Has there ever been a man so gifted, yet so burdened, as Rupert Gould? Britain’s answer to Charles Fort (the two men were contemporaries) will be best-known to FT readers as the author of The Case for the Sea Serpent, The Loch Ness Monster and Others and two incomparable collections of essays, Oddities and Enigmas. Yet ‘scientific mysteries’ (the phrase is Betts’s) were merely one of Gould’s areas of expertise. He was, inter alia, a naval officer, hydrographer, authority on Arctic and Antarctic exploration, master horologist and ‘name’ broadcaster – not to mention a talented artist in the style of Aubrey Beardsley, a leading expert on the history of the typewriter and an umpire at Wimbledon.

	Will the current generation of forteans make such compelling subjects for biographers?

Such achievements would be remarkable enough in a man who had devoted a long life entirely to his interests. Yet Gould died aged only 58, worked for years in a relatively humdrum office job, and was prone throughout adulthood to mental illness. As Betts notes in this exceptionally well researched and sympathetic biography, he was confined, speechless, to bed for the best part of a year by his first breakdown, suffered three further severe outbreaks of depression, and could be prostrated by several irrational fears, including those of being struck by lightning and getting caught up in a revolution. These frailties restricted his output, as did a dubious talent for taking on too many commitments. Among numerous projects begun but never finished were Nine Days’ Wonders and Mares’ Nests – works fit to rank with Fort’s X and Y in the damned library of lost literature.

Rupert Gould never quite achieved the fame, nor received the credit, that his admirers felt was due to him. Much of his life was spent in genteel poverty, and according to his waspish son Cecil – who by his own admission never much liked his father – his life was “as he himself realised, a sad waste of great and varied talents”. Betts is kinder, observing simply that Gould’s parents’ choice of a naval career for their son was a mistake, and that Rupert would have made an exceptional academic or barrister.

Gould’s nervous breakdown on the outbreak of World War I led to a ‘soft’ posting to the hydrographer’s office at the Admiralty, where he studied the history of navigation and read widely – everything but literature, Cecil recalled, though in fact there were other lacunæ in even his father’s fund of knowledge, notably in the field of zoology. The secret of Gould’s success as a fount of wisdom (he was the only Brains Trust panellist never hauled up for making a mistake) was a photographic memory. No reader who has made his delighted way through the footnotes of a Gould book, where information drawn from Wild Sports of the World rubs shoulders with the Transactions of the Anglesey Antiquarian Society, is likely to doubt it.

Given that Jonathan Betts is Senior Specialist in Horology at the National Maritime Museum, it’s no surprise that the bulk of Time Restored is given over to Gould’s work in a field few forteans will know much about: horology, specifically the study of the marine chronometer. Gould restored to a going condition all four of the timekeepers invented in the 18th century by John Harrison. He was self-taught, both as a mechanic and an horologist, and Betts gives an account of his subject’s achievements, praising his imaginative and systematic efforts (the restorations took well over a decade) while condemning some of the actual workmanship as unforgivably botched and hardly in tune with the modern museum curator’s preference for conservation over restoration.

There is much, even here, of interest to forteans, though, for the years of working on the ‘Harrisons’ display Gould’s character in the round. He possessed, the reader learns, a stubborn stamina, fragility and a spectacular facility for procrastination, an odd mix that eventually cost him his marriage and – thanks to the scandal attendant on the divorce – his job, home, children and best friend.

Disaster on such a scale would have been sufficient to destroy men far more robust than Gould, and perhaps the most extraordinary achievement of his far from ordinary life was to meet these devastating blows with a determination that saw him crank out most of his best-known works in an astonishingly short time. (Oddities, a book of 75,000 words complete with 27 original drawings, was written in less than a month.) This at least left time for other obsessions, including a lifelong interest in bondage and, apparently, ritualised group sex activities involving London prostitutes. One wonders whether the current generation of forteans will make such compelling subjects for future biographers.

Betts, by his own admission, knows little of forteana, and the book’s account of Gould’s contributions to our field cannot match that of his achievements in horology. There’s nothing, for example, to equal Ronald Binns’s revealing analysis, in The Loch Ness Mystery Solved, of Gould’s influential excursion to Loch Ness. Betts has also been poorly served by his proof-reader – the text is littered with typos. But these are small gripes. Even the most dedicated fortean will learn something new from this book. At £35, unfortunately, Time Restored seems destined to reach only a limited audience, and one can only hope that a paperback edition will follow in due course.