Not-so-silly season
August is often a bloody, dangerous month
ANDREW ROBERTS
At least this August is not going to be dubbed “the silly season”. No one is going to find anything remotely “silly” about armed police on the streets, interest rates at their lowest since 1694, Donald Trump threatening not to stand by America’s Nato commitments, and the possibility of Chinese economic retaliation over the Hinkley Point nuclear reactor. The astonishing thing is that August was ever considered silly in the first place, since year after year it has been the month when great and often terrible events have taken place, and it should therefore be the very last time of the year that newspapers are filled with lightweight stories about surfing hamsters and “Man Bites Dog”.
Consider the evidence: the First World War broke out in August 1914, and 25 years later Adolf Hitler gave the order to invade Poland (late on August 31 1939, after originally planning the invasion for August 25). Hitler loved August: it was the month when President Hindenburg died in 1934, propelling him to power; when he mobilised the German armed forces during the Munich crisis of 1938; and when the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed in 1939. Both nuclear bombs were dropped within three days of each other in August 1945.
The Vietnam War was sparked by the Tonkin Gulf Incident in August 1964; Russia chose August to invade Czechoslovakia in 1968; Saddam Hussein launched his invasion of Kuwait in August 1990.
Shakespeare writes in The Tempest of “You sunburn’d sicklemen, of August weary”, but the Grim Reaper never seems to weary of these 31 days.
Historically, August has also been the month in which British rule ended in India, the Berlin Wall was erected, Nelson Mandela was arrested, the Cultural Revolution broke out, Martin Luther King called for mass civil disobedience, Mikhail Gorbachev suffered his coup attempt and Diana, Princess of Wales died.
It seems that ever since the month was named after Caesar Augustus, Julius Caesar’s nephew, interesting and important things have happened. But why? Might it be coincidental, with important things happening in every month pretty much equally, or might the fact that it’s often the hottest month have been part of the reason?
Heat was certainly a factor in the St Bartholomew Day’s Massacre on August 24 1572. Paris had been sweltering in fetid heat for three weeks and tempers were short when that terrible communal massacre of Protestants by Catholics took place. But high temperatures can hardly explain the August events in the era of air-conditioning.
Perhaps the reason that a “silly season” myth came about in Fleet Street was not because nothing happened in August, but the opposite. Maybe stories about somersaulting vicars and squirrels walking on their hind legs are given prominence precisely because of the horrors that so regularly occur during August – because there is a queasy suspicion that, behind the jollity of the holiday season, something sinister is lurking.