The other day I happened to find an account of
Horace Walpole’s walking style, as described by his friend Laetitia-Matilda
Hawkins, “He always entered a room … knees bent, and feet on tiptoe, as if
afraid of a wet floor.” This drawing
from 1765 is by one Lord Massereene.
Now it so happens that I was recently discussing the walking style of
Captain Barclay, the great early 19th century competitive pedestrian,
as described by Walter Thom in the book Pedestrianism. Barclay, says Thom, had “a sort of lounging
gait, without apparently making any extraordinary exertion, scarcely raising
his feet more than two or three inches above the ground … His style of walking is to bend forward the
body, and to throw its weight on the knees … Any person who will try this plan
will find, that his pace will be quickened, at the same time he will walk with
more ease to himself, and be better able to endure the fatigue of a long
journey, than by walking in a posture perfectly erect, which throws too much of
the weight of the body on the ancle-joints.”
Well if you say so Walter, this is Barclay, though evidently not employing
the described walking method:
And naturally that reminded me of Boswell’s description of Dr. Johnson,
“His figure was large and well formed, and his countenance of the cast of an
ancient statue; yet his appearance was rendered strange and somewhat uncouth,
by convulsive cramps … So morbid was his temperament, that he never knew the
natural joy of a free and vigorous use of his limbs: when he walked, it was
like the struggling gait of one in fetters ..”
And also “When he walked the streets,
what with the constant roll of his head, and the concomitant motion of his
body, he appeared to make his way by that motion, independent of his feet.”
And somewhere in my head I have a description of somebody who (I
thought) Johnson described as being so fat he could walk down both sides of the
street at the same time. I thought it might
have been the Earl of Sandwich but a good dig both online and off suggests I
was wrong about that. I can’t find any reference whatsoever.
However,
such is the nature of internet “research” that I kept coming across a man named
Bobby Wingate who was arrested in 2012 and charged with “walking down the wrong side of the road.” Now this is clearly one of those stories
where you feel there’s a lot more going on than you know about, but there seems
no doubt that Wingate was walking down the street in Jacksonville, Florida last
December when a cop in a patrol car stopped and asked to talk to him. Was racial profiling involved? Yeah, I assume so. But Wingate declined to stop, saying he was
in too much of a hurry. Now I try to
keep my dealings with cops to a minimum but I know enough to realize that
telling a cop you’re too busy to talk to him is a really bad tactic, whatever
race you are.
Anyway, reports suggest the cop didn’t
like that answer, so he got out of the car, punched Wingate, “engaged” his
Taser, which I guess means he didn’t use it, then charged Wingate with “resisting
arrest without violence and walking down the wrong side of the road.”
This is Bobby Wingate in that very
street. It looks like the street doesn’t
have a sidewalk so there could conceivably have been an issue that you should
walk facing the oncoming traffic, but I’m guessing there aren’t very many
arrests for that kind of thing, even in Florida.
When the case came to trial the cop said he
wasn’t sure what side of the road Wingate was walking on, and the judge threw
out the case. Gawker ran the headline “Florida
Man Literally Arrested for Walking While Black.” News video shows that Bobby Wingate has an easy, fluid walking style.
He has since filed a
civil suit against the Jacksonville sheriff’s office – good luck with that one,
Bobby.
