We take science seriously but we can still be silly

I think the story that pitched the professor over the edge was probably the one Tom wrote last Saturday, about neuroscientists looking into freezing human brains just in case it might be possible, at some future date, to resurrect their memories. I sympathised with Robert Langford, who commented that he can’t even get yesterday’s memories from his brain while he’s still using it.

R Fielding said he’s already had brain-freeze, from an ice cream on the pier at Llandudno, and I’ve no idea what Mike Lee was on about but he made me laugh: “That banana sorbet tasted a bit funny.” Not much contribution to scientific debate, but social interaction of a sort.

I don’t want to belittle Professor Norman’s concerns. There is a serious aspect to this. Some while ago a team at the University of Wisconsin Madison carried out a study of comment threads under scientific articles which they published under the title, The Nasty Effect.

The main finding was that “uncivil” debate tended to increase scepticism among non-scientist readers about the subjects being discussed — and we know where scepticism about science can lead. So let’s keep it civil, chaps, even if we can’t help being silly.

Eton up with doubt

William Hague was sensible, when quoting that old saw about the battle of Waterloo being won on the playing fields of Eton in his column on Monday, to say that it was “reputedly” said by the Duke of Wellington.

This didn’t stop Chris Crowcroft of Penrith from writing that “Wellington’s biographer, Elizabeth Longford, doubted that he ever thought or said anything of the kind.” Alistair North agreed. “There is no evidence that the Duke ever said that about Eton and Waterloo. In fact he hated Eton and finished his schooldays in France.”

• Foggy days that changed the course of history

Back in 1951, the 7th Duke, great-grandson of the Iron Duke, was so exasperated with the endless repetition of the phrase that he wrote to The Times offering to donate £50 to the National Playing Fields Association if anyone could prove that the words had been uttered. The most plausible reply came in a letter from Robert Birley, who was then Eton’s headmaster.

He cited a book by a French historian, Charles de Montalembert, published in 1855, which described the duke visiting Eton in his old age, “returning to the beautiful place where he had been brought up, recalling the delights of his youth, and finding there again the same precocious energy in the descendants of his own comrades, he exclaimed aloud, ‘It is here that the battle of Waterloo was won’.”

This gallic waffle did nothing to melt the 7th Duke. His ancestor’s career at Eton, he replied, had been “short and inglorious”, he had scarcely ever been back and had no affection for the place whatsoever. Not only that, “to anyone who knows his turn of phrase, the words ring entirely false”.

He wished people would stop using them, whether they wanted to show how snobbish they were, as he thought was usually the case, or whether they wanted to give the impression that Wellington approved of organised games — “an assumption which is entirely unwarranted”.

In fact, The Times letters pages had offered a far more plausible explanation 50 years earlier. An old Etonian signing himself St J Corbett wrote that the reference to Waterloo had nothing to do with organised sport. In the duke’s time “outdoor pastimes from cricket to leapfrog had no such vogue as today, and no such hold upon public schoolboys and their masters.

The Duke’s reference was solely to that portion or corner of the Playing Fields in which the school fights used to take place, and all the illustrious field marshal meant to say was that these fights had taught British officers how to win the battle of Waterloo.” More Flashman than field game, you might say.

Goodbye to all that

‘I always read your column on Saturday to enjoy its peculiar persnickedyness,” writes Gavin Thomson. I appreciate the thought, even if I think persnickedyness is what I’ve been holding out against all these years — and I don’t know how to spell it either.

Anyway, this is the last of them. I think there probably are, after all, only so many jokes one can make about commas, or steam engines, or misplaced counties or all those other bees in bonnets that make the Feedback mailbox so extraordinary.

I’m grateful to The Times for indulging these ramblings, but most of all to you amazing readers, who’ve given me so much to think and write about. I’ve learnt a lot and, should I ever have to draw a map of Scotland, I promise I’ll never forget that there are two Loch Levens.

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