A small selection of the ninety-seven children fathered by Jeremy's brother, Jonty (right).

Birth records show that the Selman-Troytt family were fecund by any standard but Jonty seems to have been particularly fertile, producing a stream of children between 1871 and 1939 when he became inexplicably impotent at the age of 83. Grieving relatives maintained that he had never recovered from Hitler's annexation of the Sudetenland the previous year and refused to send any more financial contributions to the National Socialist Party.

Jonty's voracious sexual appetite was legendary and a source of considerable pride within the family. On one occasion he had to be forcibly restrained from having intercourse with his wife only seconds after the delivery of their 43rd child (Joyce). The attending physician, who was in the process of cutting the umbilicus when Jonty jostled him aside 'in a state of extreme and unsanitary engorgement', was compelled to lay the newborn down in order to wrestle her father to the floor with the assistance of the midwife and four servants.

The doctor was amazed to record that 'his engorgement did not subside, even under continual intravenous sedation, although we maintained constant observation of it throughout a period of sixty-seven hours.'

Jonty eschewed the use of any form of contraception, maintaining that it was 'the work of the devil to contain any man's life-juice within a bag' and that 'women were designed to be filled. Anyone can see that.' After copulation he insisted that all partners should lie prone for a period of twelve hours to 'increase the chance of my seed taking root'.

His greatest ambition was to impregnate Marie Stopes - the birth control campaigner - whom he referred to as 'a perfect vessel in need of filling.' Although he was never successful, she was so impressed by his obsessive persistence that she marked every 100 repetitions of his invitation to 'gouge your verdant valley with my rough, pointed glacier' with a congratulatory medal which Jonty displayed proudly thereafter.