https://open.spotify.com/episode/6s44wvPPsaUhCgPiBLCTWh?si=c9e4d3f6476a4d49
“Happy is the man who hath never known what it is to taste of fame – to have it is a purgatory, to want it is a hell.”
So said writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and here’s a story that proves him right, the story of a fellow known as “Boy” Jones, sometimes called the first celebrity stalker.
His targets: the Queen of England, and her underwear.
He was Edward Jones, a troubled individual who definitely leaned more into his vices than his virtues.
Here’s how his biographer describes him: “He was extremely ugly, with a wide mouth and low brow and he never washed, which is why people thought he was a chimney sweep.”
As a teenager he became obsessed with Queen Victoria, so much so that in December 1840 he snuck into the palace when she was home.
Jones spent days hiding under furniture, stealing food from the kitchens and hovering close enough to the monarch that he could hear her newborn baby crying.
When he was finally caught (with a pair of the royal undies down his pants) he happily admitted he’d repeatedly made himself at home in the palace, right near Victoria and her family.
Soon there were newspaper articles and songs and rumors about the strange young man who put himself in Her Majesty’s orbit for his own reasons.
While trespassing wasn’t technically a crime, even at the palace, there was, understandably, a great concern about what this repeat intruder might do to the queen, or the queen’s baby, if he wasn’t stopped.
So the queen’s advisors known as the Privy Council held a secret trial that put Jones behind bars for a few months.
But he promptly returned to his queen-bothering habit, and did so again even after another trial and several months of hard labor.
This set a pattern in which Jones would be caught and sanctioned, but ended up back in or around the palace anyway.
One time the authorities sent Jones into the Royal Navy, but he tried to walk from Portsmouth back to London.
The authorities deported him twice and they once put him on a prison ship, but each time he found his way back home.
He didn’t change course until the 1880s, four decades after he was first caught inside the palace.
He moved to Australia under the name Thomas Jones, maybe to avoid all the wisecracks about his past.
And he worked at times as a pie salesman, a burglar and a town crier, until he reportedly got drunk and fell off a bridge to his demise in 1893.
Victoria famously lived and reigned until 1901, so she got at least a few years away from this guy.
The fire chief of Montgomery County, Maryland had to apologize recently for an odd situation.
The fire station is next to a park with a baseball field, and after a youngster’s home run reportedly landed on his pickup truck, a firefighter apparently used the hose to drench the field so that the league had to cancel all its games.
The department had warned everybody not to park there, but then good advice so often goes unheeded.
Story of Boy Jones who stole Queen Victoria’s underwear (BBC)
Firefighter floods high school baseball field after home run hits personal vehicle (Local 12)
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Image via Wikicommons