on with the show. Right, on we go then. In the aftermath of the First World War, Colonel T.E. Lawrence was an international celebrity

thanks to his role in the Arab uprising against the Ottoman Empire. So he's, you know, our listeners, the majority of our listeners will know him as Lawrence of Arabia. He was also a budding writer, and was already busy at work on a volume titled The Seven Pillars of Wisdom When the War Broke Out.

So it's a travelogue of his journey to seven cities across the Middle East, but how does this make you feel Tom? Lawrence was unhappy with the manuscript and so burnt it. All that remains is the title. Oh no. Why? You're filing it away somewhere.

Yeah, absolutely. In a pre-cloud era, you simply cannot be burning manuscripts. No, no, absolutely not. Yeah.-cloud era, you simply cannot be burning manuscripts. No, no, absolutely not. Yeah. No, no, no. That's so frustrating. Buy one of those, what are those things that look a bit like a harpsichord or something? They like, they, you keep your contracts and your financial things. Oh yeah, yeah, like a sort of concertina file. Is a harpsichord the right word? A concertina file. I'm not keeping my contracts in a harpsichord. A harpsichord, the right word? A concertina file. I'm not keeping my contracts in a harpsichord.

Look, I'm eccentric, Ellis. What can I say? Because if someone breaks in, it's the last place they'll look. They'll never go check the harpsichord, little do they know all my important information. That's the funniest wrong word in a sentence I've heard for decades. You know, one of those, one of those obstacles you keep your contracts in. That is absolutely incredible. Right. Now he found himself at the first- Before- Yeah.

Just before you move on, do you remember a few episodes ago we were talking about Thomas Carlyle who had written a history of the French Revolution? Oh yes. The house and the pages of the manuscript. Yeah. had written a history of the French Revolution, thousands of pages of manuscript, lent it to his mate, John Stuart Mill, and the housemaid mistook it for waste paper and burned it all, and he had to start again. Oh my gosh.

Yeah, my equivalent is that, I think we have talked about this before, I can never work out where I've saved the most recent version of something on my laptop. But. So there's a lot of me desperate. I do always find it. There's always eight or nine minutes of pointless wasted time as I try to find it.

When Tom and I were writing Fancy Football League, we wrote that on Google Docs. And I did used to comfort myself. We definitely will not lose what we've done. Unless something awful happens in California, in which case we've got big problems globally. If Google goes under, the program is done. But I don't think that will happen. So he found himself at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, and then he began writing another book all about the Arab revolts. By the end of the year, he'd mulled most of the book down, leaving a manuscript of some quarter of a million words. So he's been grafting, and you know, he's either typing

that or written by hand. So it is hard, right? And then disaster struck, as the London Evening Standard pointed out, in January 1920. Colonel T. Lawrence has lost, by theft at a London railway station, a half-completed manuscript dealing with his wartime activities. It was his intention that the book should not be published during his lifetime and it is unlikely that he will attempt to rewrite it." Now... It makes me feel sick. And the horror. As soon as he'd realised. Can you imagine the feeling?

Yeah. Yeah, because you know the feeling? Yeah. Yeah, because it's not backed up. I love backing stuff up. The modern world and modern tech actually often comes in for quite a bad rap. Having lived in the non-backed up stuff era is so useful. How would you back it up? I suppose at that time you'd have to write and say out loud what you're writing while

someone sits next to you writing the same thing. So there's a second version. You would have to pay a scribe to copy it out again. Or that. But that's a ballic and expensive. Like a manual copywriter. Yeah, yeah. Would you have had a scribe who would essentially offer photocopying services in like the 1600s. You'd go copy that, make a copy of it. Well, this is the 1920s. Yeah. But yeah, I don't know. But I mean, scribes must have been like, yeah, I can do that. I'll copy that for you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Quite boring. That's your backup. I was trying to work out there whether you could have some kind of traction where you have your pen and then a stick going between your pen and another pen, which is on a second page about a metre to the left of you, and it just replicates every movement you do, so you do get a copy that way. Is that the answer? But then why stop at one backup? Get five or six pens all grouped together. There you go. Look at this. I think we're onto something, Chris. If Google does have

a shut down. Yeah, we're onto something if we can invent that time machine first. Novelists! And also work out how to pull that off, which is also Leon. Tired of not backing up your novels? You don't know what backing up means, because that is a word that is going to be invented in about 90 years. Never forget it. Now, the story went about that the station in question was in fact reading

and the manuscript was lost when he mislaid his briefcase or had it stolen in a cafe there when he was changing trains on his way to Oxford. One friend, the right and former soldier Robert Graves, insisted that the theft had been politically motivated. What survived of that first draft was the introduction and two sections from near the end. Undeterred, Lawrence sat down and began rewriting the book from memory, a drafty later called Text 2. Not at the train station?

No, no, no. Okay. A double espresso please. When do you like shots? He got 400,000 words written in three months, which is too many. Fair play. That's too many. Before beginning the process of redrafting and editing, which took him another year or

so, this gave him text number three. But what really happened to that first draft of the book? Was it stolen, as everyone believed, or mislaid? Or was it destroyed because Lawrence was unhappy with what he'd produced? Well, a manuscript came to light in 1997 and Lawrence's biographer pointed out that the quality of this early draft will fill speculation that he destroyed it. Imagine that! Someone finding a first draft so shit that your biographers

are like, yeah he destroyed it because if this was the, he wouldn't want this being published posthumously or whatever. You know, this is not good enough. Wouldn't you surely, if that is the case, go, well, I'm just going to use this first draft to inform my next one. And I know I want to improve on it. It's good that I've got this. I can read it.

Yeah. That sentence there is nice or whatever. Not just destroy it in time. I think, I think. But yes. Well, I don't know very much about T. Lawrence, so I don't, I don't really understand his process, but still. It was already known that Lawrence had destroyed his notes, which made rewriting the manuscript more difficult. And so destroying a wayward manuscript would not have been out with the bounds of reasons. Indeed, he said as much in 1922 in a

letter sent to his friend, the playwright George Bernard Shaw. God, literary circles were incredible in those days, weren't they? Yeah. I love that when you hear great literary giants just meeting up. I'd love to overhear that conversation. A lot of pressure being in that WhatsApp group when you pipe up, hoping you come across another one. Even at typo, you'd be absolutely devastated. I didn't mean to put that apostrophe there. I am a good writer. Please don't get rid of me from the group.

You know, the most famous poets, they often used to send first drafts to other poets to say, oh, what do you think of this then? Like, I think The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot, I think Ezra Pound gave T.S. Eliot notes on that. Wow. Yeah, yeah. Wow, that's awesome.

So as he said to George Bonaparte, he was someone who would destroy notes. Yeah. I don't know if he destroyed this, but it was something that he would do. Now, but Lawrence Pined for the Lost Version, which he thought was shorter, snappier, more truthful was something that he would do. Now, but Lawrence pined for the lost version, which he thought was shorter, snappier, more truthful

than the versions he produced subsequently, even if they proved to be better literature. Press, you know, if it was all the rules to cover his own mistake and destruction, he kept up the pretence of loss. So he claimed he called lost property from Oxford, he engaged in the national press, he offered a reward, and he did everything he could

to recover the manuscript, Alton of O'Vale. Now, if he's doing that, but he's sort of destroyed it or lost it, then it all adds up, doesn't it? So do you think that suggests it genuinely was an actual loss then? That's what your, yeah. I would imagine so, yeah. I think so. Now, if the story of Ansa of Arabia can be called into question, it's what your, yeah. I would imagine so, yeah, I think so.

Now if the story of Anse of Arabia can be called into question, it's got a very curious echo in the experience of another very famous wartime writer, Ernest Hemingway. Now in 1922, he was living in Paris when he was working as a journalist, starting to write fiction. So he was due to cover the Lausanne Peace Conference

and so he traveled to Switzerland in December 1922 and on the way there he met an American magazine editor who asked about his writing and wondered whether he might see some samples. The world in the 20s just seemed much easier didn't you? Yeah you know you just... It's a lot of meeting blokes in the pub. Yeah and you'd meet an influential person on the train and they'd say oh yeah you got any articles? You'd be like yeah and you'd send them and they'd be like, oh great, now I write for Time magazine.

It just seems much, there seem to be fewer gatekeepers. Anyway, so this magazine editor asked for examples and whether he could send some samples. Now, Hemingway got in touch with his wife Hadley, who packed the material, including a novel set during the First World War, which was a precursor to Farewell to Arms, one of his most famous works.

In a suitcase, made her way to the train station, the Gare de Lyon in Paris. The story goes, can you imagine this? Because it's not you doing it, it's your wife. As she put the suitcase down for a moment by a bottle of Evian mineral water, when she turned around, it was gone. Inside was almost everything Hemingway had written up to that point.

Oh no. If Izzy rang me to say, you know everything you've ever created was in one suitcase, well you'll never guess what just happened to me at Paddington. Why what? What was it? Oh, did you eat Paddington the Bear? Yeah, there's obviously some. Yeah, anyway, you don't often think of pret as having lots of dodgy people in it, but I was only buying a bottle of water. Wow.

Oh, that's heart breaking. Yeah. Now that might. Bottle of Evian. I like bottle of Evian as well because it's so sort of tasty. Yeah, that's heartbreaking. Yeah. Now that might... Bottle of Evian. I like Bottle of Evian as well because it's so sort of tasty. Yeah, exactly. It's like a plastic bottle of Evian you get with a paper. Now that might have derailed his career before it even begun. It's never been found. And he told a friend, you naturally would say, oh good, et cetera, but don't say it to me because I haven't yet reached that mood.

Yeah. Now unlike Lawrence, Hemingway never bothered to recover the suitcase, there was no reward offer, no phoning the lost property of the police, certainly no publicity around it. But anything it gave him something to write about, which he later did in a chapter that appeared in his Parisian memoir, A Movable Feast. And, obviously, as you can imagine, he had a big row with Hadley

and they were to divorce in 1927. They got divorced over this. I don't think they got a divorce over that, but certainly it contributed. It had to have helped. Yeah. I don't think he was lying there in bed at night thinking to himself, but one thing, you know, even though obviously we're arguing a lot and we're arguing about who does enough run the house etc. Thankfully when I close my eyes at night I can always say to myself, well at least you lost every single

thing I've ever created in a suitcase. If they went to marriage counselling the counsellor's going to say you lost everything he owned. In the pre-packing up age! Now in both cases, the loss of those early drafts was ultimately turned into triumph. Both men started afresh, they learned how to write fiction. Lawrence worked under the influence of George Bernard Shaw and he enforced it. Oh my god. Will Barron Amazing. Will Barron He also had translated the ancient Greeks. Hemingway adopted a paredown style for which he became famous.

So, you know, I remember writing scripts sort of 18 or 19 years ago, very early scripts when I just started in stand-up. And I do remember losing stuff in the days when you weren't backing stuff up online. So you might be saving another version on the desktop maybe. Yeah. I vividly remember being in like university libraries at midnight, the day before you've got to hand something in and like Microsoft Word crashing in the day before auto-save.

Yes, that happened to me. Oh, corrupting. Yeah, yeah. Or that. You're like, where is it? It's gone. That happened to me when I was doing my ME. I've got like, I've got eight hours.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. With the comedy, I remember it vividly happening when I was working on a desktop computer and word corrupted us and me. I'm feeling fairly certain that the second version was a bit snappier. Interesting. By which you mean much shorter. But you don't want to have to put yourself through that. But yeah, yeah. Wow. That's incredible. Genuinely nauseating the idea of

losing something. I don't I think if you've got one copy of a huge book, you shouldn't be traveling around with it. Chain it chain it to you. I might have said this on the podcast before. But I used to work in a cafe and there was a guy who came in and he wanted to be a novelist and he had a really interesting life, quite an itinerant life. He would often just go, right I'm going to go and stay in the Brecon Beacons and live in a tent for a month. Even in the winter, I don't think he had a flat, but he really wanted to be a writer, so I was talking to him about writing and he said, I've actually written three novels. And I said, oh wow. So

where are they then? If you're living in a tent. He said, they're in a bin bag in my tent. And I felt like going, that is a recipe for disaster. I cannot emphasise this enough. Change your habits. Don't store anything of importance in a bin. No. Rule number one. He said, yeah, they're all in a bin bag in my tent. Really? Have you got other versions of them? No. It doesn't necessarily suggest that you have much faith in the quality of the work as well, if his instinct is to whack it in a bin bag. You've got to back yourself more. Bin bags not ideal for keeping manuscripts in the right order. No, no, no, no.

Wow. Amazing, Ellis. Yeah. Can I propose a toast at the end of this section? Yeah. To the cloud. And all who save in her. Is that right? Alright guys, I'm taking you back in time now to December 1861.

You'll never guess who's died. I'll give you a clue. There are frankly too many monuments to this man all over London. 1861 is this? Prince Albert. Yeah, Prince Albert. R.I.P. Ah, there you go.

I have thought this my entire life. It is ridiculous the amount of monuments to Prince Albert. Yeah. It's insane. Well, I cycled past the Albert Hall the other day. Big one. That's a big one. And the Albert Hall is one of the most spectacular theatres in Europe. It is incredible, the

Royal Albert Hall. But as I cycled past it, I thought, there is a lot of Albert stuff. And I, Ellis, have done a gig at the Royal Albert Hall, not in the main venue, in the bar section where Albon is running a weekly stand-up gig. Yeah, yeah, me too. I've done that gig. And I I told everyone you're doing the bloody Albert Hall on Friday night. Oh my God. And there'd be like a proper concert going on in the actual Albert Hall and you open it up and there'd be someone huge warming up. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. People don't think of the Royal Albert Hall as having a little studio, but it does. Yeah. Does the Royal Albert Hall need to be running a 100 person comedy gig in it? I think surely it's shifting enough tickets in the main room, isn't it? You're all right.

You're the Royal Albert Hall. Don't worry about it. You don't need an extra two grand a month. Yeah, just keep cellos in here or something. You don't need to put a gig on a month. Just keep cellos in here or something. You don't need to put a gig on. I'd love to play the organ in Royal Albert Hall. You ever see when you're in there, you're like, that's a big bloody organ. There's big pipes. You imagine that power of pressing down that one key. You'd feel like God. Oh, it's a big, it's an amazing space. But yeah, I agree, too much Albert stuff. Can you play the organ Chris? Uh, I could, I could knock out, uh, Old MacDonald had a farm with one finger.

If they allow you, I'll come down and listen. I promise you, I will come to the Royal Albert Hall. If they let you play Old MacDonald, I will come down and listen to that. It's good contact. We'll work it on, we'll whack it on the ground. It's good content. Have you been opposite the Royal Albert Hall? There's the, um, the Albert Memorial, which is a huge memorial to Albert. Of course, all these memorials were the result of Queen Victoria going into a

deep, deep and long lasting grief. Lots of monuments constructed on her orders. In fact, in Albert's memory, she ordered the construction of the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore Cottage near Windsor Castle at a cost of, remember this is 1861, £200,000. In today's money, that value is £23 million pounds. Whoa! Near Windsor Castle. And again, a lot of memorials right in the heart of London, the Royal Albert Hall.

But you've got a 23 million pound mausoleum getting built. Is anyone going, can you, Vicky? Izzy will get one. You need to calm down. Izzy will get one when she dies. If she dies before me, that's what she'll get. Because I'm a bloody good husband, I love her. Is a royal mausoleum, by the way, is that just to do with him or is it just to do with

the Royals? Well, the Royal Mausoleum, I'm not sure, but she wanted, Victoria wanted a memorial built with twin effigies, which would be sculpted according to how she and her husband looked as young people, not in the respective moments of their death. When they went to Alton Towers. There's two of them, hands in the air on the log flume in marble. It was the best day ever, said Victor. We have to depict it. Would you construct the entire log flume out of marble as well, so you don't just get the end result?

There's also effigies of the people who are directly in front and directly behind them. And an effigy of a bored teenage log flue worker. That's amazing. Yeah. Very briefly, I genuinely think if the Royals tried to do that now, there would be a backlash. The idea of that sort of expenditure. The culture has changed hugely. No surprise,, since 1861, but you couldn't get away with that now. I don't think there'd be any support for that now. No one's signing that off. You get that invoice in, you're like, we need to have a chat. You've got a great hall there, a lovely memorial next door,

surely we've got to draw a line under this. Queen Victoria, what she wanted... And don't get me started on Anne. line under this. So Queen Victoria, what she wanted... And don't get me started on Anne. She wanted these effigies as they were when they were young, not at the moment of their death. So the effigies were made at the same time. So Prince Albert had died, his effigy is made, and Queen Victoria's is being made at the same time. Obviously, the problem is Queen Victoria outlives Albert by nearly 40 years. So they've got this effigy sculpted by Italian Baron Carlo Maracetti. Effigy of Queen Victoria that's obviously not

ready to go on the memorial because she's not dead. So what they did is they just stored it in a cupboard basically at Windsor Castle. But over the years, over that ensuing 40 years, the space that the sculpture was stored in, no one really knew what it was. Someone just bricked it up and enclosed it behind a wall. Oh my God. And when it came to the early 20th century, and Queen Victoria lay dying, Queen Victoria said, oh, you must remember to dig out that effigy that needs to be put on my memorial next to Albert.

And then she died in early 1901. And basically Lord Esher, who was the castle's deputy governor, had to begin an investigation. What was she talking about? So they didn't know where it was? Wow. They didn't even know if there was one. That feels like some very lazy build to be looking at a handcrafted, whatever you call it, effigy or statue of her head and just going, I'm just going to break that up. I just put a wall in

front of that. You think you tell someone and that it would be written down somewhere. Yeah, exactly. But if you're looking at a sculpture, it would look like it was kind of, I guess, my thought was, it must have looked like it was just stuck to the ground and that they can't move it, so they're like, well, we'll just break this up. When I had a real job in an office, I worked with an absolutely amazing office manager, who was just this incredible administrator and she knew where everything was and everything was filed perfectly. And if you could mention anything to her from the previous 10 years and she could find it in about five seconds, had she been working at the palace, that would not have happened.

40 years or not. Those people are special, you need to, and cling onto them. Do your partners, your wives, do a thing which what Claire describes as a woman's look. So if I can't find something, I'll go and go, Claire, I can't find my glasses. She goes, does this need a woman's look? Oh, I see. She comes down and then she finds it within like eight seconds. That is so smug about it. But she claims that men are unable to look for something they've lost and find it.

I certainly do an adult's look. Okay. So if you live with young children, as the three of us do, they'll say, oh my God, I've lost my favourite, but where is it? And then they get really upset and it's just on the bed. And you're like, how could, what is happening here? You're like, come on. Although I did get very frustrated that we had no butter beans the other day.

And as he said, yes, we do. And I said, I've been looking for an hour and they were just in the cupboard. Right. Spent an hour looking for butter beans. I think the label had been, you know, the can was... The label wasn't facing out. I just panicked. I'd have loved butter beans, actually.

In an hour, you could have gone to the shop. Yeah. I'd have bloody loved to have some butter beans with this soup. But alas. Just so I know, what is, what were you doing with those butter beans? Just so I know, just the completist amongst us. Making a meal. I've discussed another podcast known as Ann Tuna, because it was invented by my friend Ann. And it's, it's tuna, olive oil, lots of black pepper, anchovies and butter beans and parsley. Is that nice? Without the butter beans it just doesn't work. Well it lacks a heft doesn't it? It lacks something soft.

A bed basically. A bit carbless. As Dibba D'Odocherty said, the Irish comedian, it is Anne, the woman's name, Toona, not like Anne Chovey. It's not like a sort of Anne... Okay. Good name to stick on that Anne Chovey, isn't it? I like that. Shall we go back to the mystery of Queen Victoria's effigy at Windsor Castle? Please do, yeah. So Lord Isher's in charge of trying to find this effigy. He wrote in his diary, last year the Queen mentioned to me that there was a recumbent figure of herself in existence at Windsor. He wrote, I asked the clerk of the works where it was kept. He had never heard of it. No one had heard of it. And there was much

scepticism. Now she was on her deathbed. So many people thought, she's just losing her marbles right at the very end. But it turned out she was right. Lord Isher continues in his diary. Is she losing her marble sculptures? Very good. Thank you. One of Britain's finest comedy writers. Bye now. You can see what I've done. It's actually quite pleasant.

You can see the workings out. Ta-da. You're not going to fall off your chair laughing, but you'll give it a nod in the conversation with friends. You go, yeah, I recognise that as being something. I could say with certainty that something just happened. You staying for another pint? No, I think I'm going to get off actually.

After this is Lord Isha's diary. After an inquiry, an old workman remembered that in about 1865 the figure had been walled up in the stores at Windsor. The brickwork was taken down and the figure found, and it was pure chance that it was discovered. Love it. The investigation apparently took several weeks, so much so that the statue was not in fact installed at the Mausoleum until April 1901, three months after the Queen's death.

And the entire story was not revealed until Isha's diary was published in the mid 1930s. Do you know what I love about this, this gets my brain going, what other amazing artifacts are buried behind some wall? There's gonna be so many amazing things that are sat there gathering dust. Yeah, we had a fireplace put into our bedroom when we bought this house. So there had been a fireplace that was bricked up at some point. So obviously that had to be knocked down, that were in the chimney, and we found someone's library card and their national insurance card and you think I don't know how it ended up in the chimney and then bricked up but you would obviously you're

never going to find it and you'd just be you'd be racking your brains like where where did I lose that bloody library card it's actually been bricked up in your chimney and from there you committed identity fraud to the chamber 45 years old yeah yeah yeah I mean, HMRC think I'm 140 years old. I've got a little story. My friend Simran, he bought a flat. And on the first week, it was a one bed flat. On the first week he left with his girlfriend, went out to the streets, buy coffee or whatever. They looked up at the flat when she went, Oh, what's that window there? And oh, I think I think that must be the bathroom. Yeah, I think that's the bathroom. I should go and check. They went back up into the flat into the bathroom, looked out the window, the window doesn't look out where they thought it should. We didn't look out on where they were stood a minute earlier. So that's weird.

It's like tapping the walls, tap the bathroom mirror, hollow sound, pull back the mirror, a whole second bedroom behind the mirror. A bit creepy, but it did mean they bought a one bed flat, which immediately became a two bed flat and doubled in value. What? That's incredible. Yeah. That's insane. And it was on none of the plans. It was not in records anywhere, but it was theirs. And then they then suddenly had a two-bed flat, which went up twice its value. There you go. Creepy. That's an incredible story. I know someone who bought a ground floor flat,

and it was near a railway station. And basically there was like an old railway stores under the flat. Then they went down and they had like access to this enormous basement. That was an old kind of railway. So they converted the Grand Fall flat into a dual floor. That was full of all the shit sandwiches they sell in railway station cafes. Going back decades. I love stories like this. Hello, Oh What A Time, if you've got any more stories like this. Yes, that is good. We have under our living room a four-foot drop,

which apparently could be used, but it would require so much work to turn it into something. But we have at the moment, if we want it, a very tiny room. If you're willing to shuffle around on your hands and knees. It's actually more mausoleum, I would say, than room, isn't it? It is, yes, exactly. Look at a little lie down there, maybe. Put a futon down there.

I've got another royal relic for you. So when England and Scotland came together in the Act of Union in 1707, the Scottish crown jewels, which largely date from the 16th century, were wrapped up and placed in a wooden chest for safekeeping, just in case there should ever be a renunciation of the Act of Union and a restoration of Scottish independence. So the Scottish crown jewels, they were like, we're now together, we don't necessarily need these. So the regalia was not exactly lost.

Most people assumed they were somewhere in Edinburgh Castle, but they were stashed away. And there was lots of rumours about whether nefarious England had actually come and stolen the crown jewels away from Scotland. And if we fast forward to the 4th of February 1818, a century has basically passed since the Scottish crown jewels have been last seen. And a writer called Walter Scott convinced George IV to let him have a rummage around Edinburgh Castle, effectively, to prove that the active union had been above board and that the Scottish Crown Jewels

did still exist. So on literally the 4th of February, 1818, we know the day, Scott and a few others broke into a room that had been walled up years earlier and discovered a wooden chest inside, much to their relief. They opened it up and there was, in there, in the chest, was the crown jewels that were laid in the same position as they were that day in 1707 when the Act of Humanity was sealed. Wow, what a find.

That's so cool. Yeah. And they put those Scottish crown jewels, then went on display to the public in 1821, as they still are today. What an episode of Cash in the Attic that was. Imagine that on the Antiques Roadshow. You'll never guess what we felt. I'm on such an Antiques Roadshow vibe.

I'm just watching old clips. Yeah. It's so great watching unbelievable finds. Yeah, I love it. It's just wonderful. The look of shock. And then the sort of giggles from the old people stood around watching unbelievable finds. Yeah, I love it. It's just wonderful. The look of shock and then the sort of giggles from the old people stood around watching as well. I quite like it. It's great. But that's amazing. That's amazing. I also love the fact that it just

remained in the same position in situ, just in the dark. Yes, it's weird, isn't it? It's quite romantic about that, isn't it? Like crips, you know where people are buried, like those coffins laid, for example, I think Elizabeth I at Westminster Arabi, I believe, her coffin is there, laid as it was that day she was buried 150 years ago. A crypt fascinates me. Oh yeah.

Absolutely. Let's not end on that. That's where I'll end up in a crypt. I've made my feelings quite clear on this. There are certain tins in our food covers that will remain untouched in silence and in the dark, much like they've been, you know, like a royal lay to rest in a crypt somewhere. There's some, there's some, what are those thin beans

you might have in Chinese food? What are they called? It's a Chinese takeaway. It's called, not warts chestnuts, thin beans. Bean sprouts. Bean sprouts, there you are. There's a tin of those I've had sat there for about five years.

We're probably never gonna eat them. Be very careful if you decide to eat them because bad bean sprouts will take you to hell and back, Tom. You'll be joining me in the crypt if you eat those bean sprouts, so I would chuck them now. You're there after some doggy butter beans. What a way to go.

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