Charles I, whose decisions polarised England between royalty and parliament and led to the Civil War, and whose disastrous reign ended in his beheading in 1649, should never have been king at all.
A weak, indecisive and stubborn character, he had been backward as a child (he did not talk until he was four or walk until seven). He had few attributes to mark him out as a good candidate for the throne. His personal weaknesses contributed heavily to the lack of political tact he showed in his rule and he created for himself many of the problems of his times.
He only became heir to the throne when his elder brother by six years, Henry, Prince of Wales, died from typhoid at the age of 18 in 1612. Henry, by contrast, was intelligent, learned and responsible – except, perhaps, for his choice of exercise: according to some accounts, he contracted the disease after going for a swim in the polluted Thames. That swim would have catastrophic consequences for Britain’s history when Charles found himself elevated to the throne on the death of his father James I in 1625, still only 24.
Within two years he was at war with both Spain and France, which began the sorry tale of his prolonged fight with parliament over raising the taxes to pay for the conflicts, and which were to lead inexorably to civil war.
The madness of King George III (1760-1820) was probably entirely avoidable, scientists in the United States concluded in 2005.
George was renowned for his abstemious approach to dining. He was always worried about getting fat, took a lot of exercise, often eating little more than boiled eggs or bread and butter with a cup of tea, which he would consume while pacing up and down. He rarely held state dinners or dined with his ministers. Court life has been described as ‘intensely dull’.
According to a research team led by Dr Bruce Spiegelman from Harvard Medical School, the disease which afflicted him, porphyria, a hereditary complaint, has been found to be aggravated by low intake of carbohydrates and sugars which triggers a particular protein to become overactive and cause the mental instability. Said Dr Spiegelman, ‘We have explained how porphyria symptoms can [be] triggered by fasting, and why they can be treated by feeding carbohydrates and glucose.’
Ironically, it would seem, George’s frugal diet and concern for his health appears to have been precisely what ended up derailing him.
In contrast, historian nutritionists in 1989 concluded that Henry VIII’s reign might have been a more stable affair had he eaten his vegetables. That might then have led to avoiding the break with Rome and Britain remaining a Catholic country.
The almost complete absence of vitamins in Henry’s diet, which consisted pretty much entirely of meat and alcohol, fuelled his famously erratic mood swings. He is more likely to have died of scurvy brought on by malnutrition than the usually suspected causes, gout or syphilis. The puffy face of his later portraits, and descriptions of his foul breath and ‘fungus legs’ are classic symptoms of scurvy.
Had he eaten better, Britain’s historic links with the pope may have turned out very differently indeed.
Had Franklin D. Roosevelt not been disastrously mistreated when he first developed polio, he might have been spared the lifelong crippling that the disease caused him. He could have lived a healthier, and longer, life and thus had a stronger impact on the peace settlement at the end of the Second World War.
The symptoms appeared when he was on a lakeside holiday with his family in 1921, when he was a 39-year-old ex-Senator and Assistant Secretary for the Navy. After a swim he developed severe leg pains. The family doctor recommended a celebrated surgeon, who coincidentally was vacationing nearby, to see him. Having never heard of polio being contracted in a person so old – it is almost always a disease of young children – the surgeon misdiagnosed the complaint as a lesion of the spine and recommended ‘vigorous’ massage of the limbs, just about the worst treatment possible for the early stages of polio. He underwent the treatment for two whole weeks before the Roosevelt family got a second opinion from an expert who immediately diagnosed polio.
The massaging was to cause permanent paralysis of Roosevelt’s legs and although he learned to stand with metal callipers to hide his ailment in public – few outside the family and presidential circle ever knew of his disability – it effectively confined him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
The added irony of his plight is that in 80 per cent of cases, polio passes, causing no permanent damage. The treatment Roosevelt received from the unknowing doctor changed that for him.
The historic consequences may have been profound. As US President throughout the Second World War, his frailties increased as the conflict neared its end. For the last year, when crucial political confrontations with the Soviet Union set the course for the post-war territorial settlements, many historians see Roosevelt’s failing health as a crucial factor in weakening America’s resilience against Stalin’s demands as the victorious powers tussled over the fate of the Fascist empires. By the Yalta Conference of the ‘Big Three’ in February 1945 he was virtually a dead man standing, and historians universally judge Stalin to have come out on top in the negotiations. Two months later, Roosevelt was dead, aged just 63. Churchill, then already 70, in contrast would live another two decades.
The baby that would eventually rule as Queen Victoria, was nearly shot by a bird-hunting boy when just seven months old. On Christmas Day 1819 she was being cared for by a nurse at Woolbrook Cottage at Sidmouth where her parents, the Duke and Duchess of Kent, were holidaying. A shot broke the nursery window, and a bullet whistled close enough to the child’s head to tear the sleeve of her shawl. The boy responsible had been taking pot shots at sparrows noisily chattering outside.
In later life, there would be as many as seven attempts to assassinate her as queen.
Had it not been for a small act of kindness, history would be recording Sir Robert Peel as the second British prime minister to have been assassinated. At the peak of his powers, he escaped being shot in January 1843 when the would-be assassin, Daniel MacNaghten, shot Peel’s Private Secretary, Edward Drummond, as he walked near the Admiralty in Whitehall in the mistaken belief that he was shooting the Prime Minister. Drummond died of his injuries five days later.
The mistaken identity arose because when Peel had become prime minister two years earlier, he decided not to move into the prime minister’s official residence at 10 Downing Street but remain in his own house which was conveniently located in nearby Whitehall Gardens. Peel had lent No. 10 to Drummond. MacNaghten had been staking out Downing Street for weeks and concluded that the man he saw regularly coming and going was Peel.
Lloyd George, prime minister during the First World War, escaped what is perhaps the most bizarre assassination plot against a British politician. Police arrested an odd group of radical extremists in Derby in January 1917, led by a 50-year-old secondhand clothes shop owner, Alice Wheeldon, her two daughters and her son-in-law, a chemist. Wheeldon was undoubtedly a fanatical suffragette, angry that the war had put an end to the campaign for women’s votes.
The family devised a plan to kill Lloyd George while he was playing golf. They would shoot him with darts tipped with the deadly poison curare. The scheme unravelled when they chose the gunman who would actually do the shooting. He turned out to be an anti-subversion secret service agent, one of a pair who had infiltrated the group.
They were tried at the Old Bailey in March. After a five-day trial, the jury took just half an hour to convict. They were sentenced to varying terms of prison, Alice Wheeldon getting the highest penalty of 10 years.
Quite how the secret service had cottoned on to this nondescript group far away in the East Midlands has never been explained. An intriguing alternative theory is that the plot was an inside job sponsored by maverick elements within the establishment. The other agent who had befriended the group never appeared as a witness at the trial, and 10 years later was incarcerated in a mental asylum.
Lloyd George treated the whole affair casually. He ordered Wheeldon’s release before the year ended. She died in February 1919 during the mass influenza epidemic which struck after the war.
A British doctor’s misdiagnosis may have contributed to the sequence of events that would lead to the First World War. Sir Morell Mackenzie, an eminent throat expert, was asked in 1887 to examine the German Crown Prince Frederick, who had married the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria. The Prince was suspected of suffering from throat cancer, but Mackenzie, despite three examinations, was adamant that there was no malignancy. No action was therefore taken.
Months later, it became apparent that Frederick was indeed suffering from cancer, which by then had reached an inoperable stage. Two months afterwards, the reigning German Kaiser died and Fredrick succeeded to the throne – but ruled for only 99 days before dying in June 1888.
That left the way open for his son, Kaiser Wilhelm, whose erratic and bombastic reign destabilised European politics and did more than anything else to create the frictions that culminated in the outbreak of war in 1914.
Had his father’s cancer been spotted earlier, who knows how long a reign Frederick might have had and what impact that might have had in producing an alternative set of events to those which unfolded?
The assassination that directly triggered the First World War, the killing of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand while visiting Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, succeeded because of a driver’s wrong turn and a scarcely credible coincidence.
The royal entourage from the city railway station to the town hall was the target of seven Serbian nationalist terrorists. Of the potential assassins lining the route, two found themselves in awkward positions in the crowd which prevented them from firing their weapons and two lost their nerve. The fifth managed to lob a bomb that bounced off the Archduke’s car and exploded underneath the third vehicle in the convoy, injuring an officer. When the Archduke arrived at the town hall and learned of the outrage, he reacted with fury at this insult from the city, abandoned the reception formalities and asked to be driven to the hospital to see his wounded staff.
The eventual assassin, Gavrilo Princip, had heard the explosion, assumed the plot had worked and had taken himself off to a café on a street corner. The drivers of the royal cars had not been briefed of the change of destination. They drove the planned parade route along the riverside Appel-Quai back towards the station. The lead car took a tight turn off into a narrow street and the driver of the Archduke’s car followed. When told this was not the way to the hospital, he stopped and began to reverse slowly out of the street. It happened to be the precise street corner on which Princip was sitting drinking his celebratory coffee.
Princip looked up, saw the Archduke barely yards away and walked over and fatally shot him. His aimed a second shot at the Army Chief of Staff, but a well-meaning rescuer tried to grab his arm and the bullet instead hit the Archduke’s wife, Countess Sophie, who also died.
Within a month the Austrians, who blamed Russia for supporting the Serbs, had declared war on the Tsar. Their allies, Germany, also declared war on Russia, leading its ally, France, to declare war on Germany. Britain, as allies of France and Russia, followed suit. The ‘Great War’ would last for four years and lead to nine million deaths.
Emily Davison, the suffragette who died when she ran in front of the royal horse during the 1913 Epsom Derby may have achieved her lasting fame by sheer accident. An episode that has been portrayed as a deliberate suicide in the cause of women’s votes may actually have been a ghastly error of judgement.
Intriguing evidence surfaced in 1986 in the form of personal possessions kept by the family’s solicitor who represented them at the inquest. Amongst the papers was a telling item which casts doubt on the suicide theory: she was carrying a return rail ticket from Epsom back to Victoria, suggesting she had intended to go home that night.
The royal jockey, Herbert Jones, always doubted that Davison intended to bring his horse down. He is said to have been haunted by her look of surprise seconds before the collision. He was sure that she had misjudged the situation, and assumed that all the field had passed her at Tattenham Corner, but the deceptive rising ground obscured a bunch of stragglers, including his mount.
What may have been intended then simply as a public walk-on demonstration secured for Davison, perhaps more by luck than judgement, her immortal place in history.
At Abraham Lincoln’s second inauguration in March 1865 a young man broke through the police ranks and almost reached the President. Police had been on the alert as a similar attempt had been made to disrupt Lincoln’s first inaugural four years earlier. They apprehended the man and detained him for questioning. They let him go after deciding he was quite harmless. The man was John Wilkes Booth, who was to assassinate Lincoln six weeks later.
Lincoln almost decided not to go to the theatre in Washington the night he was assassinated in April 1865. Although it was Good Friday, he had worked a full day, starting at 8 o’clock, with a Cabinet meeting at 11 that lasted three hours, continual meetings in between (it was only five days after the Confederate surrender and the end of the Civil War) and he made a visit to the War Department in the afternoon.
Lincoln tried to get out of the evening engagement, to Ford’s Theatre in the heart of town. He was tired and had seen the play before. One of the main reasons for him originally having to go – because Mrs Lincoln had invited Civil War hero General Grant and his wife to accompany them – was no longer an issue. Grant had sent his regrets during the day as he was going out of town on an afternoon train to visit his children in New Jersey.
But Mrs Lincoln had set her heart on the outing. He decided he could not pull out. ‘It has been advertised that we will be there,’ he told a bodyguard. ‘I cannot disappoint the people’.
Grant’s decision to cancel saved his own life. The plot against Lincoln was to have included him as a target. He later became president himself four years later. So America nearly lost two presidents that night at the theatre.
Lincoln would not have been the first American president to be assassinated had it not been for an incredible, and inexplicable, piece of fortune for Andrew Jackson 30 years before.
In the first ever attempt on a president’s life, Jackson, who had been president for nearly six years, was shot at twice by a gunman as he left the Capitol building in January 1835. Richard Lawrence, a mentally unstable house painter, approached to within 13 feet of the President and fired. While the percussion cap exploded, it did not set off the gunpowder. As Jackson lunged forward to tackle the gunman, Lawrence fired a second gun at point blank range. This, too, failed to fire properly.
When his guns were later examined, firearms experts found both to be in perfect working order. They put the odds of both guns failing in succession at one in 125,000. Lawrence was later acquitted on the grounds of insanity and confined to an asylum until his death a quarter of a century later.
It was not the first remarkable escape for Jackson. He had carried a musket ball near his heart since a duel fought 23 years before he became president. It was so close that doctors refused to operate. His opponent in the duel, Charles Dickinson, reckoned to be one of America’s foremost marksmen, had aimed directly for Jackson’s heart but had been misled by Jackson’s unusual skinniness and his wearing of an oversized coat. Dickinson had hit exactly where he had thought he wanted, but the coat concealed the true position of Jackson’s frame. It missed by a fraction of an inch. Jackson’s shot, incidentally, killed Dickinson.
Two small, but highly consequential decisions, put paid to William Henry Harrison, who has the distinction of being the shortest-serving president in US history – just 31 days.
A military hero of the Indian wars, born in a log cabin and elected in 1840 on a campaign ticket emphasising his personal strength of character, Harrison was the oldest person before Ronald Reagan to win the office, at 68. He delivered what still remains the longest inauguration speech ever, taking an hour and 40 minutes, did so on a freezing March day in 1841 and, to continue the theme of his stamina, decided against wearing a coat, hat or gloves.
He caught a cold that developed into pneumonia. Exactly a month after his inauguration, he was dead.
The second American president to be assassinated, James Garfield, died because an innovative metal detector invented by Alexander Graham Bell with which he tried to locate the bullet, failed to work – because no one knew that doctors had laid the President on a coiled spring mattress.
Garfield was shot on 2 July 1881, by a crazed gunman in Washington’s main railway station, barely four months after becoming president. A bullet was lodged somewhere in his body but, despite numerous probes inside the wound, doctors were unable to find it. They feared to operate in case there had been damage to vital organs.
Although in great pain, after a few days Garfield was stable (he did not in fact die until 19 September, 11 weeks and several botched intrusive procedures later). Bell was intrigued by the case of the ‘unlocatable’ bullet. He brought to the White House a prototype device that he had been developing as an offshoot of his telephone and which he claimed was capable of detecting metal through electric currents.
Bell had already tested the machine with Civil War veterans who carried bullets in their bodies and it had successfully found the embedded metal. The President’s doctors enthusiastically let Bell try it out on Garfield. It unexpectedly failed. Unknown to everyone, the President was lying on a newfangled coiled spring mattress, which disrupted the signal.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, who set a record for American presidents by winning four straight elections and serving more than 12 years in office, nearly did not serve a single day. Two weeks before his first inauguration in March 1933, while on holiday in Miami, he narrowly avoided assassination in a gun attack that saw the would-be assassin fire off five shots, all of which hit someone near the President, with one killing the Mayor of Chicago who was standing right beside him.
Guiseppe Zangara, an Italian bricklayer, somehow missed the President completely.
The assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas in November 1963 is replete with conspiracy theories over who might have been responsible. One of the biggest obstacles to probing deeper into the incident is the paucity of photographic evidence. Apart from one moving-film sequence of the killing taken by a bystander, there is hardly any other visual material.
One of the curious, and still unexplained, reasons for this is that the press corps vehicle, which had always been positioned directly in front of the President’s car to help photographers get the best angles, was on this occasion consigned right to the back of the 14-car cavalcade (even though officially it was designated to be in sixth place).
From their position, none of the pressmen covering the trip were able to provide any visual evidence which might have been crucial in the investigation. Bad luck, or bad intent?
Kennedy’s prodigious womanising only emerged publicly in the years after his assassination. His philandering, however, seems very likely to have contributed directly to his death in Dallas.
According to Washington investigative reporter Seymour Hersh’s 1997 exposé, The Dark Side of Camelot, Kennedy severely tore a groin muscle while frolicking with one of his illicit partners during a vacation in late September 1963. Doctors ordered him to wear a stiff canvas shoulder-to-groin body brace that locked him rigidly upright. This, and the back brace he already regularly wore because of an old football injury which had been exacerbated during war service, made it impossible for him to bend in reaction to the assassin’s first bullet. This hit him in the throat but was not a fatal shot. His head remained upright and did not move. The second, deadly strike, blew his brains out.
The very first assassination of an American president that might have been caught on film, of William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, in September 1901, was missed through unlucky timing. The Edison Company had been filming the President on the day of his visit and was changing reels when word spread that McKinley had been shot. They had missed the actual shooting. All they could do was to film scenes showing the crowd’s reaction to the outrage.
Charles de Gaulle was a frequent target for assassination throughout his presidency of France because of his policy on Algeria, first resisting the independence movement and fighting a civil war there between 1954 and 1962, and then being regarded as a traitor by French Algerians after he agreed to independence. A shadowy organisation of former settlers, the OAS, plotted dozens of attempts to kill him in revenge.
One source suggests there were no fewer than 31 documented attempts on his life. Most were gun attacks and, as de Gaulle always travelled in a bulletproof car, were less dangerous than they looked. One famous attack in August 1962 in a Paris suburb deposited 14 bullets holes in the presidential limousine and shot out two of the four tyres.
He came closer to death when the plotters used explosives. The narrowest escape came by sheer luck. In July 1966, de Gaulle was being driven to Orly Airport. His car passed a parked vehicle on the Boulevard Montparnasse which was packed with a ton of explosives. It did not go off because there was no one to prime the bomb. Those behind the attack, students from an extreme right-wing group pressing for the preservation of French Algeria, had gone off to commit a robbery to get funds to escape abroad, and had been arrested during that crime.
It was the last known attempt to kill de Gaulle.
Leon Trotsky, organiser of the Red Army that helped Lenin to success in the Communist revolution in Russia, was assassinated in Mexico in August 1940, 13 years after being forced into exile after he fell out with Stalin. It was the second attempt on his life that year. The previous May, he had survived an attack by Stalin’s henchmen when his bedroom was sprayed with 73 bullets – he escaped without a scratch.
He was eventually done for by a lone assassin who had befriended him over recent months. He buried an ice pick in Trotsky’s skull. He had been let through the usual security checks because Trotsky’s bodyguards had been busy belatedly bolting the stable door after the earlier attack: they had been installing an up-to-date security system.
A momentary lapse of concentration by Winston Churchill a decade before he was called upon to be prime minister, almost robbed Britain of its wartime leader.
In December 1931, during a lecture tour in New York, Churchill was nearly killed when knocked down by a car as he absent-mindedly stepped off a curb to cross Fifth Avenue, having looked the wrong way to check for traffic.
He had forgotten that Americans drove on the opposite side of the road and was hit by the vehicle, which was travelling at nearly 35mph from the other direction. He suffered serious head and thigh injuries and spent nearly three weeks in bed recuperating. But he fully recovered, to history’s good fortune.
The incident did have its silver lining. He made £600 (about £30,000 in modern values) from an article he wrote about it for the Daily Mail the following January.
While serving as a First World War major on the Western Front in 1915, Churchill miraculously escaped death by just 15 minutes. He was ordered to meet a car sent by his Corps Commander, General Haking, on 26 November, which meant a three-mile walk across muddy countryside to make the rendezvous. He left in good time, and shortly before an artillery barrage opened up targeting his sector. When he reached the appointed spot, he learned that the firing had driven off his pickup. A staff officer told him that the meeting could take place later as it ‘was only about things in general and that another day would do equally well.’
A grumpy Churchill tramped the three miles back to his company headquarters to discover that a quarter of an hour after he had left his dugout, a shell had landed a few feet from where he had been sitting, destroying the shelter and killing the orderly who was inside. He later wrote, ‘When I saw the ruin I was not so angry with the General after all.’
Churchill’s own military valet also had reason to be thankful. Churchill had taken him with him for the meeting ‘to carry my coat.’
Churchill often reflected on this near-death episode and the effect of chance. ‘You may walk to the right or to the left of a particular tree, and it makes the difference whether you rise to command an Army Corps or are sent home crippled or paralysed for life.’
A Battle of Britain veteran revealed in 2000 how he saved Churchill from being shot by his own wife during a pre-war visit to an RAF station at Croydon in 1939. Clementine Churchill was being shown around the cockpit of a fully-armed Gloster Gladiator fighter plane. Winston was bending down in front of one of the guns when, according to James Sanders, Clementine’s host, her finger went unwittingly to press the firing button.
‘I knocked her hand away to stop her,’ he recalled. A year later, Churchill was prime minister.
Had anything happened to Churchill in the early years of the war, it is conceivable that Britain would have been run by a South African. The diaries of one of Churchill’s Private Secretaries, Sir John Colville, regarded as the most intimate inside account of the war premiership, relate how in October 1940, after the invasion scare appeared to be over but before the winter Blitz descended, insiders in Downing Street seriously contemplated the chances of General Jan Christiaan Smuts, the Prime Minister of South Africa, who Churchill trusted for military advice and had invited into the Imperial War Cabinet (just as Lloyd George had done in the First World War).
Smuts’ reputation, with his unparalleled experience of the workings of the war cabinet, stood high in London, and the idea of a Dominion head leading Britain was seen as the much-needed proof of the unity of the worldwide British Commonwealth at a time when Britain stood alone.
The seed of the idea, Colville suggests, was quietly fed into the King’s circle through the Queen, whom Colville’s mother knew, and other royal intimates. Two weeks later, Colville recorded in his diary that Queen Mary had been very taken by the idea and passed it on to George V, who also reacted favourably. As history turned out, the plan was never needed.
Although such an idea may sound far-fetched at this distance in time, the period was one of gigantic and unprecedented change. Barely four months earlier, as France tottered towards an armistice with Germany, the British Cabinet offered France a formal legal and political merger with the United Kingdom to try to stem defeat across the Channel. The French, in disarray, could not organise themselves in time to accept it. In such times, anything could seem a possibility.
Communism may have had its origins in an irritable skin disease. Writing in the British Journal of Dermatology in 2007, medical historian Professor Sam Shuster reported that there was credible evidence that Karl Marx suffered from a skin disease which can create a severe psychological disorder, fostering feelings of exploitation and alienation. He theorised that the affliction could very likely have given a significant push to the direction of thought Marx took which ended up with him inventing the theory that underpinned communism.
The researcher believed him to have been suffering from hidradenitis suppurativa, a repulsively messy disorder of the sweat glands that produces boils and pus-oozing spots. Although it was unclear when he first began to be affected by the disease, the symptoms were in evidence by 1864, when Marx was 46 years old and researching in the British Museum in London for his major work, Das Kapital, that lays out the conceptual theory of communism and which was published in 1867.
So it may have been all the misery, exasperation and feeling of oppression from these bodily ills that could, the medic suggests, have been the main driving force which created the state of mind that dreamt up a system of politics which was to plague hundreds of millions of people’s lives in the century to come.
British novelist Arnold Bennett died of typhoid in 1931 after a trip to Paris. He contracted the disease there from drinking a glass of local tap water. According to the most popular account, he had done so in order to demonstrate that the water in France was perfectly safe.
The last words of Albert Einstein, perhaps the greatest scientific mind of all time, are unknown as he uttered them in German as he passed away in 1955 and the nurse who was with him when he died did not speak the language.
The Titanic disaster might have been prevented had a member of the crew not forgotten to hand over the key to his locker.
Second Officer David Blair was removed from the ship’s roster at the last minute before the Titanic’s departure from Southampton in April 1912. In the haste of being replaced, Blair failed to pass to his replacement the key to the crow’s nest locker which held the binoculars vital for the lookouts.
After the disaster, which cost 1,522 lives, one of the surviving lookouts, Fred Fleet, giving evidence to the US inquiry, confirmed that they did not have any binoculars on the voyage. Had they done so, he testified, they could have seen the iceberg earlier. When the chairman of the inquiry asked, ‘How much earlier?’ the lookout replied, ‘Well, enough to get out of the way.’
The key, which saved the life of Blair, was kept as a memento. His descendants put it up for auction in 2007. It fetched £90,000.
The world’s worst air disaster, the collision of two Boeing 747 jumbo jets at Tenerife’s Los Rodeos airport in the Canary Islands on a Sunday evening in March 1977, was indirectly the result of a minor terrorist act. A small bomb planted by a group campaigning for independence for the Canaries had exploded at midday at the airport on neighbouring Las Palmas causing the airport to be closed. All flights were diverted to the Tenerife.
This resulted in the airport becoming hopelessly overcrowded. Fog descended during the afternoon which hampered operations further. The collision, between an American Pan Am 747 and a Dutch KLM jumbo, happened because of confusion about the aircrafts’ whereabouts in the fog. The Dutch plane, trying to take off, careered into the American 747 that was taxiing and had unknowingly strayed on to the main runway. Five hundred and eighty-three passengers died. There were just 70 survivors – all from the American craft.
Accident investigators of the 1998 crash of a Swissair flight from New York off Canada’s Nova Scotia coast recommended one crucial change to in-flight procedures. They urged that airlines should drastically shorten the checklist that pilots are required to follow to detect the source of cabin fires. They discovered that at the time of the crash, Swissair’s checklist took 30 minutes to go through. The flight had crashed only 20 minutes from the first signs of smoke on board.
Air Canada’s flight 143 from Montreal to Edmonton in July 1983 nearly ended in catastrophe when it ran out of fuel midway through its journey. Pilots glided the Boeing 767 for more than 100 miles before making a successful emergency landing on a disused airstrip near Winnipeg, narrowly missing a motor racing event that was being held there.
Investigators discovered that the ground crew had got their metric and imperial measurements mixed up. Instead of loading the plane with 22,300kg of fuel (or 49,060 imperial pounds), they had only loaded 22,300 pounds.
Air Canada had just taken delivery of its first four 767s. The craft was the first of the fleet to be calibrated in metric units. Up until then, all the airline’s planes were measured in imperial – and the crew carelessly forgot.
The beaching on to rocks on the Cornish coast of the 1,840 ton cargo ship RMS Mülheim in March 2003 was caused, the accident investigators found, by the captain catching his trousers on a control lever, falling over and knocking himself unconscious. He was the only person on the helm at the time. By the time he had recovered consciousness, the vessel was aground on the rocky coastline near Sennen. She lost up to half her cargo, which washed out to sea. The ship was a total wreck, and eventually broke up seven months later.
In the most serious of more than 20 incidents since the Second World War in which American nuclear weapons have either been involved in major accidents or fires which released radioactive material or where missiles have actually been lost, a B-52 bomber carrying two 24-megaton nuclear weapons broke up in mid-air over Goldsboro, North Carolina, in January 1961, four days after the inauguration of President Kennedy. One of the bombs fell into a marshy area and has never been recovered. The other crash-landed and scattered across a wide area. When it was recovered and analysed, scientists found that five out of the six safety devices had failed. Only a single switch had prevented the bomb from detonating. The weapon was 2,000 times more powerful than that dropped on Hiroshima.
The US air force lost two F-16 fighter planes to crashes in the space of 30 months in 1991 – 93 because the pilot had encountered difficulties in controlling the craft while using his ‘piddle-pack’ to urinate during the flight. Each craft cost $18 million.
San Francisco’s Golden Gate bridge was on the point of collapse during its first severe weather test during a storm in December 1951. In the early evening 70mph winds caused the deck of the bridge to sway 24ft from side to side and 5ft up and down. The main cables, which in normal conditions are 32 inches apart, were rubbing together.
Calculations done at the time indicated that had the wind lasted for just another 25 minutes, the structure would probably have given way. The bridge was later strengthened with 250 seven-ton steel braces under the roadway.
It was the first time the bridge had had to close due to weather since its opening in 1937. It has done so only twice since.
Another curious possibility surrounds the bridge’s famous rust red colour. It was chosen because it blended best with the surrounding scenery. If the US Navy had had its way, the bridge would have been painted in bright yellow and black stripes to improve visibility for shipping.
As many as 6,000 people died in a mass poisoning in Iraq in 1971 because vital labels on imported contaminated grain seed warning against human consumption were printed only in English and Spanish.
The cargo of American barley and Mexican wheat had been exported to Iraq for use as seed only. To ensure it was not eaten, it had been sprayed with mercury, and dyed bright pink as a warning. The sacks were labelled in the languages of the exporting countries but not in Arabic. The consignment was quickly stolen after it had been offloaded in Basra, and sold to the poor.
The full scale of the tragedy only emerged two years later after an American investigative journalist pieced together the epidemic of mercury poisoning which had followed. The final death toll, from hospital reports, appeared to be at least 6,000, with more than 100,000 more suffering disabilities ranging from blindness, deafness, brain damage and paralysis. No one was ever prosecuted.
The West African state of Benin had its entire air force destroyed in 1988 by a single errant golf shot.
Metthieu Boya, a ground technician and keen golfer, was practising on the airfield during a lunchtime break when he sliced a drive. The ball struck the windscreen of a jet fighter that was preparing to take off, causing it to career into the country’s other four jets neatly lined up by the runway. All five aircraft were write-offs.
Winchester cathedral had to be saved from destruction in the early 20th century by a deep-sea diver. In 1905, the authorities discovered that the foundations of the medieval cathedral, which was begun in the 11th century, were resting on tree trunks that, in turn, were lying on a waterlogged peat bed.
The operation to strengthen the base before the structure collapsed centred on a solitary diver – William Walker – who was hired to descend into the watery bowels every day for nearly six years to dig out the peat. With 250 helpers above ground, it was replaced with brickwork, 115,000 concrete blocks and 25,000 bags of cement. A statue to the ‘Winchester Diver’ stands in the cathedral commemorating the bizarre feat.
Written by Phil Mason in "Napoleon's Hemorrhoids...And Other Small Events That Changed History", Skyhorse, New York, 2009, excerpts chapter 3. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.