Some time ago I
published a regular monthly magazine column linking a set selection of dates in
history. The series was popular. I'm busy coordinating the articles into book
form. As today is 2 November, here are a number of linked events for that date
plus three other November dates.
To avoid repetition, I've simply indicated the
relevant date in brackets. Apologies for the length of this entry!
The three
dates for this article are:
2, 9, 22 and 30
November
This time, since I live in Spain, let’s begin by looking at
some anniversaries that relate to Spanish-speaking people or their countries. One of my favourite composers is Joaquin Rodrigo, who was
born (22) in 1901; the premiere of his famous ‘Concierto de Aranjuez’ took
place (9) in Barcelona in 1940. [He died in July, 1999 and a nation mourned
this socialist composer of the people.]
The rather spooky ‘Day of the Dead’ - el dia de los muertos - is held in Mexico to celebrate dead
ancestors (2). On All Saints Day (1) they generally honour the dead children - angelitos, little angels; All Souls Day
(2) is the turn of the adults when families gather round their family burial
plots and eat special food, offering to the departed too. And of course there
are fireworks.
In 1966 the Cuban Adjustment Act came into force (2),
allowing 123,000 Cubans the opportunity to apply for permanent residence in the
US. This was four years to the day after the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis
(2) when Kennedy announced that the Soviet nuclear missiles were being
withdrawn from Cuba.
Gibraltar was captured from Spain in 1704 and subsequently
was under siege several times afterwards. The Treaty of Seville in 1729 was
signed (9) by France, Spain and England and confirmed that England owned
Gibraltar. Political self-serving skirmishes occur from time to time, as has
happened recently, regarding the sovereignty of the Rock.
Gibraltar
In 1975 Juan Carlos was declared King of Spain (22)
following the death of the dictator Francisco Franco and, as we know, in the
following years Spain has undergone a remarkable transformation.
At the Cabildo building in New Orleans in 1803, the Spanish
representatives officially transferred the Louisiana Territory to the French
representative (30) and twenty days later France transferred the same land to
the US as the Louisiana Purchase.
France got rid of other places as well, whether Charles de
Gaulle liked it or not: he was born (22) in 1890 and was President of France
from 1958 to 1969; he was certainly a mite taller than many of his successors!
In 1943 Lebanon (22) became independent from France, as did Cambodia (9) ten
years later.
Other land changed hands or identity this month in history
too. Barbados (30) became independent in 1966 and a year later the People's
Republic of South Yemen became independent, both from the UK.
As far back as 1917 the Balfour Declaration proclaimed
support (2) for the Jewish settlement in Palestine. The United States gained
(9) rights to Pearl Harbour in Hawaii in 1887 and eventually became the
fiftieth state in 1959.
Of course John F Kennedy, the thirty-fifth president of the
US, was assassinated (22) this month in 1963, in Dallas, Texas, ostensibly by
Lee Harvey Oswald. As it will be fifty years ago, I imagine there will be much
discussion about this and the subsequent conspiracy theories. Those of us who
were old enough will always remember the grainy film and newsflash, as potent
an image as the much later Twin Towers atrocities.
JFK - assassination - 22 November 1963
All brought to us by the immediacy of television. In fact
the BBC started (2) the world's first regular high-definition television
service in 1936.
Two of the biggest early TV stars were Lucille Ball and Desi
Arnaz, who were married (30) in 1940; there were 180 episodes of the I Love Lucy show, starting in 1951.
In 1974 a rather older Lucy was discovered in Ethiopia (30)
- a 3.18 million years’ old female hominid, Australopithecus. About 40% of her
skeleton was found and it was estimated she died aged twenty-five. The skeleton
was christened ‘Lucy’ because on the night of the discovery, during the
celebrations, the Beatles’ ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ was played
repeatedly. The name stuck.
Six years earlier, the Beatles released (22) The White Album and one of the tracks
was ‘Back in the USSR.’
Once-communist Czechoslovakia is proud of one of its
greatest athletes, Emil Zátopek.
Emil Zátopek, one of my father's heroes
In the 1948 Olympics he won the 10,000m race. The following
year he broke the 10,000m world record twice and in the 1952 Olympics in
Helsinki he won gold for the 5,000m and 10,000m races and the marathon, the
first time he'd attempted it; he broke Olympic records in all three events.
While an ardent communist, he advocated reform and supported the Prague Spring
so was ultimately sent to work in a uranium mine as punishment. He died (22) in
Prague in 2000.
Communist-controlled East Germany opened the checkpoints in
the Berlin Wall in 1989, allowing its citizens to travel freely to West Germany
(9). Ten years earlier, Pink Floyd released (30) their famous rock opera, ‘The
Wall.’
Another wall came tumbling down – the wall of an Egyptian
tomb – in 1922. Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon opened the last resting place
of Tutankhamen, untouched for three thousand years (22).
Perhaps walls didn't fall for the Countryside and Rights of
Way Act that came into force (30) in the UK in 2000, but it provides for
greater access to moor, heath and common land than hitherto. Not that the idea
is original – Sweden has given free access to all land for years.
Swedish King Christian II executed (9) over a hundred nobles
in 1520 in what is known as the Stockholm Bloodbath. Christian II of Denmark
successfully invaded Sweden and, despite declaring an amnesty, ordered the
execution of all the nobility and clergy who opposed him. Swedish soprano Jenny
Lind was born in 1820 and after touring with the showman P T Barnum, she was
dubbed the ‘Swedish Nightingale.’ She was a great hit with Queen Victoria and
became a philanthropist, living her later years in Great Malvern,
Worcestershire, where she died (2) and was buried in 1887.
On the same day (2) in 1961 the Canadian singer k d lang was
born while the female singer Dorothy Dandridge was born (9) in 1923. Dandridge
went on to star in Carmen Jones, Porgy
and Bess and Island in the Sun.
She lapsed into alcoholism and died from barbiturate poisoning, aged forty-one
with about two dollars in her bank account.
Dorothy Dandridge
Where would singers be without lyricists? Lorenz Hart died
(22) in 1943 and was the writer of the words for Richard Rodgers’ musicals,
such as Babes in Arms whose songs
included ‘Johnny One Note’, ‘The Lady is a Tramp’ and ‘My Funny Valentine’ and
‘A Connecticut Yankee’, based on the book by Mark Twain, who was born (30) as
Samuel Clemens in 1835.
The following year, the British politician Lord Frederick
Cavendish was born (30). A protégé of Gladstone, he was appointed Chief
Secretary of Ireland and almost on arrival in that post he was assassinated by
the ‘Irish National Invincibles’ in Dublin’s Phoenix Park in 1882.
In fact, November is an interesting month for British
politicians. Prime Ministers Ramsay MacDonald and Neville Chamberlain died on
the same day (9), in 1937 and 1940 respectively. And Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher resigned (22) in 1990.
Possibly our greatest Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill
was born (30) in 1874. Serving in the Nile Expeditionary Force in 1898 he
fought hand - to hand with the Dervishes at Omdurman. Later, acting as a London
newspaper correspondent in the Boer War, he was captured and escaped with a £25
price on his head.
In 1899 the Boers started (2) their 118-day siege of the
British town of Ladysmith, the town being named after the Spanish wife of Sir
Henry Smith, the British general governor of Cape Colony.
Africa is an immense and beautiful continent that has been
torn apart by warfare and slavery for centuries. More recently however there
was the massacre in 2002 in Nigeria (22) when over a hundred people were killed
in an attack aimed at the Miss World contest.
Africa was referred to as the Dark Continent, somewhere for
intrepid explorers to investigate, while risking their lives. They didn’t come
more intrepid than Sir Martin Frobisher, roaming the seas for new discoveries
and booty from Spanish galleons. Wounded at the siege of Crozon near Brest, he
was brought back to Plymouth where he died (22) in 1594.
Forty-nine years later Robert Cavelier de La Salle was born
(22). He was a French cleric and explorer who ranged over the Great Lakes
region, the Mississippi River, the Gulf of Mexico and claimed the entire
Mississippi basin for France. He must have turned in his grave when the
Louisiana Purchase went through for fifteen million dollars, less than three
cents an acre. If you scan a gazetteer of North America you’ll find many
townships named after La Salle. During one of La Salle's expeditions he lost
several ships to pirates.
One of the most notorious pirates in the Caribbean was
Blackbeard, Edward Teach, who died on the same day (22) as Frobisher, in 1718:
a Royal Naval sloop engaged the pirates and Blackbeard was stabbed a score of
times and killed in the fighting, his head subsequently seen hanging from the
sloop’s bowsprit. In 1996 Blackbeard's ship was discovered off North Carolina.
Then there’s Captain Vallo, the fictitious pirate played by
Burt Lancaster in the film The Crimson
Pirate, a 1952 light-hearted adventure involving prison breaks, battles,
lots of sword-play and Lancaster's considerable athletic skill. Burton Stephen
Lancaster was born (2) in 1913. Another fun adventure film of his was His Majesty O'Keefe.
Burt Lancaster in The Crimson Pirate
In 1541 Her Majesty Catherine Howard was demoted from her
position as Queen (22) and confined to her rooms, being charged with adultery
with Thomas Culpepper. Having been tortured, Culpepper confessed and he was
executed, his head staying on a spike on London Bridge until 1546. Catherine
went to London Tower and was beheaded in February 1542.
London’s Crystal Palace, built for the 1851 Great
Exhibition, was destroyed (30) in a fire in 1936, twenty years after the death
(22) of Jack London, the author of the classics The Sea-Wolf, The Call of the Wild and White Fang. He was a socialist and wrote about the poor of London
in The People of the Abyss.
Another writer with a conscience, notably in
The Travels of Gulliver, was Jonathan
Swift. He generally employed criticism by means of satire. This Irish writer
was born (30) in 1667, the same day as Irishman Oscar Wilde died in 1900.
We’ve all heard of Anne Frank’s Diary, but there is another
Dutch girl who wrote a diary too - Etty Hillesum. In her family, knowledge was
admired and she often cut back on food in order to buy books. In March 1941, a
year after the German occupation of Holland, she started her diary while
helping Jews at the internment camp there. In September 1943 she and her family
were sent to Auschwitz, where she was killed (30). Her letters and most of her
diaries were saved and published after the war.
An Austrian actress who hated the Nazis was Hedwig Eva Maria
Kiesler. Born (9) in 1913, she was notorious for the first nude scene in films
in the 1933 Czech movie
Ecstasy. When
she moved to America in 1937, she changed her name to Hedy Lamar and seemed to
exude sexuality in
Samson and Delilah
with Victor Mature.
Hedy Lemar (9 November 1914 – 19 January 2000)
Hedy Lemar also co-invented an important technology for
radio communications called ‘frequency hopping’, a secret communications system
involving the use of carrier waves of different frequencies, initially to aid
remote-controlled torpedoes against the Nazis. This system also proved
difficult to discover or decipher. Nowadays, this is ‘spread spectrum’ wireless
communication, used by GPS devices, cordless and wireless phones.
I’d better hang up now.
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