‘What is your favourite piece of UK trivia?’ – 23 absolutely fascinating facts unique to Britain

The UK is a quirky little place on a day-to-day basis, as anyone who lives here or has visited will know, but it gets even more bizarre and fascinating when you drill down into the facts.

Over on the AskUK subreddit, user RoadToTyburn asked ‘What is your favourite piece of UK trivia?’ and opened the floor with their own…

‘Mine is Sir Henry Cooper (who gave Muhammad Ali the hardest knockdown of his career, as tesitified to by Ali), is the only British boxer (and probably boxer in general) to be awarded a knighthood.

‘Joe Calzaghe and Lennox Lewis (in my mind, the best living fighters of their respective weight categories) are both CBE, but only Cooper was awarded a knighthood.’

Who knew? And this interesting little nugget of information prompted lots of other folk to chip in with their own, like these…

1.

‘Edinburgh is further west than Bristol and due north of Cardiff.’
–JazzlikeTradition436

2.

‘In 1915, Stonehenge was bought at an auction for £6600 by a man named Cecil Chubb, who had been sent to the auction by his wife to buy new curtains. He donated Stonehenge to the public in 1918, after centuries of it being privately owned.

‘I forgot to mention that he was supposedly motivated by hearing an American at the auction talking about buying it to dismantle and move to the states and was not having that.’
–keelekingfisher

3.

‘My hometown of Hartlepool once hanged a monkey having mistaken it for being a French spy.’
–EasyPiece

4.

‘I post this every time, but the UK is where the world’s only surgery with a 300% mortality rate took place by acclaimed surgeon Robert Liston:

‘Amputated the leg in under 21⁄2 minutes (the patient died afterwards in the ward from hospital gangrene; they usually did in those pre-Listerian days).

‘He amputated in addition the fingers of his young assistant (who died afterwards in the ward from hospital gangrene). He also slashed through the coat tails of a distinguished surgical spectator, who was so terrified that the knife had pierced his vitals he fainted from fright (and was later discovered to have died from shock).‘
–Qrbrrbl

5.

‘Our capital city technically isn’t a city, but does have two cities inside it.’
–beeurd

6.

‘In September 1752, Britain lost eleven days.

‘At the time we were still using the Julian calendar, but it was decided to switch to the Gregorian calendar to bring us in line with the rest of Europe. So, people went to sleep on 2nd September and woke up on 14th September.’
–CosmicBonobo

7.

‘The songs ‘Can’t get you out of my head’ and ‘Toxic’ were written about the ‘Supervet’ Noel Fitz-Patrick.’
–inspectorgadget9999

8.

‘Judge Jules is Rick Stein’s nephew.’
–__mz

9.

‘The ravens of the Tower of London are classed as enlisted personnel.’
–DarthScabies

10.

‘The second half of the brand name Bovril comes from an 1870s science fiction story (The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer-Lytton) in which a master race that lives deep underground gets its mind-control abilities and extreme power from a kind of energy fluid called “Vril”.

‘The first half of the name more boringly comes from “bovine”, as in cattle, to indicate beef.’
–WorcsBloke

11.

‘Campbeltown in Scotland is nearer to Belfast 30 miles, as the crow flies, than it is to Glasgow 70 miles.’
–No-Snow-9605

12.

‘King Henry III owned a polar bear that was gifted to him by King Hakkon of Norway.

‘It was housed in the Tower of London but was often allowed to swim in the Thames whilst on an extra long chain and proved to be a popular attraction. Henry also owned an elephant at one point but his servants kept giving it wine to drink and it died, probably of alcoholic poisoning.’
–Johhnymaddog316