by Phil Mason
Philadelphia was so confident of its success – it had identified a huge area of condemned land near the University of Pennsylvania – that the City Council had set up planning hearings for a week before the UN was due to decide the issue in December 1946. The two other potential cities, San Francisco and Boston, had dropped by the wayside.
Rockefeller was well aware that a real estate planner, William Zeckendorf, had big ideas for the East River area. ‘X-City’ was to be a vast modern development, a ‘city within a city’, of four 40-storey office blocks at one end, three 30-storey apartment towers housing 7,500 families at the other, and, in the middle, two 57-storey curved slabs containing a hotel, convention centre, opera and concert halls. There would also be a heliport and yacht marina on the river front.
It was a blatant attempt to rival and surpass Rockefeller’s own Rockefeller Center across town. Aware that his own building was only 60 per cent occupied, X-City represented an acute threat to the Rockefeller organisation’s future. So Rockefeller did what tycoons can do. He made Zeckendorf an offer he could not refuse to buy him out and gifted the site to the UN. It was announced the day the UN’s deadline was up. The UN breathed a sigh of relief. Whether it was as big as Rockefeller’s, no one will ever know.
Rockefeller even used Zeckendorf’s plans to suggest the layout of the UN, pencilling in ‘General Assembly’ over the planned opera hall and ‘Security’, ‘Economic & Social’, and ‘Trusteeship’ over the other auditoriums for the councils that would form part of the UN system.
A letter that surfaced in 2000, written by the second-incommand of Captain Scott’s ill-fated Antarctic expedition in 1912, added an intriguing twist to the reasons for Scott’s disastrous end.
Lt Edward Evans, who led a support group for part of the outward leg to the Pole before turning back, deplored Scott’s decision to insist on dragging 150lb of scientific finds and geological records even when the party was short of provisions and clearly in life-threatening trouble. ‘We dumped ours at the first check. I must say I considered the safety of my party before the value of the records…Apparently, Scott did not.…he ought to have left it, pushed on and recovered the specimens and records [later].’
During Scott’s return, one man fell to his death and Captain Oates famously walked out in a blizzard to die. Scott and the remaining two perished in their tent. After an 800-mile trek dragging their heavy sleds, they were only 11 miles from the safety of a large food store.
Adolf Hitler’s father was born Alois Schicklgruber. Alois was the illegitimate offspring of Maria Schicklgruber, an unmarried peasant woman from the village of Strones in the Waldviertal, a backward part of northern Austria, and an unknown father. Alois went under his mother’s surname for the first five years of his life and lived in the single-parent household until, for reasons that remain unknown, one Johann Georg Heidler married Maria.
No one knows who Alois’s true father was. The fact that Alois continued to keep the name Schicklgruber for the next 35 years strongly suggests that it wasn’t Johann. He was still a Schicklgruber when Johann died 15 years after becoming his stepfather.
He might have remained a Schicklgruber all his life – and hence given birth to Adolf Schicklgruber, not Adolf Hitler – had the self-interest of Alois and a step-uncle not combined.
By the time Alois was 40, and working his way into a respectable civil service career, he had an interest in legitimising himself. Johann’s brother also faced a problem – the extinction of the Heidler family name because he had three daughters and no sons. He wrote a will promising Alois money if he agreed to officially change his name.
Alois did so and, changing the spelling, became Alois Hitler.
What is the historical significance of this small change? Can anyone imagine that someone tagged Adolf Schicklgruber would have been able to carve as successful a political career as Adolf Hitler did? Heil Schicklgruber?
Edmund Hillary and the Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay, were not the intended conquerors of Mount Everest in 1953. They were the back-up pair. Before their successful climb, expedition leader Colonel John Hunt sent up his first team, comprising Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans, Hunt’s deputy.
Bourdillon was a fitting choice as he had been mainly responsible for the design of the breathing equipment that had enabled them to survive this far. But misfortune was to strike an ironic blow. Less than 300 feet from the summit, his partner, Evans, encountered a problem with his breathing gear. The pair realised they would not make it to the top and returned down to the camp.
Three days later, on 29 May, it was the number two pair who were standing on the summit, and whose names would for ever be remembered by history. Who now has even heard of Bourdillon or Evans?
An oversight in preparation meant that there is no photograph of Hillary on the summit of Everest. The single famous shot is of Tenzing. Asked to explain the historic omission, Hillary said, ‘As far as I knew, Tenzing had never taken a photograph before and the summit of Everest was hardly the place to show him how.’
The strangely named Alaskan city of Nome is said to derive its name from a mapmaker’s mistake. According to the city’s legend, around the 1850s a navigator sailing up the Bering Sea mapping the area miscopied an older map which had annotated the as yet unnamed place as ‘? Name.’ The navigator misread this as ‘C. Nome’ for Cape Nome, and the promontory near the present city was thus christened.
The settlement that sprung up there in 1898, as a result of a gold rush, was forced by the US Post Office to adopt the tag of the nearby Cape. The town’s original wish to name itself Anvil City was refused as it was too close to another settlement in the Yukon.
Greenland got its oddly inappropriate name because its attributes were deliberately misrepresented by its promoter to attract unsuspecting settlers.
The first explorer to land there, the Norwegian Eric the Red in 982, found the place, not surprisingly, uninhabited. Although some portions on the coast were actually lushly verdant, at least enough to sustain a population, he chose to mask the general barrenness of the place when he returned home and began agitating for emigration to colonise the huge island.
Seven hundred people ventured out on the first journey there three years later. Only 14 of the 25 ships that started actually made it due to the atrocious sea conditions. Again, perhaps not surprisingly then, once they had got there, few had the stomach to turn around and leave.
Politics – Fates and Fortunes
The British Cabinet system of government – elected ministers led by a prime minister meeting separately from the monarch’s presence – became a regular practice after 1717 when the German-born King George I stopped attending meetings of his ministers. Legend has it that this was due to him not understanding English. This is only partially true: Cabinet meetings had actually been held in French, which he could speak, for the three years after his accession in 1714. But they were not successful and led to many misunderstandings. Another motive for stopping was that it was difficult for George to deny the right of his son, the Prince of Wales, to preside as regent in the king’s absence, and, as he detested his son, he wanted to avoid his involvement. Whichever of these motives was the predominant one, Britain’s invention of Cabinet government originated for these distinctly unorthodox and unplanned reasons.
The glue that holds the British decision-making process together was the invention of the concept of ‘collective responsibility’ for Cabinets – the practice that once a decision has been made in Cabinet, all ministers publicly support it (even if they disagreed in the original arguments). This, too, originated from the idiosyncrasies of a king, this time George III in the mid-18th century.
He had the habit of conducting business with ministers in a private room called the Closet, and to meet with them only one at a time. This caused problems by threatening the cohesiveness of governments as the king would often use the one-on-one meetings to his advantage by swaying individual ministers against any policy he objected to. So min
isters developed the practice of agreeing in advance what they would say and they also agreed to stick to the identical story as they each had their audiences with the king.
The famous home of British prime ministers since 1735, No. 10 Downing Street, only became the official residence because its first occupant suspected it was so badly built it would soon fall down, and he wanted the public purse to bear the expense.
Robert Walpole, our first recognised prime minister, was offered the house in 1732 as a personal gift by the Crown, but the sly old wheeler-dealer suspected he would be taking on a liability. He refused to accept the gift because he knew the foundations of Downing Street were built on shifting silt that came up from the Thames just yards away. The house would be a perpetual cause of expense to him if he owned it himself. So he sneakily professed to George II a degree of humility that forbade him to accept such ostentatious largesse personally, but he gladly accepted it in his official capacity as First Lord of the Treasury, the early title of the prime minister. He took up residence on 22 September and stayed there until his demise seven years later.
The tradition nearly stopped then, with no prime minister residing at No. 10 for over two decades until George Grenville resumed the practice when he took office in 1763. From then on, prime ministers, with one or two exceptions, have been there ever since – and at the public’s expense.
Walpole was probably right in his judgement about the solidity of the buildings in Downing Street. In the early 1960s, a major refurbishment programme effectively had to rebuild No. 10. The contractor was quoted as saying, ‘Sir George Downing was the greatest jerry-builder of his time…worse than the jerry-builders of today.’
The standards and public expectations of politicians have changed markedly down the years, not least due to the growing importance of the media as an essential tool of modern political life. Today, the smallest foible or indiscretion can be a death sentence to a political career, or at the very least an awkward situation to resolve through deft PR management.
Ever-changing social mores throw up some intriguing historical questions. Many of our past political heroes excelled in their own times with extraordinary panache – but would they have done so today, if they had lived under the spotlight politicians now endure? The accident of timing allowed them to be successes. Would any of these have managed to survive in a modern tabloid world?
Robert Walpole, the inaugural British PM, spent three months locked up in the Tower of London on corruption charges in 1712 when Secretary at War. It did not stop him being appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer three years later on his path to the top.
William Pitt, who became prime minister at the age of 24 in 1783 and remained in office for the next 17 years, was addicted to a bottle of port a day (by the end of his short life it was up to three) and was frequently drunk when in the House of Commons. He famously once left his seat during a debate to vomit behind the Speaker’s chair, and returned to make a superb prime ministerial speech.
His father, Pitt the Elder, had been prime minister a generation before (1766-68). He was a manic-depressive, had had a mental breakdown in 1751 while a Cabinet minister (Paymaster General) and had withdrawn from public office for three years. While serving in the highest office, clear signs of mental instability were evident. He spent most of his prime ministership sequestered away in a small room in his house at Hampstead, trying to avoid his ministers and the pressures of governing. During his time, his Chancellor was doing his own thing, unwisely levying the taxes on the North American colonies that would eventually ignite the War of Independence.
Earl Grey, who served from 1830 to 1834 and who introduced the Great Reform Act of 1832 that revolutionised electoral representation, had sat in parliament for 44 years before he reached the top and yet had just 15 months of ministerial experience. On his appointment, he named 20 of his relations to jobs in government.
Lord Melbourne, favourite and fatherly mentor to the young Queen Victoria, and prime minister for six years, mainly in the late 1830s, was a philanderer with the unique record for prime ministers of having been cited in two court actions brought by angry husbands for seducing their wives. He was also a flagellant with an unhealthy sexual interest in whipping, particularly children, and sending pictures cut from erotic French books to his mistress. Melbourne also developed the unfortunate habit of falling asleep at the wrong moments, on one occasion doing so three times during an audience with the Queen.
Lord Palmerston was granted his first seat in parliament in 1807, by the owner of a ‘rotten borough’ (where the landlord controlled the small number of voters) in the Isle of Wight, on the condition that he never set foot in the constituency. The owner did not want him to generate a local following. Palmerston was also a notorious womaniser, described by one contemporary diarist as ‘always enterprising and audacious with women’, even into his late years (he first became prime minister in 1855 at the age of 71 and died in office two days short of his 81st birthday). He was accused of adultery when he was 78, which appeared merely to enhance his popularity. He is supposed to have fathered an illegitimate child when nearly 80. Early in his career, when he applied to join a select London club, it was strongly rumoured that of the seven lady patronesses on whom the final decision rested, at least three were his lovers. He even once tried to seduce a royal lady-in-waiting at Windsor Castle while a guest of the Queen.
Benjamin Disraeli was bankrupted at 21 by his participation in a fraudulent mining company share scandal during a heady stock market boom in the mid-1820s. Working as a lawyer’s clerk, his literary talent was used to puff up a prospectus for a fictitious Mexican mining project. While it is not likely he knew the full extent of the fraud, such questionable judgement could well have put a stop to a career in public office in later times. He ran his first election campaign desperately trying to keep out of public sight because of the creditors pursuing him.
William Gladstone, stalwart of Victorian probity, when both chancellor and prime minister made midnight sojourns around the seedier haunts of London’s Piccadilly and Soho on a high-minded mission to save prostitutes. He would invite them home to meet his wife, give them support money, arrange for them to get food and shelter, and for some of them to have a holiday out of the city by the seaside. He pursued this activity across 30 years, between the late 1840s and the 1880s, starting with his co-founding in 1848 of the Church Penitentiary Association for the Reclamation of Fallen Women. His activities became widely known in Westminster political circles. When one man who followed him in 1853 tried to blackmail him, Gladstone simply marched him to a police station and pressed charges. When the story reached the newspapers, editors to a man protected him. Most historians express bemusement at the practice but tend towards accepting the innocent explanation, but there is no doubt that his solitary walks in the early hours would never have been as easily defended had he lived a century later.
At the time of the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Sir Edward Grey, foreign secretary since 1905, had never even visited Europe, apart from a non-stop journey through the continent to India and a brief state visit to Paris.
Herbert Asquith, prime minister for eight years until halfway through the First World War, became so besotted with his daughter’s best friend, 25-year-old Venetia Stanley, that between 1912 and 1915 he spent many Cabinet meetings writing love letters to her. He was in his early 60s, at the time. In the first three months of 1915, he wrote to her 151 times. There was also concern about his drinking. During the committee stage of the landmark Parliament Bill in 1911, Asquith was slumped in his prime ministerial position on the front bench in the House of Commons, too drunk to speak.
David Lloyd George, who followed Asquith and was perhaps one of Britain’s greatest prime ministers, in war and in peace, and probably the last to have been able to ‘get away with it’, was nicknamed ‘The Goat’ because of his womanising antics. His secretary had become his mistress four years before he became prime minister in 1916, and re
mained so until his wife died in 1941. While prime minister, Lloyd George also survived his questionable practice of selling honours for money, and, in 1912 when Chancellor of the Exchequer, a share scandal in which he appears to have benefited from inside knowledge of government contracts.
Would any of these have survived the modern day inquisition by television’s political pundits or the exposés by the scandal-seeking press?
For over four years after November 1892, Winston Churchill was the heir apparent to the Dukedom of Marlborough following the death of the 8th Duke and the succession of Churchill’s cousin, Charles. It was to be 1897 before Charles and his wife produced a son, and a direct heir. Had Charles died before producing an heir, Churchill would have been bound to take the title and his political career would have been very different to the one he is now remembered for.
In an era long before the acceptability of renouncing titles for political expediency, Churchill would have been banished to the House of Lords amid a period of social transformation that was to see within a generation the unelected House disappear from any governing influence of the country.
Churchill was just 18 in 1892, and still studying for a military cadetship. Any thought of a leading career in British politics would have been over before it had even germinated.
Benjamin Disraeli, one of the most flamboyant and successful 19th-century prime ministers, came within a stroke of a fatal challenge to his integrity early on in his parliamentary life that could have stopped his career dead in its tracks.
Initially a supporter of Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel when he was elected in 1837 at the age of 32, by the next election in 1841 he had established himself as the darling of the party for his wit and precociousness and he confidently expected to be included in Peel’s Cabinet. He was not. Mortified, he wrote a letter appealing for a position, but to no avail.
