Oh What A Time... - #26 Blunders (Part 2)

Episode Date: January 30, 2024

This is Part 2, for Part 1 check the feed yesterday! This week on the show we're chatting: BLUNDERS! From the worst sponsorship deal ever to darken German ice hockey, an author's worst nightmare come true, the demise of Frederick Barbarossa; and this week's bonus bit is big balls ups in the Roman Army. A Police detective emailed this week to say he'd like to go back and solve a great mystery with his One Day Time Machine. And we have a host of GREAT FEATURES for you to get in touch about: THE ONE DAY TIME MACHINE, HOW WOULD YOU IMPRESS SOMEONE IN 500AD and of course DO YOU HAVE A RELATIVE OF NOTE? Want to contribute to any of our INCREDIBLE format points? Do let us know at: [e-mail] And why not become an Oh What A Time: FULL TIMER? In exchange for your £4.99 to support the show, you'll get: - the 4th part of every episode and ad-free listening - episodes a week ahead of everyone else - a bonus episode every month - And first dibs on any live show tickets Subscriptions are available via AnotherSlice, Apple and Spotify. For all the links head to: ohwhatatime.com You can follow us on: X (formerly Twitter) at @ohwhatatimepod And Instagram at @ohwhatatimepod Aaannnd 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). And thank you for listening! We’ll see you next week! BYE! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. So, welcome to part two of Oh What A Time, the blunders episode. so i'm going to talk to you about one of the worst things that can possibly happen to a writer and more specifically a blunder that occurred during the writing of um one of the most important books on history ever written so i'm a writer that's like most of my living is that the most stressful thing that happens are you are you quite organized people the thing i find stressful as a writer is i can i can never find my most recent draft on my laptop i never know where i've

where i've saved it yeah don't talk to me about this so i will save a document and i'll just save it somewhere on my laptop. Yeah. The thing I always get caught out, I always get caught out by calling a document Final Version. Oh, yeah. Final Version 1.1. That's exactly it. Final Version 2.0.

I think if I ever run a writing course, that would be day one. Yeah. I would be saying, right, I want you to never refer to anything as final version. You can date it, but for God's sake, once the word final gets into the mix, we're in big, big trouble. Mine is a heady mix of either. It's all three.

It's final version, the name of the thing followed by the date, or draft one, two, three, whatever it happens to be. But a combination of all those three so i see every time i come on to start work on a project again i always go down to finder the bottom left and i just start typing in random things i have no idea and hope i don't know often my computer doesn't show me everything i don't understand it there must be a system but it's not sustainable but we're 15 years into his career and it seems to be the way I do things. We are going to get, Tom is going to get some of the most helpful emails we've ever received on this podcast.

And it is going to change Tom's life. Genuinely. Please do send those in. Please help me. To tell you this story, though, so my little worry is nothing compared to what happened with this story. This is remarkable. To tell you this story, we first need to what happened with this story. This is remarkable. To tell you this story, we first need to get into the time machine.

We'll head back to 1833. And this is a time when there was a writer and a philosopher called John Stuart Mill, who was alive and well. You may have heard of him. He was considered one of the great minds of the time. A question for you, Ellis. What is the nicest thing that anyone has ever written about you in a in a review because i want to compare it to something that was written about um john stuart mill just see how it compares what do you think the nicest thing anyone's ever said about

you in a review timeout referred to me as charming charming okay so by comparison the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy described described him as the most important philosopher of the 19th century. Okay, I've never had that. Do you think that would go to your head? If somebody described you as the most important podcaster of the 21st century, how would that affect you? You know, I know it. I know it's true. I just wish other people would acknowledge it. The next day, let's say that's been on the front of the paper.

Is it changing the way you walk? Is it changing the way you interact with people out and about? It's certainly changing the way I play Fiberside. The amount of nutmegs I'd be trying as the 21st century's most important podcaster. I wouldn't be confident if someone called me the most important podcaster of the 21st century, given it's only 2024, you know?

If it was towards the end of the century i'd have a little more confidence oh i take that i remember teenage fan club in an interview once i read with them they said we uh we're gonna release records in january so then you could say this is the best record of the year so far and then you put that on a sticker on the cd for the rest of the year and everyone's like oh my god what a great album that must be i would take it so unsurprisingly mill this brilliant mind was often approached to write books and in the autumn 1833 he was asked to write a history on the french revolution a history of the french revolution however because he was so busy being uh the most important philosopher of the 19th century he didn't have time to do this so instead he asked his friend the scotsman thomas carlisle to write

it instead which um which does make me laugh i know it's nice that you're thinking about his mate but it's it's quite the ask isn't it yeah yeah like me saying oh skull i know you've been a bit skinned i found you a job it's writing the complete history of the french revolution you probably got i'll probably just get a bar job to be honest i just feel like quite the request yeah but thomas carlisle so he was at that time a struggling writer and he was completely skint um and so he took he took the job and the book called the french revolution was to cover the revolution from 1789 through to 1795 and was to be published in three volumes in 1837 and so whole shebang the whole shebang and in the summer of 1834 Carlyle set to work on this huge job and it really was a huge job there was so much research

required to write this um early on Carisle is quoted as telling a friend, I've got a heap of books around me, and Mill himself laid me out the other day a whole barrow full. A barrow full of books. I was wondering whether you'd find that patronising if you were writing a book and a friend came round with a wheelbarrow full of books for you on the subject and then just sort of dumped them in your front room.

I said, get on with it you've got three years the only way i would tackle a subject like this was if i was in prison and i had no other life other than to turn to this task yes i think in that situation i'd be focusing mainly on survival rather than writing a book about the french revolution but fair play to you I do appreciate that um so he started work on this in this on this uh this book using all this research he wrote late into the evening exhausting pace basically he didn't stop for six months and that was just to get volume one finished which he finally did in January 1835 so he spent six months of his life researching and writing this book about the first

third of the French Revolution. Now, this is when things take a turn. However, as he started work on Volume 2, he lent the manuscript of Volume 1 to Mill to get feedback, which Mill agreed to do, taking possession of the sole copy. Any guesses where this might be going? Oh, my God.

The sole copy, okay? However... Oh, I actually feel ill. On March the 6th, 1835, Mill turned up at Carlisle's house looking the very picture of desperation, the way he's described. And over a drink, Mill explained that he'd taken the manuscript with him to a friend's house

and had accidentally left it there. And then a maidservant, who'd found the papers and was unable to read them mistook the book for scrap and threw the entire thing onto the fire. Oh my God. Destroying six months of work.

So this is before, can I shock you, this is before Google Doc. So there's no sort of, oh, well, at least I've got that version I saved just before Christmas. I can use that.

The problem is if it was mislaid or if she'd thrown it in the bin there would be hope yes but she's she's she's set it alight it's gone up in smoke the one thing we didn't want to happen straight in the fire i i feel i feel light-headed how would you think? I want you to really think about that, though. The idea of both of you spending six months of research writing this thing by candlelight.

You get it done. How are you reacting to that news? I think a combination of crying and being sick. Yeah, I don't think I'd shout. I don't think I'd scream. I think I'd vomit. Yeah. I think I'd throw up. left carlisle with only one option which was to rewrite the entire volume from scratch which was not an easy task now this bit i think is interesting and i think this is slightly on him because he'd thrown out all of his notes why did he do that i mean that's

your fault why would you throw out all your own notes? Unless they're like taking over your entire abode. Like you have no room in your house. Because it's just all notes. He could barely remember what he'd written because he was already writing volume two by this point. So he just basically forgot. Oh my God.

Do you reckon Mill turned up the next day with the same wheelbarrow, with those same books going, I guess you need these again just dumping them in the front room Do you know what mate, you can keep the wheelbarrow But do you know what though, there has been periods in my life where, like I've lost a word doc that I've spent a long time working on

and I have just gone right, I'm just going to use this anger right now to just do as much as I can while it's in my head and then I'll deal with this tomorrow but that is normally a day's work or let's say a week's work at most it's not six months of intense when I did my MA

this was in 2003 my computer crashed and I lost thousands of words and it was horrendous. Did you? So what did you do? I had to ring up the head of the course at Cardiff Uni and ask for an extension.

Wow. It was just awful. It was just the worst but it's not as bad as what's happened to Thomas Carlyle and I'm throwing away my notes crucially. When I got to the end of my degree at Cardiff, I had, like, no money left. I was so skint.

I just had enough money to print out my final dissertation, whatever they call it, your final piece of work, which is like a hundred-piece thing. But literally all I had was money to print this out. I printed it out, and I didn't specify which printer, which is like a hundred piece thing but literally all i had was money to print this out i printed it out and i didn't specify which printer so it just got printed somewhere in cardiff i say a minimum of a thousand one thousand five hundred printers and i spent half a day walking around cardiff University, going to every faculty, trying to find my bloody dissertation.

I did actually find it. I did. But it took me, no lie, maybe four hours, four and a half hours to find it. Where was it? It was under, like, just the rack where it comes out of a printer,

other stuff on top of it now, because all the new stuff's been printed since then. Just four hours walking around cardiff university i remember those days being so skint you can't even like you can print some paper five p remember it's like five p a page or something like that yeah it was extremely expensive so carlisle had no other option but to rewrite this. And it took him another six months to rewrite it. A period which Carlisle complained was the ugliest I have had in life or expect to ever have. Every word must have been so painful.

But it was also expensive for Mill, who insisted on paying a daily wage as compensation for the loss of the manuscript. Writing a cheque for £200, which is equivalent to £21,000 in today's money now. daily wage as compensation for the loss of the manuscript writing a check for 200 pounds which is equivalent to 21 grand yes money money now although to his credit kral only took half the amount liz trust think on exactly if you're listening trust um the final sort of interesting side point he was um mill was always quite secretive about who had thrown this into the fire and exactly where it had happened. And there was this idea that was abound at the time that he was basically trying to make sure the maid servant did not get in trouble. That actually isn't the truth. The truth was that he was having an affair with someone in his little love nest outside of the capital.

Because people who worked in houses of the capital because um people who worked in houses in the capital would have been used to manuscripts and stuff like that and they would have filed them but he was actually in this little house outside in the country um with a lady called harriet taylor who's having who um he was having an affair with and he actually wanted to keep that secret that that's where he'd been so he that's that's the real truth as to where why he never really divulged who threw it in the fire or exactly where it happened but yeah so there you are that's one of the great

blunders in writing that is horrendous imagine telling someone who's just finished their PhD that you've you've destroyed the memory stick because you're a top shagger laughing music music looking for a path Because you're a top shagger.

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he was on podcasts over a thousand years after his death. What do you think your nickname would be, Tom? Your Holy Roman Emperor. If it's physical things they're pointing out. Dad bod. Tom the dad bod.

Dad bod the first. And the statues would be really unflattering With me With a little tiny little belly They used to accentuate everything So they'd probably accentuate your dad bod So your belly would become bigger Your shoulders would become narrower Your arms would become thinner

Red beard and dad bod are the sort of things you have on the back Like stag do shirts aren't they Red beard that sort of thing Dad bod the of things you have on the back like stag do shirts aren't they Redbeard that sort of thing Dadbod the first if you were really good benevolent ruler maybe the Dadbod could be the kind of body that all Romans wanted also what would be quite interesting

is when I hit about 50 and constantly being called Dadbod the first had an effect on me and there'd be like a midlife crisis and the statues would start getting slightly more muscly as i'm losing weight and trying to sort of change my body shape you could see you could see the change yeah yeah that'd be that'd be quite good i assume with ethelred the unready i just even though this isn't actually what it means

it was because ethelred is an old English name and I think it means something like, you know, wise counsel. And unready isn't like an old English word for no counsel. So it was like kind of bookish, the non-bookish, if you know what I mean. It's because he was given bad advice. I always thought it was like, there's a war on. Oh, fuck, is that today? Shit!

Where's my sword? Where are my shoes i can't i can't shoes on that's ridiculous where are my fucking shoes ethelred's like it's sunday today no it's monday it's monday today the war started today at night oh bollocks sorry it's because it was match of the day two and not match of the day. I thought it was sorry. So has my daughter got drama today? No, it's school.

Shit. Do you know another one I was thinking about? Edward the Confessor. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Basically a grass. Edward the Grass. Whatever you do, don't tell anything to Edward in confidence

yeah because he will grass you right up he cannot keep a secret that king Chris Skull the snitch so but anyway he was known

for his red beard his contemporaries thought he was almost superhuman so he was this he had this incredible grasp of

of the law he had this amazing abilities as a knight. He had chivalric qualities. Everyone just thought, everyone swooned, right? He was a big dog. He was a big deal. He made his name in the 1140s when he joined the Second Crusade. I mean, the Second Crusade is almost a historical blend in its own right.

We could have done that in this episode. So he emerged from that crusade unscathed. So I assume at this point he's feeling quite lucky. And in 1155 he's elected Holy Roman Emperor

and crowned Frederick I in Rome. And he reigned until his death 35 years later. So he's had a good stint. Okay. He was crowned, incidentally,

by the only Englishman ever to become Pope, Nicholas Breakspear or Adrian IV. I think Nicholas is a good enough name. Yeah. Why bring Adrian into it? So what was his name?

His name was... His name was Nicholas Breakspear. And then they changed it to Adrian IV. You're like, mate, Nicholas works. Yeah, Nicholas Breakspear. Just be that. Nicholas Breakspear I. Just be Nick, mate, Nicholas works. Yeah, Nicholas Briggs. Just be that. Nicholas Briggs be the first. Just be Nick.

Yeah, Nick the first. Anyway, so far, so good. Is Nicholas particularly hard to pronounce if you're Italian? Is that what the issue is? Is it kind of? No. I don't think so. I don't think so.

No harder than Adrian. So, so far, so good. So, most of the rest of Frederick's life was taken up with politics and war, you know, usual sort of medieval kingship stuff. But then in 1187, a letter arrived at court asking for his assistance in repelling a fresh invasion of the Crusader kingdoms. So this was to be the beginning of the Third Crusade. And this one's better known in Britain, of course,

because Richard the Lionheart was involved. So Frederick marched from Cologne through modern-day Germany and Austria, on into Hungary, then into the Balkans, and finally he arrived at Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul, where he prepared his crossing into Anatolia. Now, by early June 1190, Frederick's halfway through his journey towards the Levant,

when he received some local advice about a shortcut. Oh, dear. Yeah, that's what I said when I was a shortcut. Oh, dear. Yeah, that's what I said when I was reading this. Oh, dear. He's got two options. A longer route through the mountains or the promised fabled shorter route, which involves crossing the Salif River,

now known as the Goksu River, near the hilltop crusader castle of Silikev. I don't think if you're leading an army, you can't be asking the locals for shortcuts, can you? That doesn't feel like a professional thing to do. I'm, you know, I'm not telling him how to lead an army, but it sounds naive. It's the sort of thing you do on a pub crawl, isn't it?

Do you know how you get to the house quicker? You ask some bloke coming out of a bookies and you say, do you know where to get a Yates's? He says, over there. And you're like, OK, this way. You shouldn't be turning around

to 60,000 men and going, this guy says it's through here. Now, he's an action man and he's impatient. OK, so Frederick opts for the river. At this point, the surviving sources

offer different descriptions of what happened next, but they all agreed that on the 10th of june 1190 frederick barbarossa was 67 at the time drowned in his attempted crossing now this is a big cock up right this is a big blunder one which dealt a serious blow to the prospects of the third crusade so thousands of soldiers simply returned home to germany rather than carry on under command of Frederick's co-sponsors, Philip II, France, and Richard the Lionheart,

who were as hostile to each other as they were to their opponents. So it was a real mess. So without Barbarossa and his forces to act as unifiers, there was almost no chance of total victory. So they just go home. He's drowned. Now, what happened? Now, a contemporary chronicle of Frederick's journey from Cologne,

which was a few years later in the Europe of the middle M90s, gives us the Sylvester Stallone Rambo version of the story. Okay. In this one, Frederick, who's 67, remember, decides he can swim across the river, and so he plunges into the water, believing himself strong enough to battle the currents. Although everyone tried to stop him, he entered into a whirlpool. Now, the Arab Chronicles suggest something slightly more farcical, okay?

That they agree that Frederick had entered the river, not because he wanted to cross it, just because he fancied having a wash. It's been days since he last had a shower. He stinks. He stinks. Freddie, Freddie, mate, get in that river. How deep is he going to have a wash? Yeah, yeah. Surely, surely, don't you just paddle and splash?

You don't need to go in beneath your... So he thinks to himself, listen, I'll just do the important bits. I'll do my armpits and my down belows and maybe my face if i've got time i'll gel my hair down and i'll wear a helmet anyway so i don't need to wash my head i don't need to get the shampoo out i've lost my wash bag anyway yeah now one of the arab chronicles uh there's a quote from that says the emperor drowned at a spot where the water did

not reach a man's waist. So he's had a little paddle and something's gone wrong. And he's fallen in and he's drowned. He's got cramp, hasn't he? That's what's happened. Absolutely, he's got cramp. Now, in fact, this may not have been that far from the truth since a newsletter written by someone in Frederick's army about a week after his death tells a similar story.

So in this version, Frederick, who is hot and sweaty and exhausted, who's made it to the eastern side of the river, decides he wants to go for a swim, partly to cool down and partly to refresh himself. After the innumerable and unbearable labours which he'd endured now for a month, he wished to bathe in this water. He drowned by the hidden judgment of God in a lamentable and unexpected accident. That makes it sound so poetic. Exactly. It was actually, he quite fancied a paddle. Something went wrong and he drowned. And thousands of men turned back because he's dead, right? Now, whether he's trying to cross or simply having a wash or a swim, the outcome was the same. So he drowned and his drowning,

which meant the expected course of events, a crusader victory over Saladin, that was altered. So there's one final act to follow this sort of historic blunder. Only 5,000 of the 15,000 troops followed Frederick's son all the way to the Levant. And they carried on solely because of their desire to bury the man in Jerusalem. So to preserve his body, they tried to pickle it in vinegar, but the process failed because the stench in the summer heat proved overwhelming can you imagine that so okay he's dead we need to bury him in jerusalem let's pickle him in vinegar after two days okay frederick stinks let's change your plan smells really horrible everyone well i mean i'm complaining because I'm the one bloody carrying it.

You come and carry it then if you think it's all right. If I had to transport a body a long distance, I wouldn't say pickling it would be a great idea. No, no, neither would I. Who suggested that and who's agreed to it? Are we imagining in a huge jar like gherkins in a chip shop? Are we imagining it like that? How are we imagining it? Wra like gherkins in a chip shop are we imagining it like that how are you imagining wrapped in paper exactly like he's a bag of chips we've talked

about many times on this podcast jobs from the past i wouldn't fancy i think pickling dead emperors would be up yeah yeah yeah absolutely that's got to be up there as a job i'm not i'm not going for what do i do i'm a king pickler i have a quick question for you Al which is simply you say that the soldiers just after he drowned just went home a lot of them at what point

how early do you think the first do you think the body was still floating away into the distance when one of the soldiers turned to the other one well that's that then

yeah yeah looks at his watch and says we could be home by the afternoon if we start now still just in sight going around the corner and do you think there was a large conversation about do we carry on or do you think like

people just started ones and twos just walking yeah i've been so looking for any excuse to go home i've been pushing that i'll go well i think we we're only right actually it's respectful we all go home i think it's more respectful if we just go home and watch telly. Go home and watch Spartacus. And have a day off. Shall we have a day off? I think that's the respectful thing. Yeah, it's what he would have wanted.

So he never made it to Jerusalem, Frederick Barbarossa, not even as a pickle. His body was divided up. And the parts were instead gifted to churches and cathedrals along the route south including in modern Attaki in Turkey and Tyre in Lebanon

these days Bob Ross's name is perhaps better known for a much later historical blunder namely the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 when a lot of Germans froze to death then of course it was snow and ice to help out the advance, not a river current, but, you know, the mistakes made all the same. I mean, one medieval chronicler was taking the piss,

and he suggested that Barbarossa had ridden into the river wearing full armour, and he was thrown by a spooked horse. And then, obviously, he drowned because his armour was so heavy, but they don't think that's true. That's what I'd want people to lead with. Yeah. I think. As I've always been swept away by the current,

I'd be yelling that back to my troops. Tell them I was on my horse and it's my heavy armour! And it was a really big, scary horse! And I'd done well to ride it this far! Please do not pickle me! Blame the horse, blame the horse! And don't mention the fact that I was smelly until two minutes ago.

How has he not come on to be known as Frederick the Pickle? That's a genuine question. Well, thank you for listening this week. There is a fourth part to this episode, which is Balls Ups in the Roman Army. If you want to get that, plus episodes in full, ad-free, on a Monday, a week early, and a load of other bonus things, you can sign up and become an Oh What A Time full-timer for £4.99 per month. You can sign up by going to OhWhatATime.com. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week bye Thank you.