Britain Facts

The shortest war on record was fought between Zanzibar and England in 1896. Zanzibar surrendered after 38 minutes.

Club Direct, a travel insurance company in Britain, provides insurance plans for protection from falling coconuts.

The handbook issued to US soldiers in Britain during WW2 included the line "The British don't know how to make a good cup of coffee. You don't know how to make a good cup of tea. It's an even swap."

The first man to swim the length of Great Britain grew a beard to stop jellyfish stinging his face.

The biggest burger in Britain, dubbed the 'Apocalypse Burger', is a mammoth 25,000 calories, weighs 11kg (25lb) and contains £150 (around $233 USD) worth of ingredients.

In the 1840s, Charles Babbage designed a mechanical calculator with 8,000 parts to compute error-free mathematical tables. The project was too ambitious for Victorian-era resources and was never completed. Over 150 years later, the Science Museum in London built it to his exact specifications — and it worked perfectly.

A 29-year-old London stockbroker secretly organised 8 trains that smuggled 669 Jewish children out of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939 - forging documents, bribing officials, finding British families - then told nobody for 50 years. In 1988, the BBC invited him to sit in a studio audience without explaining why. The host asked anyone who owed their life to Nicholas Winton to stand. The entire row behind him rose. He had no idea they were there.