had been so rude to him, its wireless operator had turned off his set and he therefore had no idea what was going on. A junior member of its crew had spotted distress flares, but was told it must be a fireworks show for the passengers. This was unfortunate – the Californian was the only ship close enough to help. Back on the Titanic, as the women and children were selfishly pushing themselves to the front of the queue for the lifeboats, it became apparent that 16 were not enough after all.
Only 711 people survived the disaster. A later count noted that 63 per cent of first-class passengers had survived, 42 per cent of second class and 25 per cent of third class. It led to questions being asked about how the life of a first-class passenger was given priority over that of someone travelling in third class.
Such considerations probably passed over the heads of the gentlemen left on deck as they waved goodbye, though. The band did play on, as it happens, but they were actually playing ragtime, not ‘Abide With Me’ as legend states. Drinks were still being served – you would presume it was a free bar.
As a result of this incident, the law was quickly changed to ensure that ships carry adequate numbers of lifeboats to provide places for everyone on board and lifeboat drills be carried out so that passengers know what to do in the event of an emergency. Ocean-going vessels had to carry a wireless set for emergency communication, which had to be manned around the clock.
One of the lesser-known facts about the Titanic is that it was actually on fire when it hit the iceberg. Coal in one of the bunkers had caught light some time beforehand and for hours the crew had been attempting to put it out.
So the iceberg might just have been the icing on the cake.
THE WRONG PASSPORT – LORD HAW-HAW HANGS HIMSELF, 1946
William Joyce, the most famous British collaborator with the Nazis, was not British. He was born in New York to Irish parents and the family moved back to Ireland when he was young. Although his father was a Catholic, they were staunch unionists and the young Joyce joined the Unionist special constables, the Black and Tans. After moving to mainland Britain in 1921, he became involved with Oswald Mosley’s Fascists and Mosley took a liking to Joyce, inviting him to join a group travelling to Nazi Germany in 1933 to see what Britain would be like if they were to come to power. Joyce jumped at the chance but, since he didn’t have a passport, he fraudulently applied for a British one, claiming to be a United Kingdom citizen. This petty crime would cost him his life.
Six years later, while still in Britain, Joyce was tipped off by a Fascist sympathiser in British military intelligence that he was about to be arrested as a Nazi and he fled to Germany, where he was recruited to a German propaganda radio station, Rundfunkhaus (the same one that P.G. Wodehouse worked for), to broadcast to Britain. He soon became known to British listeners as Lord Haw-Haw.
On 30 April 1945 Joyce fled the advancing Allied forces but was arrested near the Danish border and returned to Britain to be tried. As an American citizen, legally, he should have been tried in America but his trivial act of fraud a decade earlier meant he had a British passport and that meant Britain had the right to try him – and hang him.
The historian A.J.P. Taylor points out that the normal penalty for a fraudulent passport application was £2 – Joyce’s sentence was somewhat harsher, making him the last man in Britain to hang for treason. His colleagues at Rundfunkhaus received short prison sentences – except for Wodehouse, who got a slap on the wrist and was eventually awarded a knighthood.
A SHOT IN THE DARK – LORD LUCAN IS UNLUCKY, 1974
Richard Bingham, the ironically nicknamed Lord ‘Lucky’ Lucan, wanted to kill his estranged wife, Veronica. He planned to do so on a Thursday – 7 November 1974, to be precise – when his children’s nanny had the night off and always went out with her boyfriend, leaving his wife alone in the house.
So that night he hid in the kitchen of his wife’s home in Belgravia, west London, took the bulb out of the light and waited until nine o’clock when his wife always came down to make herself a cup of tea. When she did so, he sprang out and beat her to death in the dark with a length of lead piping, as in the popular board game Cluedo. He was therefore a little surprised to then hear her voice from upstairs calling for Sandra Rivett, the nanny. With understanding dawning like an unwelcome guest at Christmas, he realised that he had killed the wrong woman. Not one to be put off a task, however, when his wife really did come down this time, he attempted to kill her too, but bizarrely relented halfway through and went upstairs with her to watch television. Lucan, it seemed, couldn’t bring himself to kill his hated wife, but he was perfectly capable of beating an innocent third party to death. This unusual decision allowed Veronica to escape and raise the alarm by running to a nearby pub.
After Lady Lucan burst into the Plumbers Arms, screaming that her husband was trying to kill her, the police rushed to the house and forced open the door to find a bloodstained towel in one bedroom and a large pool of blood with a man’s footprints on the floor of the basement. In the basement they found the body of the nanny stuffed in a canvas mailbag, as in a cheap detective novel.
The perpetrator of this grisly act, however, had disappeared and soon became Britain’s most famous fugitive, passing into near-mythical status. Since then, he has been spotted everywhere and was even inadvertently responsible for one of Britain’s oddest political scandals, the Stonehouse affair…
THE WRONG FUGITIVE – JOHN STONEHOUSE GETS CAUGHT, 1974
John Stonehouse MP, who had been Postmaster General in one of Wilson’s governments, was having a few problems. His debts were mounting and he was cooking the books at his business to hide it; he was also conducting an extramarital affair with his secretary and, to cap it all, he was spying on Britain for the Soviet Bloc, in the form of the Czech intelligence service. Quite how he found the time for all of this is anybody’s guess.
Clearly, the scheduling was becoming tough for him too, so tough that he decided to fake his own death in an elaborate – some might say ‘romantic’ – fashion.
His first step was to identify a dead constituent, Joseph Markham, and go about stealing the man’s identity. He even rehearsed ‘being’ Markham. A psychiatrist’s report from the time states: ‘He spent short periods posing as Mr Markham, a private and “honest” individual, which apparently led to reduced tension. He began to dislike the personality of Stonehouse and came to believe that his wife, colleagues and friends would be better off without him. He therefore devised his escape to get away from the identity of Stonehouse. He thought of suicide but, deciding that this was not the answer, devised a “suicide equivalent” – his disappearance from a beach in Miami.’
On 20 November 1974 Stonehouse went to the beach in Miami, left a pile of clothes on it and promptly disappeared, leaving the authorities to believe he had drowned while swimming. Newspapers printed his obituary, lamenting his death. His wife, Sheila, was distraught at the death of her husband – not realising that he was, in fact, on his way to Australia to start a carefully constructed new life with his secretary/mistress, Sheila Buckley.
Upon arrival in Melbourne, he set about accessing the 36 different bank accounts he had opened in a variety of names, swapping money between them to cover his tracks. As ‘Clive Mildoon’, he deposited Aus$21,000 – around £90,000 now – in cash at the Melbourne branch of the Bank of New Zealand. It was just unlucky for him that the cashier from that bank later spotted him in the branch of the Bank of New South Wales depositing money as John Markham. The cashier thought this was a bit suspicious and spoke to the police.
Here’s where
