QI The Book of the Dead

commercial credit card in 1949 and named by Life magazine as one of the most influential Americans of the twentieth centu7ry,died broke aged forty; and Billy Crapo Durant, founder of General Motors, ended up running a bowling alley.

     
    For almost a hundred years after her death, Emma Hamilton (1765–1815), Nelson’s celebrated mistress, was airbrushed from the official record. She had tarnished the reputation of England’s most glorious hero, something the establishment could not possibly tolerate: even her own daughter refused to acknowledge her as her mother. From the most unpromising beginnings, she had risen to become not only wealthy, but the most famous and glamorous woman of her age – only to lose it all in a mess of drink, debt and bitter disappointment.
    Emy Lyons was born in a hovel in Ness, a miserable coal-mining hamlet in the Wirral peninsula in Cheshire. Her father, Henry, was a violent, heavy-drinking blacksmith who died within a month of her birth. During a drunken argument with her mother, he fell – or was pushed – fatally and Mary Lyons fled with her baby back to Hawarden in North Wales where her family lived. The house, already full to overflowing, stank permanently of dung. The family horse provided the fuel they were too poor to buy. Emy slept with her mother on a straw pallet and as the youngest, and a girl, was always the last to be fed. She probably owed her life to the fact that Mary was having an affair with an unidentified man of means – probably a high-ranking servant at the local stately home – who would slip her food and money. As a result, Emma grew up tall, strong and with lustrous black hair and a clear complexion.
    Mother and daughter were very close and, although neither of them had ever been to school, they were both highly intelligentand resourceful. Throughout Emma’s golden years, her mother was always there in the background, acting as her confidante and personal assistant. When she left the claustrophobia of Hawarden to follow her lover to London, she took Emy with her and found her a suitable position in the capital. Though only twelve, Emy began work as a nursemaid to the children of a respectable doctor’s family in Blackfriars. It was here that she met Jane Powell, an aspiring actress, and the two became close friends. Then as now, the lure of the West End was strong and, when Emy was sacked for staying out all night in Covent Garden, she turned her back on domestic service to pursue a career in the theatre. Starting on the lowest rung, as a maid to a wardrobe mistress in Drury Lane, she soon found something altogether more to her liking.
    Late eighteenth-century London was the largest sex-resort in the world. In the square half-mile of St James’s alone there were 900 full-blown brothels and 850 lesser knocking-shops providing ‘entertainment for gentlemen’. Even in this broad-minded neighbourhood, Dr James Graham’s ‘Temple of Health’ caused something of a stir. He was an unqualified, charismatic Scottish con man who, though remarkably enlightened on social issues such as slavery and women’s education and a vegetarian to boot, knew that the serious money was in sex. The centrepiece of his business was the ‘Celestial Bed’ – a huge ornate couch raised up on eight brass pillars, that looked (and sounded) like an unholy cross between a Greek temple and the orgasm-inducing ‘Excessive Machine’ in Roger Vadim’s 1968 film Barbarella . It was a giant conception device. James Graham believed having healthy children was a patriotic duty, and what he promised was not just bedsprings, but offspring. Under a dome swirling with fragrant vapours and live doves, customers were surrounded byforty crystal pillars, mirrors offering a view from every possible angle, a frieze of erotic scenes, and pipes sparking with mysterious ‘electrical energy’, which were connected to 500 magnets underneath the mattress. The bed, which could be tilted to reach the perfect angle for entry, delivered mild doses of ‘electrical fire’ designed to promote ‘superior ecstasy’ in a woman, which guaranteed conception. It also incorporated an organ whose tunes reached a crescendo in time to the occupant’s exertions. It cost £50 a night (about £3,500 in today’s money) and was patronised by some of the great men of the day, including the Prince of Wales and the noted parliamentarians Charles James Fox and John Wilkes. The whole experience kicked off with a