The Charge of the Light Brigade was a famous debacle. It was a cavalry charge at the Battle of Balaklava (October 25th, 1854) in the Crimean War and it was a slaughter. The British cavalry, armed solely with sabres, was ordered — either through poor communication or officer arrogance or incompetence or a little bit of everything — to charge down a valley and attack Russian artillery batteries. The Russians had 20 infantry battalions, fifty large artillery pieces and they held the heights on both sides of the valley, so these poor Light Brigade guys had to race through a hail of cannon fire towards a hail of cannon fire wielding nothing but their swords. Out of the 673 cavalrymen, 118 died, 122 were wounded and 335 horses killed. Around 60 men were taken prisoner by the Russians. Only 195 complete one man-one horse pairs were left, which obviously completely disabled their function as a cavalry brigade.

Although it was a stupid waste of life and a military failure, it gave the British cavalry a huge boost of respect and popularity. Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote a poem a few weeks after the battle which sealed their reputation for courage in the face of certain death. The Charge of the Light Brigade would become vernacular for the futile bravery.

Decades passed. In May of 1890, Secretary of State for War Edward Stanhope announced that the government would not grant any financial relief to the destitute survivors of the Charge of the Light Brigade because it wouldn’t be fair to single out one set of survivors, no matter how glorious their action, for benefits that no other veterans of their rank would receive. The cavalry charge down the valley of death, as Tennyson so memorably put it, was by then immortalized in the public imagination as the pinnacle of courage and valour, so the neglect of these heroes, now old, infirm and poor, caused a scandal.

In response, the St. James Gazette set up the Light Brigade Relief Fund so that the public could help support the veterans with their contributions and redeem “a national disgrace of the most odious description.” The campaign was supported by contemporary luminaries like Rudyard Kipling, who wrote The Last of the Light Brigade, a sort of sequel to the Charge in which survivors reproach Tennyson for not writing a follow-up that would reveal how the country they fought so valiantly for has abandoned them.

Also enlisted in the cause were three people closely associated with the Battle of Balaclava: Florence Nightingale, pioneering nurse who made her bones, so to speak, tending to the wounded during the Crimean War, Lord Tennyson himself, author of the poem that would ensure the immortality of the Charge of the Light Brigade, and Martin Leonard Lanfried, trumpeter of the 17th Lancers who sounded the actual charge. They would contribute with cutting edge technology: sound recordings of their voices that would be played at public events to raise money for the relief fund. This was the first Do They Know It’s Christmas ever made.

It was Colonel George Edward Gouraud, Civil War hero on the Union side, winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor for rallying the men under heavy enemy fire and Edison’s representative in England, who recorded the three on wax cylinders. He had personally contributed £1,500 (about £90,000 or $137,000 in today’s spending power) to the Light Brigade Relief Fund and then contributed his skills and Edison’s invention, which he had only introduced to England two years before, to the cause.

On May 15th, 1890, he recorded Alfred, Lord Tennyson reading The Charge of the Light Brigade. On July 30th, he recorded Florence Nightingale’s message to her “dear old comrades of Balaclava” at her home on 10 South Street, Park Lane, London. On August 2nd, he recorded Martin Lanfried sounding the charge on the very trumpet used at the battle. As if that wasn’t enough, the same bugle was also used at the Battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815, and remained in use until the 17th Lancers were merged with other regiments to form the Queens Royal Lancers in 1993.

And now for the sounds of history. First is Alfred Tennyson reciting the first three stanzas of The Charge of the Light Brigade in stentorian declamation.

[audioplayer file=”http://www.thehistoryblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/from-The-Charge-of-the-Light-Brigade.mp3″ titles=”Tennyson recites The Charge of the Light Brigade”]

Next is Florence Nightingale, introduced by Mary Helen Ferguson who has one of those unfortunate talking doll voices I can’t quite understand but appears to be announcing the location and date of the recording. Florence speaks after her in far more pleasing tones saying: “When I am no longer even a memory, just a name, I hope my voice may perpetuate the great work of my life. God bless my dear old comrades of Balaclava and bring them safe to shore. Florence Nightingale.”

[audioplayer file=”http://www.thehistoryblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/VoiceOfFlorenceNightingale1890.mp3″ titles=”Florence Nightingale speaks for posterity”]

Finally here is Martin Lanfried, veteran of the Battle of Balaclava, who was wounded in the action and his horse killed underneath him, introducing himself and playing the charge.

[audioplayer file=”http://www.thehistoryblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Martin-Lanfried-bugler.mp3″ titles=”Trumpeter Martin Lanfried plays the charge”]

Colonel Gouraud’s Edison Phonograph Company went through various iterations and wound up Edison Bell Ltd., J.E. Hough owner. The market for cylinders was dying, replaced by phonograph records, and by the early 1930s it went bankrupt. Its assets, including the historic 1890 Light Brigade cylinders, were purchased by Howard Flynn. Flynn actually tried to sell a record of the Florence Nightingale recording with all royalties going to the Red Cross and other hospital charities, but it was a flop. In 1935, he donated the Nightingale cylinder to the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum. It was transferred to the Wellcome Trust Library where it remained unnoticed until 2004 when Dr. Michael Clark dug it up and brought it to the British Library for restoration.

The Relief Fund successfully raised enough money to give grants to the neediest of the soldiers with £3,000 left over. The money was invested so it could help the greatest number of veterans, but in 1892 Parliament granted pensions to soldiers who had served 10 years or more so the rest of the fund money was distributed on a sliding scale.

A Grade II listed wooden toll bridge built in 1879 over the Mawddach River estuary in Penmaenpool, North Wales, can be yours for the bargain price of £350,000 ($533,000). It really is a bargain, too. Included in the price are the keeper’s cottage, the toll booth, office, a store and the strip of road off the north side of the bridge. You don’t have to worry about making the mortgage payments either, because that toll is a license to print money. An average of 150-200 cars each day pay 60p to cross while pedestrians pay 20p. The bridge sees enough pedestrian and vehicular traffic in a year to rake in up to £60,000 (plus a £20 ferry rights fee).

The bridge was built by the Pernmaenpool Bridge Company to replace the ferry that used to take passengers across the river. Construction was commissioned by John Leigh Taylor, the son of a prosperous mill owner who had purchased the nearby country estate of Penmaenuchaf Hall in the 1870s. The timber structure has a 1.5 ton weight limit and a neat herringbone boardwalk-looking surface.

The cottage was added in 1910. The two story building has two bedrooms, one bathroom, an open plan kitchen and living area with a sweet cast iron woodburning stove. It has been extensively renovated — the bathroom looks like something you’d see on HGTV — but still retains its original uninsulated clapboard feel. The total surface area is a cozy 462 square feet. There are some pictures of the interior on the real estate listing page.

If the historical property and filthy lucre angles aren’t sufficiently tempting to get you in this bridge and cabin, the location is sure to suck you in. It may seem a little on the secluded side, but it’s just a hop, skip and jump from the town of Dolgellau and people flock to the area, particularly in the summer, to enjoy the the great natural beauty of the Mawddach valley and mountains of Snowdonia. The bridge is in fact inside the borders of Snowdonia National Park. There are steam trains within walking distance, the seaside and several lakes are nearby, and there are piles of activities available from golf to prime hiking and biking.

Just across the street from the cottage on the south end of the bridge is the George III Hotel. Now a boutique hotel, restaurant and pub, it was began as two buildings in the 17th century. One was a pub, the other a ship chandler’s (a shop specializing in ship supplies) which serviced the the ship building industry that once thrived on the estuary. The two buildings were connected in 1890, long after the decline of ship building, to make the hotel. An adjacent building known as The Lodge used to be a train station for the Cambrian Railways. The railway was closed in 1964 and the old tracks are now a public footpath and bicycle trail. The hotel bought the station in 1977 and converted it into bedrooms with en suit bathrooms.

County councillor Eryl Jones-Williams hopes the bridge will be purchased by the Snowdonia National Park Authority.

He said: “They own the footpath and cycle track along the former railway which runs alongside the bridge – the Mawddach Trail – which is highly popular, there is a public footpath on the other side and there are plans to create an osprey nesting site. It would be an ideal purchase for the authority.”

It really would, and I’m not just saying that because I’m fresh out of half million dollars. I’m sure they could use the toll money, and it just makes sense that that the bridge and associated buildings would belong to the park that it is already a part of geographically.

A modest headstone in the cemetery St. Mary’s Church, Northchurch, Hertfordshire, simply inscribed “Peter the Wild Boy – 1785” has been granted Grade II listing, marking it as a monument of special historic interest. The gravestone is in good condition, but it’s the man who is buried under it who makes it historically significant. Peter’s life and thus his final resting place are important witnesses to the history of disability in England, a subject English Heritage has been exploring through its listed buildings and landscapes.

Peter the Wild Boy was found as a youth living a feral existence in the woods at Helpensen, about 25 miles southwest of Hanover, Germany, in May of 1724. When local farmer Jurgen Meyer found him, Peter was naked, filthy, with matted hair and long fingernails, walking on all fours and unable to speak. He had apparently been subsisting on a diet of acorns and whatever else he could forage for an unknown length of time. Small in stature, he was thought to be about 12 years old.

Meyer turned him over to the town mayor who turned him over to the St. Spiritus Poor House. Peter lived there nine months before being moved to the hospice adjacent to the prison of Celle, reportedly because he ate so much the poor house could no longer support him. There he was named Peter as he seemed to respond to the name, and it was there that Peter met the most elevated of patrons: King George I of England, who was visiting in his capacity as Elector of Hanover.

The King and the Wild Boy had dinner, which must have been an interesting study in contrasts. George left him in the care of the gardener in Hanover, but the story of the feral child returned to London with him and curiosity spread. In February 1726, Caroline, then Princess of Wales, had Peter brought to court. He became something of a pet to King George, an unwitting jester, amusing the aristocracy and nobility of England with his uncivilized antics. He liked picking the pockets of courtiers and royalty, tried to kiss fine ladies, snatched the Lord Chamberlain’s staff, wore his hat in the king’s presence, fought tooth and nail every morning when servants attempted to dress him in his elegant green suit.

It wasn’t all fun and games. Peter was baptized and given a tutor, Scottish doctor John Arbuthnot, who tried to teach him to speak. He learned how to say his name and a garbled version of “King George,” but that was as far as he got. There’s a painting of him of the east wall of the King’s Staircase in Kensington Palace. He’s standing next to Dr. Arbuthnot on a trompe l’oeil mural that depicts King George I’s courtiers and favorites as if they were clustered on a balcony overlooking the stairs. Peter is wearing his green coat and holding oak leaves and acorns, still his favorite food, in his right hands.

London society went wild over the Wild Boy. He was the subject on everyone’s lips in 1726, as a novelty and as a scientific and philosophical exhibit. To Enlightenment thinkers, Peter was a prism through which to address the question of nature vs. nurture, the “noble savage” and man’s origins in a “state of nature” before civilization permanently alters his mind and soul. Daniel Defoe called out those attitudes in a pamphlet published July 23rd, 1726, entitled Mere Nature Delineated Or a Body without a Soul.

“[Peter] seems to be the very which the learned World has for many Years past to wish for viz one that being kept entirely from Society so as never to have heard any one speak must therefore either not speak at all or if he did form any Speech himself then they should know what language Nature first form for Mankind.”

The social and intellectual reactions to an abandoned boy were prime fodder for the great satirists of the era. Jonathan Swift satirized the Peter craze in his 1726 piece It Cannot Rain But It Pours, Or, London Strewed With Rarities. Later that year, he and Dr. Arbuthnot collaborated on another satirical broadside about the lionizing of Peter, The Most Wonderful Wonder that ever appeared to the Wonder of the British Nation.

He wasn’t a boy raised by bears (seriously, in the discussion about which animal raised him, Mama Bear was one of the most popular theories) or evidence of the theoretical state of nature. From an examination of his portrait on King’s Staircase, geneticists now believe Peter suffered from Pitt-Hopkins syndrome, a chromosomal disorder characterized by drooping eyelids, prominent “Cupid’s bow” lips, coarse hair and a severe intellectual disability.

Of course, when a person is a trend, he’s going to fall out of favor soon enough. After Queen Caroline’s death in 1737, Peter was sent to live with a Mrs. Tichbourne, one of the late Queen’s bedchamber ladies, in her farm in Hertfordshire. She was paid generously to take care of him and by all accounts she was kind to him. He traveled with her on several trips to visit farmer James Fenn at Axters End in Berkhamsted, finally moving from Mrs. Tichbourne’s home to Mr. Fenn’s.

He was happy there. The government granted Peter a lifetime pension of £35 a year (paid to his caretakers) and the farmers treated him well. He liked being out in the open, helping the farmers with their work. Sometimes he wasn’t all that helpful. He liked loading manure on carts, for instance, but he liked it so much that he’d assiduously unload a full cart just to load it again. He would spend nights out of doors, looking at the stars, and would sometimes wander off impressive distances.

After James Fenn died, Peter moved in with James’ brother Thomas Fenn at Broadway Farm. His drive to go walkabout got dangerous once when he disappeared in the summer of 1751 and could not be found. Ads in the paper with offers of rewards bore no results. Months later, in October 1751, inmates were released from a Norwich jail when the building caught fire. One of the inmates was hairy and spoke in grunts and was soon identified as the missing Wild Boy. Norwich is 130 miles away from Berkhamsted. How Peter got that far, nobody knows.

He was returned to Thomas Fenn’s farm where, to avoid any future such incidents, Mr. Fenn fitted him with a leather and iron collar inscribed “Peter the Wild Man of Hanover. Whoever will bring him to Mr Fenn at Berkhamsted shall be paid for their trouble.” It’s creepy because it was padlocked in the back and looks like a dog collar or the kind of collars slaves were made to wear in Georgian England. On the other hand, it would keep him from being thrown in the slammer a hundred miles away should be wander too far afield again. That collar still exists today, in the library of Berkhamsted School

Peter would live at Broadway Farm, which passed through several hands after Thomas Fenn’s, for the rest of his life. He died on February 22nd, 1785, around the age of 72 and was buried at St. Mary’s. The grave is well-tended to and there are often flowers left on it, a symbol of the affection in which Peter’s memory is still held. A plaque inside the church reads:

To the memory of Peter, known as the Wild Boy, having been found wild in the forest of Hertswold near Hanover in the year 1725. He then appeared to be about 12 years old. In the following year he was brought to England by the order of the late Queen Caroline, and the ablest masters were provided for him. But proving himself incapable of speaking, or of receiving any instruction, a comfortable provision was made for him at a farm in this parish, where he continued to the end of his inoffensive life. He died on the 22nd of February, 1785, supposed to be aged 72.