Napoleon's Hemorrhoids_And Other Small Events That Changed History

by Phil Mason

  Liverpool, one of the biggest clubs in England, Europe and the world, owe their existence to a rent dispute involving near neighbours and rivals, Everton.

  Everton were the original tenants of the city’s famous Anfield ground, playing there from 1884 to 1892. The club then fell into an argument with its landlord, local Member of Parliament John Houlding, about the annual rent. He evicted Everton and in 1892 established his own club, naming it Liverpool.

  Had Everton not disputed the rent…

  Long teased for being just a two-side (Celtic and Rangers), one city (Glasgow) contest, the shape of Scottish football could have changed radically in the 1930s had the Scottish League taken up an offer from south of the border.

  When the League expelled two clubs, Armadale and Bo’ness, during the 1932 – 33 season (bizarrely for the offence of holding greyhound racing at their stadiums), two English clubs volunteered to take their place. Both were refused. One was border club Berwick Rangers, who eventually made it in two decades later, the other never did: Newcastle United. Then a struggling First Division club, but League champions as recently as 1927, had the northern powerhouse been accepted into the Scottish fold, the history of the game there might have taken a very different course.

  When Chester City football club built its new ground in 1992, it had to configure the layout of the stands to ensure the club officially remained in England. The Deva Stadium straddles the English-Welsh border, and savvy project managers constructed the main stand and club offices on the eastern side of the ground. They are the only part technically in England, but it allows the club to remain a member of the English Football League instead of the Welsh. The entire pitch lies across the border, so all the action during each game actually takes place in Wales.

  Cardiff City enjoy the unenviable distinction of being the club to lose the English Football League championship by the closest margin. In the 1923 – 24 season, they finished on equal points with Huddersfield, but lost out on goal average, their 61 goals for, 34 against record being 0.02 of a goal worse than the champions’ 60 – 33. Cardiff would have been champions had they not missed a penalty in their final match. It would have given them a better average than Huddersfield’s – by 0.005 of a goal.

  As the League no longer uses goal difference to separate between teams on equal points, Cardiff’s record can never be beaten.

  Carlisle United hold the record for being pipped by the narrowest margin for any Football League title when they lost out to Gillingham in the Fourth Division Championship in 1963 – 64 by just 0.019 of a goal. Gillingham had ended the season with two consecutive 1 – 0 victories and played the last game of the entire division’s programme to haul themselves past Carlisle. To add insult to injury, and strengthen the case against using goal difference, Carlisle had scored 113 goals in the season – the highest total of any club in any of the four divisions – conceding 58. By contrast Gillingham had scored just 59, conceding 30. The goal average method was abandoned in 1976.

  The British record for a football score in a first-class match – Arbroath’s 36 – 0 thrashing of Bon Accord in a Scottish Cup first round tie in 1885 – was all the result of a misunderstanding. The Scottish Football Association had intended to invite Orion FC from Aberdeen, but sent the letter by mistake to the Orion Cricket Club instead. Whether the cricketers realised the mistake or not isn’t clear, but they changed their name to Bon Accord and gave it a go.

  Wembley, the home of English football, would never have had a sports stadium built on the site had a plan for a London version of the Eiffel Tower come to fruition.

  The area had become established as a leisure venue in the 1880s, reached from the centre of the city by the new Metropolitan Railway line. To boost usage of the line, the flamboyant chairman of the company, Sir Edward Watkin (who had pioneered the first attempt to dig the Channel Tunnel in the early 1880s), proposed in 1889 a plan to build a gigantic four-legged tower similar to the one just being finished in Paris. At 1,150ft, the Watkin Tower would be the tallest in the world, edging out the Eiffel Tower by nearly a hundred feet.

  Construction started but when the legs were 200ft high, serious problems were discovered with the ground conditions. The foundations shifted, were ruled unsafe to support such a tower and the project was abandoned. The remnants of the grand scheme stayed until 1907 when they were demolished.

  When the government was looking for a site for the 1924 British Empire Exhibition, the centrepiece of which would be a national sports stadium, the cleared and unused Wembley area was a perfect location. Wembley Stadium was built on the site of the Watkin Tower, and put up in just 300 days.

  Injuries are all part of the game. But some ailments have had the least expected cause:

  Manchester United goalkeeper Alex Stepney shouted so much at his defenders in a match against Birmingham in 1975 that he dislocated his jaw.

  Darren Barnard, a Barnsley player, slipped on a puddle of his new puppy’s pee on the kitchen floor and damaged knee ligaments. It kept him out of action for five months.

  Bolton striker Dean Holdsworth injured himself in October 2000 slipping on grass cuttings after mowing his lawn and straining his groin.

  Spain’s first choice goalkeeper, Santiago Canizares, missed the entire 2002 World Cup after dropping a bottle of aftershave in his hotel bathroom. It shattered and a piece of glass severed a tendon in his big toe.

  Alan Wright, a 5ft 4in former Aston Villa footballer, strained his knee reaching for the accelerator of his new Ferrari. He later swapped it for a Rover.

  Brentford goalkeeper, Chic Brodie, had his career ended in 1970 when a sheepdog ran on to the pitch during a match and chased the ball that Brodie was about to pick up. The dog crashed into Brodie, shattering his kneecap. He never played professional football again.

  Paulo Diogo, a Swiss footballer, celebrated setting up a goal in 2004 by jumping up at the boundary fence in front of his Servette team’s supporters. His ring finger caught in the netting and when he jumped back down, the ring and most of his finger stayed put. Writhing in agony, he was given a yellow card by the referee who thought he was acting. Although the severed finger was found, doctors were unable to reattach it.

  Sevilla player, Marcos Martin, was injured during the game against Tenerife in February 1997 and was being taken off the field on a motorised buggy. The driver went too close to the goal and Martin sustained a further injury from whacking his head against the post.

  Non-League player, Robbie Reinelt, a Braintree striker, severely gashed his leg in 2001 when the treatment table he was lying on, receiving first aid for a minor injury, collapsed under him. He missed more games because of that injury than he would have done from his original problem.

  Kevin Kyle, Sunderland and Scotland striker, ruled himself out of a match in 2006 because of an injury received from feeding his eight-month-old son. Balancing a jug of hot water on his knee to warm up a bottle, he spilt it into his lap and scalded his genitals.

  Trevor Franklin, opening batsman for New Zealand, never appeared in the 1986 Test series after being run down by an airport baggage cart shortly after the team had stepped off the plane at Gatwick. He suffered multiple leg fractures and was out of the game for a year and a half. He could never sprint afterwards.

  Golfer Colin Montgomerie was so confident that his form had peaked for the 2002 British Open that he was quoted on the eve of the opening round as claiming, ‘I should win by five shots.’ Going to breakfast at his hotel the next morning, he tripped on a step, hurt his wrist which broke his fall and lasted just seven holes in the competition before having to retire.

  In 1990, Toronto baseball player Glenallen Hill injured himself while asleep. Having a morbid fear of spiders, he was having a nightmare of being attacked by them, got out of bed, sleepwalked into a glass table, which shattered, cutting his feet, and then fell down stairs. He suffered severe bruising and missed several games.

  Adam Eaton, a Texas Rangers baseball pitcher, stabbed himsel
f in the stomach in 2001 trying to open a DVD wrapping with a knife.

  Trinidadian boxer Anthony Joseph broke his leg as he struggled to get up from being knocked down after 86 seconds of his world light middleweight title bout in London in 1996. He twisted his ankle and fell back, fracturing his right leg. He never boxed again.

  Billy Jones, a charity fund-raiser planning to crawl around the 38-mile Isle of Man TT motor-racing circuit in 1994, had to abandon his effort after just six miles when he was overcome by the exhaust fumes of his sponsor’s car – which was preceding him just two feet ahead.

  A charity effort failed at the last minute in 1999 when cyclist Steven Watts neared the end of his 900-mile ride from Land’s End to John O’Groats. To celebrate his imminent achievement, he hauled his physiotherapist on to his crossbar to ride the last 500 yards together. They wobbled, both fell off, and Watts fractured his skull – within sight of the finishing line. They were allowed to claim completion of the ride as they were within the city limits of John O’Groats.

  Crime – Missed Demeanours

  The exposure of Dutch art forger Han van Meegeren, who had produced 14 paintings in the style of national master, Vermeer, which had fooled the art world for a decade, came about by sheer luck at the end of the Second World War because one of his productions had been found in the vast collection of art amassed by the captured Nazi Air Minister, Hermann Goering.

  In a bizarre twist of fate, van Meegeren was caught out not because his work was discovered to be forged but because he faced the charge of selling a national treasure to the enemy. Goering had kept meticulous records about his art purchases, and all the details of the transaction had fallen into Allied hands.

  With a prosecution inevitable, he found he had to confess to forgery to acquit himself of the more shameful allegation of profiting from the Nazis, for which the sentence was death. However, in a further surreal twist, his paintings were so convincing that the court trying him did not believe him. It insisted that he produce another in front of witnesses – which, in six weeks, he did.

  He escaped in 1947 with a one-year sentence for obtaining money by deception, and died a few weeks after the end of his trial. He had been trapped in the end by the strange obsession of the Nazi bureaucracy for keeping scrupulous accounts.

  Had a secret service official’s passport not been out of date, one of the most devastating spy rings to operate in the British government may have been wound up more than a decade earlier than it actually was.

  The defection to the Soviet Union in May 1951 of two high-ranking diplomats, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, was the political scandal of the 1950s in Britain. It was felt to be an even graver affair than the actions of just two men because it was suspected (rightly it later turned out) that they had been tipped off by another communist spy, higher up in the British government. For 12 more years the hunt for the ‘third man’ went on – with damage to the country’s security continuing – until, in 1963, diplomat and MI6 operative, Kim Philby, was unmasked.

  Spy author Rupert Allason (aka Nigel West), then a Conservative MP, revealed to parliament in 1989 how close Burgess and Maclean came to being caught on the night of their defection. Burgess was recognised by an emigration officer at Southampton as the pair boarded the ferry to France. The intelligence services were informed and a senior official was dispatched home to get his passport and fly to intercept the ferry when it docked at St Malo in France. It was only when the officer arrived at the airport that he discovered his passport was out of date. He had to return home, mission aborted.

  Burgess and Maclean made it to Moscow. Philby continued to operate undercover for another dozen years before he too managed to defect. The man who failed to make the intercept? He later went on to become head of MI5, and eventually receive a knighthood.

  Another passport mix-up did for James Earl Ray, the assassin of Martin Luther King, who was eventually caught by British police after fleeing the United States. Two months after the slaying of King in Memphis in April 1968, Ray passed through London’s Heathrow airport in transit between Lisbon and Brussels. While attempting to board the flight to Brussels, he inadvertently showed two passports with different names.

  The difference was tiny, but significant. One referred to him as George Ramon Sneyd, the other as George Ramon Sneya. Suspicions naturally aroused, immigration officials examined him further, and a search discovered he was carrying a loaded pistol. He was arrested, his true identity quickly revealed and within six weeks he was extradited back to the United States.

  He pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to 99 years in jail, where he died 30 years later in April 1998.

  One of the most elaborate con tricks of the 1970s was uncovered by complete chance and the tiniest bit of bad luck. John Stonehouse, a sitting Labour MP and former government minister, carried out an extraordinarily well-planned plot in November 1974 to fake his death by drowning while swimming off Miami beach, to escape financial debts and set up a new life with his mistress.

  He pitched up in Melbourne, Australia, and began accessing the 36 different bank accounts he had set up in his own and several assumed names. This caused suspicions in the close-knit banking system and police were called in and started to trail him.

  They did so because they wrongly believed him to be the missing peer, Lord Lucan who, in an untimely echo for Stonehouse, had also disappeared a fortnight after him after killing his family nanny in a botched attempt to murder his wife (see below).

  But one false lead led to uncovering the small mistake that would doom Stonehouse. By chance, the police officer who went to his apartment to investigate, noticed a book of matches in the room. They were from a hotel in Miami, which by coincidence the officer had visited 20 years earlier.

  It was that single clue that prompted his arrest a few days later when the officer read of the Stonehouse disappearance.

  Stonehouse was tried at the Old Bailey in 1976 with his mistress and sentenced to seven years. He served three and died in 1988.

  Lord Lucan’s crime went horribly wrong because of a single change of fortune. His plan to kill his estranged wife in the basement kitchen of their house in London’s fashionable Lower Belgrave Street hinged on the nanny having the night off on Thursdays. His wife would be the lone adult in the house and would, he knew, just after 9pm, come down to the kitchen to make her evening cup of tea.

  Lucan secreted himself in the kitchen, having taken the light bulb from the socket. When, on cue, he heard footsteps arriving, he beat the woman to death with a length of lead piping.

  Unfortunately for Lucan, the victim was not his wife, but the nanny, 29-year-old Sandra Rivett. She had decided not to go out with her boyfriend as usual, but stay at home. He discovered the unwelcome fact when, still assuming the person he had killed was his wife, he heard her calling from an upper room for Sandra. She came downstairs and he attacked her too, but unsuccessfully, allowing her to flee the house and raise the alarm.

  Lucan disappeared that night and has never been seen again.

  Government papers released in 2005 revealed an elementary error in Scotland Yard’s operation to recover Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs from his hideout in Brazil that enabled him to remain at large for a further 27 years.

  Biggs had been on the run since escaping from Wandsworth prison in 1965. In February 1974, the Daily Express discovered he was living in Rio de Janeiro and tipped off the Yard. Fearful that news would leak and alert Biggs if they contacted the Brazilian authorities, detectives decided, without telling anyone in either government, to fly directly to Brazil and obtain his arrest.

  When Detective Chief Superintendent Jack Slipper arrived at Copacabana police station, it had to be explained to him that he had no jurisdiction. The attempt was fiercely resented by the Brazilian government, and the publicity Slipper wanted to avoid quickly surfaced.

  Ironically, according to the files, had the request been passed through the formal channels, Biggs could have been arrested b
y Interpol officers in Rio and he would have been handed over to Interpol officers of Scotland Yard ‘within a short period with little or no publicity.’

  It would be nearly three decades before Biggs returned to Britain, and jail, voluntarily in 2001.

  Peter Sutcliffe, the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ who killed 13 women between 1975 and 1980, was interviewed 10 times by police between 1978 and his capture over evidence that tied him to the crimes. He would commit four more murders before being caught, and even then his capture was entirely accidental.

  Two early pieces of evidence in 1978 – a brand new £5 note found on a victim that narrowed down potential employers, and witness sightings of his car which had been seen on at least seven occasions in the same area of Bradford where some of the victims had worked as prostitutes – were not connected by investigators as different officers were pursuing the different leads.

  Hoax letters and a tape recording, supposedly from the killer, in 1979 then sent police off the trail looking for their man in Sunderland rather than Yorkshire, despite strong evidence quickly emerging that all the information in the letters and tape could have been obtained from newspaper reports. The publicity given to the tape led to the number of suspects rising to 17,000. More devastatingly for the investigation, anyone without a Sunderland accent was eliminated from enquiries.

  As well as 10 interviews, police would, towards the end, even reject a tip-off from a close associate of Sutcliffe’s, directly pointing to him as a likely suspect.

  Sutcliffe was eventually caught by a complete stroke of luck. In January 1981, a police patrol in the Sheffield red-light district investigated a car for a minor traffic offence. Sutcliffe, the driver, was interviewed and, having given a false name to begin with, the Ripper Squad were notified. Nevertheless, the squad recommended his release but at the last moment a senior suggested a blood test be taken.