History, as I have often argued, owes as much to word of mouth as the work of scribes.
So it is with Mad Jack Fuller.
A 25-foot high pyramid in the East Sussex churchyard at Brightling is Mad Jack’s tomb.
Local folk law has it that Mad Jack, a Squire well versed in the joys of the grape is sitting inside at a table, roast chicken in front of him, a bottle of vintage claret to his right hand.
Two workmen later charged with the monument’s renovation publicly debunked the story but confirmed that it was indeed the grave of this more significant than life Lewes MP. Large was the word. He weighed 22 stone and was cruelly nicknamed Hippopotamus.
The unwritten version though, is that Jack’s seated body was indeed at the table, and that the two men noted a twinkle in his eye as his head slumped forward, seemingly indicating to them to say he was six feet under, but leaving him to enjoy undisturbed his feast and eternal bottle of red wine and glass of port at his table.
I’ve been into that churchyard and gazed on this most unusual of tombs. There is nothing to indicate one way or the other how Mad Jack is positioned. But being of the eagle eye, piling up in the unscythed grass around a nearby cherub, I saw there were empty wine bottles. These were clearly labelled as nectar fermented in the late 1700s. So to me, Mad Jack dines still.
Jack was an enigma. He drank more wine than Winston Churchill, quaffed brandy and champagne combined. And that was some booze tally.
He served as MP for Lewes for 11 years between 1801 and 1812 but also was elected in Southampton for a total term of 32 years as a member of the House.
During that time he variously got slung out of the House of Commons for picking a fight with the speaker and funded the first Eastbourne life boat.
Fuller reflected some of the antics taking place in the present day parliament when in the heat of debate in 1810, he called the Speaker “an insignificant little fellow in a wig”. His political tantrum was far from flippant however and was over an £8 million price tag for a military campaign against the Netherlands in which less than a hundred soldiers died fighting, but 4000 died from sickness.
The tag of Mad Jack, he saw as a misnomer. He thought he should be called Honest John.
The Mad Jack tag came from a bet.
He wagered that he could see the spire of a church in a neighbouring village from his Brightling estate. Upon checking out the claim, he found he was going to lose the bet.
So he had a tower built overnight, Sugar Loaf Folly, to raise his line of sight and claim the prize.
Despite this eccentric behaviour, Jack was made High Sheriff of Sussex and stayed in parliament longer than most.
He was christened in 1757 not far from Lewes at Heathfield, the son of a vicar and his wife. Modest but respectable.
Then at 20, he inherited an uncle’s estate, which included West Indian sugar plantations.
Our Jack was nothing if not overtly grateful to his benefactors, and as his fortune came from the use of slave labour, he remained a vocal and stalwart supporter of slavery until he died.
This mixture of scandalous, unsocial and grape-loving behaviour left a remarkable record of kindness and inventiveness to his country and the history of his times. He was a lover of bells, and several follies were built to celebrate Nelson’s and Wellington’s victories which could be used to set a peal reverberating around the County.
Diaries exist of his beneficence to his villagers at Christmas, slaughtering whole oxen to satisfy everyone’s hunger and create a very Dickensian Christmas atmosphere.
He built an observatory, still in existence and saved Bodiam Castle from falling into serious disrepair.
And all the time, his beloved bottle of wine was never far from his lips. His servants used his observatory for other reasons. They mounted a telescope to give them warning of Jack’s returns from London.
But one of the main contributions he made was to the development of modern day television.
I kid you not. He knew and admired scientist Michael Faraday and supported his work on the relationship of magnetism with light, to the tune of £1000, the equivalent of a hundred thousand today.
Faraday also invented the Faraday Cage, which can stop electronic signals in their tracks, an ideal environment for modern spies.
An East Sussex publican Steve Tyler built a Faradays cage a couple of years ago around his pub to stop the use of mobile phones at the bar.
I’ve nominated him for a seat in the House of Lords.
Jack never became famous for anything other than his largess for scientific work, support of community institutions and love of claret. Oh yes, he also built the first lighthouse in Eastbourne, probably because of his association with Sir Humphrey Davy, he of miner’s lamp fame. George Stephenson also invented a similar lamp, but in a bitter war of words, Davy’s was recognised, and he went on to become President of the Royal Society. Stephenson became famous for inventing the railway engine. Tom Paine also worked on steam engines with American associates but to power boats and ships.
So Mad Jack sits there to this day in the churchyard of St Thomas a Beckett in Brightling.
He quaffs on his favourite tipple, rips a leg from the roast chicken placed before him and drunkenly sees stars.
Not quite just from drink and unfair comments from scribes such as me about his lack of talent.
Not even his contribution to Faraday’s work. But because his fascination with the heavens was massive and his contributions to both developers of communications and space travel in the 100 or so years after his death was enormous. If only he had known. His name does live on in as an unusual way as the man himself. There is a Morris Dance group in Hastings named after him.
A belch comes from the pyramid, the distinct sound of wine flowing from the neck of a bottle.
How can I be so daft?
Of course, he knows. I can see a grin spread all across his face.