Napoleon's Hemorrhoids_And Other Small Events That Changed History

by Phil Mason

  How easily ministers were beguilingly manipulated by civil servants became the motif of every episode.

  Roger Moore got his small screen break in 1962 when Patrick McGoohan turned down the title role in The Saint, supposedly because of the character’s bachelorhood and womanising, which McGoohan did not think fitted his demeanour. Moore’s performance in the seven-year series created a perfect platform for him to be the natural successor to Sean Connery as the big screen Bond.

  The Saint also made Volvo famous in Britain. He was to have promoted an iconic British car, the E-Type Jaguar, but the company refused to lend one for the show.

  Bergerac, one of British television’s longest-running detective dramas, came about only because the BBC’s existing crime investigator series, Shoestring, ended unexpectedly when the lead actor decided against committing to another series. Trevor Eve, who had played the eponymous hero for two seasons, backed out in 1980, leaving a gap in the scheduling for the following autumn.

  In October 1981, John Nettles opened in what was intended as a stopgap show while a longer-term replacement was mapped out. The unlikely and plot-limiting setting of tiny Jersey seemed to hold out little prospect for a prolonged run. In the event, it lasted for 10 years and nearly 90 episodes.

  Black Adder was nearly axed after the first series as it was not felt to have ‘enough laughs to the pound’, according to Michael Grade, responsible for commissioning the show at the BBC. It only got a second series by agreeing to drop the expensive outdoor filming and opt for the cheaper studio-based format. The three series that followed made the show one of the BBC’s most popular outputs of the 1980s.

  Dr Who was originally conceived in 1962 as a family educational programme, using the time travel theme to explain world history and possible futures. Creator Sydney Newman envisaged the Doctor’s companions – his granddaughter and two schoolteachers – as the vehicles for the educational dimension. His instructions to the production team were very clear: ‘No cheap-jack bug-eyed monsters.’

  The arrival of Terry Nation early on as a scriptwriter, and his vision of the Doctor visiting alien worlds, led to the Daleks being introduced when the second story began. The Dalek phenomenon was so popular with audiences that plots took off in an entirely different direction, the one for which the show is better known and which has been the secret of its success over 45 years to the present day.

  Newman’s original vision of historical settings were given airings in the first two series then dropped completely. Newman ceased to influence the show, and in 1967 left the BBC entirely and returned to his native Canada. He later acknowledged that ‘the series became famous, as the world knows, because of the Daleks, the bug-eyed monsters I never wanted.’

  Diana Rigg’s character of Emma Peel, the catsuited partner of debonair John Steed in the 1960s cult series, The Avengers, was so named because she was cast as the show’s ‘M (man)-appeal’.

  Watching the BBC’s 1976 historical drama of the Roman Empire, I Claudius, gave American producer Esther Shapiro the idea for her blockbuster centred on the family rivalries of Denver oil producers, Dynasty. She is said to have remarked, ‘These Roman families aren’t very different from what I see about me.’

  The television phenomenon of 1977, Roots, which traced the generations of an African slave transported to the American South and which has been credited with sparking the modern vogue for family genealogy, made its colossal impression because, unusually for American TV, ABC screened the entire eight-part series over successive nights. They did so only because they had so little confidence that the show would be watched that they wanted the poor ratings to appear in a single week instead of ‘losing’ the ratings war for that slot each week for two months.

  Ironically, it was the night-after-night format that drew viewers in their millions. The last episode was watched by 80 million people – over a third of the population – a record not surpassed until Dallas.

  Vincent van Gogh would have been a priest not a painter had he not tried too hard.

  He had always believed his vocation was to go into the priesthood. For three years, between the ages of 24 and 27, he tried desperately to gain a place in the theology department at Amsterdam University. When he failed the entrance exams there, he studied for a place at a missionary school near Brussels but failed the entrance course there too. He tried a third time to be a pastor, by becoming a missionary in a small Belgian mining village. It lasted eight months before he was sacked because the school thought his approach was ‘overzealous’. Only then did he take up painting. Had any of the three attempts to enter the church succeeded, we would probably never have heard of van Gogh.

  James McNeill Whistler went to West Point Military Academy to be a soldier. He put his failure to secure a military career down to not passing a chemistry exam. He once said, ‘If silicon were a gas, I would have been a general one day.’ Instead, he became one of America’s most famous artists.

  Pablo Picasso nearly did not survive his birth in 1881 through the negligence of the midwife. Thinking him stillborn, she left him on a table. It was only his uncle, luckily a doctor, who literally breathed life into him by giving him a lungful of air.

  The hymn Silent Night was composed on Christmas Eve 1818 in the tiny church of St Nicholas in Oberndorf, near Salzburg in Austria, because the organ had broken. The organist, Franz Gruber, made up the tune, which could be sung to a guitar as that was the only other instrument the small congregation had. The priest, Joseph Mohr, composed the words.

  They never planned to perpetuate it. It was only when the workman arrived later to repair the organ that they gave him a personal rendition. He liked it so much that he memorised the words and tune and sang them wherever he went. It was not written down or published until 1840.

  ‘Unlucky, Sport!’

  The name of one of the world’s most prestigious horse races, the Derby, was literally coined in advance of its first running in 1780 on Epsom Downs by a toss of a coin. The two progenitors of the idea for a race of three-year-olds of both sexes to determine the best horse of each generation, were racing administrator Sir Charles Bunbury and Edward Stanley, the 12th Earl of Derby. They flipped a coin to see after whom the race should be named. Had the coin landed differently, we would have had the Bunbury Stakes instead.

  Ten-pin bowling was invented in the United States as a subterfuge to get round the law banning such sports. The ninepin version of the game was imported into America by a number of European settlers in the 18th century. By the middle of the 19th century, it had become associated – much like snooker and pool in the 20th – with crime, gambling and disreputable behaviour.

  The State of Connecticut banned bowling in 1841, and other states followed their example. So, according to the modern game’s tradition, players simply added a pin to make it 10-pin which allowed them to circumvent the letter of the law.

  For more than 200 years after the birth of cricket, the standard form of delivering the ball was exactly as the term ‘bowling’ suggests – underarm as in the game of bowls. The shift along the road to the modern overarm technique was due to Kent’s John Willes. He picked up the idea from his sister, whom he roped in to help him practise his batting. That session, around 1822, was to change the face of the sport.

  The inspiration came from Christina Willes’s poor dress sense. She wore her full-hooped skirt, found she could not deliver the ball underarm so tossed it round-armed instead. Willes found that the way the ball pitched made it much harder to play.

  Although Willes was no-balled by umpires at first when he used the technique in matches, by 1828 the game’s governing body had allowed round-armed bowling (with the arm allowed to be raised as high as the elbow; and from 1835, as high as the shoulder) and the modern game was born – all because a woman turned up to help in the wrong kind of clothes.

  Don Bradman, the greatest batsman cricket has ever seen, entered his last Test innings in August 1948 needing to score just four runs at The Oval
to end his career with a Test average of exactly 100. The man who had made 117 first-class centuries and scores of over 200 on 37 occasions, was bowled second ball, for a duck. His record stands in perpetuity on 99.94.

  A story circulated that he had been so affected by the reception given to him by the crowd and the England players as he went out to bat that day that his eyesight was dimmed with tears.

  Brian Lara broke cricket’s iconic highest individual first-class scoring record in June 1994, scoring 501 playing for Warwickshire against Durham, a record that had stood for 35 years. It was the highest score in England for 99 years, and came just 49 days after he had broken the record for the highest Test innings.

  It could have been so different – he was actually bowled on 10 by a no-ball from Durham’s Andrew Cummins, and wicket keeper Chris Scott dropped a simple catch when he was on just 18.

  A potential commercial windfall, however, eluded Lara. His sponsors, a clothing company, had already begun developing a 375s brand after his Test score. They were flummoxed over 501s as commercial rivals, Levi Strauss, made 501 jeans. A company spokesman said, ‘If he had made 502, it would have saved us an awful lot of hassle.’

  It might have been a different record Lara was aiming for had the then record holder’s feat not occurred in even stranger circumstances. Hanif Mohammad, playing for Karachi against Bahawalpur in January 1959, having already well surpassed Bradman’s existing world record of 452, had amassed, according to the scoreboard, 496 – with two minutes of the day’s session left. Off the last ball of the day’s penultimate over, he went for a single to keep strike in order to go for the 500 mark in the final over. He was run out.

  He returned to the pavilion to discover that the scoreboard had been wrong. He had in fact been on 499 and had been running for his unique target. Would he have done so had he known his true score…?

  Golfer Roberto de Vicenzo, then reigning British Open champion, missed ending the 1968 US Masters as joint leader because he signed his scorecard without checking it. His playing partner had wrongly scored his penultimate hole a four instead of a three. The extra stroke meant he finished second – by one stroke, and denied the chance of a play-off for the title. According to the rules of golf, having signed the card there was no possibility of rectifying the mistake.

  It also happened to be his 45th birthday.

  The first televised maximum 147 break at snooker was achieved by Steve Davis at Oldham in 1982. It should have been three years earlier. At Slough, also in a televised tournament, John Spencer achieved the feat – except that at the moment he did it, owing to a union ruling, the cameraman for Thames Television was on his statutory lunch break. The exploit went unrecorded.

  Rubbing salt into the wound, Davis’s effort three years later was in a match against…Spencer.

  English tennis player Tony Pickard lost an ill-tempered tie at the 1963 Italian Open against New Zealander, Ian Crookenden. His mood was not improved at a crucial game point. Pickard’s opponent fired his return nine inches over the baseline but the shot was not ruled out as the linesman was not watching – he had turned away, and was leaning across a fence to buy an ice cream. Crookenden won the point and went on to win the match.

  Baron Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics, was inspired in his cause to re-establish the Games from a deep-seated personal drive. But contrary to what you might think, the cause had nothing to do with fostering international harmony and competition in friendship. Far from it. The origin of the Games lay in losing a war 25 years earlier.

  De Coubertin became passionate about the Games because he saw it as a way to instil back into young people the martial skills that had been so lacking when France had suffered a crushing defeat by the rising nation of Germany in 1871. The point of the Games in his view was to reverse the general culture of weakness amongst modern man and provide a means for building a stronger nation better able to fight its enemies.

  It was also men only. He refused to contemplate women athletes: ‘Their role should be, as in the old tournaments, to crown the winners,’ he said shortly, after founding the International Olympic Committee in 1894. There would be no official women participants at the first modern Games in 1896 – although there was a single unofficial competitor in the marathon, but she had to run it solo, separate from the men, and on the day after the men’s event. She was even refused entry into the stadium to finish the ‘race’. No women’s track and field events took place for 32 years, until Amsterdam in 1928. After a public outcry over the exhaustion of competitors in the 800m there, the organisers banned all women’s races longer than half a lap until 1960.

  The hosting of an Olympic Games brings national pride and a permanent place in history. In one case – Montreal in 1976 – it also brought a spectacular financial debt that kept the city on the brink of bankruptcy for 20 years. The legacy from bad management, corruption and labour unrest was a deficit of $US1.2 billion (about $5 billion in current values). The city imposed a Special Olympic Tax on residents for two decades to help pay off the debt, and the Quebec provincial government introduced a tobacco tax to help. The stadium was finally fully paid for on 30 June 2006 – 30 years after the Games.

  Ironically, Montreal could have been spared the grief had an audacious plan by American President Richard Nixon to win the Games for the United States succeeded. In the 1970 bidding war to select the venue, Los Angeles and Moscow were the other cities competing. Nixon was desperate to hold the Games, which would coincide with the America Bicentennial, and to thwart the Soviets at the height of the Cold War. It emerged from declassified papers in 2000 that Nixon wanted to offer a piece of Moon rock as a sweetener to each of the 72 members of the International Olympic Committee who would make the selection. The US State Department objected as they decreed that the precious rock should only be given to heads of state as symbols of gifts to all the people of a particular nation and not an individual.

  So Montreal won easily…to their eventual financial grief.

  The unusual length of the Olympic Marathon – 26 miles, 385 yards originates from the London Games of 1908 and a children’s birthday party.

  The standard distance for the race had been a straight 26 miles. The London race was to start at Windsor Castle. A daughter of Princess Mary was having a birthday party, so the race was organised to start directly under the windows of the nursery. When officials measured, they discovered that the race would now end on the side of the White City stadium furthest from the royal party there. So they extended the race by the requisite yardage to bring the finishing line directly in front of the VIP box. Every marathon has been that precise length ever since.

  French discus thrower, Jules Noël, lost the Los Angeles Olympic gold medal in 1932 because all the umpires were watching another event when he made his winning throw.

  On his fourth attempt out of six, Noël’s throw appeared to spectators to land beyond the mark of American John Anderson, whose throw would eventually prove to be the winning length. Unluckily for Noël, at that moment all the officials had turned their attention to a tense pole vault competition nearby. Every one missed where Noël’s discus had landed.

  Noël was awarded an extra throw in compensation, but none of his remaining attempts got anywhere near Anderson again. Even more galling, Noël did not even manage a medal place, finishing fourth – by a mere 4 inches in throws of over 150ft.

  Similar misfortune struck South African athlete, Johannes Coleman, in the 1938 Natal marathon. He returned to the stadium in Pietermaritzburg at the end of the race confident of setting a new world record. By his measure, he was over three minutes inside the record time of 2hrs 26mins.

  He crossed the line only to find that the timekeeper was having a cup of tea in the refreshment block. The official effusively apologised – none of the runners, he said, had been expected back so early. Coleman’s time could not be verified, and his world record run was consigned to oblivion. It was the peak of Coleman’s career. Although an E
mpire Games gold medal winner that year, he never again managed to get close to breaking the world record.

  The 1900 Olympic pole vault competition in Paris was decided through indecision by track officials. Two of the leading American entrants objected to the event being held on a Sunday. Officials agreed to a postponement, and the potential medal winners departed. Then the officials changed their mind, and ordered the competition to go ahead as scheduled. It took place with the athletes who still happened to be around which included, by fortune, three entrants who had just finished competing in the high jump. One of those, the American Irving Baxter won against a much diminished opposition. Both of his colleagues who missed out would go on to beat him in the subsequent American national championships in the following two years, both with jumps five inches higher than Baxter’s medal winning performance.

  At the Athens Olympics in 2004, Korean 400 metres freestyle swimmer, Park Tae-Hwan, lost his footing as he mounted his block for his heat, fell into the pool and was disqualified for making a false start. It was his only event. His Olympics was over in less than a second.

  An even shorter record for participation was achieved by athlete Wym Essajas, Surinam’s first ever competitor, at the 1960 Games in Rome. An entrant in the 800 metres, he was told that the event’s heats would be held on an afternoon. That was wrong information. When he turned up, he discovered the heats had been run that morning, and that he had been disqualified for not turning up. He returned home without even competing.