You couldn’t make it up

Nationalists across the world are notorious for bigging up their own countries while belittling others.  But all of them are rank amateurs when compared to the late, great and seriously deluded Comyns Beaumont.

Not content with simply coming from a country that still ruled a quarter of the globe back in his day, this giant prize marrow of an alternative theorist decided to colonise all their history, languages, myths and culture as well.

Ignorant berks like you, me and the wallpaper may previously have been under the impression that some of the greatest civilizations of antiquity flourished in sunny hot countries situated around the Mediterranean, such as Italy, Greece, Israel and Egypt.

Wrong, said Comyns Beaumont.

They were ALL located in Britain.

According to him, the splendour that was Egypt and the pharaohs hung out in western Scotland rather than north Africa.  Also to be found in our sceptred isle were ancient Greece, Israel, the Roman Empire – and Babylonia.  Bloody hell – by that reckoning, the world of antiquity must have been a very crowded place.

But if you tried to object that places as different and distant from one another as Athens, Jerusalem, Crete and Ethiopia all persist in occupying their habitual geographical sites in the present day world, he would simply brush your arguments aside as irrelevant.  The reason for this is that he had formulated a grand theory.

Basically, he started off by noticing the strange similarities between modern British place names and some of those in the ancient world.  As a typical early twentieth century English jingoist, it is doubtful that he knew very much about ancient languages, linguistics or comparative philology.  If Loch Carron and the neighbouring village of Erbusaig in Scotland sounded just like Acheron the ancient Greek river of hell and Erebus the mythical purgatory, then that is obviously exactly what they were.  Following this brilliantly simple (not to say absurdly reductionist) analogy, Achilles the great Greek hero grew up on the Isle of Skye, rather than Skyros, and ancient Athens must have lived in Bath.  

When he went on to examine the place names of other civilizations, the list of spooky coincidences only grew.  And grew.  Until most of antiquity had been conquered for Britain.

This is how he managed to come up with classics such as Mount Olympus the home of the Greek gods really being at the top of Ben Nevis, the battle of Thermopylae being fought at Glencoe and Ur of the Chaldees flourishing near the Stones of Stenness in the Orkneys.  Not to mention Jesus of Nazareth being born in Galilee (Wales) and crucified just outside Edinburgh, the site of the ancient city of Jerusalem.  Therefore you will not be in the least bit surprised to learn that Crete was in the Shetland Islands, the ancient Egyptians were actually Irish and hell can be found in western Scotland (I’m afraid the topic of the weather will be coming up again later.  In a BIG way.).      

Now at this point you may be wondering why so many different cultures and civilizations all grew up in the same rather small and obscure part of the world.  Because Britain is bloody brilliant, you daft pratt.  (Glad we solved that one, then.)

Yes, but if you will persist in redrawing the atlas and appropriating half of the ancient world for Britain, you’ve still got the problem of finding enough British sites to put up all the cities and landmarks of all the various lands and cultures.  Remember, Britain may be great – but it’s not very big.

Simple – every key place in Britain had several names, not just the one.  So the stone circle at Avebury can be identified not just as Mizpah, but also Thebes, the dragon’s teeth sown by Cadmus, an astronomical temple to Saturn and the image of a death-dealing comet.  The principle holds with historical figures too.  When the comet landed just outside Jerusalem (= Edinburgh, remember?  Pay attention, Bond!), the city was under siege by an army led by the matchless military genius Moses/Zoroaster/Silenus/Odin (aka Oh God, not again).

Er, WHAT comet was that, again?

Satan.  The double one made up of the fragments from the collapsed planet.

WTF is a ‘collapsed planet’?  How the hell do planets ‘collapse’ anyway?  And if they do, why? (Right, well, I’ve now looked up ‘collapsed planet’ on Google and apparently it is a genuine term, but seems to be mainly used to describe a planet undergoing a global ecological meltdown, like the one shown in that famous episode of Futurama where the crew of the spaceship had to collect creatures from the planet in question and take them to a new home.  I suspect what Beaumont probably meant was a planet that had exploded into a trillion and a half smithereens, more than anything else.  Doubt he knew five fifths of bugger-all about geology, either, but there you go.  Can’t be helped.)

Anyway, all the ancient catastrophe legends, including Noah’s flood and the destruction of Atlantis, refer to this very same event.

Of course, it was followed by storms, floods and earthquakes of truly titanic proportions.  The host of the invading general of the many-barrelled moniker was destroyed – along with much of Atlantis/Britain. (The Atlantis-Lemuria Hypothesis – a tasteful and more democratic way of finding extra Lebensraum for your nation.  Wonder if any visionary/nutter has ever suggested that their particular national government or the United Nations try pumping all the water out of one of these great sunken civilizations and erecting a system of dykes to protect it like they have in the Netherlands?)

If the Flood had occurred in Britain, then obviously that must mean that Noah, along with every other character in the Bible, had lived there too.  This ‘proves’ beyond all reasonable doubt that Britain was the root source of world culture.

Wait!  It gets even better.

Apparently the earth swallowed up much of the comet, thus increasing its size.  At the same time, the sheer force of the impact knocked the planet out further from the sun, lengthening the period of its orbit from 360 days to 365 ¼ days.  This altered the global climate system so that Britain lost its balmy sub-tropical weather and became the cold, misty place we know and love today.  (See, told you Beaumont can think of an answer for everything.)

If you were sitting there thinking that all this sounds strangely reminiscent of Emmanuel Velikovski and his groundbreaking volume Worlds In Collision, you’d be right.  Beaumont’s theory is eerily similar – and he got there first.  Apparently he used to give his own kids no end of nightmares by regaling them with tales of cosmology run amok.  He confidently predicted that another monster comet was due to crash into the planet some time during December 1919.

When it didn’t, his belief in the rest of his crackpot theories only intensified.  Typical bloody prophet of doom.

According to Beaumont, many of the survivors migrated south, founding colonies which they named in honour of the cities and districts of their beloved homeland.  However, the remnants of the north still remained very much the centre of world civilizations.

Jerusalem was rebuilt in Edinburgh. Then York flourished as Babylon, Lincoln became Antioch, London Damascus, Bristol both Sodom and Tarshish (not sure if this is at the same time), and Bath dumped Athens to turn into the Philistine city of Gath.  The Holy Family moved in near Glastonbury, where Jesus was born.  His entire mission took place in Somerset, then known as Galilee (which had obviously moved from Wales?  I’m confused!).

So if all this is true, how come the world’s historians persist in claiming that all these civilizations were located in a variety of places round the globe?

Well, they’re obviously lying and exaggerating in order to make their own countries look good in front of everybody else.  Yet it’s fine to sing the praises of your own homeland – just as long as it happens to be Britain.  Everybody ‘knows’ we are ‘superior’, so we don’t have to worry about this sort of crackpot theory making us look more than a little silly.

Apart from which, we was robbed.  Quite literally.

That great Yorkshireman Constantine the Great decided that the real Jerusalem in Edinburgh was too far away from his new capital city in Asia Minor.  So in an attempt to persuade people that the old city was actually situated in Israel, he hoodwinked his venerable old mother Helena into ‘finding’ the True Cross there.  Then to make quite sure that nobody caught him out, he purged every single ancient and modern document that described the Holy Land as being in Britain.  The few documents that were spared got severely mutilated.

Beaumont can show that this is true because historical records list many classical works that no longer seem to exist.

History also shows us that Constantine was only following in the footsteps of Hadrian, who had the better half of Athens (now moved from Bath to Dumbarton) dismantled and shipped all the way to Greece, where workmen promptly re-erected the buildings.  Naturally he didn’t worry too much about the cost in time or money, otherwise he wouldn’t have done it.

What continues to baffle me is the fact that Beaumont enjoyed a long and successful career as a journalist before sitting down to knock out this farrago of absolute nonsense.  Not only did he work as an aide for Lord Northcliffe, he founded and edited a number of well-regarded magazines.

John Michell claims that Beaumont used to get very frustrated with newspaper editors and owners because he was convinced that they failed to represent British interests properly.  But this is by no means the same as aggravating the hell out of them with patently false and absurd claims in his articles.  (Wonder if he did ever get bollocked for this sort of thing, though? Might be worth further investigation.)

Michell also reckons that readers of Beaumont’s books found them amazing and entertaining.  So you would have agreed – until he goes on to speculate that the main reason Beaumont didn’t manage to shift nearly as many books as later catastrophe-minded authors like Erich von Daeniken and Emmanuel Velikovsky is because much of his writing tended to be ‘long-winded and tedious’.  (Michell does list all Beaumont’s works in the bibliography to his volume Eccentric Lives, Peculiar Notions, so presumably he made a heroic attempt to read them.)

Whatever way you look at it, that has to be some serious achievement, managing to make such a flabbertrociously original theory boring as buggery.  You would have thought that a well-regarded journalist and uncle of Daphne du Maurier would know just how to knock out a concise argument in vivid, everyday prose.  Problem is, writing a full-length book gives you much more latitude for self-indulgence, particularly if your work is so original that your editor is unlikely to know enough about it to be able to pull you up every time you start getting carried away.

At this point I think I’ll just about give up …