Hi I’m the History Guy. I have a degree in history and I love history, and if you
love history too, well this is the channel for you.
Celebrities pass away all the time, I
mean the sad fact is that no one lives forever and as shocking as it is
sometimes, even the famous give way to age, and it happens so often that it's
easy to miss when someone passes like that. And so in 2004 when the oldest
living resident of Great Britain passed, it made some newspapers here and there
but it was largely missed by the wider world and that's tragic to me because
she lived such an extraordinary life and was truly..extraordinary. One of a kind.
She was the gentlest soul that you would ever meet but that belied a life that
had gracefully withstood enormous turmoil and change. No hapless victim, she
served her country in true brutal Wars and then came home to be famous,
hobnobbing with royalty and movie stars and music stars, she is someone who
certainly deserves to be remembered. And if I didn't mention her name was Timothy
and she was a tortoise. A Mediterranean spur-thighed tortoise to be exact,
thought to be the oldest living example of her species. She was likely born in
Turkey around 1844 and her story begins, as all great stories do, with being
kidnapped by pirates. Timothy's early days are a bit of a
mystery, she didn't really like to talk about her past, but one of the stories is
that she was originally found aboard a Portuguese privateer, essentially a
state-sponsored pirate, in 1854. Privateers are essentially given a license by
their government to engage in piracy against an enemy, and if Timothy really
did serve on a Portuguese privateer, that would have been against the French who
had frequent conflicts with the Portuguese. And if she really was a
pirate in 1854 she was among the last because in the Declaration of
Paris in 1856, all the major European powers got together and abolished the
practice of licensing pirates. The end of the age of piracy was one of the many
changes that Timothy would endure in her life. While the rumors of service aboard
a Portuguese pirate ship seemed somewhat fanciful, we do know that
Timothy was acquired by John Guy Courtenay Everard of the Royal Navy in
1854 and that her size at the time suggested that she was about 10 years
old. Everard assumed that she was a male and so gave her the name Timothy,
and she served as the mascot aboard the warship HMS Queen during the first
bombardment of Sevastopol, during the Crimean War in 1854. The war in the
Crimea was a complex affair fought between the Empire of Russia and an
alliance of the empires of England, France, the Ottoman Empire and the
Kingdom of Sardinia, and it had to do with growing Russian influence in the
Middle East. In the end Russia lost and was forced to give up territories that it
had claimed from the Ottoman Empire, and the war changed power structures in
Europe, but not before it cost nearly a million lives, many of those to diseases
like cholera. Timothy and HMS Queen served during the bombardment of the
fortress of Sevastopol in the Crimea. It was a bloody affair, the Allied fleet was
unable to do much damage to the fortifications but took quite a lot of
damage from the shore batteries. HMS Queen herself was set afire three times
during the battle, a harrowing affair even for a seasoned pirate. It was during
the Crimean War that Timothy's owner met perhaps the most famous veteran of the
Crimean War, the nurse Florence Nightingale, who developed the practice
of modern Nursing in the hospitals in that horrible war. Coincidentally
Florence Nightingale also had a pet tortoise, its name was Jimmy.
Timothy followed Cortney Everard in his naval career serving next as the mascot
aboard the HMS Princess Charlotte, a 104 gunship of the line, during the
Second Opium War. The Second Opium War was another complex affair fought
between 1854 and 1860 that was between the British and French empires and the
Chinese Ching dynasty, and it had to do with opening trade in China. It was a war
of questionable justification that supported the destructive opium trade. In
the Second Opium War, the Royal Navy participated in the attacks on the Taku
Forts, which was a series of fortifications on the high river, and
again the Navy took terrible casualties trying to fight the shore bombardment,
but since it was on a river, they were forced to use smaller gunboats that
could go up the river so Timothy was probably spared the worst of the
fighting out on the Princess Charlotte. In the end Britain prevailed and China
was forced to make concessions in what China referred to as “The Unequal Treaty”.
Having served in two of the most significant conflicts of the era
Timothy continued to follow Courtenay Everards naval career and when he
retired in 1880 he passed her to another naval officer. She didn't leave the Navy
clear until 1892 after 38 years service in the Royal Navy. From then on she lived
in England eventually with Courtney Everards family, the Earl's of Devon, who
lived in an estate near Exeter are called
Powderham. It was there in 1926 when the 14th Earl of Devon took Timothy to the
London Zoological Society to see if “he” could mate, and they found out for the
very first time that Timothy was in fact, a she. Thus revealing her to be part of a
distinguished group of women, the first known example of which, was a Pippa Lee
of Karst during the Trojan War, of women who masqueraded as men so that
they could serve in time of war. It was there at Powderham state, quietly
munching her favorite meal of strawberries in the garden and
hibernating each year under a wisteria tree that Timothy withstood great
changes in culture, lived through two world wars, the Blitz which nearly
destroyed the city of Exeter. From the 1960s on Powderham had tours
and so Timothy was given a tag that said hello my name is Timothy, I'm very old,
please do not pick me up. When the movie The Remains of the Day was filmed at
Powderham in 1993 she met actor Christopher Reeve, and as Powderham
started holding concerts, she met famous rock stars including Roger Daltrey of
the Who. When Timothy passed away in 2004 she was thought to have been the oldest
living resident of the United Kingdom, the longest lived example of a
spur-thighed tortoise, and the last surviving veteran of both the Crimean
and Opium wars, and while it might seem somewhat fanciful to see history through
the eyes of a tortoise, she is perhaps the greatest living example of the
permanence of nature and the transience of humanity. Author Rory Knight Bruce, and
his enduring work on Timothy of The Tortoise, has suggested a movement to
have the word “Timothysious”, meaning the wisdom that is derived from age, added to
the Oxford Dictionary of the English language. I’m behind that 100%. When
Timothy was born, Victoria was queen of England and John Tyler was President of
the United States. 34 presidents and six monarchs later she
passed away, reminding us all that no matter how long you live, life is short
and you should always take the time..to enjoy the strawberries.