by Dixe Wills
What is perhaps even more remarkable is that it seems almost certain that one man did indeed have the opportunity to kill Hitler before World War II began and yet did not take it. Of course, since the occasion arose during World War I and the German infantryman lined up in the man’s rifle sights was to him just another anonymous Gefreiter (the German equivalent of a lance corporal), it is difficult to be too harsh on him. The action took place on 28 September 1918, as the Germans were retreating, having lost the battle for the French village of Marcoing. The 29-year-old Hitler unwittingly stumbled into the British soldier’s line of fire. On the point of pulling the trigger, the serviceman realised that the enemy NCO in front of him was wounded and was not making any attempt to fire upon him. Unwilling to kill the man in cold blood, the British soldier lowered his weapon. The future author of Mein Kampf nodded his head at him in recognition of his act of clemency and slipped away.
We only know about this story at all because Hitler himself related it to Neville Chamberlain when the two men met in Germany in 1938 during the prime minister’s fruitless trip in search of peace. The year before, the Führer had come across a well-known painting by the Italian artist Fortunino Matania showing Private Henry Tandey – famed as the most decorated British soldier of the Great War – carrying a wounded man over his shoulder at the Menin Crossroads in 1914. As soon as he saw it, Hitler believed he recognised Tandey as the man who had spared his life nearly two decades beforehand. He even went as far as requesting a large photograph of the painting from Colonel Earle of the Green Howards, the regiment with which Tandey served. We know that his wish was granted because Captain Weidmann, Hitler’s adjutant, wrote a letter of thanks to Earle:
I beg to acknowledge your friendly gift which has been sent to Berlin through the good offices of Dr Schwend. The Führer is naturally very interested in things connected with his own war experiences, and he was obviously moved when I showed him the picture and explained the thought which you had in causing it to be sent to him. He has directed me to send you his best thanks for your friendly gift which is so rich in memories.
Chamberlain is said to have noticed the photograph of the painting during his visit. Rather taken aback that the German chancellor should be displaying it, he asked him about it. Hitler apparently confided to him: ‘That man [Tandey] came so near to killing me that I thought I should never see Germany again. Providence saved me from such devilishly accurate fire as those English boys were aiming at us.’
The German chancellor asked his counterpart to get in touch with Tandey and thank him on his behalf. On returning to Britain, replete with his scrap of paper promising ‘peace in our time’, the story goes that the prime minister rang Tandey’s home to pass on Hitler’s gratitude. If this did happen (and it’s rather questionable that it did – evidence suggests that Tandey is more likely to have had the news passed on to him at a reunion of the Green Howards) – it must have come as something of a shock. Reflecting on the episode at Marcoing, Tandey recounted, ‘I took aim but couldn’t shoot a wounded man so I let him go.’ This was typical of the man – he performed this gallant act several times during the war.
It’s an astonishing story – how the most decorated British soldier of World War I came within a split second of ending the life of the man who would be instrumental in bringing about its even deadlier sequel. A further bizarre twist is that in one corner of the Matania painting, there are three wounded German prisoners, one of whom does rather resemble Adolf Hitler.
When World War II broke out the year after Chamberlain’s visit to Germany, Tandey was filled with regret that he had not killed Hitler when he had had the chance. The incident also rather unfairly tainted his reputation in Britain – he became ‘the man who could have shot Hitler’. At the grand old age of 49 he attempted to return to his regiment, the Green Howards. However, he failed his medical on account of the injuries he had received during the war in which he had made his name. Having witnessed the bombing of Coventry and London’s Blitz at first hand, he told a reporter at the Sunday Graphic newspaper, ‘When I saw all the people, women and children he had killed and wounded I was sorry to God I let him go.’
There’s just one rather big problem with this story. Although Hitler remembered having his life spared at Marcoing and Tandey remembered sparing a German soldier’s life at Marcoing, it is highly unlikely that the two men were recalling the same incident. Tandey’s biographer, David Johnson, has pointed out that in 1997, Lt Col Mackintosh of the Green Howards contacted the Bavarian State archives with regard to Hitler’s war record in September 1917. They responded that he had been on leave from 25–27 September and that rather than arriving in Marcoing the following morning for his date with destiny, he had already been posted, as Johnson remarks, to ‘another part of the line… 50 miles away’ on 17 September. So, unless some further evidence emerges that suddenly puts Adolf Hitler in Marcoing on 28 September 1918 after all, the chances are that we’ll never know just who it was that came within a hair’s breadth of shooting the future demagogue but stayed his trigger finger.
This new information came way too late for Henry Tandey, who died in 1977 at the age of 86. He had spent nearly 40 years of his life regretting that he had not shot Hitler when, in fact, the individual he chose not to kill that day in Marcoing was doubtless just an ordinary soldier doing his best to survive the war so that he could go home to his family.
Of course, had our unknown British soldier pulled his trigger when facing Gefreiter Hitler rather than showing mercy, there’s still no way of saying with any certainty that World War II would have been averted. The Treaty of Versailles would have happened anyway and it was that settlement’s strictures and demands that so infuriated the German people. It’s possible that some other charismatic leader might have taken advantage of the nation’s resentment and swept to power with a message similar to Hitler’s. It hardly bears thinking about, but in this scenario, the result might conceivably have been even worse: a fascist, anti-Semitic, Aryan-obsessed leader with a more astute military mind than Hitler’s might have become German chancellor and started a world war that he had gone on to win.
A farmer shoots a potato-eating pig
In an attempt to meet the insatiable demands of Britain’s pork-devouring carnivores, around ten million pigs are slaughtered each year in the UK alone – many of them returning to consciousness after they are stunned only to be knifed and cast into boiling water while still alive. Further millions destined for British plates meet their fate in Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and other European countries. This might lead one to the conclusion that, as lives go, those of pigs are of little significance to the British (vegans, vegetarians, pescatarians, Jews, Muslims, Jains, Seventh Day Adventists, some Buddhists and Hindus, and sundry others notwithstanding). Given this, it makes it all the more remarkable that it was the fatal shooting of a single pig back in 1859 that all but caused a war between Britain and the United States, and pushed Canada further along the road to independence.
The dispute had its roots in an ambiguously worded agreement signed by Britain and the US in 1846. The Oregon Treaty was supposed to have set a definitive boundary between the United States and what was then known as British North America (today’s Canada). There had been particular friction over the path of the frontier at its western end. The treaty made it plain that the 49th parallel should be used to delineate the two territories.
That was all well and good on the mainland, but when it came to divvying up the islands off the west coast, it all became a bit more tenuous. Britain was to have the enormous Vancouver Island in its entirety, since very little of it actually extended south of the 49th parallel. However, the issue of who had sovereignty over a clutch of much smaller islands in the gulf waters between Vancouver and Vancouver Island proved harder to resolve, since legitimate arguments could be made by both sides as to their ownership. The situation was further complicated by the lack of an accurate map of the islands and the passages between t
hem.
To get around this, the architects of the Oregon Treaty had fudged the issue, stating that the border should run through ‘the middle of the channel separating the continent from Vancouver’s Island’. Unfortunately, there are two channels to which this wording might be said to refer. If the border ran through the Rosario Strait – as the British maintained – then the island group that included San Juan, Orcas and Lopez belonged to Britain. However, if the wording was interpreted as indicating the Haro Strait, then those islands would become US territory. A commission was set up to settle the issue. Britain offered a compromise, in which she took San Juan and offered the remaining islands to the Americans. This was rejected. The commission was suspended.
As a result, an uneasy stand-off took place on San Juan, an island that measures just 55 square miles. By the time of the porcine-related incident, Britain was well represented on the island by a good many settlers as well as the Hudson’s Bay Company, which had substantial salmon-curing and sheep-farming interests there. The Americans, by contrast, had no more than thirty of their citizens established on San Juan. Somewhat surprisingly, relations between the two sets of incomers were reported to be highly cordial.
That all came to an abrupt end on 15 June 1859. An Irishman called Charles Griffin, who worked on the island for the Hudson’s Bay Company, kept some free-range black pigs. One of these, a hefty individual by all accounts, trotted happily onto the land of an American farmer called Lyman Cutlar and began digging up and eating his potatoes. Cutlar took exception to this. It was not the first occasion on which pigs had pillaged his crops and he had had enough of it. He raised his gun and shot the pig dead.
Naturally enough, Griffin was not at all happy about this turn of events and sought Cutlar out. An altercation ensued, the details of which are less than certain (the gist of Griffin’s argument was apparently that Cutlar should have done more to keep the potatoes out of his pig). We do know that Cutlar offered Griffin $10 in compensation. It was at this point that things began to escalate almost out of control and certainly out of proportion to the injury suffered (unless, of course, you were the pig). The Irishman turned down Cutlar’s offer, demanding $100 instead. Cutlar refused to pay what he felt was a wildly exaggerated sum, at which point Griffin reported him to the relevant authorities (those being the relevant British authorities). Cutlar suddenly found himself in danger of being arrested. His fellow countrymen rallied round and sent a petition to the commander of the Department of Oregon, Brigadier-General William S. Harney, calling upon him to protect them militarily.
Harney was no fan of the British, to say the least, and relished the opportunity to confront them. On 27 July, a company of 66 soldiers of the US 9th Infantry were sent to San Juan with orders to repulse any retaliatory landing by British forces. James Douglas, who was at the time the governor of both the Colony of Vancouver Island and the Colony of British Colombia, was told of the incursion and his response was to dispatch three warships to the island. It was the beginning of a build-up of forces on both sides. The British far outnumbered their opponents though the Americans had the advantage of actually occupying San Juan. By 10 August, the British had five warships bristling with 70 guns and carrying 2,140 troops facing the Americans’ 14 cannon and 461 soldiers. Both sides were simply waiting for the other to fire the first shot.
When the commander-in-chief of the British navy in the Pacific, Rear-Admiral Robert L. Baynes, arrived on the scene, Douglas ordered him to send marines onto the island to drive the American troops off it. It was at this late juncture that common sense prevailed, as well as a long-overdue sense of perspective.
Baynes refused point-blank to carry out Douglas’ command, declaring that he would not ‘involve two great nations in a war over a squabble about a pig’.
It was only at this point that the governments of the two nations became aware of what was going on in their name. President James Buchanan and Prime Minister Lord Stanley, both of whom were keen to prevent military conflict, demanded that negotiations be set in motion. While these were established it was agreed that the British would station around 100 soldiers on the north coast of San Juan while the Americans had the same number in the far south. By all accounts, relations between the members of the opposing camps on the island returned to the genial state that had prevailed before Lyman Cutlar had lost his temper with the pig.
Like the mills of God, the mills of diplomacy grind slowly, and the dispute would not be resolved for another 13 years. The US and Britain signed the Treaty of Washington in 1871, one element of which was an agreement to settle the dispute by appointing international arbitrators. Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany (grandfather of Wilhelm II of World War I fame) was duly chosen to lead the commission. A year later, the three-man adjudication team he declared that the Haro Strait should be the designated frontier between British North America and the United States, meaning that San Juan fell entirely within US territory. Britain withdrew her troops on 25 November 1872. By that time, both the Colony of Vancouver Island and the Colony of British Colombia had joined the brand-new Dominion of Canada.
While the loss of an obscure island off the coast of one of their many colonies might have been a pill that caused the British a moment’s bitterness in swallowing, it was very hard indeed for their dominion’s politicians and populace to take. Although the dispute had the virtue of settling once and for all the frontier between the United States and Canada, the fiasco left the Canadians – already upset by some of the contents of the Oregon Treaty – feeling that their masters in London had not looked after their interests. The Pig War was thus another stepping stone towards Canadian independence from Britain, a journey that would eventually be completed in 1982.
Food
If it’s true that we are what we eat, there are few things more important than the choices of food available to us. While many of today’s dishes and foodstuffs have developed through a steady process of evolution, some of the mainstays of the British diet have come into being quite by accident. The way food is produced and marketed has even had an impact outside the kitchen, exploding into the world beyond and leaving its spattered mark on entities as diverse as the Industrial Revolution and the nation’s legal system.
A physicist demonstrates his invention for softening bones
Back in the 1670s, all Denis Papin wanted to do was find a way of thickening sauces and drawing marrowfat from bones. It did not seem like much to ask and so he set about his task with all the vigour and assurance of a physicist who had a medical degree and who was collaborating in London with the great Robert Boyle, of Boyle’s Law fame. The contraption Papin came up with in 1679, he called the ‘New Digester or Engine for Softening Bones’. Its novelty was that it cooked its contents under pressure.
Full of excitement, the Frenchman took himself off to the Royal Society to show his prototype to the great men of learning (and naturally it was all men – the society’s first women would not be elected until 1945). His demonstration was a success. The machine cooked animal bones under pressure until they were reduced to three components: marrowfat, a residue that could be added to sauces to thicken them, and bone made so frangible that it could be ground into meal with ease.
Papin is a classic example of an inventor striving for one thing, only to find that the wider application of their creation completely overshadows their original, much humbler intention. Once he had added a valve that released steam and thus negated the possibility of his machine exploding, Papin had not only effectively invented the pressure cooker, he had also produced the inspiration for a much more important innovation. Just 18 years later, in 1697, the English engineer Thomas Savery would use the piston design from Papin’s New Digester as the basis for the world’s first steam engine. Savery’s creation would in turn be adapted by Thomas Newcomen in 1712 as a means of pumping water from a mine. Scotsman James Watt would improve on it in his workshop in the grounds of Kinneil House in the 1760s, and in the following decade the Industrial Revolution w
ould be furnished with one of its most potent drivers.
Papin is also a classic example of an inventor who received neither due credit for his invention nor the financial reward his efforts merited. Developing his work on the pressure cooker, he produced plans for an atmospheric steam engine a full 22 years before Newcomen constructed his own version. In 1704 he built the world’s first steam-powered vehicle – a paddle steamer – and had the first-ever steam cylinder cast. Seven years later a paper he sent to the Royal Society set out his ideas on what he called Hessian Bellows. This is now recognised as the foundation for the invention of the blast furnace. None of these achievements succeeded in making Papin’s name.
To make matters considerably worse, as a Huguenot, he was persecuted in his native France. In 1685, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes – which had previously granted religious freedom – and Papin went into exile, alternating between England and Germany. He was last heard of in 1712.
The Royal Society retains a letter he wrote to them in January that year. A couple of weeks previously, the organisation had voted to give him £10 for the many services he had rendered them over the years. The letter makes it clear that Papin was still waiting to receive this money. The 64-year-old physicist had no relatives in London to support him and was living in penury. Nothing is known of his fate after he wrote the letter. He was buried on 26 August 1713, in the churchyard at St Bride’s in Fleet Street, London.
At least Papin got the last laugh, albeit posthumously: while steam engines have largely been relegated to the realm of heritage railways and industrial museums, his pressure cooker is still used by cooks all over the world.
