Alfred Hitchcock’s film The 39 Steps bears only a minimal resemblance to the novel whose title it borrows. One of the many differences is the character Mr. Memory, who is central to the film but does not appear in the book.
It may surprise you that Mr. Memory was based on a real person, English music hall sensation WJM Bottle, who performed under the stage name Datas. Bottle could remember thousands of obscure facts and answer trivia questions shouted by the audience, the ages and birthdays of celebrities, the results of sports matches, obscure geography facts; the range of knowledge from him was astounding (see Ricky Jay’s fantastic book Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women for more details).
Bottle wrote a memoir in which he denied any early knowledge of the special powers of memory. In the same book he recounts the accidental discovery of his powerful memory when he overheard two men trying to remember the date of the verdict at the Tichborne trial, a notorious Victorian scandal.
Heir to a vast fortune, Roger Tichborne had been lost at sea and pronounced dead. An Australian butcher named Arthur Orton, who only slightly resembled the missing man, came forward and claimed to be Tichborn. Orton’s claim was accepted by Tichborn’s mother, but after her death, Orton tried to claim the inheritance. His offer fell through and he was ultimately convicted of perjury.
Bottle provided them with the date of Orton’s conviction; February 28, 1874. When one of the men expressed surprise that Bottle knew the date of an event that occurred before his birth, Bottle proceeded to provide all the important details of the Tichborne case.
In his memoirs, Bottle tells us that “finding how surprised they were at my stock of knowledge, I was encouraged and went on with a series of event dates in English history, and the names of Derby and Oaks winners, in rapid succession. Bottle’s performance was overheard by a theatrical promoter who invited him to perform at the Standard Music Hall that same night still in his dirty work clothes. He was instantly successful and soon quit his job as a manual laborer in a gasworks to pursue show business.
Reading through Bottle’s autobiography, one finds evidence that Bottle may have had Asperger’s syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder characterized by social awkwardness and obsessive interest in facts and details. Many children with Asperger syndrome are hyperlexic and learn to read on their own at an early age. Bottle had little education and taught himself to read. As a child he showed an obsessive interest in dark deeds; “From memorizing the names of shopkeepers I got to the number of taxi drivers and policemen. Like most children with Asperger’s syndrome, he had little interest in his peers. “I was not the same as most other children” in the sense that I did not take part in their games, having no desire to do so”.
Bottle had great powers of visualization and it is possible that she also had synesthesia, which is often associated with superior memory.