Flushed with Pride: The Story of Thomas Crapper

Describes the nineteenth-century London plumber's contributions to sanitary engineering

Wallace Macdonald Reyburn OBE was born in New Zealand on the third of July, 1913. During the Hitler war he worked as a reporter for a Canadian newspaper. He was nearly killed during the Dieppe raid and was awarded the Order of the British Empire for his part in the battle and subsequent reportage. His book about that event, Rehearsal for Invasion, was a best-seller, as were some of his other works which covered such unrelated subjects as rugby football, lavatories, David Frost and brassieres. This last, entitled Bust Up - The Uplifting Tale of Otto Titzling and the Development of the Bra caused considerable confusion, especially in America and Canada. Flushed with Pride had been a great success and, as he could not think of any other famous inventor possessed of an amusingly-appropriate surname, he was inspired to create one. The story of Otto Titzling was clearly fictitious; unfortunately it was published in the same format as Flushed With Pride and contained similar illustrations and prose. This caused many American readers to assume that the biography of Mr. Crapper was also a joke which later led to extended correspondences in the letters pages of several publications. Thomas Crapper was dismissed as a hoax in various North American books and dictionaries of the early 1970s, but thankfully this mistake is rarely made to-day. Wallace Reyburn was very pleased when he learned that Thomas Crapper & Co. Ltd. had survived. When he died at the age of 87 in 2001 his passing was justly marked by extensive and illustrated obituaries in, amongst others, The Times and the Daily Telegraph