Christmas Every Day

1875

The first indoor hockey game

Ice hockey and related games had been played out of doors for some time before someone thought of bringing such sporting contests indoors. The credit for this act of genius goes to James Creighton, a lawyer and figure skater, who organized a game between members of Montreal’s Victoria Skating Club.

The Montreal Gazette announced the impending tussle thusly:

Victoria Rink – A game of Hockey will be played at the Victoria Skating Rink this evening, between two nines chosen from among the members. Good fun may be expected, as some of the players are reputed to be exceedingly expert at the game. Some fears have been expressed on the part of intending spectators that accidents were likely to occur through the ball flying about in too lively a manner, to the imminent danger of lookers on, but we understand that the game will be played with a flat circular piece of wood, thus preventing all danger of its leaving the surface of the ice. Subscribers will be admitted on presentation of their tickets.

The paper duly reported the results of the match:

HOCKEY — At the Rink last night a very large audience gathered to witness a novel contest on the ice. The game of hockey, though much in vogue on the ice in New England and other parts of the United States, is not much known here, and in consequence the game of last evening was looked forward to with great interest. Hockey is played usually with a ball, but last night, in order that no accident should happen, a flat block of wood was used, so that it should slide along the ice without rising, and thus going among the spectators to their discomfort. The game is like Lacrosse in one sense — the block having to go through flags placed about 8 feet apart in the same manner as the rubber ball — but in the main the old country game of shinny gives the best idea of hockey. The players last night were eighteen in number — nine on each side — and were as follows: — Messrs. Torrance (captain), Meagher, Potter, Goff, Barnston, Gardner, Griffin, Jarvis and Whiting. Creighton (captain), Campbell, Campbell, Esdaile, Joseph, Henshaw, Chapman, Powell and Clouston. The match was an interesting and well-contested affair, the efforts of the players exciting much merriment as they wheeled and dodged each other, and notwithstanding the brilliant play of Captain Torrance’s team Captain Creighton’s men carried the day, winning two games to the single of the Torrance nine. The game was concluded about half-past nine, and the spectators then adjourned well satisfied with the evening’s entertainment.

It would not have been a hockey game, of course, without a fight breaking out. The fisticuffs were not on the ice, but broke out after the game when players encountered hostile members of the skating club angry that the ice had been denied to them for their usual skate.

 

1859

The Great Slave Auction

Enormous fortunes could be made in the antebellum southern United States on plantations farmed by slave labour; rice, tobacco, and cotton millionaires abounded. one such wealthy slave-owning family were the Butlers of Philadelphia who held lands in the Carolinas and Georgia. When one of them went bankrupt from his gambling debts, the creditors could be satisfied only by the selling of hundreds of his Georgian slaves. On March 2, 1859 the largest single slave auction in US history took place in Savannah Georgia with 436 men, women and children put up for sale. The auction attracted considerable interest and the proceeds from the sale of humans brought in $303,850. The highest bid for a family, a mother and her five grown children, was for $6,180. The highest price for an individual was $1,750 whereas the lowest price was $250.

The following quote from a contemporary observer reveals the pathos of the scene:

‘Elisha,’ chattel No. 5 in the catalogue, had taken a fancy to a benevolent looking middle-aged gentleman, who was inspecting the stock, and thus used his powers of persuasion to induce the benevolent man to purchase him, with his wife, boy and girl, Molly, Israel and Sevanda, chattels Nos. 6, 7 and 8. The earnestness with which the poor fellow pressed his suit, knowing, as he did, that perhaps the happiness of his whole life depended on his success, was interesting, and the arguments he used were most pathetic. He made no appeal to the feelings of the buyer; he rested no hope on his charity and kindness, but only strove to show how well worth his dollars were the bone and blood he was entreating him to buy.

‘Look at me, Mas’r; am prime rice planter; sho’ you won’t find a better man den me; no better on de whole plantation; not a bit old yet; do mo’ work den ever; do carpenter work, too, little; better buy me, Mas’r; I’se be good sarvant, Mas’r. Molly, too, my wife, Sa, fus rate rice hand; mos as good as me. Stan’ out yer, Molly, and let the gen’lm’n see.’

Molly advances, with her hands crossed on her bosom, and makes a quick short curtsy, and stands mute, looking appealingly in the benevolent man’s face. But Elisha talks all the faster.

‘Show mas’r yer arm Molly – good arm dat mas’r – she do a heap of work mo’ with dat arm yet. Let good mas’r see yer teeth Molly – see dat mas’r, teeth all reg’lar, all good – she’m young gal yet. Come out yer Israel, walk aroun’ an’ let the gen’lm’n see how spry you be.’

Then, pointing to the three-year-old girl who stood with her chubby hand to her mouth, holding on to her mother’s dress, and uncertain what to make of the strange scene.

‘Little Vardy’s on’y a chile yet; make prime gal by-and-by. Better buy us mas’r, we’m fus’ rate bargain” – and so on. But the benevolent gentleman found where he could drive a closer bargain, and so bought somebody else.

National “Cursed Soldiers” Remembrance Day

Pity Poland, living between two historical enemies, Germany and Russia. In the late 1700s Poland ceased to exist, being partitioned like salami and divided between Russia and various German-speaking lands. It regained its independence after World War I, only to be threatened by a Soviet invasion in 1919. Twenty years later it was again invaded from east and west and divided between Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. The conquerors immediately tried to liquidate Poland’s leadership class, singling out military officers, politicians, academics, doctors and intellectuals for murder. The Poles fought back with an underground army and with exiles serving with the western Allies.

When the war ended in 1945 Poland found that it was not going to be free. It was occupied by the Red Army and a Communist government imposed on its people. The Soviet occupiers and their Polish collaborators were resisted for years after the war by a number of guerrilla groups, known collectively as the “Cursed Soldiers”; cursed because they were doomed to fight on without hope of winning or being aided by the outside world. The Underground Polish Army, the Home Army Resistance, Freedom and Justice, and the National Military Union attacked Soviet military units, police stations, prisons and concentration camps but one by one they were tracked down and eliminated, with the last resister killed in 1963.

Today these patriots are honoured with their own day of remembrance by an independent Poland.

One of the worst mistakes made by the British government was to allow the partition of their Empire of India in 1947 and the establishment of a religiously-centred Pakistan and a secular Hindu-majority India. This partition was far-too hasty — the result of violence by pro-independence fighters and the new Labour administration’s dislike of imperialism — and ill-conceived. For that, one must also blame the short-sightedness of Mahatma Gandhi and the cleverness of Muslim League leader Muhammed Ali Jinnah. Gandhi and his Congress Party had stupidly opposed Indian cooperation in World War II and the struggle against the Japanese takeover of Asia, while Jinnah and the Muslim League supported the war effort. When the time came for British withdrawal, Jinnah was owed favours and Gandhi was most definitely not.

The result of partition was immediate sectarian violence and a transfer of populations that took as many as a million lives. In the seventy-plus years since, secular India has (largely) prospered, while Pakistan, which enshrined sharia in its constitution, is a corrupt failed state, prone to coups and assassinations, and a culture that supports acts of terror against non-Muslims. Which brings us to February 29, 2016, and the execution of Mumtaz Qadri.

Mr Qadri was a member of an elite police squad and a bodyguard of the governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer. Taseer had bravely spoken out against Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, which called for the death penalty for anyone speaking ill of the Islamic prophet Muhammed, and had urged a pardon for a Christian woman, Asia Bibi, who had been condemned to hang for that crime. This opinion offended Mr Qadri, who registered his disapproval on January 4, 2011 by shooting Mr Taseer 27 times with an assault rifle.

This assassination pretty much ended any thoughts that a liberal opinion might be tolerated in Pakistan, especially as Clement Shahbaz Bhatti, the Minority Affairs minister and the only Christian in the Pakistani cabinet, was also murdered shortly thereafter for expressing similar support for Ms Bibi. Prominent Muslim clerics refused to conduct Taseer’s funeral, and Islamic groups warned that anyone who expressed grief over the assassination could also be murdered. “No Muslim should attend the funeral or even try to pray for Salman Taseer or even express any kind of regret or sympathy over the incident,” said the Jamaat-e-Ahl-e-Sunnat party who also decreed that anyone who expressed sympathy over the death of a blasphemer was also committing blasphemy

Mumtaz Qadir was showered with rose petals on the way to his trial; 300 lawyers offered to defend him pro bono. Lawyers in the capital city went on strike to protest his conviction (which was supposedly held on February 29 to prevent his death from being celebrated as an anniversary) and 100,000 mourners attended his funeral. His grave is now a pilgrimage site.

Asia Bibi was freed by the Supreme Court after world-wide protests and lives incognito in Canada, still under threat of a bounty placed on her head by a Pakistani Muslim cleric.

2013

Pope Benedict XVI abdicates

Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger (b. 1927) was elected Supreme Pontiff in 2005 taking the regnal name Benedict XVI, succeeding St John Paul II. For years he had been the Catholic Church’s leading theological thinker, a proponent of taking hard lines on doctrine and tradition. He championed the virtues of the Tridentine Mass and the importance of beauty and art, and was an opponent of postmodernism and moral relativity.

His resignation caught the world by surprise; no pope had stepped down voluntarily since the late 13th century when Celestine V was tricked or bullied into doing so by his unscrupulous successor Boniface VIII. (Gregory XII had been muscled out of his office by the Council of Constance in 1415.) The pitiable condition of John Paul’s later years in office seem to have been the chief motivation for Benedict’s resignation.

Benedict continues to live in the Vatican in a sort of ambiguous  state with the title of Pope Emeritus. He surrendered his papal seal; he no longer wears the symbolic red shoes or papal headgear but he retains the name Benedict and the traditional white cassock.

1902

The execution of “Breaker” Morant

On this date two Australian officers of the Bushveldt Carbineers serving with the British army in the Boer War were executed by firing squad for war crimes. The trial remains controversial to this day.

By 1901, the major Boer armies had been defeated but a nasty guerrilla war continued in the countryside. Excelling at this kind of conflict was Harry “Breaker” Morant, an Englishman who had migrated to Australia where he gained a reputation as an expert horseman and bush ranger. Serving with him in a light cavalry regiment tasked with tracking down Boer commandos was Australian lieutenant Peter Handcock. Acting out of what seems to have been a desire to avenge the death of their commanding officer, the two participated in a number of murders of unarmed prisoners. After being reported by their own men, Morant and Handcock were arrested, tried and executed. Despite a confession, subsequent books, a play, and a popular movie made the two out to be innocent victims of the British army anxious to conceal an official “take no prisoners” policy.

To the Rev. Canon Fisher
Pretoria
The night before we’re shot
We shot the Boers who killed and mutilated
our friend (the best mate I had on Earth)
Harry Harbord Morant
Peter Joseph Handcock

Historians are now convinced that the men were guilty of the crimes for which they suffered but “Breaker” Morant remains an Australian folk hero.

1815

Napoleon Bonaparte escapes from Elba

Since crowning himself Emperor of the French in 1804, Napoleon had involved Europe in a series of endless wars: the Wars of the Third Coalition, the Fourth Coalition, Fifth Coalition, and Sixth Coalition; the Peninsular War; the invasion of Russia. Millions had died or been maimed because of his grandiose ambitions. Finally, he overplayed his hand and was driven back into France, at the mercy of the armies of his enemies. In 1814 he was obliged to step down with this statement:

The Allied Powers having declared that Emperor Napoleon was the sole obstacle to the restoration of peace in Europe, Emperor Napoleon, faithful to his oath, declares that he renounces, for himself and his heirs, the thrones of France and Italy, and that there is no personal sacrifice, even that of his life, which he is not ready to do in the interests of France.
Done in the palace of Fontainebleau, 11 April 1814.

Napoleon was exiled to the small island of Elba off the west coast of Italy. He retained his imperial title and busied himself with reforming and developing his tiny domain but ambition got the better of him again. On this date in 1815, he escaped the island and sailed to France to regain the throne on which the Bourbon dynasty once again sat. The forces sent to arrest him proclaimed their loyalty to him and he entered Paris in triumph on March 20, to resume, for one hundred days, his abandoned throne and to plunge Europe into war once more.