Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish,
a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.
My name is Dan Shriver and I'm sitting here with James Harkin,
Andrew Hunter Murray and Sarah Pascoe and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go.
Starting with you, James Harkin.
Okay, my fact this week is that the first man to use an umbrella in London was pelted with rubbish for doing so.
Wow, but fortunately he had an umbrella.
Was that why he took it out?
He didn't although according to his biographer when one person threw rubbish at him he used his umbrella to give the man a right good thrashing.
Oh really?
Yeah.
Wow.
So that should be the fact, the first ever outing of an umbrella was used to beat a man.
Oh yeah.
That's quite cool.
I should redo it.
So yeah, so this is a guy called Jonas Hamway and he had been to France,
he was a bit of a traveller and he came back from France and in France they'd all been using umbrellas for quite a long time but in England they were seen as kind of either a feminine or a weakness of character that you'd have it or just French which was a bad thing at the time.
So when you say it's the first person seeing public with an umbrella you just mean the first man.
Yeah.