Christmas Every Day

Bicentenary of the death of Napoleon

Two hundred years ago, a great (but definitely not good) man died. Napoléon Bonaparte (15 August 1769 – 5 May 1821) was a military leader of great success, a reformer, a visionary, a rapist, and a mass murderer. Since the fall of the Roman Empire, Western Civilization had seen nothing like him, someone who rose from obscurity to grab destiny by the scruff the neck, win an imperial crown, and dictate the fortunes of a continent. Since his death, the world has been plagued by swarms of such would-be imitators: V.I. Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Jean-Bédel Bokassa, Mao Tse-tung, Saddam Hussein, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Juan Peron, Benito Mussolini, Kwame Nkrumah, “Papa Doc” Duvalier, etc., ad nauseam.

From his 1799 coup to his defeat at Waterloo in 1815, Napoléon had kept Europe in turmoil, overthrowing ancient dynasties, establishing new republics, settling his relatives on various thrones from Sweden to Spain, modernizing laws and bureaucracies, and killing millions of soldiers and civilians with the incessant wars prompted largely by his planetary-sized vanity. The crowned heads whose armies had finally brought him low were averse to killing a fellow monarch. This had resulted in an 1814 comic exile to the Italian island of Elba but Napoléon’s escape from there had taught a lesson — now he was to be sent to a speck of land over a thousand miles off the African coast. On the island of St Helena he would spend six uncomfortable years, constantly complaining about his food and lodgings, attended by a scruffy but mostly loyal band of retainers, and gradually growing sicker. 

He died on this date in 1821, probably of stomach cancer (his father had similarly suffered), though for two centuries rumours have circulated about his being poisoned by one of his own entourage or the British. On his deathbed he returned to the Catholic Church he had done so much to manipulate during his reign.

1728 Benefit Performance of The Beggar’s Opera

John Gay’s musical treatment of the London underworld was the sensation of 1728’s theatre season. The star of the show was 20-year-old Lavinia Fenton who played the heroine Polly Peachum. Though not a striking beauty she was a good actress and singer who seemed to radiant attractiveness. Her picture became a London pin-up, her songs were printed on ladies, crowds flocked to hear her sing, and a special benefit performance of the opera was held in her honour.

Certainly one frequent attender in the audience found her irresistible. This was Charles Powlett, the third Duke of Bolton, older than Lavinia by over 20 years, but possessed of huge tracts of land, deep pockets, and political clout. He was unhappily married, separated from his wife, and was determined that the fair Lavinia should be his. A print by Hogarth shows a scene from The Beggar’s Opera with a portrait of the actress in white, kneeling, and the smitten Duke seated in the box at the far right.

By the end of the theatre season Bolton had persuaded Miss Fenton to leave the stage for good and become his mistress. Their relationship was a long and happy one. She was treated well by society and bore him three sons out of wedlock. In 1751 Bolton’s wife died and he promptly married Lavinia, making her a Duchess. She was the first of a long line of actresses who married into the aristocracy; a model, perhaps, for Meghan Markle. 

The birthday of a plethora of popular culture luminaries:

1903 Bing Crosby. Harry Lillis “Bing” Crosby was more than the quintessential crooner whose career coincided with the introduction of the microphone that suited his intimate baritone. He was an Academy Award winning actor; he dominated record sales for decades; he was star on radio and television. Sadly his last public appearance was a bizarre Christmas duet with David Bowie.

1906 Mary Astor. The gorgeous Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke was a splendid actress with a tawdry personal life. She won eternal fame for playing villainess Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon, and an Oscar for The Great Lie. Her parents were leeches and a constant source of embarrassment while Astor herself enjoyed a string of husbands and lovers. Her diary, in which she kept details of her amorous encounters, proved a scandal during one of her divorces but she died a faithful Catholic and a recovered alcoholic. 

1919 Pete Seeger. A splendid folk singer and an engaging personality, Seeger never quite shook off his association with Stalinism in the 1930s. Following the Moscow line, Seeger and his fellow American Marxists opposed any war against Hitler until mid-1941 and the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Seeger quit the Communist Party in 1949 but continued to have trouble with Washington who viewed his progressive politics as being subversive. He supported every conceivable left wing cause in his music, from Republican Spain, unionism, the Hollywood Ten, the Rosenbergs, the death penalty, the Vietnam War, Occupy Wall Street, Obama, and environmentalism. He professed communism until the day he died but, late in life, did express misgivings about the Gulags. I love his banjo-only versions of some traditional Christmas music.

1928 Dave Dudley. David Darwin Pedruska became a big cross-over star in 1963 with his truck-driving ballad,”Six Days on the Road”. The song set the fashion for a new genre of country music and provided a decent living for Dudley who found that his popularity lingered in Europe for decades after his star had faded at home.

1933 James Brown. “Mr. Dynamite.” “The Hardest Working Man in Show Business.” “The Godfather of Soul”. “Soul Brother No. 1.” No more need be said. 

1938 Napoleon XIV. In 1966 Jerrold “Jerry” Samuels gave us the definition of a one-hit wonder and a testimony to the debased taste of a lost generation with the immortal cry of existential angst that was “They’re Coming to Take Me Away”. With great sensitivity, he further examined the hilarious side of mental illness with such other gems as “Bats in My Belfry”, “The Nuts on My Family Tree”, and “Photogenic, Schizophrenic You”.

1920 Foundation of the Negro Baseball Leagues

Racial laws and hostile social attitudes in early-twentieth-century America precluded the integration of most professional sports. In the case of baseball, this had led to African Americans forming their own teams and leagues as early as the 1880s. In 1920 under the aegis of the National Association of Colored Professional Base Ball Clubs, the Negro National League was founded with eight teams (three of them named Giants and two named Stars): the Chicago American Giants, the Chicago Giants, the St. Louis Giants, the Cuban Stars, the Dayton Marcos, Detroit Stars, Indianapolis ABC’s, and the Kansas City Monarchs. The NACPBBC was augmented the next year by the addition of the Negro Southern League but competition was fierce and player raiding was common when it came to rival associations such as the Eastern Colored League and the American Negro League.

Teams folded frequently, whole leagues went under, but the 1930s might be considered the Golden Age of Negro Baseball with players such as Cool Papa Bell, Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson. The switch-hitting Bell was reckoned the fastest man in the sport; it was said that he could switch off the light and be under the bed covers before the room was dark. Another story had him hitting a pitch up the middle and being struck by the ball as he slid into second base. Paige was an astonishing pitcher who toiled for a host of clubs, among them the Chattanooga Black Lookouts, the Birmingham Black Barons, the Baltimore Black Sox  and the Pittsburgh Crawfords — one of them, the Bismarck Churchills of North Dakota, was integrated. He would often invite his infielders to take a break on the field while he struck out the side. Catcher Josh Gibson was one of the greatest hitters — for power or average — in history. He retired with a .441 batting average and hit close to 800 home runs.

The post-war integration of baseball, led by Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers spelled the beginning of the end for Negro Leagues. A few of the stars at the end of their careers found employment in the majors — Satchel Paige pitched into his late 50s for the Cleveland Indians, St Louis Browns, and Kansas City Athletics — and various teams lingered as barnstorming propositions. In 2020 Major League Baseball announced that it would acknowledge the Negro Leagues as fully professional and recognize their statistics.

1770 Birthday of David Thompson

A tip of the beaver hat today to the man dubbed the “greatest practical land geographer that the world has produced”.

David Thompson was born in London to a poor Welsh family and was given a practical education in mathematics and surveying by a charity foundation. At the age of 14 he was indentured to the Hudson’s Bay Company and sent to the northern port of Churchill in what is now Manitoba, Canada. After serving as a clerk at several of the company’s trading posts, he became a fur trader and surveyor, mapping routes deep into the interior, despite a limp and the loss of vision in one eye. He became fluent in four native languages, compiling dictionaries of these tongues, and was almost always on excellent terms with tribes he encountered.

In 1797, frustrated because the HBC wanted him to abandon surveying and concentrate on the acquisition of furs trapped by native hunters, he switched his allegiance to the North West Company which was then involved in a heated rivalry with his old employers. There, his surveying skills were more highly valued. He worked along the disputed American border, Lake Superior, up the Mississippi River, and into the Rocky Mountains. His contributions were so valuable to the NWC that he was made a full partner of the firm.

In 1799 he married a 16-year-old (some say 13-year-old) Métis woman, Charlotte Small, with whom he enjoyed a 58-year marriage and 11 (some say 13) sons and daughters. She and their children often accompanied him on his travels.

With American explorers such as the Lewis and Clark expedition  pushing farther west, the North West Company commissioned Thompson to find a way to the Pacific Ocean. From 1807 to 1812 Thompson explored territories in what is now British Columbia, Washington, Montana, and Idaho, claiming vast swaths for Great Britain as he went.

Before retiring to Montreal in 1812 so that his children could get an education, Thompson had walked or paddled over 55,000 miles and charted 1.9 million square miles of wilderness. His later years were marked by ill health, poor finances, and neglect by the companies he had worked so hard for. He died in poverty in 1857 and was buried in an unmarked grave. Only in the 20th century was his massive contribution to history recognized. Thompson’s journals, enormously valuable for geographical, botanical and sociological observations, were finally published; statues and memorials were erected to him in Britain, Canada, and the United States; an exploration vessel, an astronomical observatory, a highway, and a university were named after him.

1944 The abduction of General Kreipe

In May 1941, Germany launched a daring parachute attack on the island of Crete which was garrisoned by Greek, British, and Commonwealth troops. Though the price paid in blood was so high that Germany never again attempted another airborne attack like it, the paratroopers secured airfields into which reinforcements could fly, and, after 11 days of bitter fighting, victory was largely achieved. Guerrilla resistance by native Cretans and Allied troops hiding in the hills continually took its toll on the Wehrmacht, prompting harsh reprisals and atrocities. 

The British Special Operations Executive (S.O.E., responsible for violent behind-the-lines activities) decided that its agents should kidnap the brutal head of the German occupation, the so-called “Butcher of Crete”, Friedrich Wilhelm Müller, but, by the time the plan was to be put into effect, Müller was replaced by the milder General Heinrich Kreipe. With Kreipe now the target, Major Patrick Leigh Fermor (the brilliant travel writer whose works should be read by all of you) and Captain William Stanley Moss, with their team of native resistance fighters, plotted to abduct the general as he drove home. 

On the night of April 26, disguised as German troops, they stopped Kreipe’s car, knocked the driver unconscious, and, holding the general at gunpoint, drove unmolested through 22 German roadblocks. Kreipe had a reputation for grumpiness and impatience with delays, so his kidnappers had an easier time. Eventually they abandoned the car and headed into the mountains, leaving false clues that they hoped would lead the Germans to believe that the team would be quickly evacuated by submarine. They eluded a vast Wehrmacht manhunt while they tried to arrange contact for a pickup that would take them to Egypt. 

Kreipe was a decent sort of chap, not a Nazi, and he had Fermor had many conversations. One morning, the captive German began to greet the dawning sun’s glint on a mountaintop with lines from an ode by the Roman poet, Horace, and, Fermor finished the recitation, as they both knew the Latin by heart. “We had both drunk at the same fountains,” wrote Fermor about the incident.

Though the general was successfully taken by boat to captivity in Egypt, the reprisals by the German army, led again by Müller, were bloody. Here is his order:

Because the town of Anogia is the centre of the English Intelligence on Crete, because the people of Anogia committed the murder of the Sergeant Commander of the Yeni-Gave, as well as of the garrison under his orders, because the people of Anogia carried out the sabotage of Damasta, because in Anogia the guerrillas of the various groups of resistance take refuge and find protection and because it was through Anogia that the kidnappers with General Von Kreipe passed using Anogia as a transit camp, we order its COMPLETE DESTRUCTION and the execution of every male person of Anogia who would happen to be within the village and around it within a distance of one kilometre.

CHANEA 13TH AUGUST 1944, THE GENERAL COMMANDER OF THE GARRISON OF CRETE, H. MULLER.

For this and other war crimes, Müller was executed by the Allies in 1947