Has anybody ever been surprised to learn that a character from a novel was based on a person with the same name who had lived?  I've mentioned these on random threads before but I was surprised to learn that Alexandre Dumas had used real people as a foundation for the three musketeers and d'Artagnan (though of course he changed a lot).  http://www.mousquetaires.asso.fr/en/athos-porthos-and-aramis.html and [url=partylike1660.com/charles-de-batz-de-castelmore-the-real-dartagnan]partylike1660.com/charles-de-batz-de-castelmore-the-real-dartagnan[/url]

From the time when my parents purchased a 14" screen TV I can remember the series Fabian of the Yard (which I always think of as "Fabian of Scotland Yard").  It took me aback to learn there really was a Robert Fabian and that the series took inspiration from his memoirs.

Edited because I just watched an episode of Fabian uploaded to YouTube and it said at the end "Let's meet the real Bob Fabian" and featured that gentleman speaking to camera - but I had quite forgotten that part of the programme.

LiR,

to take our famous stripwriter Georges Remy aka Hergé (the zjé from Zjeorges and the "err" from Remy)...
about Chang in "the blue lotus". It was a real person and Hergé visited him in China after a lifelong friendship.
https://www.tintinologist.org/guides/books/05bluelotus.html
Look at the reaction of the Japanese ambassador in Belgium and even the Belgian Army trying to forbid the album...you wouldn't believe it..





And even the character of Tintin himself would be based on a real person...

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/dec/07/man-who-inspired-tintin

And I read in a nearly thousand pages thick book about the life of Hergé that even the two "kwajongens" (rascals?) would have been based on rascals from the "Marollen" a neigbourhood in Brussels where Georges Remy grew up...

I read also there that a lot of Tintin was based on Georges' brother Paul.
https://www.tintinologist.org/forums/index.php?action=vthread&forum=10&topic=2458

And as you see even there conflicts with the inheritance estate and for instance the son of Paul (remember Caro's thread about "wills" )

Kind regards from Paul.

And I always thought professor Calculus (professeur Tournesol in the original French version) was visually based on the Swiss physicist and explorer, Auguste Piccard, although Piccard was famously very tall unlike the diminutive Tournesol/Calculus. Apparently Hergé had seen Piccard on several occasions when the latter was teaching physics at Brussels University.

   

Yes MM, you seem to be right. In Dutch it is "professor Zonnebloem" (sunflower)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professor_Calculus
"Calculus is partly modeled on inventor Auguste Piccard (1884–1962), Hergé stated in an interview with Numa Sadoul: "Calculus is a reduced scale Piccard, as the real chap was very tall. He had an interminable neck that sprouted from a collar that was much too large... I made Calculus a mini-Piccard, otherwise I would have had to enlarge the frames of the cartoon strip." ^[3] The Swiss physics professor held a teaching appointment in Brussels when Hergé spotted his unmistakable figure in the street. In The Castafiore Emerald, Bianca Castafiore mentions that Calculus is "famous for his balloon ascensions", an ironic reference to Piccard.
Philippe Goddin has suggested that Calculus' deafness was inspired by Paul Eydt, whom Hergé had known at Le Vingtième Siècle where Tintin's adventures had first appeared.^[4] Cuthbert Calculus' original French name is "Tryphon Tournesol" and Tryphon was the name of Hergé's plumber.^[4]
In contrast to his unquestionable scientific merits, Calculus is a fervent believer in dowsing, and carries a pendulum for that purpose. Hergé himself was a believer in the subject: dowser Victor Mertens had used a pendulum to find the lost wedding ring of Hergé's wife in October 1939.^[4]
 
Although I read that much about Hergé I didn't know it.

Kind regards from Paul.

I'm getting a little better at searching the archives of the site but I hadn't realised before opening this thread that nordmann had made a thread which was not exactly the same but was not dissimilar in 2012.  https://reshistorica.forumotion.com/t263-the-real-sherlock-holmes-and-other-real-people-behind-their-fictional-counterparts?

A blog (which I sometimes read) speculating what historical inspirations author George RR Martin may have taken for his A Song of Ice and Fire novels (on which the TV series Game of Thrones) was based (increasingly loosely as the TV show progressed - the final novels of the series haven't been written yet). The page one enters the site contains the write-ups of the episodes in the final series so it might contain 'spoilers' for people who might want to watch it.  I think I can say without it being too much of a 'spoiler' that one of the subplots has two young brothers on the run (well, not literally, one is crippled but they are helped by a few loyal followers) which made me think of the Princes who disappeared from the Tower.  Earlier in the site's existence a guest historian had written about Richard III and someone (I wonder who that could have been?) put forward nordmann's idea that the body hadn't been conclusively identified as Richard.  Oh it was Richard the person asking the question was assured.  Anyway here is the link http://history-behind-game-of-thrones.com/

Basil Fawlty, created by John Cleese and Connie Booth for the TV comedy Fawlty Towers was based on Donald Sinclair. the real life proprietor of the Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay where Cleese had stayed in 1970.

wiki:

Opinions are divided on how closely Sinclair resembled Fawlty. Former staff and visitors have remembered actual events there that were as ludicrous as those depicted in the series. However, Sinclair's family is adamant that Fawlty was an inaccurate caricature.Beatrice Sinclair later described her husband as a "gentleman and a very brave man" and not "the neurotic eccentric that John Cleese made him out to be." An accuracy she did acknowledge is that she was very much in charge of the business, just as Basil Fawlty was usually subordinate to his wife Sybil. The publication of Sir Michael Palin's diaries in 2006 supported Cleese's assessment of the Sinclairs. Rosemary Harrison, a waitress at the Gleneagles under Sinclair, stated,

Fawlty Towers was terribly funny. John Cleese exaggerated the character but the basic things are there. He probably wasn't neurotic but he was just so bad-tempered. It was as if he didn't want the guests to be there. He was bonkers. He thought it ridiculous that people wanted to drink at lunchtime. These were paying guests. They would be out by the pool looking for a drink and he hadn't opened the bar. He just wasn't cut out for the hotel business.




Sinclair had been in the Navy in WW2, and had been torpedoed and sunk in his first ship and bombed and sunk in his second ship. Little wonder he was eccentric.

There weren't really that many episodes of Fawlty Towers were there?  Yet its impact was such that it is still remembered as very comedic 40 and odd years later.

Now this isn't really 'people' and my memory is sometimes like a sieve so apologies in advance if I've mentioned this on another thread in the past.  (I couldn't find anything on a search). Apparently (from Wikipedia - I'm sure people can Google it if they wish) there was a half collie, Lassie, who saved the life of a sailor during the First World War.  There had though been a story about a "Lassie" helping lead a rescue party to find two boys in the snow written by Mrs Gaskell (though sadly only of the boys lived).  The story is called "The Half Brothers".

"Lassie" is one of a few animals to have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame - two other dogs who have stars are Rin Tin Tin and Strongheart.  Though a number of canine actors have played Rin Tin Tin, the first one was rescued from a battlefield in World War I, so the first one at least had a real life existence as Rin Tin Tin.  Strongheart (original name Etzel) featured in films before Rin Tin Tin.  I don't know that there was a dramatic backstory for Strongheart/Etzel.  Like Rin Tin Tin,  he was a German Shepherd dog and he had seen active service in the German Red Cross in World War I.  Strongheart's death was somewhat sad.  He got too near to a hot studio light and developed a tumour as a consequence of the burns he sustained which led to his death in 1929.  The stories of these dogs are, as I say, on Wikipedia if anyone wants to check.

The canine character Laddie is supposed (amongst Discworld afficionados) to be "Lassie" - with the name change reflectig the fact that Lassie was never played by a bitch.

Deleted - comment posted twice.

I've never read Discworld, Gilgamesh, but I did see a cartoon version of Wyrd Sisters in the 1990s.  That snippet about Laddie is quite amusing, G, if it's true.  I read once that the word bitch was considered so improper at one time that there would be advertisements reading something like "Lady dog puppy for sale".  That could be apocryphal.  I've always wondered whether the stories about people kicking dachshunds in World War I were true or apocryphal wondering if people would really be so silly, but in the early stages of the coronavirus scare there were incidents of attacks on people of oriental appearance and I wouldn't have believed that if I hadn't seen videos of it.

Yes, the original Lassie was a dog called "Pal", later succeeded by his son, Lassie Junior. As to why, I haven't the faintest idea. Re discworld - the original Lassie's trainer was one "Rudd Weatherwax". What the relation between him, Esme and Galder was beggars belief.

I'd wondered with Stonyshire and Loamshire in (some at least) of George Eliot's novels sometimes being said to be Staffordshire and Derbyshire whether the prison where Hetty (in the book Adam Bede was interred was based on Stafford Jail.  A hunt around the internet revealed a belief that Hetty's story was inspired in part at least by something that happened to a woman called Mary Voce, only Mrs Voce was interred in Nottingham and unlike Hetty she didn't get a last minute reprieve.

I didn't know that in 2014 the prison in Stafford became one for category C sex offenders (male).  They are said to be prisoners who are not really deemed to be dangerous.

Before 2014 Palmer the Poisoner and Lewis Collins (Irish Republican) had been imprisoned there though obviously not at the same time.

One of the most popular stories staged for pantomime is Aladdin and the Lamp. The well-known tale sees Aladdin, the son of a poor widow, adopted by a wicked step-uncle who tells his mother that he will apprentice the lad to a good trade. The step-uncle, however, is not Aladdin’s uncle at all but is a sorcerer who intends to enslave the little boy and use him to fetch a magical lamp from an inaccessible cave. In the cave Aladdin finds the lamp and discovers that it contains a powerful genie. This enables him to leave the cave without the help of his uncle and then win riches for himself. Later, the now wealthy Aladdin builds a splendid palace to rival even that of the sultan and gains the hand in marriage of the sultan’s only daughter who was already betrothed to the grand vizier’s son. The rest of the story involves attempts by the uncle to wrest the lamp and its genie away from Aladdin and Aladdin’s efforts to thwart this. In the end Aladdin prevails and inherits the throne upon the death of the sultan.

The character of Aladdin is often seen as being purely fictional coming from a tale in The Arabian Nights. The term 'the Arabian Nights' is sometimes used interchangeably with the term 'The Thousand and One Nights' although The Arabian Nights is an English-language name describing a compilation of The Thousand and One Nights along with some other tales such as The Seven Voyages of Sinbad, Aladdin and the Lamp and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.

The significance of this is that, whereas The Thousand and One Nights and The Seven Voyages of Sinbad existed as separate literary pieces in the Persian and Arab worlds for hundreds of years, the stories of Aladdin and Ali Baba can only be traced back to the 18th Century. They were translated into French by archaeologist Antoine Galland who heard them (in Paris) from Syrian writer Hanna Diyab. A scholar of Arabic, Galland had earlier travelled to Constantinople and had already translated The Seven Voyages of Sinbad and The Thousand and One Nights. He was now able to add Aladdin and Ali Baba to the collection.
 
It's thought that the stories of Ali Baba and Aladdin were influenced by Hanna Diyab’s own lifetime and experiences. Both Ali Baba and Aladdin are depicted as orphans as was Diyab. Ali Baba had a brother who became a successful merchant as had Hanna Diyab while Aladdin travelled extensively meeting people from several different cultures as did Diyab.

The story of Aladdin is unusual in that it is not set in the Near East but in China. In the Arabic terminology of Diyab’s time, however, ‘China’ referred to any of the lands beyond India such as China (of course) but also Japan, Siam and Java etc. Being resident in Paris when he related the tale, Hanna Diyab would have encountered French orientalists and diplomats of the time. Indeed, he had been invited to Paris and was sponsored by Paul Lucas who was curator to King Louis XIV and with whom Diyab was even granted an audience at Versailles.



(The French ambassador presents his credentials to King Narai of Siam in 1685. The man couching with his hand raised is Constantine Gerakis 'Phaulkon' the chief minister.)

When Diyab related the stories to Antoine Galland in 1709, Galland was lecturing in Arabic at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. A Jesuit college, the Lycée Louis-le-Grand was at the forefront of the study of foreign and particularly oriental languages in France. Some of the Jesuits whom Diyab would have met at the lycée were Guy Tachard, Louis le Comte and Jean de Fontenay, who, as members of the Société des Missions Etrangères de Paris, had been part of the French embassies to Siam in the 1680s. At that time France was the European power with whom the Siamese had the best relations and the King of Siam, Narai and Louis XIV had exchanged 5 embassies with each other between 1680-88.

1688, however, had been a critical year. The Siamese chief minister at the time was a Greek called Constantine Gerakis who had been born in the Venetian Ionian Islands and had been educated in England. He had arrived in Siam aboard an English East India Company ship and as a penniless foreigner had seemingly magically risen from penury to the highest office in the land in just 10 years. He even built a palace for himself which rivalled the splendour of the king’s own but was careful to also build an even grander new palace for Narai. Despite his Venetian and English background, Gerakis increasingly acted as an advocate for French interests in Siam. In this he overreached himself, however, by planning to have the French navy occupy strategic ports in southern Siam ostensibly to resist incursion by his former employers the English East India Company. This was the last straw for those at the Siamese court who were jealous of his power and influence. A coup was mounted to oust him led by the Director of the Royal Elephants, Phra Petratcha who himself had risen from humble peasant origins.

Having ousted chief minister Gerakis , however, Petratcha didn’t stop there but also moved against the now ailing king Narai and placed him under palace arrest. Petratcha then married Narai’s only child, the princess Sudawadi, even though she was already betrothed to the king’s councilor and adopted son. When Narai died shortly afterwards, Petratcha declared himself king. The new king was no friend of foreigners and immediately besieged the French at Bangkok before expelling them. Eleven years later in 1699 Guy Tachard attempted a further embassy to Petratcha but this ended in failure. French state officials would then not return to Indochina until the 1840s.

This diplomatic catastrophe which had seen France go from most-favoured-nation to the French becoming personae-non-gratae in Siam was no doubt still a heated topic among the Jesuits and diplomats whom Hanna Diyab met in Paris in 1709. Their stories must also have made the orient seem impossibly exotic even to a Near Easterner such as himself. The leader of the 1687 mission, Simon de la Loubère, had written a book in 1691 entitled Du royaume de Siam about their time there which, among other things, outlined the Siamese mathematical method for drawing magic squares and also described the workings of Siamese parachutes. To Diyab, Siam must have seemed literally to be a land of magic boxes and flying carpets. The story of the rags-to-riches tale of Gerakis and his fabulous palace, along with the marrying of Petratcha to the already betrothed princess/heir are themes to be found directly in the Aladdin story.
   


(The usurper king Petratcha of Siam – an amalgam of his life story and that of the contemporary chief minister Constantine Gerakis ‘Phaulkon’ almost certainly provided inspiration for the character of Aladdin.)

I'd always assumed that in English, Jack Ketch, was simply a generic name for a hangman or other public executioner, rather in the same way that Jack Tar might refer to a sailor, or Tommy Atkins to any WW1 soldier. With his noose and portable gallows Jack Ketch used to be a stock character in Punch and Judy shows; Charles Dickens in several of his novels uses the name as synonymous with the public hangman; and I seem to remember that Jack Ketch is the name of the hapless hangman in Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera 'Yeomen of the Guard'.

However it seems that there was a real man of the name. John 'Jack' Ketch served as the official state executioner almost continuously between 1666 and 1687 during which time he was responsible for several high profile executions. Other than his job little else is known about him, except that he lived in Gray’s Inn Road (conveniently close to Newgate Prison) and that he was eventually buried in Clerkenwell. With at least ten public executions a year at Tyburn, Tower Hill and elsewhere in the capital, it is certain that Ketch would have dispatched hundreds of prisoners, almost all by hanging, however it is the executions of those who were found guilty of treason and so were also drawn and quartered, that he gained particular notoriety. But why did Ketch's name and reputation persist in the public memory long after his death, while the names of others who have held the same infamous position, such as Ketch's immediate predecessor, Richard Brandon, who had beheaded King Charles I no less, but is, at least by his name, largely unremembered?

Firstly perhaps there's his longevity in the position and secondly he was known to be thoroughly unpleasant, being frequently extremely drunk, both on and off the job. Thirdly, he seems to have been particularly avaricious, often in dispute with the authorities over payment for his unsavoury services, in particular his recorded quibbling over his fuel allowance for "boylinge" of all the bodies prior to them being gibbeted or otherwise displayed alongside busy highways. Then there were also the complaints from his domestic neighbours who objected to the obnoxious smells coming from his kitchen when he was 'working from home'. As a further stream of revenue it was the customary right of the executioner to keep the clothes of the condemned - often very fancy in the case of the wealthy as people preferred to look their best en route to the scaffold - and Ketch was always most insistent on getting his full due, even going so far as to strip the bodies completely naked before handing them over to the next-of-kin. In addition the condemned would often pay the executioner, with as much as they could afford, desperately hoping he'd give them a quick, dignified and relatively painless end. However Ketch was known to try and milk this by pushing the price up ever higher with threats that he could, if not duly paid, deliberately make things even worse for the condemned. Furthermore, in the event, he often seems to have reneged on any of these agreements, whether through cruelty, incompetence or just inebriation.

It is however his appalling bungling, or simple sadism, in the beheadings of William, Lord Russell, in 1683 for the Rye House Plot against Charles II, and of the Duke of Monmouth in 1685 for his failed attempt to overthrow James II, that Ketch seems to have gained particular notoriety.

In the case of Lord Russell, despite being given between ten and thirty guineas (accounts vary) to do a good job, Ketch took at least three blows to sever the noble’s head. Some say Ketch was being deliberately vindictive, possibly acting on orders, others that he was simply blind drunk - perhaps he was both - but either way the execution was so barbarically botched that Ketch was later forced to publish a pamphlet publically apologising for his appalling performance.

Then two years later it was the turn of James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth, after his failed rebellion. There was always something of a love-hate relationship between the crowd (who expected a good show), the condemned, and the executioner. However in this instance, while Monmouth seems to have upheld his side of the performance by acting calmy and nobly, Ketch rather overstepped the limit of decency. On the scaffold the Duke gave Ketch six guineas with a promise of more from his servant if he did a better job this time, saying:
"Do not serve me as you did my Lord Russell. I have heard you struck him three or four times …"

But it was in vain as Ketch took a least five strikes - some reports say it took as many as eight blows - before the head was fully severed. Halfway through the job Ketch cast down his axe in frustration and had to be ordered to continue, while Monmouth was even said to have partly risen from the block, half cut to pieces, drawing shocked gasps from the onlookers. The grisly, protracted affair was finally cut short, so to speak, by Ketch’s use of a knife to saw through the last of the Duke's neck and so complete the bloody deed. The crowd, in which there were likely many who had been sympathetic to the Duke's rebellion against the far-from-popular new king, James II, was understandably outraged. As the diarist John Evelyn wrote:
"Five Chopps … so incens’d the people, that had he [Ketch] not ben guarded and got away they would have torne him to pieces."

A year later Ketch himself was dead (of unknown cause) however his fame was by then well established: ballads, pamphlets, broadsheets, essays abounded, all laced with hefty dollops of black humour, irony and sarcasm. Being the official executioner is a macabre profession in any age, and there have been many over the years, but why I wonder did the name Jack Ketch become so particularly remembered?