Christmas Every Day

A great day for decisive battles.

31 BC Battle of Actium

After the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC, the Roman world came to be divided between the forces of Caesar’s nephew Octavian (later Augustus Caesar) and Caesar’s right-hand man, Marc Antony. Antony had taken up Caesar’s old mistress Cleopatra and become ruler of Egypt and the Middle East.  Octavian feared that Antony had ambitions to seize all of the Roman empire and confronted him in a naval battle off the coast of Greece. When the Egyptian fleet abandoned Antony, the battle was lost. Antony and Cleopatra were soon to commit suicide and leave Octavian as unchallenged emperor.

1870 Battle of Sedan

Napoleon III, the incompetent nephew of the great Napoleon Bonaparte, was foolishly goaded into a war with the German military powerhouse Prussia and was soundly beaten in the Franco-Prussian War. At the Battle of Sedan Napoleon III was captured (he is pictured above sitting with the German Chancellor Bismarck), his Second Empire government collapsed, and Prussia dictated harsh terms for peace. The French resentment over this defeat and the peace treaty helped lead to World War I.

1898 Battle of Omdurman

In the 1880s a Muslim prophet, Muhammad Ahmad, styled himself the Mahdi, a Messiah-like figure whom many Muslims believe is to rule on earth before the Final Judgement. The Mahdi drove the British and Egyptians out of the Sudan in 1885, killed General Gordon, the British governor, and set up a fundamentalist state. In 1898 an Anglo-Egyptian army, accompanied by gunboats and Canadian voyageurs, marched up the Nile to confront the Mahdi’s successor, the Khalifa, at Omdurman (near present-day Khartoum). The Mahdists greatly outnumbered the invaders but the British were much more heavily armed, equipped with machine-guns and heavy artillery. The effect of modern weaponry was devastating on the Sudanese spearman and cavalry. One observer noted: “They could never get near and they refused to hold back. … It was not a battle but an execution. … The bodies were not in heaps—bodies hardly ever are; but they spread evenly over acres and acres. Some lay very composedly with their slippers placed under their heads for a last pillow; some knelt, cut short in the middle of a last prayer. Others were torn to pieces.” Winston Churchill was present at the battle and took part in the cavalry charge depicted above. The Mahdists suffered 10,000 dead while the British lost 42 men.

1997

The death of Princess Diana

By 1997, the life of Diana, Princess of Wales and ex-wife of the heir to the British throne, was a soap-opera nightmare. Her marriage had collapsed under the weight of mutual infidelity — Charles had taken up with an old mistress Camilla Parker-Bowles, and Diana conducted a series of affairs with her bodyguard, a polo-playing soldier, a rugby player, a Canadian rock star, a Pakistani heart surgeon and, lastly, Egyptian-born playboy Emad El-Din Mohamed Abdel Mena’em “Dodi” Fayed, whose father owned Harrod’s department store and Fulham soccer team. Diana was a psychological mess, bulimic, depressive, self-harming, and manipulative, carrying an enormous grudge against her ex-husband whom she accused of plotting her death in a car crash that would be made to look accidental.

What she saw in Dodi Fayed remains a mystery, though some say his Muslim religion was a factor — supposedly it would outrage the Royal Family. Dodi was in every way a lightweight, scarcely employable and a connoisseur of American models, one of whom he had married, another of whom he had dumped for Diana, but his family fortune was clearly not a barrier to romance. In August 1997 the couple spent six days on his yacht in the Mediterranean and then flew from Corsica to Paris where they stayed at the Ritz Hotel, owned by Dodi’s father. In the early hours of August 31, while a decoy car attempted to lure away journalists, Diana and Dodi entered a Mercedes limo driven by Ritz head of security Henri Paul and accompanied by a Fayed family guard. Chased by paparazzi, the limo entered the Place de l’Alma tunnel at a high rate of speed and crashed. Paul and Dodi died immediately, Diana expired from massive internal injuries a few hours later in hospital. The only survivor, bodyguard Trevor-Rees Jones, was severely injured and spent a month in hospital recuperating. His face was reconstructed using family photographs as a guide and held together with 150 pieces of titanium.

Controversy continued to dog the dead princess. As Britain mourned in spectacular fashion, rumours spread of the limo being struck from behind by a white Fiat which then sped off, never to be seen again. Others spoke of an assassination of the lovers by British intelligence services at the behest of the Royal Family — a view that Dodi’s father clung to. The driver Henri Paul was found to have been intoxicated and no one in the car was wearing seat belts.

1657 Death of a bold pamphleteer

John Lilburne was born in 1614 to an English family of the squirearchy. In the turbulent 1630s when the rule of Charles I was growing odious to many, Lilburne adopted a number of radical stances and, at one point, had to flee to the safety of Holland. In 1637 he was whipped, pilloried, and jailed in chains for publishing a tract without the approval of the Stationer’s Company, which governed legal printing. He began to style himself “Freeborn John” and got into more trouble for opposing the Church of England.

When the Civil War broke out, Lilburne fought for the forces of Parliament and rose to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He was captured by the king’s army after the Battle of Brentford but, when exchanged for a royalist officer, he rejoined his regiment where he was wounded and suffered the los of his property.

A man of high principle, he quarrelled with his superior officers, refused to sign the Solemn League and Covenant, and disputed with fellow radical William Prynne on the question of freedom of religion. His supporters came to be known as Levellers because of the social equality they demanded. He asserted that Englishmen had “freeborn rights” granted by God, and that the Parliamentarian rule was even more tyrannical than that of the king. Lilburne was imprisoned, this time by the Parliamentary government, but was acquitted of a charge of high treason. Finally in 1652 his disputatious wrangling resulted in a forced exile from England.

When Lilburne returned without permission from Holland he was imprisoned again, tried again, and again acquitted. Nonetheless, the Puritan government considered him such a nuisance that he was kept in jail regardless of habeas corpus. In 1656 he was allowed out on parole, having convinced the authorities that his conversion to Quakerism meant that he was no longer a menace. He died the next year and was buried in the churchyard next to Bedlam.

1859 Death of Leigh Hunt

Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) is mostly a footnote these days in the history of 19th-century English literature, but there was a time in which he was well-regarded. Historians of Christmas remember him as the author of remarks on “The Inexhaustibility of the Subject of Christmas”, others for his poem in which he boasts “Jenny kissed me”, some for his being the inspiration for the character of Harold Skimpole in Bleak House, but he is most noteworthy as being a companion of Byron and Shelley.

In 1813 Hunt was imprisoned for some harsh words about the Prince Regent (later George IV). Hunt objected to the grossly flattering image that other journalists were painting of the prince and penned a much more honest account of that bloated worthy. This is what cancel culture of the Regency period would give you two years in jail for:

What person, unacquainted with the true state of the case, would imagine, in reading these astounding eulogies, that this ‘ glory of the people’ was the subject of millions of shrugs and reproaches? —that this ‘protector of the arts’ had named a wretched foreigner his historical painter, in disparagement or in ignorance of the merits of his own countrymen? — that this ‘Mecaenas of the age’ patronised not a single deserving writer?—that this ‘breather of eloquence’ could not say a few decent extempore words, if we are to judge, at least, from what he said to his regiment on its embarkation for Portugal?—that this ‘conqueror of hearts’ was the disappointer of hopes?—that this ‘ exciter of desire’ [bravo! Messieurs of the Post!] — this ‘Adonis in loveliness’ was a corpulent man of fifty? in short, this delightful, blissful, wise, pleasurable, honourable, virtuous, true, and immortal prince, was a violator of his word, a libertine, over head and ears in disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps, a man who has just closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country, or the respect of posterity?

2009

Jaycee Dugard is rescued

On June 10, 1991 eleven-year-old Jaycee Dugard was walking to school in South Lake Tahoe, California when she was approached by two strangers in a grey mid-size car. One knocked her down with a bolt from a taser gun and placed her in his car which then drove off. This abduction was witnessed by several other children and her stepfather who vainly tried to pursue the car on his mountain bike.

Jaycee’s kidnappers were convicted rapist Philip Garrido and his wife Nancy who took her to their property and locked her in a shed. For the next eighteen years she was repeatedly raped and abused, bearing Garrido two daughters, forbidden from receiving any medical care and threatened with death. She was forbidden to use her real name, told to treat Nancy as her mother, and to tell her children that she was their older sister. After a time she was allowed out to work in Garrido’s print shop. Neighbours tried to alert police to the strange goings-on behind the 8-foot-high fence at the Garrido household but no action was taken.

Garrido was quite insane. He was convinced that he could control sound with his mind and that he had developed a method to cure sexual urges. He visited the FBI to inform them of his discoveries and in August, 2009 went to the University of California at Berkeley trying to book a space to announce his program; he was accompanied by his two daughters. Their appearance and Garrido’s strangeness aroused the suspicions of officials there who learned that he was wanted for parole violations. The police were informed and when Garrido appeared at the parole office, this time with Jaycee and the girls, officers quizzed the young woman who insisted that her name was Alissa and that she was a battered wife from Minnesota, fleeing an abusive husband. Only after Garrido confessed to kidnapping and raping her did Jaycee, clearly a victim of Stockholm Syndrome, admit to her true identity.

Jaycee and her children were released to her mother and began trying to rebuild their lives. She wrote two books about her experience, A Stolen Life: A Memoir, and Freedom: My Book of Firsts. Phillip Garrido was sentenced to 431 years to life imprisonment; Nancy received 36 years to life imprisonment.

Birthdays of Sort-of Canadian Entertainers

Every Canadian knows that Hollywood and the American music industry would collapse without the contribution of artists from the Great White North. Every schoolboy knows that actors from Montreal and Vancouver ran the bridge and engineering deck of the starship Enterprise. What would New Year’s Eve be without “Auld Lang Syne” by Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians? How could the Ponderosa have survived without Lorne Green as Pa Cartwright? 

But even savvy Canadians may not be aware that August 25 is the birthday of three such expatriate stars of popular culture.

Cute-as-lace-pants hoofer Ruby Keeler first saw the light of day in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia in 1909. Her family soon moved to New York where by the age of 14 she was working as a dancer, graduating from speakeasies to Broadway. She appeared in numerous films and was married to Al Jolson.

Born in 1921 as Monte Halperin, Monty Hall came out of Winnipeg’s Jewish North End to make it big as an announcer and game show host.

For years Graham Jarvis played hapless figures of authority who never got the girl. Born in Toronto in 1930, his forgettable features appeared in All in the Family, M*A*S*H, Mork & Mindy, Starsky and Hutch, Cagney and Lacey, Married… with Children, and Star Trek: The Next Generation.

1939

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact

By the summer of 1939 it was clear that Adolf Hitler had no intention of keeping the peace in Europe; all of his previous promises had been broken and the German army was being put on a war footing. In order to head off more German aggression, the British and French had guaranteed their military support to Poland and sought to involve the Soviet Union in an anti-German alliance. The Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin feared the western nations as much as he did the Germans. He demanded as a price for allying against Germany the right of the Red Army to enter Poland; the Poles, quite rightly, feared that once the Russians were in their country there would be no getting them out. Stalin, therefore, entered secret negotiations with his arch-enemies in Nazi Germany and received the German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop for talks with Vyacheslav Molotov, the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs. The result, which staggered the world, was the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the so-called Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

On the surface, the treaty was a pledge of neutrality should either country go to war against another country, and a ten-year pledge of peace between the signatories. It was seen, at once, as a carte blanche for Hitler to go to war against Poland, secure that the USSR would not intervene. As such, it made World War II inevitable. Around the world, it also shocked Communist supporters  who had been told that Nazi German was the supreme enemy; the Soviet excuse that the two countries shared a common anti-capitalist stance was met with derision. Many western intellectuals and artists who had seen Stalin as the bulwark against fascism never got over their disillusionment and abandoned Communism; others continued to toe the Party line and to oppose war with Germany until 1941 when Hitler broke the pact and invaded the Soviet Union. The folk-singer Woodie Guthrie was in the latter camp, making a mockery of the motto on his guitar which read “This Machine Kills Fascists”.

What the world did not know in August of 1939 was that there were secret articles of the treaty that were even more sinister. In return for its acquiescence in the invasion of Poland, Germany would allow the Soviet Union to occupy Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Bessarabia and the eastern part of Poland. Once war started in September, the two tyrannies cooperated in massacres of Poles, Jews, and prisoners of war.

1965

Barry McGuire’s “Eve Of Destruction” released

No song captures the political vibrations of an era as well as “Eve of Destruction” sung by folk-rock singer Barry McGuire and written by P.F. Sloan, who also wrote hits for The Turtles, Herman’s Hermits and Johnny Rivers. Its burning topicality made it a controversial song for pop radio stations; many banned it. It called forth several reply songs, as was typical of the period: “The Dawn of Correction” offered a much more optimistic view of the 1960s; Sgt Barry Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Beret” and Johnny Seay’s 5 ½-minute “Day of Decision” were also considered rebuttals.

The eastern world, it is explodin’,
Violence flarin’, bullets loadin’,
You’re old enough to kill but not for votin’,
You don’t believe in war, but what’s that gun you’re totin’,
And even the Jordan river has bodies floatin’,
But you tell me over and over and over again my friend,
Ah, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction.

Don’t you understand, what I’m trying to say?
And can’t you feel the fears I’m feeling today?
If the button is pushed, there’s no running away,
There’ll be no one to save with the world in a grave,
Take a look around you, boy, it’s bound to scare you, boy,
And you tell me over and over and over again my friend,
Ah, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction.

Yeah, my blood’s so mad, feels like coagulatin’,
I’m sittin’ here, just contemplatin’,
I can’t twist the truth, it knows no regulation,
Handful of Senators don’t pass legislation,
And marches alone can’t bring integration,
When human respect is disintegratin’,
This whole crazy world is just too frustratin’,
And you tell me over and over and over again my friend,
Ah, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction.

A particularly grim day in history

1672

The murder of Jan de Witt

Jan de Witt was the leading Dutch politician of his age, known for his opposition to the Orange family’s dynasty in his country. After a series of military defeats Jan and his brother Cornelis were set upon by a well-organized mob in The Hague, tortured, murdered, and, then cannibalized. De Witt’s supporters and most historians blame William of Orange for instigating the violence. William later assumed the throne of the Netherlands and England.

1940

The attack on Leon Trotsky

The creator of the Red Army, the instigator of the Red Terror, and brilliant Marxist theoretician, Leon Trotsky was one of the chief architects of the Bolshevik success in the Russian Revolution. He fell out, however, with Joseph Stalin and was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929. Stalin’s wrath was not pacified by Trotsky’s absence and the dictator continued to seek his rival’s destruction, condemning him in absentia to death in a show trial. A couple of murderous attempts on his life during Trotsky’s exile in Mexico had failed but in August, 1940 Ramón Mercader, a KGB agent, struck him with an ice axe, causing his death the next day.

1968

The end of the Prague Spring

Under Premier Alexander Dubcek, the Czechoslovakian Communist party had attempted a policy of relaxing controls on freedom of expression, producing more consumer goods, and hinting at multi-party democracy. This “socialism with a human face” aroused fears among Party hardliners and their masters in Moscow. Fearing lest Dubcek’s ideas spread, Soviet leader Brezhnev ordered an invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces. Under the pretext of foiling a pro-Western coup, 20,000 troops and 2,000 tanks from the USSR, Poland, and East Germany crossed the borders and took control of the country. Dubček was deposed, replaced by a hard-liner, expelled from the Communist Party and given a job as a forestry official. His reforms were undone but his example seems to have inspired Soviet thinkers 20 years later in the period of glasnost.

1952

Night of the Murdered Poets

On August 12, 1952, thirteen major Soviet Jewish figures were executed. Their alleged crimes included espionage, bourgeois nationalism, “lack of true Soviet spirit,” and treason, including a plot to hand the Crimea over to American and Zionist imperialists.  In the group were famous writers such as Peretz Markish (above, winner of the Stalin Prize) , David Bergelson, and Itsik Fefer—which is why the date has come to be marked annually as the Night of the Murdered Poets—but the murdered also included an actor, a former deputy foreign minister, a scientist, and a general.  A fourteenth defendant died during the four years the group suffered in Moscow’s dreaded Lubyanka prison, and a fifteenth was merely sentenced to exile.

Though Jews such as Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev had featured prominently in the leadership of the Bolshevik Revolution, the fate of Judaism in the Soviet Union was not a happy one, especially during the Purges of the 1930s. During World War II when Stalin needed the help of the West, members of the Jewish Antifascist Committee were sent to the United States to raise money and awareness. After the war this connection to international Judaism was perceived as a threat. In 1948 a series of murders and arrests by the secret police took a toll among the Jewish intelligentsia. In the grim cells of the Lubyanka Prison went former artistic luminaries, including men like Fefer who had loyally toed the Party line and informed on his fellows. They suffered years of torture to produce false confessions and were finally put on trial in 1952 when Stalin’s anti-Semitism was increasingly unchecked.

Following a cursory, secret trial, the thirteen were executed. After Stalin’s death in 1953 the new Soviet government reexamined their cases and declared them posthumously rehabilitated.