Counting Britain’s beauties and leech-bleeders

By the start of the 20th century statisticians had mapped where some of the drunkest people in Britain were (Swansea, take a bow) as well as the most criminal (ditto). They had chronicled the sanitary state of London’s West End (filthy) and its reading habits (also, at times, filthy). They knew more about Ramsbottom than anyone could wish to. But they didn’t know where the hottest women in Britain lived.In 1908 Francis Galton—a noted polymath and inventor, but not a noted feminist—came up with a solution to this lamentable omission. He created a simple tool to record female attractiveness quickly. About his person he would carry a piece of paper divided into three and “a needle mounted as a pricker”. Then, when he saw a woman, he would “prick holes, unseen” in the relevant part of the paper depending on whether she was “attractive, indifferent, or repellent”. To sort Britain’s women by looks all that was needed was a map, the device and a bit of a prick. Galton was just the man. (London ranked top, he reckoned, and Aberdeen last.)