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Oliver

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Oliver (the Man in the Box)… – Tales of History and Imagination


Hi all, this week is probably the second, and final unplanned episode. If you’re curious, the new day job is going fine. Trigger warning on this one, it gets gory at times.    

I have an image in my mind of Josiah Wilkinson, that may not be entirely accurate. More a whole scenario than an image, I imagine us transported back to some time – let’s for argument’s sake say 1818. We’re at an upmarket ale house a short ride from Harley Street, London and Wilkinson is holding court in a corner of the pub. As the beer flows the gentlemen pass judgment on German inventor Karl Von Drais
“damn fool invented a wooden horse, if you would believe it!”
a newly released, anonymous novel discussing wide ranging themes from the sublimity of nature to the dangers of an unfettered pursuit of knowledge, to ambition, to just what is the true nature of monstrosity?
“I dare say the chap who wrote that book is far too fond of the opium.
“Romantics they call em…Hmph”.

Perhaps conversation veered to the recent passing of Seymour Fleming, the scandalous Lady Worsley 

“I hear she had affairs with 27 men while wedded to that sot.”
”Yes, but the damn fool invited some of those men into his marital bed – who does that?”
“Sir Richard worse than sly, that’s who”
”Look up, dear – Bisset’s at the window!”
”that’s the one….. What’s that Oliver? What happened to that African slave boy Worsley bought in Turkey? You think he murdered and cannibalised him while in Moscow. Oliver that is preposterous, the man was a damn fool but he was no monster”

If writing this in longer-form, I’d start in 1612, and we’d stay there a while. At the time James I, one of our bad guys in the Pendle Witches saga, was the king of England and Scotland (and by extension Wales and Ireland). His son and heir apparent, Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales – a bright, capable young man – suddenly died of typhoid fever. His passing was a heavy blow for the nation – not least of all as the new heir apparent was the awkward, incompetent, less beloved younger brother, Charles. 

In longer-form we’d definitely expound on Charles’ tumultuous reign. We could easily spend several episodes unravelling this. What we need to know, however, is he ran into conflict with parliament early on, never managing to come to a consensus with them. They clashed over religion (not as simple as Protestant vs Catholic, there were various factions vying for specific permutations of Protestantism from almost Catholic to full-on Puritanism to become a new state religion). They also clashed over failed attempts to bring Scotland and Ireland into line with the official religion. 

Charles and Parliament clashed over taxes, the long-held belief kings had a divine right to rule, over what rights a rapidly growing middle class should be granted, the perception the king was a warmonger – and of course George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. 

Buckingham was reputedly a lover of Charles’ father, James. He later acted as Charles’ wingman in the clumsy attempted wooing of the Infanta Maria Anna of Spain. Villiers’ assassination in 1628 robbed the king of one of his trusted supporters very early on.

Having never been trained to rule till his early teens, he lacked the diplomatic skills to navigate in such an explosive time. While he could, and did dissolve parliament on occasion – a sitting Parliament remained a necessity. War with his continental neighbours constantly loomed. To levy the taxes needed to put an army together, Charles constitutionally needed a sitting parliament to sign off on taxes to pay the soldiers. 

By 1642 a frustrated Charles tried, and failed to prorogue parliament. Civil war soon erupted between crown and parliament. 

At 2pm, January 30 1649, a defeated Charles knelt before the executor’s block. We don’t know the identity of the executioner, but a 19th century exhumation shows they were an experienced axeman – the cut was extremely clean. Normally an executioner would hold the head aloft, proclaiming ‘Behold the head of a traitor’ to all in attendance. Possibly in an attempt to hide his identity, the axeman remained silent. The head was sown back on. His body prepared for burial at Windsor Castle. 

At his funeral a middle-aged parliamentarian, turned cavalry officer gazed down at the corpse. “It was a cruel necessity” he exclaimed. That man played a vital role in the execution, as the second signatory of twelve on the death warrant. That man – Oliver Cromwell – is our man in the box. 

Oliver Cromwell was born in 1599 to a gentrifying, middle class family. His grandfather made a small fortune from a brewery he established. The brewing side of the family married into the titled, but disgraced forebears of Thomas Cromwell – a chief advisor to King Henry VIII who faced the executioner’s axe after he fell foul of the king. Oliver studied at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he was introduced to Puritanical thought. In 1620 he married Elizabeth Bourchier – a young lady from an influential Puritan family. Her uncles helped the young Cromwell into politics, helping him win a parliamentary seat at Huntingdon in 1628. 

Cromwell wasn’t overtly religious till he slumped into a ‘dark night of the soul’ in his late 30s. 

From early adulthood on, Oliver Cromwell suffered bouts of severe depression. He was often bed ridden for days on end in a deep, blue funk. The root of his depression was surely more complex than the following, but the explanation we have is he was convinced he was a sinner in a land full of sinners, and destined to burn in hell for eternity. Oliver Cromwell had a complete nervous breakdown in 1638; a spiritual awakening shaking him out of it. Born again, he adopted the solipsistic goal of becoming ‘the greatest man in the kingdom’. 

If doing a longer-form piece on Cromwell, and again people could devote whole series to him – I’d detail how his radicalism made him an ideal fit amongst the parliamentarians who declared war on the Crown. How he turned out to be an extremely capable fighter, rising through the ranks as a cavalry man. How he was given the task of building their ‘New Model Army’. His decisive leadership in the battles of Marston Moor in 1644, Naseby in June 1645 and Langport in July 1645 were instrumental in the defeat of the king. As were his murderous raids on towns who remained loyal to the king. 

We most certainly would linger on his genocidal campaigns in both Scotland and Ireland following the king’s execution – particularly in Ireland where civilian deaths may have run in excess of half a million souls. He had 50,000 Irish sent off as indentured labourers to the colonies – essentially slaves by another name – expected to be worked to death on an American plantation. He dissolved the ‘rump parliament’; then the bare-bones parliament’ following King Charles execution. By 1653, feeling he had no other option if order was to be restored to the realm – Oliver Cromwell was declared Lord Protector of England – essentially a dictator for life. He instituted a network of Major Generals to enforce his regime. In an effort to save souls he banned joy in life; criminalising swearing, blasphemy, drunkenness and sex outside of marriage. 

Though he didn’t personally ban Christmas – the puritans in the ‘Long Parliament’ did that in 1647 – he oversaw a half-hearted attempt to enforce the law on Christmas 1655. 

Oliver Cromwell is a divisive figure in English history. Some see him as a heroic figure. Others think him a monster. I fall in the latter camp, and think his death of kidney failure on September 3 1658 no great loss for England. Now we’ve covered some background, let’s discuss his head.

On 29th May 1660; a day designated Oak Apple Day (if I need more downtime we’ll come back to that in a few weeks’ time), Charles’ son and namesake, now Charles II – re-entered London. The new king forgave many of his father’s enemies, but saw to it anyone responsible for his father’s death warrant were punished – whether dead or alive. 

On 30th January 1661, the anniversary of Charles I’s execution, Oliver Cromwell’s body was dragged through the streets of London, hung from a gallows, then decapitated. His head was pierced through with an iron spike. The spike then stuck on the end of a long pole, then was hoisted atop the Parliament buildings at Westminster Hall. A warning to future despots, his head was to remain there forever.
Oliver Cromwell’s head disappeared mysteriously on a stormy night in 1684. The pole snapping in the tempest, it was thrown across the courtyard. A guard found the head, and secreted it away to his own home. 

As soon as the missing head was noticed, authorities went into a mad panic, scrambling to find it. Although a large reward was offered for Cromwell’s head, the sentinel in possession of the head became increasingly worried he’d be accused of theft if he brought it in. He stored Oliver up his chimney – where it stayed till the guard passed on. There is a presumption he made his family aware of the ghastly house guest on his death bed.  

In 1710 Oliver Cromwell’s head went from cautionary tale to morbid curiosity. First it showed up in the London curiosity room of a Swiss calico trader named Claudius Du Puy. In amongst a cabinet full of rare coins and exotic herbs, the gnarly-looking head was a sight to behold for the many foreigners stopping by his museum. From there the head found itself in the possession of Samuel Russell, an actor who performed in London’s, Clare Market, from a stall. I cannot say if he ever soliloquised  “Alas poor Yorick!, I knew him, Horatio” while holding Mr Cromwell up for inspection. Oliver was, however, popular with passers by, having visited the meat market on the look out for a leg of lamb or cut of beef. Russell sold the head to one James Cox, who owned a museum but Cox chose to exhibit the head only to his close friends. He in turn sold it to the Hughes family – who owned a museum full of Cromwell memorabilia. They, in turn sold it to a surgeon named Josiah Wilkinson in 1814. 

The head became Wilkinson’s prized property. He had an oak box made to exhibit it, and took to bringing his friend Oliver with him to the local pub. One wonders what Cromwell would have thought at becoming the centre of attention in the midst of the boozing, swearing, laughing and – one hopes – blasphemy. When someone doubted the raggedy head’s provenance, Wilkinson took the head out, pointing to the wart above his left eye. One friend noted the head “A frightful skull it is, covered with it’s parched yellow skin like any other mummy and with it’s chestnut hair, eyebrows and beard in glorious preservation”

The head became of public interest again in the 1840s after proponent of the ‘Great Man’ theory of history Thomas Carlyle published a collection of Cromwell’s letters and speeches in 1845. This was helped on by the rise of the pseudo-science of phrenology, and the appearance of a rival Cromwell skull, exhibited at the Ashmolean. The rival skull was easily dismissed as a fake when it was shown to be in circulation in the 1670s, while Cromwell’s head was verifiably still on the pike as late as 1684. Efforts to confirm our head reached a reasonable level of certainty in 1930, when the new-fangled technology of the X Ray at least proved the head had been run through with an iron spike as described in the accounts of Cromwell’s mounting. 

In 1960, Dr. Horace Wilkinson, the original Dr Wilkinson’s great-grandson handed Cromwell’s head over to his old alma mater, Sidney Sussex College. On 25 March 1960, his head was finally laid to rest in an intimate ceremony, at an unspecified location within their chapel. 

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The Sin Eater, Wizard of Mauritius & ‘Mr Good Day’ – Three Work Tales

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The Sin-Eater, Wizard of Mauritius & Mr Good Day – Three Work Tales – Tales of History and Imagination

Hi all, I’m starting a new role at my day job, and seeing it is something in a whole new field, with possible homework to do – I’m putting a couple of the more content heavy tales on hold till I’ve settled in. 

I was planning on podcasting a couple of older blog posts in the meantime; starting with The Sin Eater. The episode only ran six minutes long on it’s first recording, so I figured let’s do a trilogy today – some of this tale is old, most of it is new.

Today let’s talk about the things some people did for work.  

One- The Last Sin Eater.  

On occasion I’ve wondered about Richard Munslow’s funeral in 1906. When the Shropshire farmer – and practitioner of a lost art – died, aged 73, did the kin of his clients come to pay their respects? Was a gathering held afterwards, with food and drink? Did those assembled dare take a bite? I don’t ask to make fun of his passing – I do seriously wonder. 

There’s a riddle ‘When the undertaker dies, who buries the undertaker?’ The answer “whosoever undertakes to do so”

When a sin-eater passes, who will break bread for them? Given Munslow’s passing saw the death, also, of a practice long frowned upon – my best guess is no-one? When Richard Munslow passed, the act of sin-eating went to the grave with him. I’m a non-believer myself, and of course don’t believe Mr Munslow went to hell. I dread to think he might have believed in his avocation. Did he go to the grave terrified all of Shropshire’s collected sins would drag him to the other place when he crossed over? 

The practice of sin eating dates at least as far back as the early 17th century, mostly in Wales and the bordering English counties. If someone died before they could make a final confession, a sin-eater was called in. As the body lay in state, a pastry would be placed upon the deceased’s chest or face. Like a crouton swimming in a bowl of soup, the pastry would soak up the deceased’s misdeeds. The sin-eater then entered, and ate the pastry – reciting 

“I give easement and rest now to thee, dear man. Come not down the lanes or in our meadows. And for thy peace, I pawn my own soul. Amen.” 

Not unlike The Green Mile’s John Coffee, a literary stand in for Jesus (right down to the JC initials), it’s believed the practice grew out of a wish to emulate Christ.

The service gave families solace, knowing their relative would now ascend to heaven free of their baggage. The community at large could breathe easy some poor spirit would not be stuck in limbo to chain rattle – scaring others half to death on stormy, or foggy nights. 

For having scapegoated themselves, the sin-eater barely eked out a living.  

Sin-eating was a profession for only the poorest in the village. It paid little, and carried the heaviest of stigmas. Sin eaters regularly lived on the outskirts of the town or village, in semi-isolation. Often they made do in some abandoned, ramshackle old shed living a life scarcely better than a deceased sinner locked out of heaven. They were considered so toxic, to look a sin eater in the eye was said to bring a curse upon you. Sin Eating was also considered an act of heresy – and if caught, a practitioner could face punishment similar to a witch caught practicing witchcraft. As a rule, most sin-eaters were criminals or alcoholics who had few other options available than other than to turn to such work.  

Though the practice all but disappeared in the mid 19th century, Richard Munslow – a man who had a well-paying job, but hated to see others suffer – continued to break bread with the deceased till early into the 20th century. I’m doubtful others passed on the favour for him, though it is something that he was honoured by the people of Ratlinghope, Shropshire in 2010. His tombstone much the worse for wear after a century of neglect, Reverend Norman Morris collected £1,000 from locals, and had his grave restored to something more akin a man of his heroic stature.

Two- Mr Good Day…  

There’s a belief the Chinese philosopher, and by profession politician and teacher, Confucius once wrote “Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life”. This is a misnomer. For one, it doesn’t reflect his strict views on life (the man was a stickler for a rigid social order, and expected people to even wear specific items of clothing on specific days. If you were caught wearing Wednesday’s outfit on a Tuesday, you could be in deep trouble.) For another the quote doesn’t appear in the analects. It’s a nice quote however, whoever said it first. It is also something many never achieve. Workplace research shows in our own time only 23 percent of workers are actively engaged in their day job. Half of employees, on the other hand, are likely to be actively disengaged with their role. 

Joseph Charles of Berkeley, California was a man who found great joy in a job he loved.

 

Joseph Charles

What’s more he was appreciated for his hard work. The Mayor of Berkeley honoured him on his 85th birthday. The people named a tennis court in his honour. His gloves are on display in a museum. Even Walter Cronkite interviewed the man. 

Charles came to his best loved role later in life. Born in 1910, he was professional baseball player in the segregated ‘Negro leagues’ before moving to the Bay Area in the 1940s. Mr Charles worked much of his adult life in the dockyards. 

On October 6th 1962 he began the role he became best known for. Stepping out from his weatherboard home on the corner of Oregon Street and Martin Luther King Way (then Grove Street), he waved to every single motorist who drove past. As he waved he’d call out to motorists “Keep on smiling” and ‘Have a good day”. Joseph Charles took his post weekdays between 7.45 and 9.30 am, rain or shine, for the next thirty years – only retiring from the role, aged 82 in October 1992. 

Some motorists were initially suspicious of the Waving Man of Berkeley, or ‘Mr Good Day’ as some called him. Was the man some kind of communist out to spread Marxism under the guise of random kindness? Others wondered how long it would take him to cause an accident with his tom-foolery. Many, however, found him charming – and waved back, or beeped their horns. One day a man stopped to give him a pair of bright yellow gloves. These became the first pair of eighteen Charles would own in his tenure. Many of the estimated 4,500 people he waved to each day detoured just to see him in the morning. 

Most locals loved the Waving Man – one child commenting to her mother “it’s like having a blessing bestowed on us every day we drive by”. In 1992 a stranger knocked on his door, stating

“You don’t know me, but my wife and I have been having a lot of problems and we’re thinking of getting a divorce. But after driving by your house every day and seeing your positive outlook on life, we’ve decided to give it another try.”

Like any superhero, Charles became the Waving Man after suffering a loss. A Filipino neighbour he regularly waved to packed up and returned to the Philippines one day without warning. He found he missed the interaction, so he started waving to everyone. His wife Flora at first thought he’d gone mad – but after the NBC Nightly News, CBS News with Walter Cronkite, Real People and Ripley’s Believe it or Not came knocking, Flora conceded he was at least helping make a world a better place for people, one wave at a time – mad or not. 

The people of Berkeley, California were distraught at losing their famed Waving Man, aged 92, on March 13 2002. 

Three – The Wizard of Mauritius

For a period of close to half a century in my own lifetime, New Zealand had it’s own wizard. Ian Brackenbury Channell arrived on our shores in 1974, having previously served in the RAF as an airman – and Australia’s Melbourne University as an official sociology lecturer and unofficial ‘cosmologer, living work of art and shaman.’ He stood atop a ladder in Christchurch’s city square to argue a contrarian viewpoint over whatever was topical that day. He trolled Ray Comfort, a New Zealand born, American televangelist. When he was not performing a rain dance in the middle of a drought, the Wizard regularly donned his velvet robes and entertained kids on Sunday morning television.  

The Wizard of New Zealand

The Wizard was honoured as a living work of art in 1982, promoted from Wizard of Christchurch to Wizard of New Zealand by Prime Minister Mike Moore in 1990, and was granted an annual stipend for his wizardry. In 2021, Ian Brackenbury Channell was told to hang up his magic robes by Christchurch city council after stating in a television interview 

“ I love women, I forgive them all the time, I’ve never struck one yet. Never strike a woman because they bruise too easily is the first thing, and they’ll tell the neighbours and their friends … and then you’re in big trouble.” 

It was not his finest hour.  

Of course, as colourful a character as the Wizard of New Zealand was, he was an entertainer cosplaying as John Dee. The Wizard of Mauritius on the other hand – he had mysterious powers which to this day may still defy explanation.

Etienne Bottineau, a man known as the Wizard of Mauritius, was believed to have an uncanny ability to detect ships headed towards the isle de France from distances greater than any spy glass could see. What’s more he could often guess the size and type of the vessel, and if the ship was sailing alone or in a flotilla. 

Etienne Bottineau

Bottineau was born in Anjou, France some time around 1740. As a young man he became enamoured with the sea, joining the navy as an engineer. Though records of his life and alleged abilities are sketchy, we know in 1762 he claimed he could sense incoming ships before they became visible. His claim, ships “…must produce a certain effect upon the atmosphere”. This isn’t a terribly descriptive explanation – though it appeared incoming ships somehow struck him with a wave of sensations and colours – perhaps similar to the way synesthete experiences seeing musical colours from different sounds? He tried to codify this talent, and sharpen it, by privately making predictions on arrivals. The results were dismal – something he put down to far too much noise in the signal. Too many boats were constantly coming and going in French waters. 

His talents lay dormant, and functionally useless, till he was assigned to the remote East African island of Mauritius – 700 miles to the east of Madagascar. Out in the splendid isolation of the island chain – then named Isle de France by the French – he could easily sense ships as far as 700 miles away. Was that colourful sensation a French battleship headed their way, or an East Indiaman sailing for the Bay of Bengal? Bottineau claimed to know exactly which it was, while others were still asking “what ship?” He honed his talents, intending to develop a teachable method he could monetise. He named the method ‘nauscopie’. After six months on the island he had fully mastered the art, and began to show others. 

People in charge possibly either saw him as dangerous or an annoyance, and sent him off to Madagascar for several years. When he returned to Mauritius, however, attitudes had changed and the people there viewed Bottineau as a living, breathing oracle. 

In 1780 Etienne Bottineau started collecting data, in the hope of selling nauscopie to the French government. Over the space of eight months he claimed to have made sixty two predictions, correctly predicting the course of 150 ships. He kept a log of his predictions – most of which took between two and four days to confirm. He set sail for home in 1784, with his evidence and a letter from the Governor of Mauritius, Francois de Souillac which concurred the man was indeed an oracle. He wrote Bottineau ‘…sees in native signs that indicate the presence of vessels, as we assert that fire in places where we see smoke”

On his arrival he was widely regarded as a conman or a fantasist. He did have one prominent sponsor however – in all round renaissance man Jean-Paul Marat. Of course the French Revolution erupted in 1789, and his patron Marat took to writing angry invectives which influenced many towards the reign of terror that followed. In 1793 a minor aristocrat named Charlotte Corday assassinated Marat as he bathed. Initially a supporter of the Giordins’ who wanted to abolish the monarchy, Corday was horrified by the September Massacres of 1792. More than 1,100 political prisoners were murdered in a mass lynching. She blamed Marat for the massacre. 

From Jean-Louis David’s The Death of Marat.

With his patron gone, Bottineau returned to sea. His evidence was sketchy at best, and his major backer – a man partially responsible for 40,000 murders – was increasingly more hinderance than help. He spent four years in Sri Lanka, and is believed to have passed on in Pondicherry, a French colony in India, in 1802.  

The Many Deaths of Glenn Miller

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The Many Deaths of Glenn Miller – Tales of History and Imagination



Glenn Miller was a trombonist, composer, band leader and late 1930s – early 40s musical icon whose work is utterly impenetrable to me. Not that I mean I can’t dissect it, and regurgitate some horrific approximation as background music (podcast listeners, much of the music this episode is stolen from Mr Miller) I mean in terms of, in the era of the swing orchestra full of heavy hitting bands led by people like Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton and Fletcher Henderson – all bands sure to get everyone up on the dance floor – 

It was the comparatively restrained, in my opinion, polite music of The Glenn Miller Orchestra that dominated the pop charts like nobody else. 
(Edit: in the process of putting this episode together I may have subsequently fallen for his polite music. This bears mention)

Culturally I don’t possess the touchstones to judge his music in any meaningful way. I can say, however, the man was a superstar. If you are to go by the 59 top ten records he released – or the seventeen number one Billboard or Hit Parade records he dropped between 1939 and 1943, he must’ve been a constant and well-loved presence on the radio. If you go by the hollering crowds on a 1939 Carnegie Hall concert I listened to while writing this Tale, crowds most certainly did cut a rug or two to his songs. Music charts change their names, what they measure, and how they measure it over time so you may not see his name alongside Elvis, The Beatles, Madonna or Drake for that matter – but the guy was a huge star in his time – as big as anyone. He even featured in a couple of Hollywood movies.

On 7th December 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour, Hawaii. The subsequent entry of the USA into World War Two changed everything for Miller. At 38 years of age, he was never going to be drafted into the armed forces, but he felt he needed to do whatever he could to help. Glenn Miller walked away from an income of between $15,000 and $20,000 a week (that’s upwards of $250,000 USD weekly in 2022) and enrolled in the army. His civilian band played their last show in Passaic, New Jersey on 27th September 1942 – before Captain (later Major) Miller left to head the then Army Air Force’s dance band. The superstar band leader was off to keep morale high among the troops, a service he carried out with distinction.

I’m leaving a lot of biography out, so the following is a quick rundown. Glen with one n is in fact his middle name – He was born Alton Glen Miller in 1904, in Clarinda, Iowa. When young his family moved to Nebraska, then Missouri, then Colorado. He paid for his first trombone by milking cows after school. Upon leaving high school, Glenn moved to LA to become a professional musician. He studied music with a man called Joseph Schillinger, who had developed a structured, mathematical system of music theory that I’m told takes years for an already capable musician to master. Before his big break, he cut his teeth playing with several bands and on sessions, as well as playing in the orchestra pits for a couple of Broadway musicals. He married his high school sweetheart Helen Burger in 1928; the couple were still married in 1944, where we rejoin the Tale proper. 

We pick up the tale on 15th December 1944. The location, an airstrip in Bedford, England. Glenn is due to board a plane to Paris, France – specifically a UC-64 Norseman – a single engined,  tough little craft designed to handle even arctic conditions. Paris had been liberated by the Allies on August 24th. The war in Europe would slog on till 9th May 1945, so a large number of soldiers stationed on the continent needed entertainment on Christmas Day. 

Miller was hitching a ride by convincing a friend, an American officer named Lt Colonel Norman Baessell, to let him jump in a spare seat. The flight contained just himself, Baessell and a 22 year old pilot, Flight Officer John Morgan. The rest of the band would arrive separately on a later, scheduled plane. Around midday, though an extremely cold, foggy winter day, the call was made it would be safe enough to make the flight that afternoon. This was in spite of the fact that several other flights that day had been cancelled on both sides of the English Channel. Hours later, the Norseman took off for Paris. No one on that flight was ever seen or heard from again. 

When a superstar disappears mysteriously, theories – some mad, some not – develop. Today we’re looking at some of the many possible deaths of Glenn Miller. 

One: The Secret Agent. 

Let’s start with one of the, probably, crazier suggestions. The Norseman did in fact land in Paris that day. The band were supposed to meet up with him on the 18th but 18th December came and went with no sign of their leader. His compatriots reported him missing, but he was not acknowledged as missing till December 24th – the day before the planned Christmas concert. This was done because he was a spy on a classified mission, and someone higher up was concealing the disappearance for as long as they could. 

Where was he exactly, and what was he doing? 

In this case, not so much spying as diplomacy. He had been secreted away to the front to meet with high ranking Nazis to discuss a peace treaty between the USA and Germany. Perhaps he said the wrong thing, or the Nazis also knew he was a spy all along, or someone just decided it was worth more to the war effort to capture the band leader than discuss peace?

What happened to him afterwards? I don’t know, maybe Hitler didn’t like his rendition of Lili Marlene, and immediately wished he’d snared Dame Vera Lynn instead? This theory usually ends with Major Miller, blindfolded, in front of a Nazi firing squad. 

Do I think this is likely? There is no evidence whatsoever that he was a spy. All manner of other plots have been revealed in the years since the war. One example, James Bond writer Ian Fleming discussed using famed occultist Aleister Crowley to ensnare deputy fuhrer Rudolf Hess – a man with heavily occult leanings. Before Crowley could be put to use, Hess took off in a plane for Scotland. Completely unsanctioned by Hitler, he hoped to make peace with Churchill. Hess was arrested, then brought back to London by an agent named Brinley Newton John – the father of Australian pop star Olivia Newton John. 

Aleister Crowley
Rudolf Hess

Another plan which leaked years after the fact was Winston Churchill’s Operation Unthinkable – a plan which would have seen the Allies finish the Nazis, then re-arm Germany to help them defeat the USSR. I imagine this plan being unveiled to a roomful of weary politicians to a chorus of ‘Good lord, Winston – have you lost your mind?’ Had he ever tried to implement it. 

Besides this, one only has to look at the Instrument of Surrender documents the UK, USA and USSR spent the first half of 1944 writing, then fine tuning. The document was a very clear statement of exactly what the Allies needed from Germany to accept their surrender. With the USA so adamant on terms of surrender – would they really go behind their allies backs, especially this close to the end of the war in Europe?

There is no evidence – and that which can be stated without evidence can be dismissed as easily.  This theory also runs contrary to good sense. 

Two: A Hail of Bombs…

On the morning of December 15th 1944 the RAF 149 squadron took to the skies on a mission to bomb the Siegen Railway yard in Germany. A dangerous task, the slower moving Lancaster bombers would be escorted by a bodyguard of smaller fighter planes on the mission. 138 Lancaster bombers took to the sky, flying towards their target. 

A Lancaster bomber

When it came time for the fighter planes to launch, it was decided the weather was too dangerous. This was a daylight bombing mission requiring precision. People would see them coming. If they could see them at a distance, the risk of being shot out of the sky increased considerably. Knowing they could take another run at the railway tomorrow, the bombers were called home. 

The Lancasters had flown out fully loaded with bombs – including many 4,000 lb blockbuster bombs – often referred to as cookies. It was extremely risky to land with these in the cargo bay. A long way from a convenient bombing range to offload their cargo, the order was to drop their payloads over the English Channel. This seemed risk free, only an idiot would be out in that weather. As one they dropped their cookies, creating one hell of a shock wave. 

In Avro Lancaster NF973, a navigator named Fred Shaw was looking into the fog beneath him when a lone UC64 Norseman appeared. Flipped upside-down, the plane suddenly took a nose-dive into the fog. Shaw did report the incident, as did two other airmen, but the RAF chose to do absolutely nothing. Really what could you do? Had a plane been hit by friendly fire there was little chance of finding survivors – especially in the middle of a war, in diabolically terrible weather that to venture out into would be putting others’ lives at risk.

Of course the weather was much improved the following day. The squadron flew back out, bombing the living daylights out of Siegen. You can buy prints online of the December 16th 1944 bombing, if you wish to see the damage a squadron full of blockbusters can do. There wasn’t much left of the site. 

Was Glenn Miller accidentally taken out by friendly fire? Possibly – although questions have been asked whether Miller’s plane could have been in this airspace at the same time. Outwardly it appears so, but a Miller family investigation suggested the Norseman would not have been in that airspace till at least 90 minutes after the bombs were offloaded. 

Three: The Brothel…

I don’t believe there is any serious evidence for the following theory, but it is often talked about – so here goes. The history of sex work in Paris would provide a wealth of material for anyone interested in the topic. In the thirteenth century King Louis IX tried to curb prostitution in the city by designating just nine streets where brothels were allowed. The crown followed his lead in allowing, but restricting the practice throughout the following centuries. By the 19th century brothels were known as ‘Maisons de Tolerance’. They were allowed to operate if ran by a female brothel owner, were discreet in the way they carried out business, and if they hung a red lantern in the window when they were open for business. This is from where the term red light district originates. When World War Two broke out, Paris alone had 117 such Maisons. 

Invading Nazis added to the number of brothels – in an extremely problematic way. Though I don’t believe this pertinent – I don’t know where else I’ll ever get a chance to share the following. In 1940, Reinhard Heydrich – easily one of the most sadistic men in history (he was the chief architect of the Holocaust) had a problem. I doubt that guy cared whatsoever for the victims if horny Nazis were raping their way through captured territory. He did, however want to ensure what still equated to rape was safe for his men. 

Three issues occupied his mind. First, if the men caught venereal diseases they might be taken off the battle field. Second, if left to their own devices with the native populations, several officers might have their heads turned by a modern day Mata Hari – some spy on a mission to seduce them. Thirdly, Heydrich in a ‘what Paul says about Peter tells us more about Paul than about Peter’ moment, was convinced if men were banned from sex entirely, they would all turn gay – something the party could not tolerate.  

So, a man considered a cruel, feckless monster even for a Nazi, hatched a plan to create a franchise of 500 brothels across occupied territory. Upwards of 34,000 girls and women were press ganged into sexual slavery. They were regularly tested for VD – the poor women taken away and shot if unfortunate enough to catch something. Pregnancy would be ‘treated’ the same way. The Nazis ran nineteen brothels in Paris during the war. 

I doubt it is alleged Glenn Miller was at a Nazi brothel. For one, a number of sex workers known to have slept with Nazis were kicked to death in the streets post-liberation. Others had their heads shaved and were paraded through the streets in the back of wagons. 

French women, heads shaved and paraded for collaborating with Nazis

But it has been alleged by some he arrived safely, then sought out the services of sex workers amongst the red light district. In the throes of passion he suffered a massive heart attack and died in the escort’s arms. Presented with this tragedy, the top military brass made the decision to hush up the incident. It was bad morale when they needed morale high. 

This claim started to circulate in English-language newspapers around 1997 after a Far-right German conspiracy theorist named Udo Ulfkotte wrote an article. He claimed he’d just stumbled across a classified US military document while writing a book on German post-war spies. As best as I can tell the alleged document itself has never been published, or verified anywhere – but a far-right grifter had a new book to sell, so any publicity is good publicity??

Beside this, what happened to Lt Colonel Baessell and Flight Officer Morgan? – Did they too drop dead of cardiac arrest at the same brothel? They are real, verifiable people who left loved ones behind. Their disappearance is an awkward spanner in the works for this theory. 

Four: Mechanical Failure

Sometimes mysteries have simple explanations. The weather was atrocious, so much so that flights were being cancelled everywhere. The Norseman was designed for this kind of weather, but, end of the day it was a single engine craft. Many aviation experts believe the answer is as simple as ice on the engine brought the craft down somewhere over the English Channel. 

Five: …….

I have one final theory to share. Do I place much trust in it? It struggles with the same issues as the spy and brothel theories – what happened to the pilot and the Lt Colonel? It is somewhat more believable by virtue of it coming from a family member. Let’s overlook the eerily prescient letter he wrote one of his two brothers on 12th December 1944 stating “barring a nosedive into the channel, I’ll be in Paris in a few days”. This could signify something, or just be one of those strange coincidences. We don’t know if it reflected something he regularly said to family when flying out – if so how can you weigh the one time he was right against the hundred he wasn’t? It does, however, lend a little weight to this final theory if taken on face value. 

Another letter, written to his younger brother Herb, did have his brother wondering if he covered up the true nature of his death for patriotic reasons. 

Glenn’s letter to Herb, written in mid 1944, stated he was having great difficulty breathing. He was feeling increasingly ill, and despite eating very well – losing a lot of weight. Others near the bandleader echoed this sentiment, particularly towards the end of his life. My eyes not being the greatest, and live photos of shows in September 1944 often being a little blurry, I think he had lost a noticeable amount of weight prior to his death. Glenn Miller was a smoker from a young age, and  some – Herb among them, have suspected he was dying of lung cancer. Their belief, he was secreted away to an Army hospital somewhere in Britain, where he was kept isolated from the other patients. For the sake of keeping up morale among the troops, he died, anonymous and alone in some hospital bed so a heroic narrative could be told to the public. 

Of course either way, had he died of cancer his family were nowhere near. The war, though months from an end was still being fiercely contested – The Battle of The Bulge kicked off in Belgium and France the day Miller was reported missing. It wasn’t terribly safe to travel to his bedside – but at least a final phone call to his family should have been possible otherwise? 

Of course, having disappeared on route to a mission – the Christmas show, he did die a hero, and was awarded a Bronze Star, posthumously. 

What happened to Alton Glen Miller, superstar band leader, trombonist, composer and war hero? Your guess is as good as mine, though I suspect the simplest answer the most likely.   

The Ghost & The Darkness

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The Ghost & The Darkness – Tales of History and Imagination


The human history of Kenya, were we to know it fully, would certainly be one of the longer histories out there. On the continent’s East, below the ‘Horn of Africa’, certain simian ancestors of ours, such as homo habilis and homo erectus have been found to have thrived there. Fossil records in the region show an abundance of human apes as early as two million years ago. Pre human primates were there even longer – perhaps first settling in Kenya 20 million years ago. 

As early as 300,000 years ago some species of human, possibly homo-sapien, were beginning to develop traits we think of as what differentiates us from the other animals – primarily they started to make and use tools – and possibly even traded goods with neighbouring villages. “Hey I’ve got several chunks of obsidian, wanna swap for some of those colourful pigments you’re hoarding?”

Over a long, Neolithic period, nomadic groups of humans came and went. Over time the weather changed, becoming wetter and more alluvial, and hunter-gatherers began to stay local, keep livestock and grow crops. Groups of Proto- Khoisan and Bantu tribes settled in the region. By the first century there were cities along the coast, famed in the region for their iron work. They traded with the Arabs, among others.

I mention this as far too many histories glancingly acknowledge there were native people on the land, but history truly starts when Arabs colonised the coast in the 7th Century – Or perhaps pick up from the Portuguese arrival in the 15th Century. The Portuguese almost immediately began warring with the Arabs for control of the land. Some accounts may start with tales of the explorer Vasco da Gama narrowly avoiding death at the hands of an unscrupulous Arab pilot. Those same chroniclers – my main source for this tale among them – are far less apt to tell how, in 1502 da Gama attacked The Mira – a ship laden with hundreds of Indian pilgrims on their way home from Mecca. The explorer set fire to the captured ship, immolating 300 innocent travellers. That tale is too deep a rabbit hole for today’s episode. My point however, not only is Kenya a land with a long long history, often poorly acknowledged by writers of a certain era – It is a place where, by and large, humankind thrived for millennia.  

We do need to know, however, the British Empire showed up in 1888 and laid their own dubious claim to the region. In 1890 they set about building a railway through the land via Uganda. It was this task which brought Lt Colonel John Henry Patterson to Tsavo, Kenya in March 1898. Among his tasks – the construction of a stretch of railway through dense forest – and a bridge over the Tsavo river. No-one was expecting the sudden arrival of a pair of man-eaters days after Patterson’s arrival. For the following nine months the two lions, later named The Ghost and The Darkness, would prey upon the men building the railway.

Only days after Patterson arrived, the first few imported Indian workers disappeared. Late at night, while everyone was sleeping, a sole lion crept into a tent. Seizing a sleeping man by the head, the lion would drag the man kicking and screaming into the forest, where the leonine pair chowed down on the hapless victim. Patterson – not atypical of a 19th century colonial – ignored early reports from the workers on the encroaching lions. The coolies (his wording) – well paid as they were, must have fallen foul of bandits in a nearby town. This didn’t concern Patterson. If we’re to take Patterson’s account as gospel, the terrified men were convinced the lions were vengeful spirits of departed native chiefs opposed to the construction of the railway – all fairness to the man, he was right in doubting they were demons at least. 

Three weeks after his arrival, an incident occurred that he could no longer ignore. A jemader – one of the supervisors – named Ungan Singh was seized by the throat as several other men looked on in horror. Singh attempted to fight back, but was nowhere near as powerful as the lion. The following morning Patterson, accompanied by one Captain Haslem – a guest of his – went out  to investigate. Along the way they came across several pools of blood, where the lion possibly stopped to play with his meal. When they finally came across Singh’s remains, they were greeted by a large pool of blood, scraps of flesh, several bones and the more, or less intact head of the unfortunate jemader. This, especially the terrified look on Singh’s face, shook Patterson into action. 

For many nights following, Patterson took to perching in one tree or another, a rifle and a shotgun by his side. Come hell or high water he was going to bag the lions. The Ghost and the Darkness, however, had the better of him. At the time, the men were split across several camps along the railway line. Whatever camp he was watching, the lions would attack elsewhere. Patterson would get himself settled in, only to hear a blood-curdling scream several miles down the track. Daytime excursions through the heavy undergrowth also came to nil, though a number of daylight attacks did occur. In one case, a travelling salesman narrowly escaped death when one of the lions took out his donkey – but got caught up in a rope the donkey was carrying. The rope tangled up with several oil tins. The din of the rattling tins as the lion tried to free himself spooked the lion – giving the salesman time to scramble up a tree to safety.

It would be a distraction to the tale to cover Lt Colonel Patterson’s atrocious refusal to pay the employees the sum agreed upon, or willingness to take workplace injuries for what they were in detail. He was utterly convinced the men were lying to him about their capabilities, and constantly swinging the lead. Patterson was always ordering them back to work, injured or not, for a quarter of their previously agreed wage. Workplace relations reached a low point when several men conspired to kill Patterson and leave his body for the lions. Suffice to say, intent to murder aside, he was not a swell chap to work for. Add to this the arrival of the lions was enough to send many of the men running for completely different reasons.

In an attempt to keep the workers there, and to make the workers feel safe, Patterson had circular boma – thick, thorny fences – built around the work camps. The lions were not put off at all by the fences and soon both lions took to forcing their way through the boma for a midnight snack. 

For those who remained, the following few months were terrifying. The Ghost and The Darkness prowled from camp to camp. One night they raided the hospital. All the while Patterson spent his night in the trees, a couple of guns constantly at his side. At times he tied goats to trees, even left human remains where they lay, in the hope an easy meal would entice the lions. One night he recalled staking out a deserted camp only to hear screams from the direction of the recently relocated hospital. That night the lions leapt the boma, eating an unfortunate water-carrier in front of the man’s horrified colleagues. 

This brazenness was yet another thing which could be said of these lions. If someone had a gun, and was nearby, gunfire, yelling, the clanking of anything metallic meant nothing to them. If they decided this was the spot they were going to enjoy their meal, no-one was going to disturb them. 

The aforementioned attempt to mutiny and dispose of Patterson in September 1898 finally brought a little help. Those higher up in the organisation were called in to arrest the conspirators. Following the arrest, and punishment of the mutineers the top brass were suddenly far more interested in the goings on in Tsavo. 

Patterson had, by this stage, built a cage – half of which held some poor railway worker or other as bait. The other half was a trap to contain one of the beasts. For several days the lions ignored the trap. They did burst through a boma one night, however, picked out a victim and dragged the poor man into the jungle. For weeks Patterson, now aided by several military officers, staked out several camps at once. The lions continued unabated – with increasing impunity. They had now taken to staking out the Tsavo railway station for a fresh meal. One night the railway inspector fired fifty shots at one of the lions, convinced he hit the animal. 

The following morning men went out to track the beast down. A trail was left in the sand that resembled a dragging limb – had the conductor struck the beast in the leg, causing it to limp off? To their shock the trail was left by a human arm dragged along the ground as the lion strode off, carrying a half-eaten torso. Said torso had been discarded some way down the track.

Towards the end of the year, the railway employees finally refused to go back out, going on strike till the company built them lion proof accommodation. For three weeks work came to a standstill while huts were finally constructed. The district officer, Mr Whitehead, also arrived with soldiers to help hunt down the lions. Three weeks of strike was more than enough disruption for him. On his late night arrival at Tsavo station, Whitehead nearly fell prey to a lion. He escaped with deep, long gashes down his back from one of the duo taking a swing at him. The police superintendent arrived soon after to help also. 

It would be Patterson himself who finally took down the lions. The first was shot and killed on 9th December 1898. Patterson bagged the second 20 days later – the latter requiring eleven shots to put down. At just shy of ten feet, nose to tail – both were on the large side – as the mane-less Tsavo lions often are. Lt Col. Patterson made several claims in his 1907 bestseller as to the death toll from “…no less than twenty-eight Indian coolies, in addition to scores of unfortunate African natives…” to 135 victims. Scientists examining their remains have more recently put forward a lower figure of around 35 victims of their reign of terror. 

But what caused this reign of terror? 

While the encroachment of the British into their territory to build their railway seems the most obvious answer, it ignores the fact locals lived nearby for millennia. Lions did occasionally eat a human, but generally they avoided people, and vice versa. The favoured meal of the Tsavo lions, was zebra, wildebeest or antelope. 

One possible reason they turned man-eater relates back to Mr Patterson’s hero, Vasco da Gama. When da Gama and the Portuguese took notice of this region of Africa at the tail end of the 15th Century – subsequently taking over from the Arab interlopers. They were always on the lookout for slaves to import to Brazil. Brazil was their cash cow. Local slave labour was scarce. The Conquistadors brought European diseases, like smallpox, with them. These diseases went through native populations in the Americas, wiping out up to 90 percent of the population. Needing people to enslave and quite literally work to death in the plantations and mines, they imported millions of Africans to Brazil. 

(Sidebar: I have covered some of this history in Njinga of Ndongo and Henry ‘Box’ Brown). 

When the Sultan of Oman finally got the better of Portugal, expelling them from Eastern Africa in 1698, they continued the practice of selling slaves. On the island of Zanzibar, where Sultans would reign and continue to co-exist well into British times, a slave market flourished. 40,000 to 50,000 mostly Bantu people from Central Africa were brought to the island to be sold to wealthy Egyptians, Persians, Arabs and Indians. A third of the haul stayed on the Tanzanian island to replace the slaves worked to death that year in their own plantations. Many slaves also died on their way to the market, their bodies unceremoniously dumped on the way. One place which became a regular dumping ground was the Tsavo river. 

The British allowed Zanzibar to remain a protectorate – free to govern themselves, with a handful of restrictions, throughout the 1880s and 90s. They finally cracked down on their slave trade in 1897. Did the start of the slave trade give Tsavo lions a liking for human flesh? Did the end of Zanzibar’s slave trade cut off the flow of The Ghost and The Darkness’ favoured snack, forcing them to look for an easy meal elsewhere? 

Another possibility is the lions were simply following the principle of adapt or die. 

When scientists examined the teeth of the two beasts, it was noticeable neither had taken on a larger boned animal, like a wildebeest, in quite some time. The expected wear and tear simply wasn’t showing on their chompers. One of the pair however – for the life of me I couldn’t tell you if Ghost or Darkness – had three broken incisors, a missing canine tooth and an abscess under another tooth. The man-eater would have been incapable of bringing down a wildebeest or zebra, and was likely in constant agony. Some poor, slow moving human however, was manageable. 

Patterson went on to do other things. He became a war hero in World War One, leading the Jewish Legion – five battalions of mostly Jewish soldiers, against the Ottoman Turks. He also discovered a completely new species of antelope – the eland – only after shooting one of course. He commanded a battalion of Ulster Unionists in Ireland, just prior to the First World War and saw action in the 2nd Boer War. Patterson was a prominent Zionist who argued for a Jewish state in Palestine. His final wish was to be buried in Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu, a fan of Patterson, facilitated this for both his and his wife’s remains in 2014. 

The Ghost and The Darkness suffered a somewhat less dignified fate. They were skinned, their hides becoming trophy rugs of Patterson until 1924, when he sold them to the Chicago Field Museum. They were taxidermied and placed on display in a diorama in 1925. You can still visit the remains of these remarkable beasts today.   

Three Short Tales…

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Three Short Tales – Tales of History and Imagination


Hey folks the internet tells me you all like lists, so I thought I’d fill a gap in the schedule with a short list, of short tales. This week’s tale is a triptych – a little like the Francis Bacon piece I borrowed for the featured image today…

One – Pirates!

Our first tale takes place on a Merchant vessel, off the coast of Honduras in 1717. This was an unsettling time to be a sailor in the Caribbean – The War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714) was a great time to be a privateer, but the resolution of the conflict (Philip V was allowed to ascend to the throne, but ceded numerous territories to Britain, Savoy and Austria) left many said privateers out of work. Large numbers of British and American pirates flooded into the Caribbean, making easy pickings of the merchant ships sailing through the region.

Picture this, the crew of a merchant vessel is completely blindsided by pirates. In the early hours of morning a boarding party sidled up to them in a sloop. Before the crew could react all hellfire and thunder breaks loose – as large, heavily bearded men threw the sailors around like rag dolls, brandished swords in their faces and corralled the crew onto the quarter deck. The crew are then forced onto their knees, then poked and prodded. “Look at the noggin on that one” I imagine one pirate commenting – “he’d do you right Pete”. I get an image of Pete passing comment that he must be a smart man, big headed people always are, while he runs a length of twine around the man’s forehead. I picture another passing one of the men over. “Nah, far too threadbare. I do have standards, you know”. The crew beg the pirates for mercy,
“Please spare us, take anything you wish – we just want to make it home to our loved ones”

A particularly terrifying pirate steps forward, demanding “Who’s the captain?” This pirate is Benjamin Hornigold – an up and coming buccaneer with five ships and 350 men under his command. Among his men one Edward Teach – known to history as Blackbeard.

“Why, sir… I… I am. Please sir, as a good Christian I beg you, spare our lives” The captain responded, meekly.

“Well, captain. What size hat do you wear?”

The night before Hornigold and his crew were out carousing. A good time was had by all. The drinks flowed, and the men partied into the wee small hours – when it struck them as a smart thing to do to throw one’s hat into the air – on a moving ship – with a wind strong enough to send the hats scattering. From there the hats all sank to the bottom of Davy Jones’ locker. As daylight came, and the men worried that sailing on bareheaded would lead to disaster, a plan was hatched to steal all the hats from a merchant ship spotted in the distance.

The pirates took the hats they needed, and nothing else. They returned to their own ship and let the merchant ship return to their business.


Two – Mr. 380.

Though really not big on ‘Big History’, I’ve heard it said a student once asked the anthropologist Margaret Mead what she considered the first sign of civilization. Her answer? A broken femur which has healed. In my time I have read a sum total of three books on Big History, little specific to anthropology, so am in no way qualified to offer an opinion – but I think it is a great anecdote to open my next short Tale…. Which is definitely not Big History.


The Lombards were a tribe of Germanic people who conquered and ruled much of Italy from 568 AD, till they were conquered themselves in 774 AD by the Frankish king Charlemagne. They are of indeterminate origin – their own 8th century historians stating they were from Southern Scandinavia – but Roman historians in the 1st Century BC count them among the Suebi, a group which originated in the Elbe river region of modern Germany and the Czech Republic. Their name lives on in the Northern Italian region of Lombardy.

Over two seasons 1985-86 and 1991-92 a group of archeologists came across, then excavated a Lombard graveyard in Veneto, Northern Italy. They uncovered 164 bodies, buried between the 6th and 8th centuries AD. One is of particular interest to our next tale.


The man in tomb T US 380 is a man of mystery. Examination of his remains suggest he was a warrior – not uncommon for a Lombard male. At the time of his death he would have been somewhere between 40 and 50; for this time and place in history that was a reasonably good age to make it to. His grave was not filled with earthly treasures, or his favorite horse, or a team of slaves to serve him in the afterlife. By all accounts T US 380 was an average Joe – in all ways but one – Mr. 380 was missing his right hand, and part of his forearm. In place of the missing limb, it appears he had a knife attached to his stump.

No-one knows exactly how Mr. 380 lost his limb. It looks like it was removed in one heavy blow – though it could have been done in battle, or it could have been an amputation of a limb too badly damaged to heal itself. There is a possibility Mr. 380 had a hand cut off as punishment for theft – this was not unheard of among the Lombards. The stump showed signs of a callous built up, suggesting a (probably leather) device used to attach the blade. Signs of wear on the man’s teeth and shoulder suggest a daily routine of using his teeth, and spare hand, to fasten the prosthesis with laces.

In medieval times people generally didn’t survive amputations. If the blood loss didn’t kill you, the post amputation infection would likely finish the job. Margaret Mead’s rationale at the top of this tale – if a group takes care of it’s damaged members, cares for them, nurses them back to health – then that’s a civilized society. There is no question the Lombards were a civilization, but knowing their tough as nails, warrior reputation – Hardcore History’s Dan Carlin for one described them as like an Outlaw Biker gang – it is remarkable to think of the group of people who handled the tourniquet, who sewed him back together, and who nursed Mr. 380 through the inevitable days of normally deadly fevers.


Three – Doll Babies.

In November 1983 a wave of madness broke out across America, leading to a number of riots and physical altercations. The tale most often told took place in a Zayre department store in Wilkes- Barre, Pennsylvania. 1,000 Adults pushed, and punched, pulled hair and tussled with one another. Boxes flew across the store, shelves were sent sprawling over. Weapons may have been used on one another. Store manager William Shigo, surrounded by the melee grabbed a baseball bat, climbed atop the counter and yelled at the horde to leave immediately. His requests fell upon deaf ears as the assembled continued to beat the living daylights out of one another, hoping to defend their prized item. This scene played out at toy shops all across the United States that year. Of course opportunists swooped in, buying up stock then selling on the black market for huge mark ups. Some parents drove hundreds of miles looking for this elusive item. Others resorted to bribery. Zayre resorted to issuing tickets to lucky parents, then serving the lucky ones out back, but this hardly solved the problem. What was the cause of all this kerfuffle? This thing, a Cabbage Patch Kids doll… If I may offer an opinion, a doll as ugly as the behavior of the parents willing to beat another parent down to get one.


Legend has it the Cabbage Patch Kids started their lives as ‘Doll Babies’, developed by Martha Nelson Thomas of Louisville, Kentucky. Thomas was a folk artist, specializing in doll making. She developed her doll babies some time in the early 1970s, and would exhibit them at local art and crafts fairs in the area. Though running a business, she appears to have had no intention of ever selling in large numbers.

In 1976 she met a then 21 year old Xavier Roberts at a fair. Roberts, an aspiring artist living in Georgia convinced Thomas to let him sell some of her dolls in his state for a cut of the profits. The two would do business till 1978, when they had a falling out. It was at this point that it’s alleged Roberts stole Thomas’ idea, and began working towards scaling up the business. Martha would begin a protracted legal battle with Xavier in 1979.

In 1982 Roberts signed a contract with toy company Coleco to produce the re-branded ‘Cabbage Patch Kids’. While the agreement was to mass produce the dolls, they had two things working against them. 1. Production was always to be a little laborious – no two dolls were alike, from their appearance to the packaging which contained a personalized name for each of the dolls and 2. This angle contributed to the dolls becoming the most desired toy of Christmas 1983.

Martha Nelson Thomas would settle her $1 Million lawsuit against Xavier Roberts in 1984, out of court for an undisclosed sum. In the meantime Xavier Roberts continued to rake in much more money than that. There was now a 9 month waiting list for one of the dolls – and the price had skyrocketed from $30 to $150 per doll.

Martial Bourdin

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Martial Bourdin (Re-upload) – Tales of History and Imagination


At 4:45pm precisely, GMT, on 15th February 1894 the grounds of Greenwich Park, London – home of the Royal Observatory, and a clock we’ll discuss later – are shaken by a resounding boom. Staff at the observatory recalled a “sharp and clear detonation, followed by a noise like a shell going through the air”. They peered out the windows in trepidation attempting to work out what just happened. A park warden and a group of students ran towards the epicenter of the blast – where a solitary young man lay dying. The young man, who died not long after in a local hospital, was identified as 26 year old Frenchman Martial Bourdin.

Bourdin was a member of the Autonomie Club – a collection of anarchists who had largely escaped more authoritarian regimes on the continent, and who, once in Britain had either become radicalized or found kinship in the group. To pin down what constitutes an anarchist – well, their beliefs could run the gamut from Communism to Libertarianism, and all sorts in between – but the unifying themes were the rejection of authoritarian figures and hierarchies, a distrust of all current institutions – and often a wish to destroy society so they could build a new society based on their particular beliefs. Often they hoped to achieve this through terrorist acts. The Autonomie club had come to the attention of many in 1892, when a bomb making facility was rumbled in Walsall, North West England.

The Autonomie Club



That Bourdin would expire from his injuries was a given – when inspecting the scene his blood, flesh and bone left a 60 metre blast radius. That he hadn’t intended to blow himself up was assumed – when he left Westminster that day he was carrying a considerable sum of money. Inspectors took this as evidence he was planning to skip the country for the continent following the blast. It has always been assumed he lost his footing while nervously walking a zigzag pathway to his intended target, and on stumbling, the bomb went off.

His intended target has always been a matter of speculation. It probably wasn’t the well guarded naval facility that was the observatory – chances are at most Bourdin may have blown a hole in their fence – perhaps killed a guard or two; or a crowd of Londoners – on Thursday afternoons the park was quiet… but the 24 hour gate clock on the grounds – a clock which had counted the time with deadly accuracy since 1852.

Greenwich Observatory
The Gate Clock

To understand why someone might want to blow up a clock, we have to consider the concepts of ‘noble myths’, that ‘time’ hasn’t always been exactly as it is now – and that for most conveniences that improve our lives, there is often a corollary effect which makes our lives worse off.

First, to time itself. The Earth is in constant motion in a couple of ways. One way is it spins on its axis – in a direction we call East, at a speed we measure as either 1,000 miles per hour or 1,600 kilometers per hour. The mile comes from an estimate of 1,000 paces by a Roman soldier (in Latin the ‘mille passus’). A Kilometer is 1,000 metres, and a metre is 1 ten millionth the distance from the equator to the north pole. A twenty four hour day is a close approximation of the time it takes for Earth to spin one time on it’s axis (it actually takes approximately 23 hours 56 minutes to fully spin, but close enough). The other way we move of course is in an elliptical orbit of the sun – which gives us our year, but let’s skip the specifics of that.

We get divisions of hours, minutes, and seconds the way we do because 5,000 years ago the Sumerians worked with a duodecimal (base 12) and sexigesimal (base 60) system rather than our preferred decimal (base 10) system. The Babylonians kept base 12 and 60 alive in their mathematics and astronomy because it suited what they were doing. The Greeks brought the concept back to Europe in the wake of Alexander the Great’s conquests, 336 – 324 BC. They used those systems, particularly for navigation and trigonometry.
Going on knowledge the world was spherical, Hipparchus of Nicaea broke new ground when he divided a globe up into 360 degrees – a derivation of 6 x 60. The Roman Ptolemy of Alexandria further developed the language by subdividing the lines into minute (small) parts ‘minutes’ and a smaller second ‘seconds’, division. He divided by 60 both times. In the 16th century our technology was good enough to make clocks which could tell the time beyond the hour (the very first mechanical clocks in the 14th century only had one arm, for the hour). We borrowed the terms minutes and seconds from Ptolemy of Alexandria via thousands of years of precursors, sexigesimal framework and all. We really could have divided our time any number of ways; by 10, 15, 20, 200 it doesn’t matter- but this is the common story we all adopted, simple as that. It had history and a commonality in it’s favour- and as such it gives us a common, understood framework to work, plan, explain, develop from and exploit- It allowed a framework to direct others by, so is a kind of noble myth if you will.

Oh, and just to reiterate – we had hours, days, weeks, months, years – we had the words minutes and seconds; but we did not measure our time in minutes and seconds until the technology of the 16th century allowed us to.

If you put aside all of the scientific advantages of measuring to the second and beyond (Danish astronomer Tyco Brahe being one of the first to work by such small increments – one day we will come back to Tyco, his brass nose, drunken pet moose, and embarrassing death) – and look at the lives of ordinary working folk you can see how an accurate conception of time may have brought several advantages in organizing your life outside of work, but when coupled with an increasingly industrialized world it also enslaved a lot of people to it’s incessant tick, tock, tick, tock.

For one as production moved away from a model with an artisan making one item from start to finish, then doing the next one – to a mass production model where maybe a dozen people made one part only, over and over. Focus changed to how quickly a person can make that one thing? To a business owner this is efficiency. To a worker this presents a scenario where an artisan, once at liberty to take their time over a varied task, now had one simple – perhaps boring task – and could find themselves having to account for their every second if deemed to be ‘swinging the lead’. In 1748, when Benjamin Franklin offered the advice ‘time is money’ it was clear the criteria for what construed a good job had tipped in favour of efficiency.

In Bourdin’s time, time and productivity experts like Frederick Winslow Taylor had codified your every second into a science – his method, commonly referred to as Taylorism carried the official brand ‘Scientific management’ with good reason. While Mr Taylor suggested workers needed regular breaks (so they could recharge their batteries and work harder overall, not out of any particular kindness) he also had every task analyzed to the smallest increment. He introduced the concept of ‘soldiering’ to the workforce – the belief that a worker will do the minimum they can before they get into trouble. Believing soldiering to be “the greatest evil with which the working people… are now afflicted”, he advocated the use of slave-driving managers to crack the whip. While Martial Bourdin himself may have felt a slave under the shackles of a factory owners obsessive drive be the most productive, let’s not ignore productivity is measured against time – then in minutes and seconds, on new-fangled, accurate clocks. Factory workers were slaves to time as much as a hectoring supervisor.

Frederick Winslow Taylor, a man of his time?
work in the 19th century, no soldiering here.

In the 19th century this adherence to time took more of a twist. As marine chronometers were more in use on ships, to more accurately assess longitude, and people travelled through time zones more – as telegraphs, then later the telephone made our world smaller – and as railways required some uniformity of time zones, clocks across the country, and the world began to follow a more common pattern. Towns could no longer have one town on their own time, and the next town on theirs, a few minutes different. While this seems a good thing – I would argue it is – to many an anarchist like Bourdin this would have seemed another way central governments enforced their will on the people. Only a few years earlier, on November 18th 1883, the USA had finally managed to get their railways running on a common time scheme – following the British who had done so back in 1847. The USA was trying to plan their burgeoning railway system around 300 local time zones before they made the change.

Only a few before the Bourdin incident, on November 1st 1884, the world would officially assign 24 time zones at the international meridian conference, in Washington DC. Greenwich Mean Time – based on this twenty four hour clock in a London park, where years later a young man hopped aboard a time shackled train, and disembarked with the intent of killing time, blew himself to pieces – that Greenwich Mean time, developed I might add, in part so large imperial powers could run their empires of conquered peoples more efficiently- THAT Greenwich Mean Time suddenly became the beat we all danced to. I have little doubt the clock was Martial Bourdin’s target. To Martial Bourdin the clock wasn’t a convenience, or a wonder – the damn thing was enslaving the lot of us.

Sommaroy Island, Norway..



Now, as a coda to this story, in June 2019, I don’t think it matters which day (Ok the article I saved to favorites when I read it says June 23rd 2019) the Norwegian Island of Sommaroy announced the tale we tell ourselves about time no longer served a purpose for them. When you are up high in the Arctic circle and have a 70 day run without a night the downsides began to outweigh the upsides. Effective immediately – whatever that meant to them anymore, time did not exist for the 350 residents. If you ask any historian, or historical writer like myself, if you could live in any time in history I’m pretty sure most of us will pick now (edit: I wrote this a few months ago, some of us would not pick right now in the COVID outbreak obviously – Simone). Now is not necessarily the best time we will have, but it sure beats dying of typhus, cholera, or being murdered by marauding Vikings, Avars, Magyars, Mongols, or for that matter British imperial soldiers. However I bet I’m not the only one that looks a little enviously at those who were less a slave to the clock than we are today. Are not the best times, those idle moments where you have nowhere you need to be, nothing you need to do, and you can relax in a chair with a good book?
Unfortunately it turns out Sommaroy were scamming us – it was a ploy by the tourism authority to get more people to come see the land that time forgot.

Oh, as a coda to the coda, fans of English literature – Joseph Conrad based his novel ‘The Secret Agent’ on the tale of Martial Bourdin. It was my introduction to Conrad’s writing, and is a very readable book, check it out.

This episode features on the Tales of History and Imagination Podcast, here

Samuel Parnell and the fight for the 8 hour workday

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Hi all I feel like telling a local tale for once this week. Please be prepared, dear reader, for one this will feature more New Zealanders than normal on this channel… for another it won’t be the usual quirky, obscure or horrible fare I peddle most weeks.

The man in the featured photo today may be familiar to some Kiwis out there, if not, his name was Samuel Parnell – and we owe him a huge debt of gratitude.

Parnell was born in London in 1810. Though from a wealthy family, he gravitated towards a career as a tradesman – apprenticing as a carpenter. He trained at a time of increasing militancy from the growing trade union movement. You see unions were outlawed during the Napoleonic wars, and the immediate years afterwards – the country needed to present a united front to Bonaparte if they ever hoped to defeat him – but that ban was lifted in 1824, and unions popped up all over the sceptered isle. I would not do the topic, or my subject, justice here to attempt to summarize- but in 1834 Parnell came out of his time and took a job at a large joinery firm in Holborn. At around the same time the case of the Tolpuddle Martyrs brought a lot of disparate unions together under the Utopian Socialist Robert Owen and his Grand National Consolidated Trades Union.

The Tolpuddle Martyrs were a group of six agricultural workers from Tolpuddle, Dorset who took an oath to a union organization – and were arrested and deported to Australia for their troubles. The backlash was massive, and intense – and the crown eventually relented, repatriating the six back to the United Kingdom. Most of the group returned in 1838; all but James Hammett – detained on assault charges, and sent home in 1839.

This iteration of unionism would lose steam in the late 1830s however, as Chartism – the call for the right to vote for all men over 21 (without criminal convictions, or a mental illness so not quite universal) – overtook the movement for several years. It was in this brief flowering, and petering off of the unions that Parnell grew to maturity.

From the get-go Samuel Parnell hated giving 12 to 14 hours a day, six days a week to his employer. One can understand this – in an age where working lives were still brutish and short, where does leisure fit into a regular life, let alone a work week? He approached the union, but the union refused to back his crusade for a shorter work day. Parnell left his job to pursue self employment. In 1839 he fell in love with Mary Ann Canham and soon married. 11 days later the couple set sail for Wellington, New Zealand aboard The Duke of Roxburgh.

1840 sketch of Petone by Captain W. Mein- Smith.

On 8th February the ship anchored at Britannia Beach – now called Petone. A shipping agent named George Hunter struck up a conversation with Parnell. Hunter needed to build a store, so he could launch his business. He heard Mr Parnell was handy with a hammer and a chisel. Parnell’s reply has become New Zealand lore.

“I will do my best” Parnell stated “but I must make this condition, Mr. Hunter, that on the job the hours shall only be eight for the day … There are twenty-four hours per day given us; eight of these should be for work, eight for sleep, and the remaining eight for recreation and in which for men to do what little things they want for themselves. I am ready to start to-morrow morning at eight o’clock, but it must be on these terms or none at all”

A little flustered, Hunter replied

“You know Mr. Parnell, that in London the bell rang at six o’clock, and if a man was not there ready to turn to he lost a quarter of a day”

“We’re not in London” was Parnell’s response.


Sometimes origin stories are as simple as this – Parnell later commented “the first strike for eight hours a-day the world has ever seen, was settled on the spot”. This is, of course, a little disingenuous of me – the concept of ‘8 hours labour , 8 hours recreation, and 8 hours rest’ was something Parnell borrowed from Robert Owen – Owen first articulating the idea in these specific words in 1817. Newly established employers fought against the eight hour day, employees adopted the eight hour day en-masse – the small populations of Europeans in New Zealand, and shortage of skilled workers particularly, gave the workers an advantage. Parnell remained actively involved in the spread of the concept.

It is also fair to say I’m mythologizing, were I to present New Zealand as some workers’ paradise thereafter – unions had numerous other battles to fight, some as bloody and costly as some battles fought overseas. The 1912 Waihi gold miners strike – fought over low pay and work conditions which killed most before their 40th birthday – escalated till 10% of New Zealand’s police force were sent in. A gunfight between miners and police erupted on 12th November 1912. A miner named Fred Evans was killed in the battle. A couple of police officers were wounded.
In 1951 the Waterfront dispute – a strike action which ran for 151 days, claimed no lives but did see similarly violent clashes. In March 1984, Wellington’s Trades Hall – a Union headquarters, was blown up by a bomb left in a suitcase. A union stalwart named Ernie Abbot was the sole fatality.

In 1990, Jim Bolger’s Fourth National Government came to power. One of their more heinous acts was to bring in The Employment Contracts Act, which gutted union power in the country. Later in his life, in 2017, Bolger admitted Neo-liberalism failed most New Zealanders. He stated it was time to empower the unions again. In 2018, in his early 80s, Bolger was appointed by the Labour government to head a Fair Pay Agreement working group.

When I first wrote this, New Zealand had union membership of just 16% of the workforce. In my own day job I am the sole member of the union out of around 700 employees. Unions continue to fight strenuously for workers rights.
Right, back to Mr Parnell…

the 1951 Waterside dispute.

In the 1870s concepts of an 8 hour day, or 40 hour work week increasingly became a goal of unions across the globe. People started to look for ground zero of the 8 hour work day in practice, and Samuel Parnell, quite rightly I believe, asserted himself as the originator, stating in an 1878 letter to the New Zealand times ‘The eight-hours system was established in New Zealand in the year 1840, either in February or March, by myself’.

In 1890, the 50th anniversary of the 8 hour work day in New Zealand, the New Zealand labour unions honoured Parnell, parading through Wellington in his honour. Parnell was given pride of place on a horse drawn carriage. He died later that year, the labour movement honouring him in death with a large funeral procession.

We have observed Labour day in New Zealand on the fourth Monday of October, annually since 1900. Regardless of political affiliation, or lack of downwards movement in work hours (John Maynard Keynes for one would be horrified we don’t work a 15 hour work week in 2020) it is always worthwhile stopping a few minutes to think on Samuel Parnell and thank him for his massive contribution to all our lives.

Reader Challenge: On J.F.C Fuller

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Hi everyone, this week I’m doing things a little differently. I think this will be a one off, but the process was fun. A few weeks before this will publish I got a message via the portal from WordPress follower Tom Doberman – Hi Tom. His question, have I thought of picking a date then doing a post based on that date. Short answer yes, I did the Christmas Carol episode last year, on the stories of O Henry – writer of Gift of the Magi, and Lee Shelton, the man behind the Stagger Lee legend.

I’m also planning a Halloween week this year, a post a day for five days all on ghosts, and monsters and other spooky things.

‘But’, Tom replied, ‘what about a normal day on the calendar?’
I said no, but I could. The next date free was 15th September. According to the ‘today in history’ type sites, what happened on this day that I could spin an odd tale out of?

Hmm… not my usual brand of history really…. OK let’s go with the tanks.

A Very Graceful Machine

As stated – tanks were first used in the Battle of the Somme, September 15th 1916. The Western Front had devolved into a messy stalemate with an ever growing death toll, while the opposing trenches stretched out for hundreds of miles. Neither side’s infantry, or cavalry could make any headway on the other. They just sat there in the damp trenches waiting to become cannon fodder. The top brass were eager for any solution to this dilemma, no matter how mad. Putting Da Vinci sketches aside for a moment, the idea of a tank like contraption had been floated before.

In 1855 inventor James Cowen had built a model he named a ‘Locomotive Land Battery’, hoping Britain would develop and use his steampunk contraption in the Crimean War. The top brass passed on Cowen’s invention. In the First World War the ‘landship’ got the green light – Lincolnshire agricultural machinery manufacturers William Foster & Co were awarded the contract. The prototype, nicknamed Little Willy, was described by one officer who is very important to our tale as


“…a very graceful machine with beautiful lines. Lozenge- shaped, but with two clumsy looking wheels behind it.”

Cowen's Locomotive Land Battery
Cowen’s Locomotive Land Battery
The Mark 1
The Mark 1


Little Willy came to be known as the Mark I. Landships were re-named tanks.
The first tanks were horrendously unreliable; buggy and constantly breaking down. Many early crews found them death traps – but at their best, they were spectacular. Where soldiers were stuck in the mud, a tank could just roll over trenches, crush razor wire, and shake off machine gun fire like it was nothing. Over the course of the war they developed – the bugs ironed out of the design. The French seemed especially tank mad in these early days, making a lot of tanks, and working out many of those teething pains. The Germans also got into the tank game towards the end of the war, but of course were banned from owning any tanks after, as per the Treaty of Versailles.

For all the French innovation, Britain should have had an unassailable lead in the tank game. It didn’t work out that way. To explain why, we first must meet the man from the ‘lozenge’ quote, Major General John Frederick Charles ‘Boney’ Fuller (1878- 1966).

Now, when discussing J.F.C Fuller you must keep two things in mind. 1. He was a brilliant military strategist, and 2. he was a remarkably unlikeable guy. Perhaps his sense of ‘otherness’ distanced him from other soldiers – he was a short, slightly built guy who preferred staying home reading classic literature over mixing with his peers (if you recall the tale of his contemporary Adrian Carton De Wiart; De Wiart’s downtime was full of sports, drinking and pulling off dangerous stunts) – I don’t think it justifies his argumentativeness, bloody-mindedness, and utter disdain for his fellow officers; so evident in letters, essays and documents left behind by (or concerning) him. By today’s standards, his white supremacist views would be abhorrent to wide swathes of society today, but it was his strong belief in occultism, particularly the Thelemic Mysticism of his close friend Aleister Crowley, that separated him from many of his peers.

J.F.C. Fuller
J.F.C. Fuller
Aleister Crowley
Aleister Crowley


Fuller had been trained at Sandhurst, before being assigned to the Oxfordshire Light Infantry in the 2nd Boer War. During the war he formed an opinion that wars should be fought with increasingly agile forces, at lightning fast speed, as opposed to slow, steady and methodical formations. After the war he was sent to India – where he fed his passion for occultism – before coming back to the United Kingdom to take on a role at Staff College, Camberley. When World War One broke out, the top brass put him to work coming up with strategies and tactics. Much of the time he rubbed his superiors up the wrong way – in one task they were worried a large number of sheep on rural roads would hamper a quick defence if needed and tasked Fuller to come up with signs. Fuller replied asking what to do with the sheep who were illiterate. When the tank came along however, Fuller began planning tactics in earnest. He came up with a strategy called ‘Plan 1919’.

Fuller believed the way to stop an army was to win the battle in a single, decisive attack on it’s command. If you took a large contingent of tanks, and drove them straight through enemy lines – directly for the high command who were safely ensconced an hour from the front – the front lines would not realize what was happening till it was too late. They would also be powerless to stop you. When you smashed the command, the army would turn into little more than a rabble and soon surrender.

Fuller never had the chance to test his plan. The war came to an end in November 1918, by other means. In peacetime he became an advocate for the widespread adoption of the tank by the military. He met opposition, on the face of it from generals who wanted to return to using cavalry. In 1919 he wrote an essay advocating for tank warfare, reminding everyone of the great advances made – but of a need to keep developing. Fuller wrote

“Race horses don’t pull up at the winning post”.

His essay won him a gold medal from the think tank The Royal United Services Institute. His superiors were furious at his subordination. Fuller continued to be a thorn in the side of top brass until 1926. In 1926 he was offered a promotion, and command over a new infantry force, which would include tanks – but also included foot soldiers. Fuller wanted no part of the foot soldiers, and resigned. In the following years Fuller would become involved in fascist groups, including Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists; but far more concerning, the Nazi party. General Heinz Guderian was a particularly big fan of Fuller, and invited him to see the rollout of the Panzer tank in 1935.


Why did Britain not take up the tank?

… at least not till much later (it is true that as war broke out the top brass ordered 1,000% more hay for their horses, even insisting their few tank commanders also keep a horse in reserve.) This would change, at a huge cost to them.

Fuller’s unlikeability probably played a small role, but it appears the biggest reasons revolved around the British armed forces not being set up for tanks. First, who owns them? If they are put in with cavalry they are a bad cultural fit and sow discord among cavalry officers, concerned the tanks are there to take their jobs. As a result they will do their best to undermine them. If a separate division, then they become competitors with every other division of the army, for attention and resources, running the risk of being deliberately stifled by top brass looking out for their pet projects. Does the British army even have the organizational architecture to develop tank divisions, people (Fuller aside) with the skill sets to build the division, and to know what to do with it? Think of recent examples in business – Xerox built the first personal computer in their Palo Alto ‘PARC’ facility in 1970, but were not set up to do anything with the invention. Sony built a digital music player before the iPod, but did not have the organizational architecture to capitalize either.

No doubt some generals were struck with the ‘innovators dilemma’ if you’re in at the ground floor, you also get to see all the flaws, all of the bugs. These blind you to the future potential of the tank – baggage other nations are not burdened with. No doubt some generals just felt mechanized warfare ‘ungentlemanly’ and wanted no part in it.

Of course one power had none of that baggage. Nazi Germany more or less rebuilt their military from scratch, free of such limitations. General Guderian turned to Fuller’s writings, and put his plan 1919 to use, first in the invasion of Poland, then much of Western Europe. Dunkirk was quite a wake up call. Of course they gave it a different name – the Blitzkrieg.

OK, back to normal transmission next week – Simone.

Charles Lightoller’s worst night ever

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Today’s tale is set in the North Atlantic ocean, around 400 miles off the coast of the then Dominion of Newfoundland. The date 15th April 1912. The time, around 2.30am. Picture our subject, a 38 year old former Navy officer named Charles Lightoller. Tonight may well be his worst day on the job.

Sitting in a lifeboat watching his expensive new ship sink below the waves, something he was assured could not happen – he must have paused to think if he bore any responsibility for the disaster. Just two and a half hours earlier the scene aboard the ship had been anarchic. The unsinkable ship, on her maiden voyage, was sinking! Torn to shreds below the waterline, she was taking on much more water than one could hope to keep pumping back out. With no chance of caulking up the gaping hole, many would die before the night was out.

As men tried to muscle their way onto the scant few lifeboats, ahead of women and children, Lightoller stood in their way, pointing an empty service revolver at their heads – cursing them for their cowardice, and threatening to murder the first man who stepped forward. Many women and children would survive because of his bravery – that is good right?

He must have questioned his culpability. It was hardly as if he was in charge at the time of the disaster. He’d only just been commanding the bridge watch, but had handed responsibility on to William Murdoch. He was asleep, in his pajamas, when it hit… something attested to by the fact he still had them on under his hastily thrown on uniform.

Lightoller must have looked on, aghast, as the ship sunk below the waves. 1,503 souls onboard would be dragged down to Davy Jones Locker that night. How could you not look on so? Only 705 passengers and crew would survive the shipwreck. Of the more prominent victims were John Jacob Astor – science fiction writer, socialite and co-founder of New York’s iconic Waldorf-Astoria hotel; the investigative journalist W.T Stead; Macy’s department store part owners Isidor and Ida Straus; Benjamin Guggenheim, the mining magnate, and Archibald Butt, a military aide to presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. Various other executives, and even investors in the company drowned in the wreck. Even Thomas Andrews, the man who designed the ship, drowned in the disaster.

John J Astor IV
John J Astor IV
Isidor and Ida Straus
Isidor and Ida Straus
Archibald Butt
Archibald Butt



Lightoller was not the highest ranking member of the organization to get off safe – that honor would go to a cad named J. Bruce Ismay – a White Star executive who was one of the first to get into a life boat; and who later commented to press he flat out refused to look at the sinking ship – and was glad he hadn’t.

J. Bruce Ismay.


But still, for whatever public ire comes the company’s way, he WAS the highest ranking officer on the ship to escape; and Ismay was just some toff, born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Some rich guy who ascended to chairman on his father’s death in 1899. Ismay never steered the ship…. If anyone was likely to be a scapegoat… could it be him?
Well… here’s the thing, there are a number of reasons the RMS Titanic sank – disasters like this usually are a combination of factors. Much of which could be laid at Ismay’s feet (well maybe not the claims by William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers, of Ismay ordering Captain Smith to push the ship faster than it should safely go – there is no evidence this ever happened).. Most everything else requiring executive sign off perhaps… But there is one element – often overlooked – for which Charles Lightoller does bear a little responsibility… a locker key which could have saved everyone from this mess.


You see, Lightoller was appointed second officer aboard the Titanic only two weeks before the ship was set to sail. There had been a number of changes in positions among the officer class in the lead up to the maiden voyage, leading to promotions, and demotions – and the original second officer, Davy Blair, being dismissed from the ship rather hastily on 9th April. He left, accidentally taking the only key for a locker which held the binoculars – much needed up in the crow’s nest. This was discovered while out at sea. While lockers are really only designed to keep honest people out, when brought to Lightoller’s attention he advised to leave the locker as is. When they got to New York he would buy a new pair of binoculars from his own pay-check.

Did Charles Lightoller know the risk of hitting an iceberg? It appears so. On his watch that night he gave orders to the lookout to continually watch for “small ice… (and) particularly growlers” till sun up. At congressional hearings after the disaster lookouts Frederick Fleet and Reginald Lee both brought up the lack of binoculars as the main reason for the wreck. How much sooner would they have spotted the iceberg, congress asked “well, soon enough to get out of the way” was the reply.

If one is looking for a moral in this tale, maybe you could go with ‘you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette’. Yes it wasn’t great Charles Lightoller was faced with the prospect of vandalizing a locker… but which holds more value, a cheap locker or 1500 lives? Perhaps the moral is one for greedy organizations to empower your employees to make the hard decisions? Lightoller had every right to be scared of vandalizing the locker – in the wake of the tragedy, the White Star Line sent bills to the families of deceased staff asking them to pay for the brass buttons on the deceaseds’ uniforms. Maybe it is a tale about hubris; when they claimed the ship couldn’t sink you knew exactly how that tale would end. I don’t know, take you pick.

As a post note, however, I should comment briefly on that key. Davy Blair went to his grave feeling guilty for the sinking of The Titanic. At some time he gave the locker key to his daughter, who passed it on to The International Sailor’s Society. In 2007 the key was sold for £32,000.00, and has since resold to a Chinese businessman for £90,000.00.
I should also speak a little more about Charles Lightoller. He was a highly respected mariner before the Titanic, and would remain so after. He would serve with distinction in World War One, and would become a footnote in another landmark historical moment of the 20th century. In what became known as ‘The Miracle of Dunkirk’, 26th May- 4th June 1940 – Lightoller was one of thousands of civilian sailors who crossed the English Channel to rescue the Allied Expeditionary force from certain destruction at the hands of Nazi Germany.

Why O is for Owesome, and OK is Oll Korrect

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Hi there folks thanks for liking the page. If you’re wondering where I’m up to, I do have scripts together for the first 4 months, at a podcast a fortnight… and a shortlist of ideas years long. I want to run these weekly, but need to stockpile a bunch of these scripts first.

When will the first podcast be? I have a Blue Yeti mic I bought a few months ago… it seems to hate Windows 10. As an ex lease laptop with Windows 7 costs about the same as the mic, I’m looking to pick one up on my next pay.

Show hosting? Well that’s the next stage. In the meantime I figured I’d start writing a weekly article up here, and drop these back to every other week once the podcasts start. Going on what a toastmasters for dummies site I found online says I’ve been writing the podcasts at around 3,500 words an episode… it’ll be nice to have an off week where I’m just doing a few hundred words on something else.

This week’s topic why O is for awesome and why that may be Ok.

So, New Zealanders will remember in the 1990s we had so many TV game shows, mostly borrowing from American formats. Kiwis may also remember the night -10th October 1992 – when Moana Robinson of New Plymouth swore at the television – no doubt till she was blue in the face. You see, non kiwis, Moana had been picked as an at home contestant on a celebrity episode of Wheel of Fortune. The prizes were great. A 2013 Dominion Post article listed a $4781 porcelain set, and a $36,000 Ford Telstar. Moana was represented by a young Commonwealth games bronze medallist, the boxer David ‘Terminator’ Tua.

David the Terminator aka The Tuaman Tua.

Now I’m the last to criticize anyone’s performance on a game show- my experience on Mastermind was terrifying. You silently pick off all your opponents questions, but when the camera is on you, you do freeze a little…. well I did. David Tua had a shocker though! We might forget where, looking for the word Facelift, he asked to buy a vowel – then asked for P. What we do remember though was when he seemed to ask for an “O for Awesome”. Moana swore, her four kids probably swore, her brother swore -apparently – and at the end of the night all she had was a commemorative pen (I’m not sure if it was a nice pen but as of 2013 Moana still had it). Was Tua O for Awesome after that? A little embarrassed maybe, but it became a part of his story that he embraced. He had a licence plate O4OSUM made for his 1973 mini, though has always stated he said “O for (his friend) Orson”.

But, you see, – and let’s just put aside for a second he asked for a vowel, not a consonant – if David Tua said O for Awesome that is OK, cause we play a little fast and loose with language all the time – just look at the word OK.

In Boston, Massachusetts in 1838, a new fad was taking hold. I’m unsure if it was in response to one of Massachusetts’ greatest sons, Samuel Morse, developing the telegraph in the 1830s and 1840s, but Boston was crazy for abbreviating words at the time. The wealthier citizens of Boston, for example, became OFM, our first men. NG was no go, GT gone to Texas, and if something was no big deal it was SP, small potatoes. There was another trend at the time, ‘comic misspelling’ … well it was the 1830s, Americans had only just gotten their first dictionary of American English in 1828, written by Noah Webster. It had 212 new spellings of English words. If Webster could reinvent the language, why not some barfly in a Boston pub? All right became Oll Wright, abbreviated to OW in Boston.
All correct became OK by the same process… Oll Korrect.

So why do we say OK now, but not OW? That comes down to the man in the third picture, the 8th President of America, Martin Van Buren. Van Buren, who lived in Kinderhook New York, ran in the 1840 election. His campaign slogan was “Vote for OK” standing for Old Kinderhook. It may have also been meant as a sly dig at his opponent, Andrew Jackson, who was really not a man of letters. This embedded OK in the wider public lexis.

Martin ‘Old Kinderhook’ Van Buren

Now OMG has an origin from before the internet too, Admiral Lord John Fisher first used the phrase in an 1917 letter to Winston Churchill; but the practice of abbreviating words, LOL, SMH, BRB, all began in the drinking holes of 1838 Boston.

This blog was originally posted to Tales of History and Imagination’s Facebook page, on 16th January 2019. Edited July 2020. Copyright Simone T Whitlow.

DavidTua #Wheeloffortune #Oisforawesome #Ok #Samuelmorse #MartinVanBuren #History