1836 Brazos (Texas), History: A convention of residents, including Tejanos as well as Americanos, declared Texas independent of the distant and corrupt government in Mexico City. We saw an original of the Declaration in the excellent state museum in Austin.
1877 Washington, D.C., Politics: With a minority of the popular vote Rutherford Hayes became President. The results in four states were disputed. Electoral College representatives from two other states were replaced at the last minute. Irregularities were alleged in another four states. A joint sitting of the two houses of Congress appointed a Special Commission of five Democrats, five Republicans, and five of the Justices of the Supreme Court to resolve the impasse. The selection of the members of the Commission itself was disputed. This Commission ruled by an 8-7 vote on party lines that Hayes had won by a single electoral vote from Louisiana. The loser Samuel Tilden maintained a studied calm and accepted the result and disappeared from history. If only Al Gore had followed that example. [Sigh.]
1933 New York City, Entertainment: ‘King Kong’ premiered. With its special effects it was a sensation reversed the love of Beauty and the Beast. Of course, Fay Wray’s scream helped a lot. Could that woman scream, or what! KK, however, did not get a best actor gong. Wallace Beery did. In the picture below Kong is on the Empire State bailing which had not yet had the radio mast installed.
1949 New Milford (Connecticut), Technology: The first automated street light system turned on. Until then the lamp of each light was lit by hand by turning a switch. The New Milford system was operated for the whole town by a single operator in an office. That was soon automated by a mechanical clock. It made street lighting cheaper and simpler to operate and so it spread rapidly but the lamplighter lost the job. Many worried that such street lighting would fade the curtains. Others opposed it for destroying the ancient and honourable profession of the lamplighter. These same people today go to a check-out clerk rather than scan their own goods.
1972 Cape Canaveral, Space: Pioneer 10 was launched into the void to survey Jupiter. It navigated the perils of the Asteroid Belt and meteor showers, going on another 620 million miles to send back the first close images of the gas giant. It continued out of the solar system, transmitting data that was received until 1997. It travelled a total of six billion miles at that time. It bore the brass plate shown below, designed by Carl Sagan, to introduce us to whoever is out there.
Author: Michael W Jackson
1 March
1867 Lincoln, History: Nebraska became the 37th state. Its border were slightly amended in 1882 to follow the Missouri River in the north east.
1873 Ilion (New York), Technology: Eliphalet Remington began production of a typewriter. Remington and his sons had produced firearms for the Union Army during the Civil War, and then sewing machines. In 1872 Remington purchased the patent (79,265 from Christoper Sholes) for a Type-Writer with which a skilled operator could produce text faster and clearer than a person could do in long-hand. It had the QWERTY layout of keys as does my IMAC keyboard purchased a year ago.
1921 Forty-one year old E. M. Forster embarked on a sea voyage to India. He distilled the experiences and observations of that trip into ‘A Passage to India’ (1924). No reader ever forgets Adela’s visit to the Marabar Caves.
1975 Sydney, Technology: Colour television broadcasting began in Australia when James Dibble read 7 pm news on the ABC. I probably saw it but the memory is gone. But I pine for the day when news readers read the news without editorial eyebrows, adverbs, and adjectives to let the viewer know their oracular judgements. I never did know what Dibble thought and we were both happy with that.
1977 The Bank of America began issuing VISA cards. Got mine. It had been issuing credit cards in its own name but wanted something more suited for an international clientele without the need for an account at the Bank of America.
29 February
0704 Rome, History: Per the Gregorian calendar This was the first leap day in a leap year.
1848 Neuchâtel, History: The principality of Neuchâtel declared its independence from Prussia. By matrimony, treaty, and conquest Prussia once extend from Königsberg in what is now Russia to Neuchâtel in Switzerland in a loose confederation. On a map it looked like an archipelago. Went to Neuchâtel once in pursuit of an autograph manuscript from the hand of Jean-Jacques Rousseau which I was permitted to hold in my hand.
1868 London, Politics: Benjamin Disraeli formed his first government. Is he the only British Prime Minister to write novels? Never read any myself.
1904 Washington, D.C., Politics: President Theodore Roosevelt appointed a commission to oversee the construction of a canal at the Isthmus of Panama. Completed ten years later, it cut shipping time between the East and West coasts by two-thirds, and offered a much less hazardous route than around the Cape Horn off Tierra del Fuego and the Roaring Forties.
1940 Hollywood, Entertainment: Kansas-born Hattie McDaniel won the Academy Award for best supporting actress for ‘Gone with the Wind,’ the first black to earn such an award. She edged out Olivia de Havilland, who did not take it well.
28 February
202 BC Peking, History: The four hundred years of the Han Dynasty in China began with the coronation of Liu Bang as Emperor Gaozu. During this long period of stability, China prospered.
1790 Sydney, History: Governor Phillip signed John Irving’s Warrant of Emancipation, making him the first convict to be freed. He went to Norfolk Island to work as a surgeon’s assistant. Later when he returned to Port Jackson he was awarded thirty acres of land at Parramatta.
1840 Ripon (Wisconsin), Politics: In the Little White School House the Free Soil Party was born and it later morphed into the Republican party in 1852. Three of the five signatories to the minutes of the first Free Soil meeting had been members of an Associationist Fourier community inspired by French utopian socialist Charles Fourier which had flourished in what is now Fond du Lac county at Ceresco just east of Ripon. This origin is discussed on other posts on this blog. Get clickin’ for enlightenment. By the way, the term ‘Free Soil’ referred to those who worked it, free, not slaves.
1933 Washington, D.C., Politics: President Franklin Roosevelt appointed the first woman to a cabinet position, Francis Perkins, who became and remained Secretary of Labor until 1945, playing a pivotal role in Roosevelt’s make-work programs during the Depression, and an even larger role during the war. She is one of two only cabinet members to serve throughout Roosevelt’s presidency.
1953 Cambridge, Science: James Watson and Francis Crock published the double-helix structure of DNA.
‘The Singing Masons’ (1950) by Francis Vivian and ‘Beekeeper ‘(1999) by J. Robert Janes
‘The Singing Masons’ (1950) by Francis Vivian
GoodReads meta-dat is 226 pages, rated 4.25 by 4 litizens
‘Beekeeper ‘(1999) by J. Robert Janes
GoodReads meta-data is 305 pages, rated 3.96 by 28 litizens
Verdict: Beeology galore.
In ‘The Singing Masons’ the local playboy is found at the bottom of a well. Scotland Yard dispatches Inspector Knollis to the small town of Cleverly to get to the bottom of things. (Groan.) He does.
Nobody has a good word to say about the deceased, not his fiancee, not colleagues at work, not his many conquests, not his landlord, not his cousin, not anyone. Moreover, as investigation continues it seems Playboy was up to some shenanigans of his own, burning down the property of a romantic rival, and planning to murder his fiancee as soon as they were married so he could inherit and move on. Like a good stereotype, there was no end to his perfidy.
The manners and mores are rural England of the 1950s. I expected my crush Flavia to show up at any moment on her bicycle Gladys and sort things out with her chemicals. No such luck.
This is a puzzle krimi in the manner of the Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie. All the information is there for the reader to detect the villain and in due course, after repeated, and I mean repeated, interrogations the plod do detect the villain, who was obvious from page one to hardened krimiologists.
I chose to start with this, the sixth, volume in the Knollis series because I have been reading about bees in several books discussed elsewhere on this blog. There is much lore about bees, and in the end the bees are well integrated into the story throughout and decisive in the plot.
While in the literary apiary I also re-read Janes’s ‘Beekeeper.’ This is the eleventh in his series. He sustains the an atmosphere like few others. It is winter in Occupied Paris, January 1943. There is no fuel for heating. No energy for lighting. Little food. The Occupier is everywhere.
A beekeeper is found poisoned and St Cyr and Kohler, that odd couple, are assigned the case. It is dark and tangled world of black market, rapacious Naziis, rivalries among rapacious Naziis, bitter priests who have been displaced by the Occupier, the shadowy resistance, and the sheer struggle to survive.
The fact at the bottom of the mystery is that one of the evils of Naziism was the wholesale destruction of beekeeping in Russia. In rear areas, apiaries were systematically looted with the hives piled on railway cars and send to Paris, where there was a thriving market for beeswax candles (since no electricity was available any longer, and moreover churches had to have beeswaax candles). Thousands and thousands of hives, and in them came a bee virus that began to infect French bees.
The beekeeper had found this out and was about to tell all. Is that why he was poisoned? Or was it because his wife hated him for rejecting her son by another marriage? Or was it the animus of childhood friends whom he had blackmailed for years? Or the local priest who might suppose the flock would be more stable without this volatile man around? Or did the alienated step-son do it? Or was it a supremo of the black market? Or the German importing the hives? Or…. Or was the poison intended for someone else entirely?
I admit at the end I was not quite sure what the answer was, but the trip, as always in these stories was engrossing..
27 February
1827 New Orleans, Popular Culture: On this Tuesday a group of costumed and masked youths danced through the streets of the Vieux Carré accompanied by musicians. Mardi Gras remained amateurish until 1833 when a wealthy planter funded an official celebration in the city. From these seeds Tuesday grew fat.
1860 New York City, Technology: Mathew Brady photographed presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln campaigning. Brady said ‘I felt an obligation to preserve the faces of the country’s historic men and women.’
1907 Vienna, Science: Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud met for the first time at a coffee house where they ate sachertorte. Other dates are given for their first meeting, first discussion, first handshake….but the cake remains the same.
1932 Cambridge, Science: James Chadwick discovered the neutron for which he got a Nobel Prize. Later he headed the British atomic bomb project.
1990 Devonport (NZ), History: The final day of the rum ration for sailors of the Royal New Zealand Navy. Believe it or not, Ripley. The Royal Navy had ended the practice twenty years earlier in 1970.
26 February
1606 Arnhem Land, History: Seaman Willem Jansz of the Dutch East India Company landed near Weipa in the far north of Queensland to take on water. He is the first recorded European visitor to the mainland of Australia, though he thought it was continuous with New Guinea, as it once was.
1616 Rome, Religion: Pope ordered Galileo Galilei to deny helio-centrism, or else.
1919 Washington, D.C., Politics: Congress legislated to establish the Grand Canyon National Park. The original bill had been introduced in 1882. Using the executive powers of the Presidency in 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt had made the Grand Canyon a game reserve. He did the same in 1908 when he had made it a National Monument under the protection of the Federal Government. But legislation to make it a Park was repeatedly defeated in 1883, 1886, 1905, 1907, 1910, and 1911. Even today there are rumours of minerals and oil in them there canyons.
1949 Fort Worth, Technology: A B-50 Superfortress took off in the first continuous round-the-world flight with a crew of fourteen. In 94 hours it travelled 23,452 miles. It was re-fueled four times in the air by B-29 tankers in carefully planned rendezvouses, and returned to Fort Worth on 2 March. The flight tested equipment, crew endurance, planning, flight fuelling, and weather conditions. This was a Cold War exercise. It is pictured below landing back in Fort Worth.
1984 New Haven, Literature: Robert Penn Warren became the first United States poet laureate. He had moved to New England in a self-imposed exile from the South where his support for racial integration had made him a pariah. I heard him read his poetry twenty years earlier, and felt privileged for it.
25 February
1862 Philadelphia, Economy: The first United States paper money was issued. Because of its green colour it quickly became known as the greenback. Heretofore banknotes had been just that notes issued by particular banks. The Government had minted coins (hard money) and issued warrants that could be converted into gold at banks.
1904 Dublin, Literature: J. M. Synge’s ‘Riders to the Sea’ premiered. It is a one-act tragedy famed for its poetic language in which the waters give and take the lives of the fisherman and their folk.
1956 Moscow, Politics: In a secret speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, party chairman Nikita Khrushchev denounced Joseph Stalin’s reign of terror.
1964 Miami Beach, Sports: At a 3-1 underdog defeated reigning heavyweight boxing champion Sonny Liston and did so easily. That was Cassius Clay.
1965 Ottawa, Politics: The André Laurendeau and Davidson Dunton’s Royal Commission Report committed Canada to Bilingualism and Biculturalism. It morphed into Bilingualism and Multi-culturalism in short order. It was the first time the Federal government undertook to preserve French.
February 24
1510 Rome, Politics: Pope Julius II excommunicated the whole of the Republic of Venice. At the time Julius was allied to the French, trying to drive the Venetians out of the northern Italian region. He had changed sides several times to keep his enemies at bay. The Venetian Senate did not bother to inform the populace and in time with another changing alliance the excommunication was lifted.
1582 Rome, Technology: Pope Gregory XIII asserted the new calendar that still bears his name. It was devised by Luigi Lillo who reformed the Julian calendar. To make the change, later in the year the calendar moved from 4 October to 15 October to re-set the year, omitting Eisenhower’s birthday. The 29th of February as a corrective. This calendar remains in use.
1821 Igula (Mexico), Politics: Two leaders of a popular revolt Agustín de Iturbide and Vicente Guerro agreed that once the Spanish were driven out the independent country would be a monarchy, Roman Catholic, and based on equal rights. It set the foundation for the Mexico to come.
1977 President Jimmie Carter declared that US foreign aid will be allocated in part on guarantee of human rights. The gesture put human rights on the international agenda as never before. The White House, for a time, was off the Christmas card list of dictators here and there. Consistent with his beliefs, Carter extended a visa to the Shah with regrettable results. Consistency is no virtue in changing times. See the entry above about Venice.
1984 Sydney, Medicine: Dr Victor Chang performed first successful heart transplant in Australia. He was later murdered by three bunglers all of whom have served their time and are now free men, but Dr Chang is still dead, his children still without a father, and his widow a widow. She went to great pains to keep his name alive by raising money for medical care and research.
Ellen Wilkinson, ‘The Division Bell Mystery’ (1932)
GoodReads metadata is 256 pages, rated 3.57 by 132 litizens
Genre: Krimi, sub-species Locked Room murder.
Verdict: More, please.
In the hallowed halls of Westminster a financier sits down to dine tête-à-tête with his old friend, the Home Secretary in a private room. The subject of conversation will be money, a lot of it for the Exchequer is at low tide. But before the Home Secretary can pop the question of a gigantic loan, the division bell rings and off he goes to the floor of the House of Commons to cast his vote, leaving Money Bags alone in a closed room with an attendant outside. Yes, I know, not literally a locked room but near enough.
When the Home Secretary, famed both for this stupidity and honesty, the former, say the wits, explains the latter, returns to dinner he finds Money Bags shot dead!
While Scotland Yard puts in an appearance, a young parliamentary secretary is drafted to investigate the nooks and crannies of Westminster where no plod is likely to make headway. The Tory government is already rocky and this murder could send it to the bottom in no time, unless there is a quick resolution that clears the air. More generally the murder of a major financier does not enhance the reputation of England as a safe investment to other financiers!
As a guide to the topography of parliament of the time, this is Baedeker in all but name. It comments on the accommodation, the food, the time to get from one place to another, the friendliness of locals, the standard of service. and so on.
The author was a Labor MP and she has an eye for details, and the wit for satire, all of which is well judged. Just enough to taste but not too much to jade.
It is far superior to J V Turner’s ‘Below the Clock’ set in the same time and place, discussed elsewhere on this blog. This leaden title is rated higher at 3.64, such is the idiocy of the species.