NO TIME TO SPY: 1 – COME SPY WITH ME - Book review

This, the first book in the trilogy No Time to Spy by Max Allan Collins & Matthew V Clemens (published by Rough Edges Press, 2021) is highly enjoyable. The authors are after my own heart with their playing with words – both book titles and chapter headings. Some chapter headings: Harbour Frights, Dominican Dominoes, The Brother-in-Lawford, and Sand Storm, for example)

The action of all three books spans from 1959 to late 1963. The central conceit is splendid: John Sand is a recently retired MI6 agent, now married to Stacey. His real-life exploits have been written as fiction by a friend and former colleague not a million miles removed from Ian Fleming. ‘Though retirement had been forced upon him by his colleague’s novels – and because Sand’s body carried more lead in it than a crate of number two pencils – he relished his new freedom.’ (p13)

Unfortunately, the past tends to raise its ugly head in the guise of an old enemy, Raven, who attempts to kill not only Sand but his wife! It is possible the attempt is connected to a secret mission the US President wants Sand to undertake – go and protect Castro from a planned assassination!

Apart from the local colour, the authors also inject the Rat Pack into the story – capturing the voice and mannerisms of Sinatra et al (yes, including Peter Lawford). The period is well-realised, as are the references: ‘Wearing a smile on a face on loan from Troy Donahue, the blond boy said…’ (p105)

There are several amusing scenes, plenty of wit and suspense, a dash or two of sex, glamorous settings, and the kind of fast-paced action we’ve come to expect in the life of a famous spy. ‘Sand let go of the assassin, a corpse now, and let him sink like the stone he’d had for a heart.’ (No spoiler page number here).

I look forward to savouring the other two books: Live Fast, Spy Hard and To Live and Spy in Berlin.

Make a Date – 9, 14 and 26 October

Some time ago I published a regular monthly 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 9 October, here are a number of linked events for that date plus two other October dates. To avoid repetition, I've simply indicated the relevant date in brackets. The three dates for this article are:

9, 14 and 26 October

This month (26) saw the British military occupation of Iraq end – in 1946. Obviously, governments don’t refer to history these days! Peace in the Middle East has been an elusive dream for a long time, and seems to be further away than ever. As far as this month goes, because he had made peace with Israel (and gained a Nobel Prize for his efforts), the President of Egypt was assassinated by members of the Islamic Jihad in 1981 and one week later President Hosni Mubarak was elected (14) President.

On the same day in 1994 Palestine leader Yasser Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (14). Twelve days later, Jordan and Israel signed a peace treaty (26).

A year later to the day, Israeli secret service agents from Mossad assassinated the Islamic Jihad leader Fathi Shikaki in his hotel in Malta (26).

And still people die in the Middle East – and elsewhere in the world – because of the politics and religion affecting that region’s instability.

Politicians tinkered with the House of Lords and in 1999 the Lords voted to end the right of hereditary peers to vote in the upper chamber of Parliament, bringing to a close hundreds of years of tradition (26).

Lord Home of Hirsel (Sir Alec Douglas-Home), the ex-Prime Minister, died (9) in 1995. He was a keen cricketer and played against Argentina for three of his first-class games for the MCC during their South American tour in the 1920s. On retiring as PM, he became the president of the MCC in 1966.

Cricketer Charlie Parker was born (14) in 1882 and is the third highest wicket taker in the history of first class cricket, behind only Wilfred Rhodes and Tich Freeman. During his career with England he took 3,278 wickets and scored 7,951 runs.

Running of a different type is the 1,500 metres race – which was first run under 3 minutes 30 seconds by Steve Cram, who was born (14) in 1960. At one time he seemed unbeatable, gaining world records for the 1,500, 2,000 metre races and the mile, all within nineteen days in 1985. His record for the mile stood for eight years.

Sportsman Matthew le Tissier, who played soccer for Southampton and England, was born (14) in Guernsey in 1968. A little over a hundred years earlier, in 1863, the Football Association was formed (26).

 
An association of a different kind was cemented by the marriage (9) of Louis XII of France and Mary Tudor, the daughter of our own Henry VII in 1514, striving to get a male heir. They were not successful and he died the following year. The Salic Law did not permit either of his two daughters by an earlier marriage to succeed to his throne so his cousin succeeded him instead to become King of France.
 
The Royal Charter, a steam clipper, was wrecked (26) by a severe hurricane off Anglesey in 1859. Over 450 souls died.

Sixty years earlier, HMS Lutine was transporting over a million pounds of bullion to the Hamburg banks when she encountered heavy gales and off the Dutch coast she became a total loss, with all but one of over 240 passengers and crew dying.

Lutine bell, Lloyd's - Wikipedia commons

 

Several attempts were made in succeeding years to recover the gold but most of it remains unsalved to this day. The ship’s bell was found almost sixty years later and was placed in the Underwriting Room at Lloyd’s. Traditionally, the bell was struck once when a ship was lost and twice when an overdue ship returned. A crack has developed so the bell is only rung to commemorate disasters, such as the atrocities of 11 September 2001, the Asian Tsunami, the London terrorist bombings and annually at the end of the Armistice Day silence.
 
HMS Royal Oak was sunk (14) by German U-boat U-47 in 1939, six years to the day after Germany withdrew from The League of Nations (14).

German businessman Oskar Schindler has been immortalised in the 1982 book Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally, filmed by Steven Spielberg as Schindler’s List. He saved over 1100 Jews from the concentration camps and died (9) in 1974.

 
Jewish-born Hannah Arendt fled her home in Germany in 1933 and lived in France until she had to elude the Nazis again in 1940, this time with her husband and mother. She was helped by American diplomat Hiram Bingham IV, who illegally issued US visas to her and about 2,500 other Jewish refugees. She was born (14) in 1906 and brought her considerable intellect to bear on the philosophical conundrums posed by the twentieth century and attended several US universities.

The Commission of National Education was the first recorded ministry of education and was formed (14) in Poland in 1773.

Education and intelligence could be the death of you in Pol Pot’s regime in the 1970s; ‘intellectuals’ – if you could write, you fell into that category! - were massacred in their thousands. The Khmer Republic was proclaimed (9) in Cambodia in 1970 and civil war was waged until 1975 when Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were victorious, renaming the country Democratic Kampuchea. His guerilla fighters and later his government were responsible for the deaths of over two million Cambodians in the Killing Fields.

 
Guerilla fighter Che Guevara was captured in 1967 in Bolivia and the day afterwards he was executed without trial (9). Guevara is variously a socialist revolutionary icon or a terrorist and butcher. He was in at the beginning with Castro and founded Cuba’s labour camps and state-endorsed executions and mismanaged the Cuban economy, overseeing the near-collapse of sugar production, the failure of industrialization, and the introduction of rationing—all this in what had been one of Latin America’s four most economically successful countries. Many Cuban exiles have said that their country could not afford another Che Guevara. The Left still idolise him, however.
 
Cuban musician Chucho Valdés was born (9) in 1941 and in 1967 co-founded Orquesta de Música Moderna with his compatriots guitarist Carlos Emilio Morales, reedsman Paquito D’Rivera, trumpeter Arturo Sandoval and singer-percussionist Oscar Valdés. In 1973 eight members of that orchestra formed Irakere, which in 1978 became the first Castro-era Cuban ensemble to obtain a contract with an American-based record label. Irakere's debut on Columbia was a Grammy winner.
 
The Cuban Missile crisis began in 1962 when a U-2 flight (14) over Cuba took photographs of Soviet nuclear weapons being installed on the island. These definitely were Weapons of Mass Destruction, no doubt about it, and the world teetered on the brink of war.

U2 plane on USS America - Wikipedia commons

Another momentous flight was that of the Bell X-1 which Chuck Yeager flew faster than the speed of sound (14), the first man to do so in level flight in 1947.

Eleven years later, in 1958, Pan Am made the first commercial flight of the Boeing 707 from New York to Paris (26). [The Pan Am airline collapsed in 1991.]

In 2001 internal US Delta Flight 458 was an early symptom of terrorist paranoia which we’re still seeing today, some years later. The aircraft was diverted (14) and passengers were taken off while officials investigated a report that two ‘Middle Eastern men’ were making threats in a foreign language. The two were actually Orthodox Jews praying... Not a suicide bomber in sight.

In 1984 there was one strange suicide when John D McCollum shot himself after spending a day listening to Ozzy Osbourne records (26); a law-suit was later filed by his parents over the song ‘Suicide Solution’ but the case was thrown out.

 
Osbourne’s wife Sharon was born (9) in 1952, the same year as the poet Andrew Motion (26).

American poet e.e. cummings was born (14) in 1894. Fellow American writer Harold Robbins, author of The Carpetbaggers (1961) and A Stone for Danny Fisher (1952), seemed to invent the modern blockbuster with its sex and violence; he died (14) in 1997. In complete contrast was the author A.A. Milne’s book Winnie-the-Pooh, which was first published (14) in 1926. An Italian author who wrote political works as well as stories for children, Carlo Collodi died (26) at the age of sixty-four in 1890. Collodi created Pinocchio, the puppet without any strings.

 
Someone who has had a string of popular hit singles is Cliff Richard, who was born (14) in 1940, the same day and year (14) as actor Christopher Timothy, the actor best known for his portrayal of the vet, James Herriot.
 
Also born (9) in the same year was John Lennon, musician and songwriter. The term ‘Beatlemania’ was coined (14) in 1963 to describe the scenes at the previous night’s performance of The Beatles on the TV show Val Parnell’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium. In early 1964 The Beatles appeared at the Palladium with Alma Cogan, the singer who had ‘a laugh in her voice’. Tragically, cancer killed her (26) in 1966 at the age of thirty-four; she was also known for wearing amazing dresses.

Alma Cogan

American fashion designer Ralph Lauren was born (14) in 1939. One wonders what he would have thought of the sumptuary law passed (14) in 1651 in Massachusetts forbidding poor people from adopting excessive styles of dress - the law-makers were filled with ‘utter detestation’ concerning those people of ‘mean condition’ who disported themselves as ladies and gentlemen by ‘wearing gold or silver lace and silk or tiffany hoods’. What a silly law!
 
What would PM David Cameron make of that law? He was born (9) in 1966, fifty years after Francois Mitterrand, President of France, who was born (26) in 1916 (he died in January 1996). Full circle again, we started with politics so we might as well end on that subject!

[PS - yes, I know, 14 October was included in the 1, 14 and 31 October item too! Well, a lot happened on that day in history!]

Make a date - January 1, 7, 11 and 22

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 1 January, here are a number of linked events for that date plus three other January dates. To avoid repetition, I've simply indicated the relevant date in brackets. Apologies for the length of this entry! The dates for this article are:

 1, 7, 11 and 22 January

January’s the time when we put up our pristine calendars and look forward to a new year full of promise – if you’re an optimist, of course. At one time calendars could present a little problem or two. Take for example the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in 1582 (named after Pope Gregory XIII), which was to replace the Julian (named after Julius Caesar, which began in 45 BC). It was bound to cause consternation. After all, ten days were eliminated – 5 to 14 October. Only Spain, Portugal and parts of Italy started to use the new calendar in 1582 – now, a calendar for that year would make a priceless collectors’ item.

Friar Roger Bacon – not to be confused with Sir Francis Bacon (22), the philosopher who was born in 1561 – felt that this action was necessary some three hundred years earlier, calculating that the Julian calendar had been overestimating the solar year in excess of eleven minutes per year. Bacon was ignored, his representations misplaced in time, but by the 1500s scientists were clamouring for a correction, even Copernicus joining the fray. Those calculations were remarkable; the length of time the Gregorian calendar is off from the true solar year is 25.96768 seconds per year.

Most Catholic countries accepted the Gregorian calendar between 1582 and 1584; Scotland adopted it in 1600; Protestant Germany accepted it partially in 1700 and fully in 1775.

Almost two hundred years after its creation, Great Britain and the American colonies accepted the Gregorian calendar in 1752; Parliament eliminated 3 to 13 September of that year and London bankers shouted ‘Give us back our eleven days’, protesting against paying their taxes on 25 March, eleven days early. Taxes were finally paid on 5 April, which remains tax day in the UK today. It also plays havoc with time-travellers, as you can imagine!

China accepted the Gregorian calendar in 1949.

As you’d expect, the first day of a year is a significant start-point for any number of changes. On this day in 1651 Charles II was crowned King of Scotland. And 150 years later to the day the legislative union of the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland was completed to form the United Kingdom.

 
Three years later, French rule was ended in Haiti and eight years after that the importation of slaves into the United States was banned (though it was another fifty-five years to the day before Abraham Lincoln gave his Emancipation Declaration). Pioneers of a different stamp were accepted into the United States when Ellis Island opened in 1892 for immigrants (1).
 
Just before the close of the nineteenth century, Spanish rule in Cuba ended in 1899 (Fidel Castro seizing power on the same day sixty years later). In 1901 the Commonwealth of Australia was established and eleven years later the Republic of China.

A regular staple on television screens, the Vienna New Year’s concerts actually began in 1939. Nothing to make a song and dance over, true – though possibly singers who died on this day might have given it a go, such as Hank Williams (died 1953), Maurice Chevalier (died 1972) and Ray Walston (died 2001) of South Pacific and My Favourite Martian fame. Fifteen years earlier Gershwin completed Rhapsody in Blue (7); and on the same day two other famous musicians were born – Francis Poulenc (1899) who actually wrote music especially for the man with the golden flute, Jean-Pierre Rampal (1922).

 
The first day of January is significant regarding the UK’s love-hate relationship with the EU, which began in 1958 when the European Economic Community was established; the UK, Ireland and Denmark joined the EEC in 1973 (gosh, that was generous of the French to let us in at last!) Greece entered the European Community in 1981, Spain and Portugal in 1984 and the single market within the EC was introduced nine years later. Yet another name-change heralded Austria, Finland and Sweden joining the European Union in 1995 and four years later the euro currency was introduced, the banknotes and coins becoming legal tender in 2002 (which seems a long time ago now!)

As a nation of shopkeepers, the UK ought to welcome the euro and the simplification of the immense marketplace it offers; it would be interesting to know what Harry Gordon Selfridge (11) would have thought – he was born in 1858, the same day as the coal-miners’ once-powerful trade union leader, Arthur Scargill, in 1938. Scargill was a member of the Young Communist League from 1955 until 1962 when he joined the Labour Party. The so-called Scargill miners’ strike brought down Edward Heath’s government in 1974, a year after Heath took the UK into the European Community (1). Since those on mainland Europe couldn’t successfully invade us or beat us, they decided to join us.

Perhaps we’ve never recovered from losing England’s last possession on the continent in 1558 – Calais, which France took back (7); well, we did let them win occasionally. That Channel might divide us, but plenty of people have attempted to bridge the gap, not least the Frenchman Jean-Pierre Blanchard and American John Jeffries, who in 1785 were the first to travel by air in a gas balloon from Dover to Calais (7). It was another hundred years before the more famous Montgolfier brothers flew over the Channel (1); incredibly, it was a mere fifty years later in 1935 that the first woman flew from Hawaii to California – plucky Amelia Earhart (11).

 

Amelia Earhart (Wikipedia commons)

When Earhart was twenty she visited her sister in Toronto and saw first-hand the survivors from WWI. She received nurse’s aide training and worked in the military hospital, handing out medicines. Here, she contracted Spanish flu during the pandemic which lasted from March 1918 until June 1920. Spanish flu claimed about fifty million lives. After about a year, Earhart recovered but would suffer from chronic sinusitis thereafter, which affected her flying. Because there was censorship during the World War, and Spain was neutral without news blackouts, when the flu pandemic was reported in Spain, it was wrongly assumed this was where the disease originated, when in fact it was virulent in North America and all of Europe, not only Spain. 

Spain ceded Port Egmont in the Falkland Islands to England in 1771 and, sixty-nine years later to the day, British colonists reached New Zealand (22). Many colonists might have thought life was a lottery – and could bear in mind that the first recorded lottery in England (11) was in 1569.

Still dwelling on the other side of the globe, it might have had something to do with the growing threat of Japan, but in 1943 both the US and Britain gave up all territorial rights to China (11).

 
Perhaps there were no new lands to discover once the Pacific Ocean was navigated, but there were still places ‘out there’. In 1610 Galileo Galilei observed the four largest moons of Jupiter for the first time (7): Callisto was a beautiful maiden who enticed Jupiter, thereby invoking the wrath of Juno, Jupiter's wife. She turned Callisto into a bear. After Io's romance with Jupiter, she was turned into a heifer, pursued by Juno's gadfly. To elude the ever-watchful Juno, Jupiter approached Europa as a bull; she climbed upon his back, and the two flew off to Crete, where Europa became an object of worship. Ganymede, a “handsome youth” attracted Jupiter's attention too, who whisked the boy off to become a cup-bearer to the gods.

Galileo (Wikipedia commons)

 
In 1787 William Herschel found Titania and Oberon, the two moons of Uranus (11); and a mere fourteen years later the first asteroid, 1 Ceres, was discovered.

On the same day Galileo made his discovery (7), but nine years earlier, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, led a revolt in London against Queen Elizabeth. Happily, the UK’s other long-lived monarch didn’t have to put up with such things. Although Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India in 1887 in Delhi (1), her troops didn’t get it all their own way by a long assegai.

Sixty-three years earlier – the young queen had been on the throne just five years - the Ashanti warriors crushed the British forces in the Gold Coast (22) and on the same day in 1879 Zulu troops massacred the British at Isandlwana, just a short time before the famous battle of Rorke’s Drift. The Anglo-Zulu war started some eleven days earlier (11). Stories of all those flashing spears, knives and naked bloody heroism probably appealed to someone born in 1906, Robert E Howard (22) - the creator of the mythical Hyborean Age warrior Conan. And on the same day at the beginning of the twentieth century – 1901 – Queen Victoria died, to be succeeded by Edward VII.

 
On the same day in 1924 Ramsay MacDonald became the first Labour Prime Minister; in fact he was one of many distinguished people who visited author Thomas Hardy, who died four years later (11).

This writer thinks that’s about it for this January subsection.

 

Happy new year!

Make a Date - 3, 15 and 26 September

Again, linking dates through history, showing only the day in brackets to avoid repetition of the month. Another section from the book in progress. This time, the random dates are:

3, 15 and 26 September

At a time when the Royal Navy is shrinking, and when UK’s political masters would rather have Britain’s naval heritage as a dim memory, if at all, let’s begin this month’s article by looking back on some great seagoing events.

In 1580 Francis Drake completed his circumnavigation of the globe in his ship ‘The Golden Hind’ (26) and was knighted by Elizabeth I.

A mere forty years later (15) the ‘Mayflower’ departed from Plymouth to settle permanently its puritan passengers in New England to discover new food, drinks and people.

And a voyage of discovery of a different kind - two hundred and fifteen years later to the day, 1835 - laid the foundations of the Theory of Evolution, when HMS ‘Beagle’ brought Charles Darwin to the Galapagos Islands (15).

 

Ninety-nine years later, the steamship RMS ‘Queen Mary’ was launched (26) into the Clyde.

Scotland also witnessed a somewhat less illustrious nautical event in 1931: the infamous Invergordon Mutiny began (15) against the Royal Navy pay cuts and lasted two days. Although mutiny then carried the death penalty, the sailors’ strike was considered to be industrial action and while it was admitted that they had a good grievance - many liable to a 25% pay-cut, when they were poorly paid anyway - the ringleaders were jailed and some two hundred were dismissed from the Navy.

While the sea can be attractive and fickle, it can be treacherous and deadly too. No less deadly are rivers. The River Thames has been linked to our history for millennia and in 1878 over 640 passengers died when the crowded pleasure cruiser ‘Princess Alice’ collided with the ‘Bywell Castle’ (3).

Before moving on from boats and ships, mention should be made of Sir Malcolm Campbell. Lake Maggiore in Italy and Lake Hailwil in Switzerland respectively in September (2)1937 and (17)1938 saw him break the speed record on water in his boat ‘Bluebird’.

He was a true speed king and broke the land speed record (3) on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, the first person to drive an automobile over 300mph (attaining 304.331mph).

This month we can also commemorate two men famously associated with the motor industry. Born (3) in 1875, Ferdinand Porsche was an automobile engineer whose name can still be seen on vehicles, just like another engineer and designer, Ettore Bugatti, who was born (15) in 1881.

Civil engineer Sir Donald Bailey designed the Bailey Bridge while working in the War Office and was later knighted for that; he was born (15) in 1901.

One of the world's greatest engineers was Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who died (15) in 1859.

Kingdoms wax and wane and even though he was king for ten years, being crowned (3) in Westminster in 1189, Richard I, the Lionheart, only spent about six months of his reign in England, because he considered it ‘cold and always raining’ and didn’t particularly like rusty chain-mail.

Charles II was made King of the Scots but his army of Scots and Royalists was decisively beaten (3) at Worcester in 1651.

Then there are those who depose kings. Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England, changed the face of politics, royalty and Ireland and died (3) in 1658.

After his death his body was exhumed from Westminster Abbey and posthumously ‘executed’ on the anniversary of the beheading of Charles I. Cromwell’s head was placed on a pole outside Westminster then changed hands several times before finally being buried in a Cambridge college in 1960.

Near another county’s college is the spiritual centre of the Church of England, Canterbury Cathedral. My surname-sake, John Morton was Archbishop of Canterbury and a great builder. The central tower of Canterbury Cathedral, known both as the ‘Angel Steeple’ and as ‘Bell Harry’ was erected with Morton’s help and at his expense.

The Gateway Tower of Lambeth Palace, where he lived and where Sir Thomas More served him as page, bears Morton’s name and remains as a monument of his taste and generosity. He died (15) in 1500, the same day that Thomas Wolsey was made Archbishop of York (15) fourteen years later.

Wolsey, the pope’s representative, went on to become powerful, shaping England’s power at home and abroad for over ten years; he advocated the dissolution of the monasteries which Henry VIII completed. Then he fell into disfavour with Henry, when the king wanted to be rid of Catherine of Aragon, and was summoned to London for treason but died on the way. Wolsey fancied becoming pope but this was denied him because his arrogance and greed were too obvious to all. He’d never make a saint, unlike More who was beheaded by Henry VIII and canonized in 1935.

In 608 AD Saint Boniface IV became Pope (15). He was responsible for making the Pantheon - the temple to Mars, Jupiter and Venus, built by Agrippa and Hadrian - into a Christian church and thus preserving this remarkable building for posterity. He took great interest in the fledgling church in England and had dealings with the Irish monk Saint Columban.

Three hundred and thirteen years to the day later (15), Saint Ludmilla was murdered at the command of her daughter-in-law, Drahomira who secretly favoured paganism over Christianity.

Jealous of her mother-in-law’s influence over her young son and heir, Saint Wenceslaus (Father Christmas), Drahomira hired two not so noblemen to strangle Ludmilla with her veil.

Ludmilla’s remains finally ended up in the church of Saint George in Prague and she is one of the patrons of Bohemia and her feast is celebrated on 16 September.

A saint of stone rather than flesh is the San Lorenzo del Escorial Palace near Madrid, which was finished (15) in 1584.

An intriguing mixture of royal grandeur and monastic austerity, it’s the gilded resting place of twenty-six kings and queens of Spain. It was built to commemorate Spain’s victory over the French at San Quentin in 1557.

In 1687 a building of even greater antiquity - the Parthenon - was partially destroyed (26) after an explosion caused by the bombing from Venetian forces while besieging the Ottoman Turks situated in Athens.

Greek film actress Irene Papas, star of about eighty-three films, including ‘The Guns of Navarone’, ‘Zorba the Greek’, ‘Yerma’ and ‘Captain Corelli's Mandolin’, was born (3) in 1926.

 

Talking of Captain Corelli, another string musician was Frenchman Charles Munch, who was born (26) in 1891. He was the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for thirteen years. Born in 1898 on the same day (26) was George Gershwin, the composer of such classics as ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ and ‘Porgy and Bess’. Still on the same day (26) but in 1957, Leonard Bernstein’s ‘West Side Story’ opened in Broadway.

This is the same day (26) that the Third World War was averted in 1983. At the height of the Cold War, only weeks after Korean Airlines Flight 007 was shot down by Soviet aircraft, Early-warning Commander Stanislav Petrov was facing a crisis when his Soviet computer system told him that the US had launched five missiles at Russia.

Petrov had seconds to make a decision. He came to the conclusion that if the West was going to attack it would do so in massive numbers of missiles, not just five. He declared it was a false alarm - which it was, caused by the satellite interpreting sun shining off the tops of clouds as a missile launch. Having avoided all-out nuclear war, Petrov was neither punished nor rewarded but essentially his career was over and he retired to live in poverty outside Moscow. This was all kept secret until 1999.

The other moment when the world stood on the brink of nuclear holocaust was in 1962. The Soviet ship ‘Poltava’ headed towards Cuba (15), one of the events setting in train the Cuban Missile Crisis. Krushchev backed down. He actually was the first Soviet leader to visit the United States (15) - in 1959 when things were not so tense with America.

American novelist James Fennimore Cooper was born (15) in 1789, the same day as namesake actor and director Jackie Cooper (1922). Fennimore Cooper’s ‘Deerslayer’ series, including ‘The Last of the Mohicans’ were surprisingly popular, probably influenced by the life story of Daniel Boone, frontiersman, who died (26) in 1820. Cooper’s stories defined much of the bravery and pioneering spirit of the Old West.

A pioneer of a different kind was Sir Alexander Fleming who noticed in 1928 a bacteria-killing mold growing in his laboratory and thus discovered penicillin (15).

Besides medicine and new frontiers, there were pioneers in transport systems too. In 1830 the Liverpool to Manchester railway line was opened - though the event was marred by death. The Liverpool MP William Huskisson alighted from the train to chat to the Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, and misjudged the speed of the approaching locomotive The Rocket. He died shortly afterwards (15).

Another casualty, hit by a train on the same day (15) though in 1885, was P. T. Barnum’s Jumbo, the circus elephant, while crossing the railroad tracks. The train was derailed and it took 150 men to haul the body off the line. Twenty-four-year-old Jumbo was later stuffed and featured as an exhibit.

I think I’ve stuffed enough linked facts and dates for now.