Frederick Gustavus Burnaby (1842-1885), painted by Tissot

Frederick Gustavus Burnaby (1842-1885) was more of a well-rounded individual than you, I or anybody else will ever be. Here’s why.

- He was said to be the strongest man in the British army, which he joined in 1859.

- He regularly wrote for The Times, Vanity Fair, and numerous other journals.

- He could break a horseshoe with his hands.

- He crossed the Channel in a balloon.

- He claimed to be descended from Edward I.

- He could hold a billiard cue horizontally and steady, gripping only the tip, with his arm outstretched.

- He could also vault over a billiard table using only his left hand.

- He travelled a thousand miles by sleigh, from Orenburg to Khiva, with only two other people, in one of the coldest winters then on record. His servant was ‘a [...] salacious [...] Tartar dwarf named Nazar’.

- Though married, Nazar ‘lost his heart to an Ursk siren’.

- While on this journey across Asia, his beard snapped off due to frostbite.

- He wrote several bestselling books.

- At the age of 13, he rowed from Windsor to Shrewsbury and back again (600 miles) in a one-pair skiff.

- He once carried two ponies under his arms, ‘as if they had been cats’.

- His wife, Elizabeth Hawkins-Whitshed, was a mountaineer and also probably the first ever female film-maker.

- He once twisted a kitchen poker around a friend’s neck, as a joke, in the presence of the future King Edward VII.

- He inspired Prince Charles’s 60th birthday portrait.

- He was fluent in English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, and Arabic. And was also proficient in Italian.

- He became extremely famous and you could buy Burnaby crockery and playing cards.

- Queen Victoria reportedly fainted on hearing of his death.

- He could also play the cornet.

These facts are all here and/or here and/or in Peter Hopkirk’s The Great Game.