Everyone, sooner or later, reads books like these. This book is not a narrative, but rather a collection of reportage about the worst, the least successful and the ill-conceived events, persons and attempts in history.

Purporting to be the Official Handbook of the Not Terribly Good Society of Great Britain, the Book of Heroic Failures was a book I found second-hand. Published in 1977, it had the air of the Goodies or the Two Ronnies about it: that terribly British 1970s ‘here’s something funny you might be interested in reading whilst enjoying a nice cup of tea’ feeling. It’s an innocent enough book: the knives don’t really come out and the comments on people’s inability to function in their chosen professions are not so much scathing as pitying. Much of it’s abundant humour comes from Stephen Pile’s wit.

Highlights include:

The Least Successful Attempt To Capture The Loch Ness Monster On Film, in which several Scottish researchers decided in 1975 to seduce the monster with a papier-mache ‘lady monster’, complete with buxom fittings and long eyelashes;

The Man Who Almost Invented The Vacuum Cleaner, in which a man demonstrated an electric device which blew the dust away with a stream of air. Hubert Booth saw the demonstration, and advised the man afterwards that it should suck the dust up instead of blow it away. The man scoffed at the idea, and Booth patented the vacuum cleaner shortly afterwards;

The Most Misprints In A Newspaper, The Times 15 March 1978 (78 misprints);

The World’s Worst Interpreter, a Polish Governmental official who told Poland of Jimmy Carter’s “Lust for the people of Poland”; and my personal favorite

The World’s Least Successful Secret Weapon, France’s introduction of the machine gun during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. So secret was it that the guns were delivered to front-line troops who had never heard of them and had no training whatsoever in their use. As literacy was not a requirement for front-line service in the French Army the large instruction manual which accompanied it was not much good to anyone except the Germans, who overran the (for all intents and purposes) unarmed French army, read the book and used the guns themselves.

A note: Whilst reading this book I was in two minds as to whether any of the events actually occurred, or had occurred and were exaggerated. I was very pleased to say that towards the end of the book the author began (during his telling of these anecdotes) to let slip his various methods of data collection, which led me to believe that each event had been rigorously investigated. Indeed, the last chapter is an apologetic list of the things that the author had heard about but had not been able to confirm, but which were included for completeness.

A very funny book, for all it’s 70′s British tweeness. 4 stars.