the Astor Cut, the reason for killing a tree, and making a special railroad car to transport a piece of that tree to ship a table top to England to settle a bet. Rich people problems.

the March 6th 1895 edition the Chicago Tribune reported that Lord Astor bet the then Prince of Wales that a slice of California Redwood would be large enough to seat 45 persons around.

The slice was sent from San Francisco to London where, somehow, it was taken to Lord Astor’s estate at Cliveden on the north bank of the Thames. When it was unloaded, surprise, surprise it wouldn’t fit through the front door! The round/slice was placed by the Thames.

The Fieldbrook stump is a Californian coast redwood. It is said that the Fieldbrook tree was felled under the orders of William Waldorf Astor, a wealthy American living in Britain, who became embroiled in a bar-room bet about making a table seating 40 from a single cross-section of a tree. Lord Astor certainly had a giant tree slice imported to Cliveden, his stately home in Buckinghamshire, but when he was alive he vowed to sue anyone who repeated the story. “He probably realised that killing something that was nearly 2,000 years old for a bet didn’t really reflect very well on him

“It would have been the biggest tree alive today had it not been so ignominiously felled in 1890 – reputedly to satisfy a drunken bet about making a table big enough to seat 40 guests from a single slice of tree-trunk. But after a century of being left for dead, a giant redwood that grew as tall as a 30-storey building over the course of nearly 2,000 years in northern California

https://www.mendotraintony.com/the-astor-cut-lord-astors-country-mansion-at-cliveden-the-profumo-affair/