This 15th February marks Jeremy Bentham’s 273^rd birthday. But, if you’re unfamiliar with the name, never fear! We’ve put together a quick summary of his professional life, along with a list of our top seven of his frankly brilliant eccentricities…

Born to a wealthy family on the 15th of February 1748, Jeremy was somewhat of a child prodigy! We’re told he studied Latin at the age of 3, and went on to attend Queens College Oxford at age 12 to study law. After completing both a bachelors and masters degree in the subject though, he grew to become disillusioned and frustrated with the intricacies of law and indeed of lawyers themselves! He later said of them that “lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished!”

Professional life

Bentham turned his hand to writing criticism of law, suggesting ways in which it could be reformed, and existing society institutions improved. He is most known for his association with the rise of ‘Utilitarianism’, the ethical theory that prescribes actions that ‘maximise the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people’. He spent his life working on society reforms that upheld this fundamental principle, offering improvements to subjects as wide ranging as religion, poor relief, and prisons. He was also a strong advocate for animal welfare, the abolition of slavery, equal rights, and the decriminalisation of homosexuality. He was particularly scathing of religion, criticising the influence it held over many societal foundations. He strongly opposed the idea of ‘Natural Law’ and ‘Natural Rights’ – both considered as ‘God-given’ rights – remarking that they were “nonsense upon stilts!” and later published an essay on the subject under the same name.

He also spent many years of his life designing a new prison system that enabled one guard to maintain control over multiple prisoners without the need for physical punishment. His ‘Panopticon’ (meaning “all-seeing”) was based on a circular design with the cells arranged on the outer wall and a central watch tower within. The prison inspector could look into the cells, unseen by the prisoners, at any time – sort of like 18^th century CCTV! Bentham anticipated that the inmates would all ‘behave themselves’ under the ‘omnipotent eye’ of the prison inspector, in order to avoid physical punishment.

Bentham the Eccentric

Bentham died on the 6^th June 1832 aged 84, but his fight against societal norms didn’t necessarily end there… Perhaps as a final rebuff against the church, Bentham chose a very different manor of funerary practice… Instead of opting for a burial, which would have forced him to pay money to the church, in his will Bentham wrote in detail what was to become of him:

“My body I give to my dear friend Doctor Southwood Smith to be disposed of in a manner hereinafter mentioned, and I direct … he will take my body under his charge and take the requisite and appropriate measures for the disposal and preservation of the several parts of my bodily frame…The skeleton he will cause to be put together in such a manner as that the whole figure may be seated in a chair usually occupied by me when living, in the attitude in which I am sitting when engaged in thought in the course of time employed in writing… He will cause the skeleton to be clad in one of the suits of black occasionally worn by me.”

This ‘Auto-Icon’ (or self-image) made from his own skeleton was then directed be housed in a cabinet, and every now and then, was to be ‘wheeled out’ to attend meetings of his utilitarian friends and colleagues. Bentham’s wishes were followed to the letter, and you can still visit him today at University College London!

But not quite all of him…

Originally, Bentham’s own head was intended to sit atop his body (as you might expect!), however the desiccation process went a little wrong, robbing the head of its facial expression and making it look, well, rather creepy! A wax replica head was affixed to his body’s frame instead, and for a time, his actual head was kept and displayed, rather unceremoniously between his feet! Later, the head was placed in a wooden box to give it a little more protection, and displayed in the cloisters of UCL. However, his head proved too tempting a prize for neighbouring students, who stole it and held it to ransom in 1975! (Don’t worry, his head was later returned for the princely sum of £10) You may be relieved to hear that today Bentham’s head is now safely housed in UCL’s conservation safe.

Top 7 weird facts about Jeremy Bentham

And now to our favourite part; here’s a quick list of some of the more unusual facts about Jeremy Bentham:

1.  He had a pet cat called the Reverend Sir John Langbourne, who ate macaroni noodles at the table, and who Bentham described as “a universal nuisance” (we all know cats like that).  Bentham was a strong opponent of animal cruelty, arguing that “the question is not ‘can they reason?’ nor ‘can they talk?’, but rather, ‘can they suffer?'”
2. He had a pet teapot named Dickie that no one else was allowed to touch, and had two walking sticks named Dapple and Dobbin, one of which (whom?) is still displayed with his Auto-Icon.
3. He may have invented jogging, or ‘circumgyrating’ as he called it, described by his friends of a sort of ‘trotting step’. We’re told that he would rise at 6am and circumgyrate for 2 hours a day before work.
4. Bentham once wrote to London City Council asking if he could replace the shrubs in his front driveway with varnished, mummified corpses, which he said would be “more aesthetic than flowers” and would serve the purpose of de-mystifying death and conquering the human fear of mortality. It’s speculated that by requesting his own body to be preserved as an ‘Auto-Icon’ Bentham hoped to question the religious sensibilities of life and death.
5. To complement his Panopticon Prison, he wrote a cookbook called ‘Jeremy Bentham’s Prison Cooking’, containing a series of recipes providing the inmates with cheap, nourishing food.
6. He was the possible inventor of underpants – the conservation itinerary for the auto-icon lists a pair of underpants and two sets of socks (got to keep those feet warm!), and these are now thought to be the oldest examples of underwear recorded.
7. He invented a game called ‘battledore’ – sounds epic, but basically a game of ‘keepie-uppie’ with a shuttlecock.

Who do we have to thank for our divisions of time? And how did the days and months get their names? Read on to find out in our brief history of time…

We’ve been thinking a lot about time recently. It’d be fair to say that the days, weeks, and months of the past year have lost a little of their definition, with current restrictions causing the passage of time and normal routine to become a little, shall we say, distorted. Time seems more fluid (though, on some days, the speed at which it seems to move feels A LOT slower), and it reminds us that our units of measuring its passing haven’t always been in place…

Dividing the days

As with many things, we have the ancient Babylonians to thank for our 24-hour days. They were the first to divide both the day and night into 12 equal hours, later separating each hour into 60 minutes and the minutes into 60 seconds. Though these divisions of time were based on the movements of the Sun and Earth, they also had their roots in the Babylonians’ numbering system – and here’s where it gets mathematical!

Unlike our standard decimal system today based around grouping numbers in ‘10s’, the Babylonians used duodecimal (base 12) and sexagesimal (base 60) numeral systems – systems that were in fact started by the Sumerians, a culture that began 2,000 years before the Babylonians, in around 4000BCE. It’s believed the system likely originated from ancient peoples using their thumbs as a pointer, and counting by using the three jointed parts on the other four fingers (try it yourself!) It was pretty logical, then, for them to divide their time using this same mathematical system.

(If you want to fall down the rabbit-hole of information on this, here’s a pretty good starting point!) 

Days become weeks, weeks become months…

When it comes to the number of days in a week, and weeks in a month, it seems we have the Babylonians to thank again. For them, the number ‘7’ held a particular significance, observing as keen astronomers, that there were seven celestial bodies in sky – the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Through their lunar calendar, which tracked the transitional phases of the moon, they also calculated that it took approximately 28 or 29 days for the moon to complete its full lunar cycle. This period (give or take a few ‘transitional’ days) became a ‘month’, and, divided into four equal parts, produced seven-day ‘weeks’.

Though other great civilizations chose to divide their weeks slightly differently – the Egyptians’ week was 10 days long and the Romans’ originally lasted for eight – it was the Babylonians’ system, born from such an influential culture, that lasted, spreading quickly through the neighbouring large empires of Persia and Greece.

(N.B. How the modern year came to be divided into 12 months is a more complex story, and the subject of another blog entirely! Later we’ll see that originally, the Romans chose to divide their calendar into 10 months, before necessity caused them to swap to 12)

It’s all in the name

So that’s the maths out the way, now what about the origins of the names we now use for the days and months? Unsurprisingly, the names have their roots in astronomy and the deities that were once associated with the planets. It was our old friends the Babylonians once again who set the trend, naming each day after the celestial body they believed held sway over the first hour of that day. But it’s the Romans’ adaptation of the idea which led to the days and months being named as we know them today.

In the ‘romance languages’, like Italian and French, the days of the week have predominantly remained very close to their original Latin forebears. If we take the Italian, starting with our equivalent of ‘Monday’: Dies Lunae, the day of the moon, became Lunedi, combining lunae (moon) and di (day); Dies Martis, the day of Mars, became Martedi; Dies Mercurii, the day of Mercury, became Mercoledi; Dies Jovis, the day of Jupiter, became Giovedi; and Dies Veneris, the day of Venus, became Venerdi. Interestingly, Dies Saturni, day of Saturn, and Dies Solis, day of the Sun, are not the root for the modern Italian sabato (Saturday) and domenica (Sunday), though they clearly influence our English versions. Instead, the pagan names for these days were replaced and influenced by the Hebrew Sabbath, day of rest, and the Latin Dominus dies, day of the Lord.

Germanic adaptations

As for our English words for the days, we’ve seen they bear traces of the Roman, but it’s a connection that’s been heavily filtered through centuries of Norse and Anglo-Saxon influences. Like the Romans before them, Germanic people also adopted the system of identifying the days with deities, this time simply replacing the Roman gods with the names of their own. Monday derives from the Old English Mōnandæg and Norse Mandag, associated with Mani the Norse goddess of the Moon; Tuesday is associated with the Norse god Tyr, a warrior god like Mars, whose name in Old English gave us Tīwesdæg; Wednesday derives from Odin’s or Wōdensdæg, like the Roman god Mercury, Odin (Anglo-Saxon Wōden) played a part in guiding souls to the realms of the dead; Thor gave his name to Torsdæg or Thursday, sharing Jupiter’s association with the sky and thunder; Frigg, the Anglo-Saxon goddess of love, gives her name to Frīgedæg or Friday; strangely, Saturday retained its Roman deity, becoming Sæturnesdæg in Old English; and finally Sunday comes from the Old English Sunnandæg, deriving from the Norse sun goddess Sunna or Sól.

As for the months…

The months are brought to us by the Romans again, who followed a similar naming method to the days to begin with, before, it seems, losing their creative flair as they approached the end of the year. Originally the Roman calendar began with March or Martius, named for one of their favourite deities Mars. Aprilis came next, named from the Latin word aperire, meaning ‘to open’, and sacred to goddess Venus. Maius (May) and Junius (June) were named for the goddesses Maia (a deity of springtime and growth) and Juno (the goddess of marriage and childbirth). When we reach July and August though, the calendar gets a reshuffle…

As we mentioned above, originally the Roman calendar (borrowed from the Greeks) had only 10 months, and as the fifth and sixth months of the year, July and August were once known as Quintilis and Sextilis. However, under the authority of Julius Caesar in 46BCE, two additional months were added to the year, in order to better synchronise the year with the seasons and tie in with the 12 lunar cycles of the moon. These were Januarius, named after the Roman god Janus (god of doors and beginnings) and Februarius, named after an ancient festival of purification known as Februa. At first, these two months formed the end of the year, but were later moved to the beginning (which explains the odd positioning of the leap year in the modern calendar). Quintilis and Sextilis, now out of order in the calendar, were renamed Julius (July) after Caesar himself, and Augustus (you guessed it, August) after his great-nephew and Rome’s first emperor Augustus.

And as for the rest of the months? Well, here’s where the creativity runs out. September, October, November and December are also named after the Roman numbers 7 (septem), 8 (octo), 9 (novem) and 10 (decem). After January and February were moved to the beginning of the year, these too were placed out of order numerically. Though later emperors had a go at changing the names of the months (Caligula insisted that September be renamed Germanicus, after his father, and Nero had a go at renaming April Neronium), unsurprisingly, none of these stuck, and so the original names were kept.

So, if, like us, you’re struggling with the slow passage of time and uncertainties of the year ahead, take comfort in the knowledge that January, though it may be a bleak time of year, is named for the god of gateways and new beginnings. Time will pass, and whether you’re counting in days, weeks or months, lockdown too will pass.

If you’re thinking of taking up a new sport or joining an exercise class this January, then you’ll be in good company! St Neots has a proud sporting heritage, much of which is celebrated in the museum with displays on some of the town’s sporting heroes…

Until the industrial revolution of the early 1800s, everyday life was strenuous enough to keep most working people fit.  Many local men were farm workers, and women’s lives, before the invention of the modern washing machine and vacuum cleaner, involved daily heavy labour. It was during the early Victorian period, as the population increased dramatically and people began to move away from the land and into towns, that organised team games for men (sadly there were very few organised women’s sports at that period!) began to become popular.

When the Reverend William Maule became the Rector of Eynesbury in 1851, a talented and experienced sportsman arrived in the town. Maule excelled at cricket and rowing, and while at Trinity College, Cambridge he’d been President of the Trinity Boat Club. By 1865 he had established St Neots Rowing Club which produced many fine rowers, including Laurie Evans, who was a member of many winning crews in the 1920s and 1930s.

As the enthusiasm for organised sports grew, many new clubs were formed in the town. St Neots Cricket Club, dating back to the 1840s, has had a chequered career, but other sports thrived. Cycling also took off as a sport in the late Victorian period, after Dunlop patented the pneumatic tyre in 1888, and the St Neots Cycling Club formed as early as 1887. An early champion of the club was E. J. Bass of Eynesbury who was a rider of national importance. The photograph below is thought to show him in 1899 after he had won the mile race at the Spring meeting of the Surrey Cycling Club, held at the Kennington Oval (one of the most important meetings of the cycling calendar). The First Prize of a silver claret jug and silver beakers can be seen in the photograph.

Another talented sportsman who threw himself into the sporting life of the town was C.G. Tebbutt, who moved to the town from Bluntisham in 1889. Not only was he a gifted skater and ice hockey (bandy) player, he was also an outstanding speed skater holding three world speed skating records in 1891. At different times in the 1890s, Tebbutt captained both the St Neots football club and the cricket club.

Champion jockey Otto Madden was also educated at the Eaton Socon Academy, Peppercorns Lane in the 1880s.  He was the most successful British jockey between 1888 and 1918, and Champion Jockey in 1898, 1901 and 1903.

Women were also keen sports players, but found it much harder to break into the world of organised sports. However, Eaton Socon Ladies’ Hockey Club formed in late 1898, and already by 1894, St Neots Golf Club (founded 1890) was holding a Ladies Monthly Prize competition, with a final in the April of the following year.

Football became an increasingly important part of national life in the 1950s and 1960s, several local boys became professional players, including Chris Turner, Terry Oakley and Christopher Jones. The most well-known of our local footballing hero’s was John Gregory of Longsands school, who played for England in the 1983 – 84 season and later went on to a successful career as a team coach and manager.

As the opportunities for ice hockey declined with warmer winters, and with the development of the Little Barford Power Station upstream of St Neots Common, field hockey became a popular sport, with the St Neots club boasting teams of both men and women players. The town’s moment of glory in the hockey world came when local player, Anthony Ekins, was selected to play for both England and Great Britain between 1966 and 1972. He played for Great Britain in the 1968 Mexico Olympics and captained the British team at the Munich Olympics in 1972. More recently, the triumph of the GB women’s hockey team, who took Gold at the 2016 Rio Olympics, has made hockey the fastest growing participation sport in the UK.

Many other sports flourished in the post war period. Philip Cole played table tennis at county level and was National Student Table Tennis Champion in 1982. The St Neots Outdoor Bowls Club was formed in 1920, and member Joyce Brittain, nėe Hodson, was a very talented outdoor and indoor bowls player. She reigned as the Cambridgeshire Ladies Singles Champion for most of the 1950s, and played outdoor bowls for England to International level in 1961 – 63. Her son, Roger Brittain, was also an excellent bowls player at both club and county level.

Finally, in the twenty-first century running has become an increasingly popular sport, with thousands of people taking to the pavements. The St Neots Riverside Runners were established in 1987 and remain a very successful club, organising many local runs including the Riverside 10K run and the St Neots Half Marathon.

It’s impossible to cover everything in this brief article, so if you have any information and / or photographs about local sports that you would like to pass on to St Neots Museum, please do contact the Director via email at director@stneotsmuseum.org.uk. Photographs can be copied and returned.

As you’ll know, each year we run our Winter Craft and Gift Fair, which showcases the work of local craftspeople and provides a unique venue where modern day local crafts can be celebrated alongside the traditional crafts of the past. The crafts we sell today often mirror those that were once an essential part of life in St Neots. Our curator Liz tells us more…

Huntingdonshire has been an essentially agricultural county for many centuries, growing wheat, barley, oats and vegetables for local people and for distribution to the wider world. In such a rural area, traditional crafts continued to be practised widely until the outbreak of the First World War.

Woodwork

Woodworking and carpentry are both ancient crafts and, in Edwardian St Neots, Charles Gill was well known as a cabinet maker and also as the maker of the houseboats, which he rented out as holiday homes in the early 1900s. He could turn his hand to almost any sort of woodwork, a even made a lovely wooden box to hold the records of the commemorations for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, which is now on display in the museum.

Basketry

Basket making was another long established craft in St Neots and Eaton Socon, because of the plentiful supply of willow trees growing beside the river and its tributaries. The osier beds (willow trees from which young branches were cut to make the baskets) beside the river still existed until the 1960s, and hundreds of different items could be made from the willow, from hampers to shopping baskets to babies cradles.

Sammy Hawkesford was a well-known local basket maker, carrying on a local craft which dated back to prehistoric times when baskets were used to catch eels and fish in the river Great Ouse. Mr Hawkesford made baskets for local farmers and market gardeners, though despite his hard work, prices were very low at ten shillings (50p) for a dozen round bushel baskets!

Metalworks

The blacksmith and farrier were also essential local craftsman until well into the 1940s. Horses were used on every farm and, until the First World War, for all types of transport, regularly needing new shoes. The well-known local company of Ibbett’s at Great Paxton began life in the 1850s as a blacksmiths shop behind Brook Street, St Neots. As farming methods and machinery changed though, they became agricultural engineers, and by the time Cyril Ibbett took over the business from his father in 1939 they had also begun importing and selling farm machinery.

Textiles

In the Victorian period, the invention of the sewing machine led to the mass production of clothing, but many tailors, dressmakers and milliners continued to thrive in rural areas like St Neots. Mr F. C. Riseley advertised millinery and dressmaking ‘by experienced hands’ in his advert of September 1914 in St Neots Advertiser, and Rowell and Sons advertised ‘costumes to measure from 47/6’ (£2.37 in modern money!) Rowell’s advert also emphasised the craft involved in their work, stating that their clothes were:

‘Correct in cut and style, perfect in workmanship and finish. We are prepared, for a moderate price, to give you tailoring that for correctness in every detail of cut and fit cannot be exceeded in our district.’

Stay tuned for more about local crafts in a future post, and do stop into our modern day Craft Fair at the Museum, open from 11am-4pm until 23rd December!

At this time of year, we crave certain comfort food: pumpkin pies, toffee apples, chocolate (in any form!) … But have you ever wondered why certain foods have become associated with Halloween? Well, wonder no more…

Pumpkins lanterns

First up (of course!) is the pumpkin, and you might be surprised to hear that the carving of pumpkin lanterns (or ‘Jack-o’-lanterns’) for Halloween, likely originated in Ireland from local folklore, and not from America. Originally, turnips or large potatoes were used to carve the lanterns, until Irish migrants took their stories over to America, and, once there, discovered the superior carving qualities of pumpkins!

The story behind these lanterns concerns a miserly and unpleasant character known as ‘Stingy Jack’. As with most folklore, there are a number of versions of his tale, but all recount how Stingy Jack once tricked the Devil into turning himself into a sixpence in exchange for his soul. Instead of using the sixpence to buy himself one last drink (as promised) before his damnation, Jack quickly pocketed it, and kept it securely next to a silver crucifix, preventing the Devil from escaping. In exchange for his freedom, Jack forced the Devil to grant him ten more years of life before returning to claim his soul, to which the Devil reluctantly agreed.

Ten years passed and the Devil once again returned to claim Jack’s soul, but true to form, Jack managed to trick the trickster again, this time trapping him in an apple tree by carving a crucifix into its trunk (you’d think the Devil would’ve seen it coming). Feeling a bit cocky after his latest triumph, in addition to another ten years of life, Jack made the Devil promise that when the time came for him to die, the Devil would relinquish his claim to his soul. The Devil agreed (and was probably fairly happy to be rid of Jack).

Unfortunately for Jack, that’s where his fun ended. When the time came for Jack to die, and he stood at the pearly gates to heaven, he was dismayed to find that God didn’t want anything to do with him either. So now, having been denied entry to both Heaven and Hell, legend has it that Stingy Jack’s spirit is forced to wander the earth for eternity. His only possession as he traipses on his endless path, is a lump of coal burning with hellfire and placed inside a hollowed-out turnip, which Jack uses as a lantern to light his way. Spooky!

Auspicious apples

Apples are also a food we often associate with Halloween, and like the pumpkin, this could partially stem from the seasonality of the fruit, which peaks at this time of year. But the significance of apples is also deep-rooted in mythology and folklore. Celtic and Pagan tradition placed apples as powerful sources for divination and prophecy, and when the Roman’s came to Britain, they brought their own prophetic associations with the humble fruit.

On the 1^st of November, the Romans celebrated a harvest festival dedicated to the goddess Pomona, goddess of plenty and abundance. Part of the festivities involved unmarried, young people attempting to bite into an apple floating in water or suspended from a string. The first to bite into the apple would be deemed next in line to marry. This tradition became embedded in Celtic festivals, like Samhain, and has naturally been adopted into Halloween celebrations. One of the colloquial names given to the 31^st October, in Britain at least, was ‘Snap-Apple Night’, deriving from this practice, and later developing into the modern Halloween game of ‘Bobbing-for-Apples’.

Sweet treats for the dead

If you’ve read our blog post on Samhain, you’ll know that this Pagan festival was celebrated over the 31^st October – 1^st November to mark the last harvest of the year, the start of winter, and as a time to remember the dead. As part of the festivities, offerings of food were left for the spirits, either thrown on the scared bonfire or left on the doorstep of the home.

The act of leaving food as an offering to the dead is a tradition that can be found throughout the world; the Ancient Egyptians left food inside tombs to help nourish the soul on its journey to the afterlife, and feasts honouring the dead at the grave side is a common practice in many cultures, perhaps the most well-known taking place in Mexico on the Día de los Muertos, or the ‘Day of the Dead.’

In Christianity, the tradition of leaving something sweet to honour the dead became more prominent. On the 1^st of November, Christians celebrate the feasts of ‘All Saints and All Souls’, renaming the 31^st October ‘All-Hallows Eve’ or ‘Hallow’een’. As part of this new tradition, ‘soul cakes’ (small cakes or pastries usually baked with spices, currants and saffron) were customarily baked and distributed as alms to the poor. Prayers to the dead were said as the cakes were consumed, and the ritual became known as ‘souling’ – (Terry Pratchett fans may be disheartened to hear, however, that there’s sadly no reference to a ‘Soul-Cake Duck’).

Perhaps these traditions of leaving food as an offering to the dead, combined with the ‘sweet’ element of the soul-cakes, gave some origin to Halloween’s modern association with distributing sweets and chocolate to the rowdy ‘spirits’ (‘trick-or-treaters’) that now knock on our own doors at this time of year…

So, whether you’re marking Samhain with apple-bobbing, All Hallows Eve with a soul-cake, or Halloween with a carved ‘Jack’o-Lantern’, you’ll be able to take a minute to reflect on how these traditions have come about.