Born Todd Remington Whitworth on June 31, 1912, the infamous Nottingham "Coal Boy" lived a strange and varied life.

Abandoned by his horrified parents shortly after his birth, Todd was taken in by a nearby con...vent of Christian Science nuns, the "Baker Girls". Sheltered by the convent walls, young Todd learned to read and became fluent in German, French and Italian by the time he was twelve. When the convent teetered on the edge of bankruptcy in 1925 because of the failure of its peanut crop for the second consecutive year, Todd hired himself out to thye Flying Bettys Circus and Amazing Freak Show, dutifully sending all his earnings back to his beloved, beleagured nuns. The "Coal Boy" quickly became the rage of England and then, the following year, the continent as well.

Despite his fame (and growing fortune) Todd returned to the convent in 1927 after the nuns' bumper peanut crop of that year.

Two years later Whitworth published I Know Why the Coal Lump Burns, a witty, yet virulent attack on English society. The book caused a decidely unpleasant uproar. Fearful his beloved nuns might be damaged by his continued residence, he fled the country and exiled himself in Tahiti.

His second, and last, book, published in 1935, Hard Face with a Harder Past, a reflection on his life and his newfound joy in competitive knitting, largely failed to find an audience in England (yet, oddly, sold remarkably well in parts of India and Argentina). Whitworth perished in the tragic fire that engulfed the world knitting championship and congress in Bremen in 1939.

Only after his death was medical science able to identify the cause of his disfigurement: the extremely rare Fasciopullus syndrome. Ironically, this condition can be cured within six months of birth if the affected parts of the face are bathed repeatedly in peanut oil. 

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