On the Road

John Stuart Mill, in his essay On Liberty, considered eccentricity in a nation's character to be "proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor and moral courage it contained." Britain has always esteemed such doughty dotties as the 19th century Roman Catholic naturalist, Charles Waterton, who devoted his life to exterminating black rats in England on the ground that they were foreigners smuggled into the country by Hanoverian Protestants. The 1951 Festival of Britain even set aside a section of one pavilion to commemorate oddballs. Britain's contemporary eccentrics manifest more energy than originality, but Britons in the past month have found cause for hope in:

P: A Nottingham undergraduate who shook 9,001 hands in the town square, breaking Theodore Roosevelt's record of 8,513 established at a White House reception in 1907.

P: Four Cantabrigians who played contract bridge nonstop for 73 hr. 45 min. (618 hands, 87 rubbers), surpassing the old record by 35 min.

P: A London University student who traversed the tubes of London's entire subway system in 17 hr. 41 min.

P: A 40-year-old Lancashire engineer who played the piano for 134 hr. straight.

These are isolated feats. The real craze at the moment is hiking against the clock. The fad started a month ago when Royal Marine Pete ("Hopalong") Dagnan, 24, set out to challenge the record of 104 miles paced off in 40 1/2 hr. by a U.S. marine. Hopalong, in service dress and carrying a submachine gun, marched the no miles from Dorset to London, eating buns and sipping rum for fuel, staggered across the Charing Cross finish line in mid-London 36 hr. 27 min. later, gasped: "Tell that to the marines!" The marines were serenely proud of his deed. Said a Marine surgeon: "We learned a lot. There were emotional stresses during the long, lonely night part of his march.''

In no time two lance corporals of the army's Royal Engineers, with their officers' encouragement, had bested Dagnan's mark. Then civilians began hitting the road. Among them: a walker who drank 16 pt. of milk en route; a 14-year-old schoolboy; two bowler-hatted, brief-cased, brolly-toting civil servants from Bath. By week's end an R.A.F. technician had got the time down to less than 28 hr. A Russian-born doctor, Barbara Moore, 56, also claimed to have made the trip in under 28 hr., shod in gunny sacks, eating watercress and honey, and carrying her pet tortoise, Fangio by name, who slept on a hot-water bottle. Since no one paced her, her time was not recognized. Undaunted, Vegetarian Moore snorted, in the language of the true eccentric: "Men just can't compete with me. I'm super fit."

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