![Frederick Gustavus Burnaby (1842-1885), painted by Tissot Frederick Gustavus Burnaby (1842-1885), painted by Tissot](https://flaneur.me.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/735px-Frederick_Gustavus_Burnaby_by_James_Jacques_Tissot-678x381.jpg)
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.
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