Christmas Every Day

1918 The end of the War to End All War

The Great War, or the First World War, was the most hideous conflict yet to plague mankind (though that distinction only lasted 20 years). The millions of casualties had to be gathered, identified, and buried. (A splendid movie dealing with how the French handled the challenge is 1989’s  Life and Nothing But with the great Philippe Noiret.) The British Empire and Commonwealth’s War Graves Commission decided that the bodies should be interred close to where they fell and should be commemorated with a standard headstone, regardless of rank. Families of the dead were invited to add a personal tribute on the memorial. 

Canada’s Dream Shall Be of Them by Eric McGeer is a collection of epitaphs from Canadian graves on the Western Front. These are words from another age, written for soldiers born in the 1880s and 1890s to parents born between the 1850s and 1870s. They provide a priceless glimpse at a lost world whose ideas of grief and loss may seem strange to children of the 21st century.

1914 The birth of Hedy Lamarr

Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was born in Vienna and from a young age attracted attention because of her good looks. In her teens she began getting parts in movies, most notable of which was 1933’s Ecstasy with its notorious sexually-charged scenes. By 1937 she had ditched Europe, her rich husband (she would ditch five others before she gave up matrimony), and her birth name, henceforth adopting “Hedy Lamarr”.

In Hollywood, Lamarr was billed as “the world’s most beautiful woman” and most of her roles were meant to capitalize on that claim. Among a number of duds and flops, she acquitted herself well in Algiers (1938) with Charles Boyer, and Samson and Delilah with Victor Mature (1949). Her stardom faded in the 1950s and by 1958 she had made her last film.

These days Lamarr is mostly remembered for a spiteful little lawsuit against Mel Brooks for naming one of his characters Hedley Lamarr, and for her invention of a frequency-hopping guidance system for a torpedo, a discovery which led to secure WiFi, GPS and Bluetooth. Her last years were spent in sad isolation.

Despite her classic features, Ms Lamarr never set my heart aflutter. There was something a little too artificial and reserved about her screen presence. If I were to list film goddesses in order of swoon-worthiness I would do it thusly:

1. Merle Oberon, The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934)
2. Anita Ekberg, La Dolce Vita (1960)
3. Monica Bellucci, Malèna (2000)
4. Sophia Loren, Sunflower (1970)
5. Ewa Aulin, Candy (1968)

644 The Assassination of Caliph Umar

The death of Muhammed, the founder of the Islamic faith, in 632 led to a period of succession quarrels within the young movement. The claims of Ali, nephew and son-in-law of Muhammed, were set aside in the election of the first three caliphs”, or “Successors”. Abu Bakr, Muhammed’s father-in-law, was the first chosen; he was successful in expanding Islam throughout the Arabian peninsula. By the time he died in 634, he had appointed Umar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb as the next caliph.

Umar was born c. 583 in Mecca and initially resisted Muhammed and his new religion. After his conversion in 616, he became a firm follower and was among those who migrated from his home town to Medina in 622. He rose high in the estimation of the Muslim elite and helped secure the choice of Abu Bakr. As caliph he proved an excellent administrator; under his guidance Islam continued its rapid expansion.

While worshipping in a Medina mosque, Umar was attacked by Abu Lu’lu’a Firuz, a Persian slave who stabbed him seven times with a poison knife before committing suicide. The motives for the killing are still a subject of debate. In some accounts the assassin was a resentful Christian; in others he was a “fire-worshipper” or Zoroastrian. Some say he was the tool of a larger group of conspirators; others say he hated Umar for supporting the confiscation of too large a proportion of his wages; still others say that Persian animosity to Arabs propelled the deed.

The death of Umar did not end the turbulence of early Islamic politics. The next two caliphs, Uthman and Ali, were also murdered.

Britain abandons France

On the 5th of November 1800, it was settled by the privy-council, that in consequence of the Irish Union, the royal style and title should be changed on the 1st of January following—namely, from “George III, by the grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith;” to “George III, by the grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith.” And thus the title of king of France, which had been borne by the monarchs of England for four hundred and thirty-two years—since the forty-third year of the reign of Edward III —was ultimately abandoned.

It was the Salic law [forbidding a female to inherit or pass on a claim to the French throne] which had excluded Edward from the inheritance of France; but Queen Elizabeth I claimed the title, nevertheless, asserting that if she could not be queen, she would be king of France. During the war between England and Spain, in the time of Queen Elizabeth, commissioners were appointed on both sides to discuss peace. The Spanish commissioners proposed that the negotiations should be carried on in the French tongue, observing sarcastically, that “the gentlemen of England could not be ignorant of the language of their fellow-subjects, their queen being queen of France as well as of England.” “Nay, in faith, gentlemen,” drily replied Dr. Dale, one of the English commissioners, “French is too vulgar for a business of this importance; we will therefore, if you please, rather treat in Hebrew, the language of Jerusalem, of which your master [Philip II] calls himself king, and in which you must, of course, be as well skilled as we are in French.”

Despite the abandonment of the claim to France the motto of the British monarch outside of Scotland (where the motto is different) is in French – “Dieu et mon droit” – as is the motto of the Order of the Garter – “Honi soit qui mal y pense”.

1818 Death of Sir Samuel Romilly

Samuel Romilly was born in London in 1757 to descendants of French Protestants who had fled the persecutions of Louis XIV. He entered the legal profession in which he rose to renown and wealth. Romilly’s sympathies were always on the side of reform. During the 1780s he made the acquaintance of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot and he had high hopes for the French Revolution but its increasing radicalism and violence ultimately dismayed him.

Romilly’s brilliance and oratorical skills won him the patronage of influential politicians and when he entered Parliament in 1808 he was made Solicitor General. He was a fierce opponent of the slave trade and a firm supporter of the attempts by William Wilberforce to abolish that institution but his main contribution as a reformer was to amend laws to which the death penalty was attached.

Since the sixteenth century England had passed legislating mandating execution not just for crimes of murder or treason but for far more trivial offences. By 1800 there were over 200 offences for which death was the mandatory sentence: theft of goods worth more than 12 pence, wrecking a fish pond, cutting down a young tree, keeping the company of gypsies, or impersonating a Chelsea Pensioner. Romilly’s efforts resulted in a gradual abolition of many of these statutes. (Britain’s last execution was in 1964 though the death penalty was abolished only in 1998.)

In October 1818 Romilly’s wife Anne died and a few days later, in a paroxysm of grief, he cut his own throat.