But Wykeham-Rackham’s excessive bravery was again his downfall. Emboldened by this taste of his former glory, he refused the offer of transport back to England and stayed with the Allied forces pressing forward through the Norman hedgerows. A close-range encounter with the infamous German
Astoundingly, he lived on.
Indeed, some began to speculate that out of the crucible of the world wars, humanity’s first immortal being had emerged. Wykeham-Rackham showed no obvious signs of aging, apart from his mane of white hair, which he took to dyeing to match its original lustrous black.
But inside, his soul was wasting away. A dark time began for Wykeham-Rackham. Owing to the precipitous decline in sales of wainscoting and wainscoting accessories since the Victorian period, his family fortune had dwindled almost to nothing. He was able to survive only on his military pension, and whatever he received making promotional appearances for the British Armed Forces. Twice he was caught stealing lubricants for his joints and convicted of petty larceny. He became silent and morose. He sold off eleven of his masks, and the Picasso, leaving only the one titled “Melancholia.” It was, he said, the only one he needed.
Wykeham-Rackham’s last moment in the spotlight came in the 1960s, when he became one of the oddities and grotesques taken up by Andy Warhol and the Factory scene in New York. He appeared in several of Warhol’s movies, to the lasting detriment of his dignity, and was, of course, the subject of Warhol’s seminal silkscreen
Conventional wisdom would argue that this was the end of WykehamRackham’s existence as a sentient being, but in truth, it was difficult to tell. As the 1960s wound down, he had spoken and moved less and less. One Warhol hanger-on remarked, in a display of sub-Wildean wit, that after the operation his conversation was “more brilliant than ever.”
But Warhol cast Wykeham-Rackham off as lightly as he took him up, and the old soldier passed the 1970s and 1980s in obscurity. It’s difficult to track his movements during this lost period, but curatorial notes found in Lambshead’s basement suggest that some of Warhol’s junkie friends eventually sold him to a traveling carnival, where he was put to use as a fortune-telling machine.
Even there, he was exiled to a gloomy corner of the midway. The proprietors despaired of ever making money off him, because, they said, no matter how they fiddled with his settings, he only ever predicted the imminent and painful demise of whoever consulted him.
His glorious past had been entirely forgotten but for a single trace. On the sign above his booth was painted, in swirly circus calligraphy, a quotation from Oscar Wilde:
Sir Ranulph Wykeham-Rackham in his full sartorial (and metallic) splendor
Shamalung (The Diminutions)
Documented by Michael Moorcock
SIR JOHN SOANE’S MUSEUM
13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, England
St. Odhran’s coll
Reverend Orlando Bannister 1800–1900
Miniaturisation experiment? (c. 1899)
Organic material (wood, etc.) plus metals (various)
Loaned by the Barbican Begg Bequest at the City Museum (note, proprietorship challenged by Battersea Municipal Museum, by the Lambshead Trust, and by Greyfriars School, Kent)
L1922.11. bmm/LT/GFS
Notes
Greyfriars School in Kent claims this odd piece on the grounds that (a) Reverend Bannister was an ex-pupil still funded by the school to perform certain scientific investigations and experiments, and (b) the piece is possibly the work of another of its alumni, the sculptor and scientist John Wolt. Wolt disappeared from his lodgings in 1899, leaving only a brief note suggesting that he intended to take his own life (“My final journey, undertaken voluntarily, should not prove a difficult one, and I could ultimately come face to face with my Creator. Even if a little discomfort is felt, it will be as nothing compared to the joy of bringing the word of Our Saviour to God’s tiniest creatures. B. has convinced me of their intelligence and individuality, and therefore they must be possessed of souls, just as St. Francis, apparently, believed that animals, too, have souls. I am filled with humility and ecstasy when I consider that I was their first missionary. Though the transition be painful and not a little difficult, I am assured by B. that all will be well in the ultimate.”). This note and others are attached. In Reverend Bannister’s remaining journal fragments (the majority were eaten by rats while in storage), he writes for January 1, 1900: “W. proves to be an enthusiast, perfectly willing to aid me in my work. We both feel God has chosen us.”
One of the early cases of Seaton Begg (“Sexton Blake,” as he was known to readers of detective fiction) was reported as “The Fairy Murders” in the
The bare facts of the case were as bizarre as they were brief: The small daughter of a Bermondsey tailor claimed that her half-grown cat, Mimi, had eaten a fairy. Of course, no one would believe her, even though she insisted she had seen Mimi nosing around a tiny leg. Rebecca, of course, was rightly punished for telling stories. But a few days later, she came to her mother holding triumphantly a little human ear. The Rabinowitzes, her parents, were unusual in those days in that they were vegetarians. The only meat they bought was for their cat. It came from their local butcher, Jacob “Cocky” Cohen. They inspected the ear and decided it was not human. When they went to Cocky’s next, they would complain that monkeys and possibly other animals had been used in the preparation of his cats’ meat.
Then Rebecca found part of a miniature arm, dressed in what appeared to be a tiny silk blouse sleeve, and brought this to her horrified parents, who could no longer hide the truth from themselves. The following Tuesday, they confronted the butcher.
Suspecting them of an extortion plan, so before witnesses, including PC Michael McCormac, Cocky began to sort through his supply of cats’ meat in order to prove the Rabinowitzes wrong.
To his shocked astonishment, he discovered several items of what could only be human remains, but of such tiny proportions, they were immediately called “Lilliputian,” by one of his witnesses, a Dr. Jelinek, Bohemian music teacher, originally of Prague, who would later give his part of the story in German to his sister. Upon informing the police, the witnesses were sworn to secrecy and made to sign Her Majesty’s Official Secrets Act, but this did not stop the disgusted Cocky Cohen from taking the case to a young consulting detective who had recently set up practise in Norfolk Street, London E.
Seaton Begg (not yet knighted) would become famous under another name when his adventures were sensationalised and written up for a popular weekly, but in those days, he was scarcely a household name. He worked at that time with a gigantic creature of no known breed, whom he had raised and trained and named “Griff,” or sometimes “Man-Tracker.” An invaluable asset. Begg eagerly undertook to investigate the case, and within hours, Griff had found the source of the butcher’s meat. A Battersea slaughterhouse advertised as The Metropolitan
