DID YOU KNOW…?

Pole stars

During the 1920s there was a craze for pole-sitting, with individuals striving to see how long they could spend perched on top of a wooden pole. The star performer, who in 1930 sat on top of a 69-metre-high pole in Atlantic City for 49 days and 1 hour, was a former movie stunt man named Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly

(right). Towards the end of his career, Kelly calculated that he had spent 20,613 hours sitting on flagpoles, 1,400 of them in the rain.

Deadly judgment

A Confucian scholar dragged his own coffin into an audience with the first Ming emperor of China, Hongwu (reigned 1368–98), and climbed into it immediately after delivering a stinging critique of the ruler. Hongwu had decreed that anyone questioning his policies would be put to death, so the scholar expected instant execution. According to some sources, the emperor was so impressed by the man’s bravery that he spared the scholar and allowed him to leave the court.

Terrible titles

Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell’s epic novel set during the American Civil War and made into a famous Hollywood film of the same name (below left), might have been called, less impressively, Baa! Baa! Black Sheep. This was one of several options that the American novelist considered. She also had moments when she thought that Tote the Weary Load or Bugles Sang True would be catchy titles for her magnum opus.

Her final choice comes from a verse by the dissolute 1890s poet Ernest Dowson.

Nick Rennison, writer and journalist specialising in history