Classic tale on the rails
QUESTION Was The Railway Children plagiarised from another novel?
The Railway Children, by the prolific children’s author edith Nesbit, was published in 1906. The most famous passage in the book features the three children, Bobbie, Peter and Phyllis, saving a train from crashing into a landslide by waving warning flags made from the girls’ red flannel petticoats.
In 2011, it emerged that this scenario bore a close resemblance to one found in a book called The house By The Railway, which was published in 1896 and serialised in a popular magazine in 1904.
A copy of the work, by Ada J. Graves, had been discovered by her granddaughter, Anne hall-Williams, as she cleared out her father’s possessions after his death.
There are a number of similarities in the two works. Both feature middle- class children in straitened circumstances who move with their mother to a house in the countryside near a railway.
In The Railway Children, the family’s move follows the arrest of their father on suspicion of spying; in The house By The Railway, the father has died.
Defenders of Nesbit point to the fact that the dramatic spread of the railways across Britain from the 1830s made it inevitable there would be children’s fiction written about them and so such coincidences were possible.
Others suggest the scene with the petticoats was inspired by the Northallerton to Thirsk train disaster of 1892.
Signalman James holmes had reported himself unfit for duty following the death of his infant daughter two nights before, but he was told he could not be replaced.
he fell asleep and ten people died in the crash that ensued after one train crashed into another train waiting on the points.
Nesbit and her husband hubert Bland campaigned on behalf of holmes, who was tried for manslaughter.
he was found guilty, but released — to cheers in the court — as he was considered to have been punished enough.
Margaret Leeman, Ely, Cambs.
QUESTION Did the German armed forces have chaplains in the field during World Wars I and II?
DURING World War I, there were 1,800 Protestant and 1,700 Catholic military chaplains, designated as senior officials, but without rank or insignia.
A provost (brigadier equivalent) was based at each army HQ, a senior priest at corps HQ and a divisional priest at divisional HQ. A field senior priest supervised chaplains on the Western and later eastern fronts.
There were also 30 Jewish chaplains serving in the German army during World War I.
The chaplain’s primary responsibilities lay in arranging services, visiting field hospitals, helping with correspondence, arranging burials and distributing packages from home.
The German Reich tried to weaken the authority and influence of the churches. By 1942, there were just 480 Protestant chaplains and a similar number of Catholic chaplains — roughly a quarter of the numbers in World War I. There were, of course, no rabbis serving as military chaplains.
Chaplains were not in all branches of the military: Goering had forbidden them in the Luftwaffe and himmler saw them removed from the SS in 1941.
Dr Doris L. Bergen, author of Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement In The Third Reich, argued that the chaplains shared the same motives as those of ordinary Germans — they wanted to do a good job, make their families proud and serve their country. They also wanted to bring the word of God to men in the field and, in the case of Catholic chaplains, to deliver the sacraments to their co-religionists.
however, the author says, ‘their noble, personal and professional motives turned them into a legitimating force in a war of annihilation’. Alan D. Wright, Sheffield.
QUESTION The inventor Nikola Tesla said that if you understand the numbers three, six and nine, then you understand the universe. What did he mean by this?
NIKOLA TESLA was born in what is now Croatia in 1856 and went to the u.S. in 1884 to work for Thomas edison at the famous inventor’s Menlo Park laboratory in New Jersey.
he is known for his strange personality as well as his key contributions to science, including the design of the modern alternating current( AC) electricity supply system.
There is no known source for the quote about the numbers three, six and nine being key to the understanding of the universe, so he probably never said it.
however, the quote is similar to something he did say: ‘If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.’
Tesla had an obsessive compulsive personality. In later life, his symptoms became extreme, including a hatred of jewellery and round objects and a fixation on the number three. he never owned his own home, preferring to live in hotel rooms, supposedly all with numbers divisible by three. When he died in 1943, it was in room 3327 of the New Yorker hotel.
his fascination with the number three is probably the source of the quote.
Clearly, three does have significance in science: there are 360 degrees in a circle; three dimensions of space (height, width and depth); and three main types of matter (gaseous, liquid and solid).
however, you could equally argue the case for the number two. For example, cells and embryos develop following a binary pattern: 1,2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc.
James Cox, Loughborough, Leics.
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