Fun With Research #1

 More fun with research.

In the betting book at Brooks' Club in London, in 1785: "Lord Cholmondeley has given two guineas to Lord Derby, to receive 500 guineas whenever his lordship f***ks a woman in a balloon one thousand yards from the earth." (The original did not use asterisks).
Origin of the Mile-High Club?
In 1774, Brooks had to outlaw betting on other peoples' premature deaths.
From the book, Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know, by Karl Shaw. And I'm only in to Chapter 2.
As my friend Laurie says, "You can't make this shit up."

Comments

  1. Eric Charles BaldwinSeptember 18, 2021 at 3:21 PM

    Cholmondeley pronounced "Chumley" of course...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mike HallSeptember 21, 2021 at 11:14 AM

    Maybe the half-mile-high-club? I wonder what proof of performance had to be provided or was a gentleman's word good enough?

    1774 was when the UK Life Assurance Act basically banned taking out policies on people where you did not have an "insurable interest". Maybe Brooks had a rush of people who had previously used Equitable Like for their premature death wagers?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Barbara HamblySeptember 27, 2021 at 11:57 AM

      I think it was just a case of, that these guys would bet on ANYTHING, and some of them bet on, "I bet so-and-so will die before he's thirty," or, "I bet so-and-so will be dead by Christmas..." And somebody at the club twigged to the fact that they were tempting fate.
      I don't think the half-mile-high club bet was ever collected on.

      Delete
  3. Patty McInnesNovember 20, 2021 at 4:25 PM

    Dear Ms. Hambly, I was just reading Edmond Dede's entry on Wikipedia. He seems to have been Ben's contemporary. I rushed here to your website to ask if you've considered making him a guest star in your next Benjamin January book. And I was delighted to find you've produced 2 new ones! Thank you!
    I'm pretty sure I'm not putting this in the right place. And I don't know how to change the "Comment as" field from "Google Account" to "Patty McInnes".

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Barbara HamblyNovember 21, 2021 at 10:08 AM

      Patty, your name is given in your reply, not as "Google Account". Thank you for coming by!

      I'm not sure how I could have used Dede as a guest star in the January series up to this point - since he was pretty much a little kid for most of the series - but I do have my eye on him. Part of the problem is that the current publisher of the series has a word-count limit - which is good, in many ways, since it reminds me to keep my stories tight. But there's a lot about New Orleans that I'd like to explore, and haven't been able to... yet.

      Many thanks for your post!

      Delete
  4. Robert PiepenbrinkSeptember 8, 2022 at 5:27 PM

    Research. It is my regrettable duty as a Nitpicker to point out that Will Rogers was right: it's not the things you don't know which trip you up, but the things you think you know that aren't so. In Pale Guardian, someone's running around like Bulldog Drummond five years before the first Bulldog Drummond story was published. (Unless the Asher/Ysidro books take place in the same universe as Sapper's stories, and Drummond had already made a name for himself in the first year of the war. Opens up some possibilities. )
    And Alec is a good 15 years too early to line his room with paperbacks--at least pocket books. I've never gotten a good feel for the binding of "railway editions," which irks me no end.
    Allow me to say you are a great credit to your historical training. I've read nearly everything of you you've ever written, and those are the only two nits I've ever managed to pick. Bless you for all the stories.

    ReplyDelete

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