Eccentrics – Opus

Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly

Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly was an American stunt performer who turned flagpole sitting into a national craze during the 1920s. Beginning with a 13-hour publicity stunt, he toured 28 cities, eating, shaving and sleeping on tiny platforms while crowds paid to watch from nearby rooftops. In 1930, he spent 49 days and one hour atop a 225-foot flagpole above Atlantic City’s Steel Pier. Kelly called himself “the luckiest fool in the world.” For a few years, America made him famous for going nowhere at exceptional height.

Plennie Wingo

Plennie Wingo was an unemployed Texas café owner who attempted to walk around the world backwards during the Great Depression. Wearing spectacles fitted with small rear-view mirrors, he set out from Santa Monica in 1931 and walked roughly 8,000 miles across the United States and Europe before authorities stopped him in Istanbul. He financed the journey by selling signed postcards to curious strangers. Eighteen months and thirteen pairs of shoes later, he returned home with four dollars.

Archduke Ludwig Salvator

Archduke Ludwig Salvator was a Habsburg prince who preferred a steam yacht to court life. He sailed the Mediterranean aboard the Nixe with scholars, sailors, dogs, cats, birds and monkeys, documenting entire islands in lavishly illustrated volumes. On Mallorca, he purchased a 16-kilometre stretch of coastline, protected it from development and filled it with paths and viewpoints. His former Mallorcan home, S’Estaca, is now owned by Michael Douglas.

Ibrahim Njoya

Ibrahim Njoya was the ruler of the Bamum Kingdom in present-day Cameroon. Around 1896, he began inventing a writing system for the previously unwritten Bamum language, refining hundreds of pictograms into an 80-character syllabary used in schools, histories, maps and court records. He also built a palace, established a printing press and exchanged a spectacular beaded throne with Kaiser Wilhelm II, who sent him a German Imperial Guard uniform in return.

Gangajalis

The Gangajalis are two enormous silver urns made for Maharaja Sawai Madho Singh II of Jaipur. Travelling to England for Edward VII’s coronation in 1902, he brought thousands of litres of water from the Ganges rather than drink foreign water. Each vessel was formed from thousands of melted silver coins without soldering and weighs around 340 kilograms empty.

Désert de Retz

Désert de Retz was the private world of an eighteenth-century French aristocrat who treated landscape gardening as autobiography. He designed the estate himself and disguised his house as the shattered base of an impossibly large classical column. It was less a garden than one man’s attempt to build the ruins of a civilisation that had never existed.

Ornamental hermit

An ornamental hermit was a man paid by a wealthy eighteenth-century landowner to live alone in a garden grotto as part philosopher, part decoration. Some positions required years of seclusion, silence and uncut hair before payment was received. At Painshill in England, a hermit was reportedly promised the substantial sum of £700 if he remained on the estate for seven years.

W. Reginald Bray

W. Reginald Bray was an English accountant who spent decades testing what the postal service was willing to deliver. Beginning in 1898, he mailed unwrapped turnips, a bowler hat, a rabbit’s skull, his dog and postcards addressed only with riddles or drawings. In 1900, he had himself delivered to his parents’ house, earning the name “the Human Letter.” He also mailed autograph requests to thousands of public figures, eventually building a collection of more than 15,000 replies.

Madman Muntz

Madman Muntz was an American car dealer, electronics engineer and early master of the unhinged television commercial. Wearing ridiculous costumes, he threatened to destroy cars that failed to sell and claimed he bought retail but sold wholesale because it was more fun.

Gaddafi’s travelling tent

Muammar Gaddafi was Libya’s ruler from 1969 to 2011 and an unusually committed practitioner of political theatre. On foreign visits, he often received dignitaries inside a large Bedouin tent, presenting it as a connection to his desert upbringing. The tent travelled to Brussels, Moscow, Rome and Paris, where it was erected in palace gardens and surrounded by security, communications equipment and Gaddafi’s considerable entourage. Its greatest difficulty came in New York in 2009. Central Park refused it, New Jersey objected and officials ordered it removed from an estate owned by Donald Trump for violating local regulations.