Michael Flannigan:
A Life of Invention
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Chapter 8
The Manx Minx (1833 - 1836)

Flannigan's first night at The Coach and Horses was his last night with Zanzibar's Freak Festival. Coming through the front door of the inn in search of a dark and foamy "book"(1), he was thoroughly gobsmacked by the sight of a beautiful young woman lying atop a grand piano, clad in a black velvet catsuit. The moment of Flannigan's infatuation was captured for posterity in a letter sent the next day by the inn's proprietor Tossie Flossingham to her sister Gladys in Birmingham:

"There's nowt better for business than young Connie and her bag-pipery. An Irish chappie came in last night for a single pint, and stayed all night; all agog he was while she were piping. He must have polished off six or seven pints, plus a quart of lemon gin. Quite a dashing figure he were, all bearded and bespectacled. 'Tis a damn good thing the Minx's husband can't see a thing, or there might have been fisticuffs. Say hello to Bernard." (2)

Flannigan was crestfallen when he saw the sign next to the piano.

The object of Flannigan's rapt attention was Constance Banks (3), known throughout the Isle of Man as "the Manx Minx." The inventor's heart leapt as he set eyes on the toothsome young bag-piper, but fell with a thud as he read the sign next to the piano:

"Welcome, Donnie and Connie Banks! He's blind as a bat, she strangles the cat. Please tip heavily."

Not having just gotten off the boat (4), Michael Flannigan realized right away that the raven-haired beauty with sapphire-blue eyes was part of a musical duo with her sightless, piano-playing husband Donald. Further, he could see - and tell from the sporadic and wonky accompaniment - that Donnie had fewer than the standard allotment of fingers. (5) Despite his immediate and compelling attraction to the curvaceous entertainer, Flannigan knew she could never be his. Heartsick yet honourable, he ordered what would be the first of many brain-boggling beverages that night, and settled in to watch the show.

Deep in his cups (or at least those of Tossie Flossingham), Flannigan could not have known that the girl the old biddies in the town of Douglas called "a tart with a heart" had noticed him, too.

Zanzibar and his menagerie of human curiosity left Douglas the next week, without their catastrophe-causing clown. Over the next few months, while Donnie tinkled and plinked unseeingly in accompaniment, Connie piped her heart out to the debonair Irishman in the bowler hat. Flannigan, in return, gazed back, enraptured by her measured breathing, her poignant phrasing, the flecks of foam on her ruby lips. Their eyes were locked in a wordless embrace, and their relationship ripened with each evening of unspoken attraction. Slowly but surely, never having exchanged a single word, they fell in love.

Flannigan had always been a man of phenomenal personal appetites, and this fiery but never-to-be-consummated relationship exacerbated the situation immensely. Retiring each night at the end of the show, the unfulfilled inventor was forced to try a variety of remedies for what he called his "manly concerns." (6) In addition to his unmentionable first choice, Flannigan tried to drown his passions in Guinness and lemon gin, and began a vigorous program of hill-walking.

To most of the locals, Flannigan was a strange and solitary figure, striding out across the countryside for no apparent reason. To Constance Banks, though, the bearded man's perpetual perambulations made perfect sense. She herself was full of unmet and forbidden desires, and had taken the advice of a regular at the Coach and Horses, Father Phil O'Dendron, to "exorcise through exercise." Eventually, the two dedicated walkers came face to face at the summit of a small hill on the outskirts of Douglas.

Eventually, the two dedicated walkers came face to face at the summit of a small hill on the outskirts of Douglas.

No words needed to be spoken. Both were intelligent; each saw that their ardor was reciprocated, but impossible. Talking of everything but their passion for one another, they began a daily regimen of hill-climbing to assuage their common problem. Unsurprisingly though, the situation worsened, and they had to find higher and higher summits to scale.

In an attempt to find suitably elevated peaks, Michael Flannigan and Connie Banks took a short and chaste trip to Scotland together. Connie told Donnie that she needed to travel to Edinburgh to buy a new bag for her pipes, and she and Flannigan took the ferry from Douglas to Stranraer, enroute to Mount Snaefel, the North and South Barrule, and the two Big Bens - Lomond and Nevis.

In between their strenuous exertions, the pair had several memorable adventures. Connie made such an impression during their short stay in Aberfoyle that the local folk still sing her praises in a bastardized version of their local song, "the Connie, Connie Banks of Loch Lomond." And to Michael Flannigan's great delight, on the slopes of Ben Nevis he met an intriguing Austrian mountain-climber, a massively hairy fellow named Gunther Gruntz.

Gunter Grunzt was a "massively hairy fellow" as well as an accomplished mountaineer. This early Daguerreotype shows the climber's well-appointed backside, and is part of the "Van Heersute Collection." Claude Van Heersute was a Dutch loony who was convinced that body hair could transmit and receive "stellar waves" from other "transworldly" intelligent species.

The Austrian traveled on with the inventor and his comely companion to the dreary Scottish lake Loch Ness, in search of evidence of the aquatic snake-like beast that St. Columba had supposedly defeated there (7). Unsurprisingly, Flannigan's fertile mind was full of ideas about how to find the great serpent if, in fact, it existed, and he tried out several of them with Connie and Gruntz. In an attempt to send the overly buoyant Austrian to the bottom of the loch, Flannigan fashioned his first pair of Unfathomable Feet Flappers out of Scottish granite. The submerging was a success, but breathing was a problem. Flannigan had the brilliant idea of sending air through a hose down to Gruntz, and realized that Connie's bagpipes provided a powerful force that could pump the air down to where it was required.

What a team they made! The Austrian dove, the striking Manx piper let fly with a mighty skirl, and the Irishman danced a celebratory jig that resulted in him falling into Loch Ness. Little did Flannigan realize, emerging sopping from the frigid water, that he had invented first wet suit. (8)

Despite their best efforts, no serpent was seen, and the trio went on to Glasgow to find a nice pint of beer and a dry pair of underpants for Flannigan. Little is known of this brief hiatus. (9)

Bidding adieu to Gunther Gruntz, Michael Flannigan and Connie Banks returned to the Isle of Man, to the sightless and digitally-deficient Donnie, and to their impossible situation of unspeakable passion. Flannigan threw himself into his work to fend off the pain, for he realized that Connie could never leave her blind husband. He also increased his amount of daily "reading," and one gin-fueled night at the Coach and Horses had an indelible - if somewhat blurry - vision: he would invent a device that would cure blindness! It was all so clear. Donnie would regain his eye-sight, Connie would be free to leave Donnie, and Michael and Connie could be together forever. If only it had been so easy.

Donnie Banks did not have the standard allotment of fingers.

Flannigan immediately began work on his invention, the Ocular Proxy Contrivance, and things were looking good. He used three unsighted mice as his test subjects, and they quickly began to see improvement. Feeling confident and excited, Michael fabricated a human-sized pair to try out on Donnie. Ironically, "Pranks" Banks picked that same day to revert to his old ways and blew the only existing Contrivances (even the mice-sized ones) into smithereens. Some scholars believe this explosion was accidental but others suggest that Donnie's whispered words to Flannigan on that day tell the true story: "You're next!"

With his Ocular Proxy Contrivances in pieces, his tools destroyed, the plans incinerated and his hopes in tatters, Michael Flannigan took the blind pianist's hint and hightailed it out of Douglas, leaving the beautiful and broken-hearted bag-piper Connie behind forever as Donnie waved his hand in a friendly single-fingered salute.

--"Scholarship" by Flyboy

Next: Sloe Gin, Head Hurly and the Bull Ring Riots

Notes:

1. A pint of Guinness, Flannigan's favourite "reading material." [back]

2. Mrs. Tossingham's letter is archived at the Chesley Institute in Schenectady, New York. [back]

3. Née Lingasse. [back]

4. Figuratively speaking, that is. In a literal sense, Flannigan had in fact just stepped off a ferry. [back]

5. Donnie had been known as "Pranks" Banks during the war of 1812 where, to make his fellow soldiers laugh, he would set off small munitions caches to surprise the officers. Unfortunately, he frequently blew up things of value to their owners, such as trunks, the food wagon, and a series of cows. Once, to Donnie's great chagrin, he blew off most of his left hand, leaving only his middle finger. [back]

6. It was ironic that while Flannigan was staying at the Coach and Horses Inn, he received a completely unnecessary shipment of Pinnepedia Elixir. [back]

7. In 565 AD, while preaching to the godless Picts. [back]

8. In 1837, German-born inventor Augustus Siebe claimed to have invented the first watertight, air-containing rubber suit connected to an air pump on the surface. As a result, Siebe is considered the father of diving. It is unknown whether Siebe was vacationing in Inverness at the time of Flannigan's visit. [back]

9. However, leading scholars have surmised that Flannigan, with his talent for import/export and his interest in the Far East, may have had something to do with the arrival of the first shipment of tea direct from India at the Broomielaw Docks in Glasgow on October 9, 1834. [back]