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WORK TITLE: The Phantom Atlas
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.edwardbrookehitching.com/
CITY: London
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Son of Franklin Brooke-Hitching.
EDUCATION:Graduated from University of Exeter.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, geographer, documentary director, and television scriptwriter. Writer for the television program QI, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).
MEMBER:Royal Geographical Society (fellow), British Cartographic Society, International Map Collectors’ Society.
AWARDS:Winner of awards for documentaries.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Edward Brooke-Hitching is a British author, geographer, documentary producer, and television writer. He has been a writer for the BBC series QI (Quite Interesting), a combination quiz show and panel program featuring prominent comics and performers. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a member of the British Cartographic Society. His father, Franklin Brooke-Hitching, was a well-known antiquarian book dealer and collector of maps and British exploration memorabilia, a tradition which Edward continues today. “He lives in a dusty heap of old maps and books in London,” commented a writer on the Edward Brooke-Hitching website. Brooke-Hitching graduated from the University of Exeter with a distinction in filmmaking.
Fox Tossing
Brooke-Hitching’s first book, Fox Tossing: And Other Forgotten Dangerous Sports, Pastimes, and Games, takes an amusing look at unlikely sports and games that were actually practiced in the past. His research “revealed eccentric inventions, activities that questioned credibility, and senselessly brutal amusements,” observed Angela Lumpkin in Phi Kappa Phi Forum. The author covers sports and games from as far back as the Medieval period, and notes that some of them might have passed for a form of martial training.
The book reveals recreational activities that often posed a danger to participants and spectators. Centrifugal bowling turned the traditional alley into a U-shaped track that relied on physics. Auto polo transferred the horse-mounted sport into one where players careened around the field and chased balls in cars. Waterfall riding created a risk of injury from plunging over a tall waterfall. Ice tennis was played much like the regular game, but on ice. Horseback boxing involved combatants who, while riding horses, worked to get in close enough to land a solid punch on each other.
Some of the other activities that the author mention were relatively harmless. Popular pastimes in the United States in the middle of the twentieth century included phone booth-stuffing (seeing how many people could be fit inside a phone booth), goldfish swallowing, and flagpole sitting. These and other activities were often considered fads among the young, and they came and went with a swiftness expected of such diversions.
As suggested by the title, many of the historic sports mentioned in the book involved animals. The “the overriding theme that emerges is the amount of cruelty that humans inflicted on animals in the name of providing themselves with entertainment,” observed James Hill in the Washington Post Book Review. The fox tossing of the title was once popular in Germany. The sport involved releasing foxes into a confined space, catching them in nets, then throwing up as high into the air as possible. In other cruel sports, bulls were attacked and killed by dogs; roosters were tied to poles or buried with their heads sticking up, and then shot with arrows; and animals of various types were pitted against each other or against humans, such as in the stereotypical Roman fights in the arenas. In many cases, spectators and participants gambled on the outcome of the conflicts.
“Readers interested in popular looks at history, sports, and cultural anthropology will be amused by this title,” commented Jim Burns, writing in Library Journal. “The intriguing and the weird enlivened this recounting of how the rich and the poor chose to entertain themselves,” Lumpkin concluded. Irish Examiner contributor Simon Peach called Fox Tossing the “intriguing, go-to guide on the weird and wonderful activities of years gone by.”
The Phantom Atlas
In The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies, and Blunders on Maps, Brooke-Hitchings looks at historical maps and mapmaking in terms of the accidental errors or deliberate misinformation that was included in them. He “presents the stories of over fifty locations that unwarrantedly found their way on to maps,” noted Spectator contributor Alex Burghart. The author points out that many of these errors were the result of confusion on the part of explorers or those who interpreted the reports of their travels. Some of the mistakes came about because of errors in recording and reporting discoveries. Other errors, once they were in place, remained on maps for years due to lack of attention or sheer laziness. For example, the island of Burmeja, shown off the northern coast of the Yucatan peninsula, was removed from maps only as short a time ago as 2009.
Other problems with early maps seem unfathomable today. California was frequently depicted as its own island on many early maps from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Legendary locations such as El Dorado, Atlantis, and Thule were depicted in earnest on contemporary maps. Brooke-Hitchings also shows how some early conceptions of animals emerged through drawings of fantastic creatures in the margins of maps, such as the Sea Pig and Hippocentaur. The author includes many high-quality reproductions of maps to illustrate the mistakes he mentions in the text.
Brooke-Hitchings’s book of “cartographic errors from maps throughout history provides an entertaining glimpse into the spread of misinformation during the age of exploration,” commented a Publishers Weekly writer.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Irish Examiner, July 4, 2014, Simon Peach, review of Fox Tossing: And Other Forgotten and Dangerous Sports, Pastimes, and Games.
Library Journal, October 15, 2015, Jim Burns, review of Fox Tossing, p. 93.
Phi Kappa Phi Forum, summer, 2016, Angela Lumpkin, review of Fox Tossing, p. 30.
Publishers Weekly, February 5, 2018, review of The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps, p. 52.
Seattle Times, February 14, 2016, “Fox Tossing: Sports and Pastimes Best Forgotten,” James Hill, review of Fox Tossing.
Spectator, November 26, 2016, Alex Burghart, “Atlas Shrugs,”review of The Phantom Atlas, p. 38.
ONLINE
Edward Brooke-Hitching website, http://www.edwardbrookehitching.com (June 20, 2018).
Edward Brooke-Hitching is the author of the critically acclaimed books 'The Phantom Atlas' (US April 2018), 'Fox Tossing...and Other Forgotten Sports', and the forthcoming 'The Golden Atlas'. The son of an antiquarian book dealer, he is a writer for the popular BBC television programme QI and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He lives in a dusty heap of old maps and books in London, UK.
Edward Brooke-Hitching is the author of the critically acclaimed books The Phantom Atlas (2016), which has been translated into nine languages, and Fox Tossing, Octopus Wrestling and Other Forgotten Sports . The son of Franklin Brooke-Hitching, collector of the largest and most comprehensive library of British exploration and discovery ever accumulated, he is also a writer for the BBC series QI and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He lives in London.
Edward Brooke-Hitching is the author of the critically-acclaimed books The Phantom Atlas (2016), and Fox Tossing, Octopus Wrestling and Other Forgotten Sports (2015), and an award-winning documentary director. The son of an antiquarian book dealer, he graduated from the University of Exeter with a distinction in filmmaking before entering independent documentary production. He is also an ‘Elf’ (writer/researcher) for the hit BBC television programme QI, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and a member of the British Cartographic Society and International Map Collectors’ Society. He lives in a dusty heap of old maps and books in London.
The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps
Publishers Weekly. 265.6 (Feb. 5, 2018): p52.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps
Edward Brooke-Hitching. Chronicle, $29.95
(256p) ISBN 978-1-4521-6840-1
This collection of cartographic errors from maps throughout history provides an entertaining glimpse into the spread of misinformation during the age of exploration. Brooke-Hitching (Fox Tossing) arranges his subjects alphabetically and begins with the "Strait of Anian," a misconceived western terminus to the Northwest Passage from the 14th century, and ends with the "Zeno Map," based on an unsubstantiated exploration of the North Atlantic by the Zeno brothers in the 15th century. Reproductions of mistaken maps accompany each entry, along with theories of the errors' possible origins and accounts of their final erasures from the annals of geography. Some entries are for places that exist, but at one point were improperly described, as with a California that appears as its own island on hundreds of maps from the 17th and 18th centuries, a mistake that the author tracks back to the 1602 voyage of Sebastian Vizcaino. Though much of the book covers familiar ground in documenting accounts of nonexistent lands such as Atlantis, El Dorado, Hy Brasil, and Thule, a section on the fantastic creatures, including the Sea Pig and the Hippocentaur, that appear in the marginalia of many maps sets this atlas apart from the mass of other books on the subject. Cartophiles will find much to amuse themselves. Color illus. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps." Publishers Weekly, 5 Feb. 2018, p. 52. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A526810421/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f72739e3. Accessed 29 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A526810421
Atlas shrugs
Alex Burghart
Spectator. 332.9822 (Nov. 26, 2016): p38+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
The map-maker's task may never be done, says Alex Burghart. Seven new islands have appeared in the past decade alone
The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps
by Edward Brooke-Hitching
Simon & Schuster, 25 [pounds sterling], pp. 256
Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders
by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras and Ella Morton
Workman Publishing, 25 [pounds sterling], pp. 480
Atlas of Improbable Places: A Journey to the World's Most Unusual Places
by Travis Elborough
Aurum, 20 [pounds sterling], pp. 224
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
In his Forward Prize-winning collection of 2014, A Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion, Kei Miller's hero describes his craft thus: 'My job is to imagine the widening/ of the unfamiliar and also/the widening ache of it;/ to anticipate the ironic/ question: how did we find/ ourselves here.' This bringing of the unfamiliar into scope looms large in three new collections of cartographic curiosities which tell us about places that never were, places we've never been and places we will never go to.
Edward Brooke-Hitching's beautifully illustrated The Phantom Atlas presents the stories of over 50 locations that unwarrantedly found their way on to maps. In many cases these 'places' were the fault of mis-recording and misreporting, the progeny of the weary confusion of those far from home. Having fixed themselves in one map, they were replicated and disseminated until such time as they were--like learned theorems--disproved. What is most remarkable is the sheer length of time for which some errors persisted. It might be expected that Edwardian explorers sent telegraphs proclaiming the anti-discovery of islands charted centuries earlier. It is, however, a little brain-boggling that the island of Bermeja (supposedly off the north coast of the Yucatán peninsula) was only finally eliminated from maps in 2009.
Brooke-Hitching's book is, in part, an excursion into the minds of men imagining an as yet uncharted world--one in which Australia might have a large central sea--or reporting the confused rumours of earlier travellers. The medieval Icelandic Book of Settlements, the Landnámabók, recounted how a tenth-century explorer, Ari Marsson, had a ship which was driven by a tempest to a place near Vinland, which he called Greater Ireland. Stories of this island spread and somehow caused it to appear in the works of the 12th-century Arab geographer, Muhammad al-Idrisi.
Among Brooke-Hitching's subjects is a detailed dive into the world of the Nuremberg Chronicle Map. This was a sort of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy of yesteryear, which made note of how very odd foreigners could be, what with some of them having six arms, being half-horse or having no head. Brooke-Hitching notes that the written origins of such folk can often be traced to the works of Pliny and the legends of Alexander--though there may be further to go. The race of chaps with extended necks and beaks could derive from mangled accounts of neck-stretched and lip-plated African peoples, and the monocular men of the far north seem to speak of one-eyed Odin, god of the Norse.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The Nuremberg Chronicle's desire to catalogue and promote the joltingly bizarre runs through two other new atlases: Atlas Obscura, by an intrepid internet trio, and Travis Elborough's Atlas of Improbable Places. The 'atlas' was obviously named after the titan whose hard lot it was to hold up the celestial spheres, and whose image adorned a 1595 collection of maps published by the Dutch cartographer Gerhardus Mercator (presumably because his was an Atlas-eyeview of the world). Mighty Atlas bore not only the globe's boundaries but all the peculiarities contained within them -something that Atlas Obscura and its parent website seem to aspire to do.
Less a collection of maps and more an intriguing inventory of hundreds of oddities, it references a soothsaying creature--half fox, half woman--who lives in Karachi Zoo; the medieval Bantu city of Great Zimbabwe; a Thai Buddhist temple constructed from beer bottles; the phallic tombstones of Golestan (Iran); the world's largest ball of paint; and the 'tempest prognosticator' of Okehampton (a meteorological device powered by the cognisance of leeches).
Travis Elborough's improbable places are similarly surprising--a series of architectural and societal anomalies obliged by history to be different. We are reminded of the unlikely relocation, in 1971, of the 130,000 tons of London Bridge to Lake Havasu City, Arizona; we learn of the ruined ancient city of Ani in east Turkey--once the capital of the Armenian empire--and see the massive, forgotten African Renaissance Monument--the tallest statue in Africa--in Senegal.
Reassuringly compelled by the bleak, Elborough also takes us to Zheleznogorsk (a former closed Soviet city in one of Siberia's quieter corners); to Wittenoom, an asbestos-ridden industrial town in Western Australia, abandoned in 1966; and to the horrific-sounding 'Island of Dolls' in Xochimilco, Mexico. He is a brilliant guide to places we are never likely to take the family on holiday but still rather hanker to see.
These books are wonderfully strange, though in creating such ready accessibility in print and online they almost pluck out the heart of their subjects' mystery. (There is something profoundly comforting in having only a small number of photographs in Elborough's well-mapped book.) Fortunately, odd things keep popping up--as do islands. Seven have appeared in the past decade, including, most recently, Hunga Ha'apai in Tonga. Such ever-shunting tectonics--physical and political--ensure that the atlas-maker's job will never quite be done.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Burghart, Alex. "Atlas shrugs." Spectator, 26 Nov. 2016, p. 38+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A472239701/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4baaf748. Accessed 29 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A472239701
Brooke-Hitching, Edward. Fox Tossing: And Other Forgotten and Dangerous Sports, Pastimes, and Games
Jim Burns
Library Journal. 140.17 (Oct. 15, 2015): p93+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Brooke-Hitching, Edward. Fox Tossing: And Other Forgotten and Dangerous Sports, Pastimes, and Games. Touchstone. Nov. 2015. 272p. illus. bibliog. ISBN 9781501115141. $24; ebk. ISBN 9781501115172. SPORTS
If there are any hidden takeaways in this droll romp through the history of bizarre games and other pastimes, they are that humankind has, from the dawn of time to now, had a low tolerance for boredom, and that this has been more than offset by our ability to compensate with creative diversions that lay bare what might be called the inanity of humanity. Readers will already know of some of the approximately 100 re-creations that BrookeHitching, a British documentary director, presents: flagpole-sitting, phone booth-stuffing, goldfish-swallowing, and bull-running. Many others, definitely not so much: ice tennis (tennis played on ice); auto polo (polo using cars, not ponies); boxing on horseback (imagine Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali pounding each other while mounted on stallions); and fly ting (matches in which contestants tried to best the insults and profanity they hurled at one another, a pastime that could have been the medieval precursor to The Jerry Springer Show). VERDICT Readers interested in popular looks at history, sports, and cultural anthropology will be amused by this title, though animal lovers might be appalled by sections on sports such as monkey-fighting, cat burning, Italian cat head butting, pig running, and lion baiting.--Jim Burns, formerly with Jacksonville P.L., FL
Burns, Jim
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Burns, Jim. "Brooke-Hitching, Edward. Fox Tossing: And Other Forgotten and Dangerous Sports, Pastimes, and Games." Library Journal, 15 Oct. 2015, p. 93+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A431617175/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=49251699. Accessed 29 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A431617175
Fox Tossing And Other Forgotten and Dangerous Sports, Pastimes, and Games
Hits Mark
Phi Kappa Phi Forum. 96.2 (Summer 2016): p30.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi
http://www.phikappaphi.org/web/Publications/PKP_Forum.html
Full Text:
Edward Brooke-Hitching, Fox Tossing And Other Forgotten and Dangerous Sports, Pastimes, and Games (New York City: Simon and Schuster), 2015. 272 pp.
Cruel, dangerous, and ridiculous describe some sports that, thankfully, have been erased from memory. E.B. Hitching's exhaustive research for Fox Tossing revealed eccentric inventions, activities that questioned credibility, and senselessly brutal amusements.
Take, for instance, the titular fox tossing, a seventeenth-century Germany amusement that left hundreds of foxes dead after they were released into a confined space, caught in nets, slings, or blankets, and repeatedly tossed into the air. Until these and other such sports were banned, few animals were safe. These included squirrels (hit by the bark of trees to concuss and kill them); bear-baiting (bears were restrained and subjected to vicious attacks by dogs); cats (beaten out of barrels and clubbed to death); bulls (chased by dogs and killed); cockfighting (roosters fighting each other) and cock-shying (as roosters were tied to a stake or buried except for their heads, then shot with arrows); duck-baiting (with wings pinioned, they were attacked by dogs); eel-pulling or gander-pulling (as competitors attempted to grasp all or a part of an eel or goose); lion-baiting (with caged lions attacked by dogs); monkey fighting (against dogs); pig-sticking (spearing boars who had been cornered by dogs); ratting (dogs killing rats); and the Roman venatio in arenas where hundreds of lions, elephants, bears, bulls, ostriches, panthers, leopards, wolves, and other animals slaughtered each other and prisoners to the excitement of the masses, who loved the blood and gore. Several of these animal-baiting events were popularized by the associated gambling.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Shifting to dangerous sports--and to humans, who were bruised, broken, bloodied, and killed in thrill-seeking activities such as auto polo, baby boxing, balloon jumping, boxing on horseback, cricket on horseback, donkey boxing, firework boxing, fiery kites, flagpole-sitting, human fishing, man-baiting (against dogs), mob football, people-throwing, and waterfall riding.
Among the nearly 100 sports, pastimes, and games included by the author were those so ridiculous and bizarre, they would not be featured on ESPN's SportsCenter. Inventors led the way with an aquatic tripod to get hunters closer to waterfowl; bone skates, which were the forerunner of ice skates; bow-and-arrow golf, where archers competed against golfers for the lower score; centrifugal bowling, which used a shortened, U-shaped alley with the outer side tilted upwards like a velodrome; an ice velocipede, with a front-pedaled wheel and two rear razor-sharp metal skates; and a monowheel with a giant outer wheel with the driver, controls, and engine level inside it. Imagination also offered sometimes-deadly alternatives to more traditional pastimes. There's barrel jumping, baseball with cannon, battle ball, bloodless dueling, cheetah racing, ice tennis, octopus-wresting, phone booth stuffing, phosphorescent golf, racing deer, ski ballet, and stilts versus runners versus horses.
The intriguing and the weird enlivened this recounting of how the rich and the poor chose to entertain themselves.
ANGELA LUMPKIN (TexasTech University) is chairwoman of the Texas Tech Department of Kinesiology and Sport Management and a graduate of the University of Arkansas, The Ohio State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She's authored 23 books and served as president of the National Association for Sport and Physical Education. Lumpkin is the vice president for awards and fellowships for Phi Kappa Phi and president of the Texas Tech chapter.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Mark, Hits. "Fox Tossing And Other Forgotten and Dangerous Sports, Pastimes, and Games." Phi Kappa Phi Forum, vol. 96, no. 2, 2016, p. 30. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A454362374/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=65ecf149. Accessed 29 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A454362374
‘Fox Tossing’: sports and pastimes best forgotten
Originally published February 14, 2016 at 6:00 am
In “Fox Tossing,” British documentary filmmaker Edward Brooke-Hitching compiles the many cruel, dangerous and inexplicably goofy sports and pastimes that humans entertained themselves with in the past, from wolfing to phone-booth stuffing.
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By James Hill
The Washington Post
‘Fox Tossing: And Other Forgotten and Dangerous Sports, Pastimes, and Games’
by Edward Brooke-Hitching
Touchstone, 264 pp., $24
Centuries from now, archaeologists are likely to uncover video of American professional football circa 2016 and be appalled by the brutality of the game. If they are lucky, they might also find a copy of a book explaining that, in the grand scheme of things, football and other contact sports weren’t so bad after all.
British documentary filmmaker Edward Brooke-Hitching has written such a book about amusements past. And while “Fox Tossing” is meant to be an entertaining look at the way things were, the inescapable conclusion is: Thank God these so-called sports were quickly consigned to history’s ash bin.
As Brooke-Hitching goes through a range of forgotten sports, from aerial golf to the particularly bloodthirsty wolfing — the royal sanction of hunting wolves into extinction in medieval England and Scotland — the overriding theme that emerges is the amount of cruelty that humans inflicted on animals in the name of providing themselves with entertainment. It’s enough to make you sick.
Such decadence, of course, did make others sick, a prime reason the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was formed in the early 19th century. Birds, bears, cats, dogs, foxes — indeed the entire animal kingdom — owe a tremendous debt of gratitude.
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But if we weren’t killing animals, we often were killing ourselves. And not just in the medieval period, a time when some of the rougher sports were considered to be foundations of military training. Brooke-Hitching cites many a sport that didn’t catch on even in the 20th century, largely because the game was an invitation to a premature death.
Cruelty and danger are two of the three categories that catch Brooke-Hitching’s eye. The other is ridiculousness. Fox tossing, the 18th-century German “sport” from which the book takes its name, could reasonably be considered for all three. “Played by both men and women, the aim of the game was to launch the unsuspecting animals in the air as high as possible,” the author writes. When they came back to Earth, the grim reaper took over.
There are some problems with organization in this book, namely the author’s decision to list the sports in alphabetical order. The effect is to jump around from the ancient period to the Middle Ages to the modern era, leaving the reader not quite sure what people-throwing in the 18th century has to do with phone-booth-stuffing in the mid-20th century. Answer: not much, except the ridiculousness of it all. And when did phone-booth-stuffing become a sport, rather than a stunt?
Yet although “Fox Tossing” seems at times like scrolling through Wikipedia, give Brooke-Hitching some credit. Even though blood sports still exist, what he’s really accomplished is to make us aware, in vivid detail, that the mass killing of animals just isn’t cricket.
James Hill
Book review: Fox Tossing, Octopus Wrestling And Other Forgotten Sports
Saturday, July 04, 2015
Review: Simon Peach
FUCHSPRELLEN is the inspiration for Edward Brooke-Hitching’s first book.
Edward Brooke-Hitching
Simon & Schuster, €14.50
The writer and documentary filmmaker’s German may not be the best, but even he was able to recognise the words ‘fox’ and ‘bouncing’.
It was a cruel, peculiar activity which involved throwing a fox as high as possible and piqued Brooke-Hitching’s interest, leading to this A-Z of forgotten sports, activities, and games.
Meticulous research has led to fascinating accounts of these forgotten sports’ origins and endings, offering great nuggets of information.
For example, did you know the pub name ‘Dog and Duck’ owes its name in part to duck-baiting — or the bloody origin of the phrase ‘to beat around the bush’?
Then there is eel-pulling, ice tennis, and phonebooth-stuffing, as well as the day in December 1937 when cheetahs took on greyhounds in Romford, Essex. All of these and more are covered in this intriguing, go-to guide on the weird and wonderful activities of years gone by.