Christmas Every Day

1777 Death of Samuel Foote

The tastes of one age are not necessarily the tastes of another and this particularly applies to humour. What has the audience rolling in the aisles one year is yawned at the next. Dubbed the “English Aristophanes”, Samuel Foote (1720-1777) was once accounted the wittiest man of his age but now seldom merits even a footnote in the history of British literature.

Foote trained for the legal profession but he was a man of a light and careless disposition, more eager to spend money than to make it, preferring the pleasures of the tavern to those of the law courts. He soon ran through his inheritance and that of his wife, winding up for a spell in debtor’s prison. For lack of a better alternative he turned to the stage and after discovering that he had no talent for tragedy began a career in comedy. His satires such as An Englishman in Paris, Diversions of the Morning, and Taste won him a contemporary reputation but not always financial success.

What tickled the ribs of 18th-century London may be seen in this collection of Foote’s more famous bon mots:

While present one evening at the Lectures on the Ancients, adventured on by Charles Macklin, the lecturer hearing a buzz of laughter in a corner of the room, looked angrily in that direction, and perceiving Foote, said pompously: ‘You seem very merry, pray, do you know what I am going to say?’ ‘No,’ replied Foote, ‘do you?’

On another occasion, while dining at Paris with Lord Stormont, the host descanted volubly on the age of his wine, which was served out in rather diminutive decanters and glasses. ‘It is very small for its age,’ said Foote, holding up his glass.

‘Why do you hum that air?’ he said one day to a friend. ‘It for ever haunts me,’ was the reply. ‘No wonder,’ he rejoined, ‘you are for ever murdering it.’

A mercantile friend, who imagined he had a genius for poetry, insisted one day on reading to him a specimen of his verses, commencing with, ‘Hear me, O Phoebus and ye Muses Nine;’ then perceiving his auditor inattentive, exclaimed, ‘Pray, pray, listen.’ ‘l do,’ replied Foote, ‘nine and one are ten, go on.’

Having made a trip to Ireland, he was asked, on his return, what impression was made on him by the Irish peasantry, and replied that they gave him great satisfaction, as they settled a question which had long agitated his own mind, and that was, what became of the cast-off clothes of the English beggars. 

1951 The Johnny Bright Incident

The integration of African American players into professional and university sports was a long and painful struggle. One of the ugliest moments in this story took place on this date in 1951 in Stillwater, Oklahoma during a football game between the Bulldogs of Drake University and Oklahoma A&M College Aggies (now the Oklahoma State Cowboys).

Johnny Bright was a superb black athlete who had come to Drake on a track scholarship but who would eventually also star in basketball and football. During the 1951 season Bright, playing halfback and quarterback, was leading the nation in both rushing and passing, when they met the Aggies. It was no secret that the Oklahoma team meant to target Bright in some nasty way and within the first seven minutes of the game Bright had been knocked down by defensive lineman Wilbanks Smith, the last time with a clearly illegal blow to the face well behind the play and long after Bright had handed the ball off. Despite a broken jaw, Bright continued for a while, completing a touchdown pass before leaving the game.

The play was not penalized and nothing more may have been heard of the incident had not photographers from the Des Moines Register captured it on film. The Pulitzer Prize-winning shots caused a national scandal but neither Oklahoma A&M, the Mississippi Valley Conference or the NCAA took any action, causing Drake and Bradley University to withdraw from the league. 

Bright was named to the All-America team in 1951 and went on to a stellar career in Canadian football, playing an important part in the Edmonton Eskimos dynasty of the mid-1950s. Bright became a Canadian citizen and was a repected teacher and coach in Alberta before dying in 1983. Twenty-two years later Oklahoma State officially apologized to Drake for the incident.

1216 Death of King John

If there were a vote for England’s Most Unpopular King, the sure winner would be John (1167-1216). Other monarchs of that land have been crueller, more profligate, or unsuccessful, but none have combined high levels of nastiness, pettiness, and bumbling in the fashion of John. He was the youngest son of Henry II, founder of the Angevin empire, and Eleanor of Aquitaine, both significant political figures but failures as parents.  

In the constant warfare between his father, brothers, and mother, John remained loyal to Henry who came to consider him his favourite child and who tried to find territory for him to inherit. Late in Henry’s life as the king battled his oldest surviving son Richard Lionheart, John switched sides and betrayed his father.

During the reign of Richard (r. 1189-99), John proved equally duplicitous. While Richard was absent on the Third Crusade, John, who had been bribed into loyalty by Richard’s gift of a wealthy bride and considerable land holdings, quarrelled with royal officials and conspired with the wily Philip Augustus of France. When Richard, on his way home from the crusade, was held for ransom in Germany, John allied himself with the French and rebelled against his brother but was stripped of all his lands by Richard when the king was released.

On Richard’s death in 1199 and after a tussle with his nephew Arthur of Brittany, John assumed the throne of England. He was also ruler of that significant part of France that had been acquired by his father and brother but it required considerable military and diplomatic skills to keep that makeshift empire intact and John conspicuously lacked those abilities. Through a series of defeats in battle and political blunders, John proceeded to lose Normandy, and place the rest of his French holdings in jeopardy. At home, he feuded with the great barons, developing a reputation for lechery, greed, irreligion, and untrustworthiness.

In 1205 he initiated a quarrel with the Church by a disagreement over the choice of the next Archbishop of Canterbury. Innocent III, the most lordly of medieval popes, responded by placing England under the interdict, essentially excommunicating the entire country. Because Innocent had also personally excommunicated John, canon law permitted the pope to declare John deposed and turn the realm over to another Christian  king, in this case Philip of France. This encounter ended with John’s surrender, acceptance of the papal candidate, and surrender of his kingdom to Innocent III as a papal fief.

Equally humiliating for John was his forced signature on the Magna Carta, a charter of traditional English rights, presented to him by a coalition of his barons. This 1215 document is seen as the foundation of liberty in the English-speaking world. Though John later repudiated the Magna Carta and continued his war against his own political class, he was unsuccessful at everything in 1216. Dubbed “Lackland” and “Soft Sword”, John was so infamous that no English king in the past 800 years has borne his name.

A potpourri of historical events on this autumn day.

1081 Battle of Dyrrhachium

Normans under Robert Guiscard defeat a  Byzantine army under Alexios I Komnenos near modern-day Durrës, Albania. Guiscard, a mercenary and bandit, had made himself powerful in southern Italy and had carved himself a duchy out of lands won from Lombards, Byzantines and Muslims. His ambition of placing a son on the throne of Constantinople received a boost when his lance-wielding cavalry smashed the larger Byzantine force

1405 Birth of Enea Silvio Bartolomeo Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II

Pius II served as pope from 1458 to 1464. Before his election he was noted for his dissolute life and humanist scholarship but he underwent a moral conversion. His reign was marked by a call for a renewed crusade against the Turks, a letter to the Sultan refuting Islamic doctrine, and quarrels with the French.

1646 Martyrdom of Isaac Jogues

A Jesuit missionary to the natives of America, Jogues was captured by the Iroquois and mutilated before being rescued by Dutch merchants. He returned to France to recover and was granted a dispensation to continue administering the Eucharist despite his wounded hands. When he went back to Quebec continue his work he was captured again by the Mohawks and murdered. He and seven fellow Jesuit martyrs were canonized in 1930.

1977 Mysterious deaths of Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin

Baader and Ensslin were lovers and German leftist terrorists, leaders of the Red Army Faction which tormented West Germany with a series of arson attacks, murders, kidnappings and hijackings.  After their capture and conviction they were placed in strict isolation and confinement but somehow they and two other RAF militants managed (according to authorities) to kill themselves the same night in different prisons. The suspicion that they were murdered to prevent yet more attempts by their comrades to free them does not seem unlikely.

2007 Karachi bombing

Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s return to Pakistan from exile threatened the military regime of General Pervez Musharraf, so when a suicide bomber attacked a Bhutto rally, killing 180 and wounding 500 more, it was natural to blame the ruling junta. Later investigations pinned the blame on al-Qaeda. Bhutto would be assassinated by a similar attack two months later.

1881

Birth of P.G. Wodehouse

The greatest 20th-century wordsmith at work in the English language was Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse. Stand aside, Hemingway, Joyce, Nabokov and Churchill, you are as but tykes, tyros or tots in the shadow of P.G. Wodehouse.

After a brief stint as a banker, Wodehouse tried his hand at writing fiction in 1900 and never looked back. He became an enormously successful playwright on Broadway, and a screenwriter in the Golden Age of Hollywood, but his lasting fame and fortune came with writing short stories and novels of a comic nature. He became the creator of the Jeeves and Wooster saga, the chronicler of the strange deeds done at Blandings Castle, and the observer of that stylish member of the Drones Club, Psmith (the “p” is silent, as in “pshrimp”).

Consider these sentences: