The Quanderhorn Xperimentations

PREFACE

During the current restoration of the Palace of Westminster certain documents and artefacts were discovered, hidden in a bricked-up alcove behind the mechanisms in the clock tower popularly known as ‘Big Ben’.

They were quickly dismissed as a hoax, and a rather pointless and unconvincing one at that. For reasons far too circuitous to elaborate, the material eventually found its way to us. There were dozens of volumes of badly scrawled personal journals and various sketch pads and notebooks crammed with strange inventions and astonishing designs, together with some extraordinarily curious devices, the purpose of which has yet to be established.

Intrigued, we ploughed through everything, and the results of that research are here in these pages.

If it is a hoax, it’s a very elaborate and clever one, in that it’s impossible to disprove.

Where there are multiple accounts of the same incident, we have chosen what appears to be the most credible. Since the journals are personal, they tend to present their author in a most favourable light. When this understandable foible is in danger of distorting the truth, we have used aggregates of the accounts and our best guesses to arrive at a more likely accurate version. Where facts are disputed, we have pointed out the alternatives in our footnotes.

For reasons that will quickly become apparent, it was painfully difficult to establish a sequential chronology to these events. Hence, we present this account in the way it was revealed to us, and leave readers to make up their own minds.

RG & AM, London 2018. Probably.