Boy, we missed some anniversaries this year
Before giving 2016 a hearty kick into the past tense, we have unfinished business. We’ve heard a lot about the Battle of the Somme, Shakespeare’s death and England winning the World Cup, but many anniversaries passed this year without any acknowledgement except, perhaps, in the most recherche corners of cyberspace.
That’s a shame. They are all significant stitches in the rich tapestry of history. Here’s my list of 10 that we should have remembered.
The Great Famine, 1316
Across Europe it didn’t stop raining from the spring of 1315 to the summer of 1317. Crops failed; millions of peasants starved to death. Cannibalism was rife and children were abandoned (the Hansel and Gretel legend, tarted up centuries later by the Brothers Grimm, probably dates from this time). And if you survived the Great Famine, the Black Death lay in wait 20 years later. Has there ever been a nastier century than the 14th?
‘No-one saw nuffink’, 1966
Fifty years ago the gangster Ronnie Kray sauntered into the Blind Beggar pub in Whitechapel, east London, and shot dead George Cornell. A member of the rival Richardson gang, Cornell had unwisely called Kray a ‘‘fat poof’’. Although Cornell had been drinking with companions, the police were dismayed to find that, in time-honoured East End gangland fashion, ‘‘no-one saw nuffink’’. It would be more than two years before Scotland Yard assembled enough evidence to arrest the Krays and 20 of their accomplices - at which point the barmaid of the Blind Beggar miraculously recovered her memory sufficiently to identify Ronnie Kray as Cornell’s murderer.
Freedom of the Press, 1766
As the British press faces the possible imposition of Section 40 and its catastrophic economic and political consequences, it’s worth recalling that other countries have had laws guaranteeing a free press for centuries. The Swedes led the way, passing a Freedom of the Press Act in 1766 that made censorship illegal and ensured that nearly all state documents would be publicly available. It’s still a revered cornerstone of Sweden’s constitution.
The first ghetto, 1516
The dubious honour of coining the word ‘‘ghetto’’ belongs to Venice, the most enlightened of Renaissance cities. It passed a law 400 years ago compelling Jews to live in a small area of the city. The restriction lasted nearly 200 years until Napoleon’s invading army reunited the ghetto with the main city. At least it inspired The Merchant of Venice.
The year without a summer, 1816
A volcanic eruption caused such low temperatures that 1816 became known as ‘‘the year without a summer’’. Happily, however, it produced a remarkable literary harvest. Byron, John Polidori, Shelley and his future wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, gathered in a dark, cold villa beside a rainswept Lake Geneva to tell each other macabre tales. Three masterpieces came out of this morbid Romantic brainstorm: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Polidori’s The Vampyre and Byron’s apocalyptic poem Darkness.
Jack London, 1916
It’s a pity that so few people today read the pungent, punchy prose of Jack London, the American writer who died 100 years ago, aged 40. In 1902 London came to London. Dressing himself in secondhand rags he lived the life of an East End vagrant - sleeping in workhouses or rough on the streets - then wrote a shocking chronicle, The People of the Abyss, portraying the degradation of the forgotten underclass barely surviving in what was then the world’s richest city. The book inspired George Orwell to make similar excursions 30 years later.
Kaap Hoorn, 1616
Am I the only idiot who thought that the name Cape Horn referred to the shape of the land at the foot of South America? It doesn’t. When the intrepid Dutch mariner Willem Schouten discovered and sailed round it 400 years ago, opening up a priceless trading route to the Pacific, he named it after Hoorn, his home port in the Netherlands. This year the Dutch and Chileans held joint celebrations of Schouten’s epic voyage.
Stari Most, 1566
Commissioned by Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman bridge at Mostar in Bosnia was the world’s largest man-made arch when it was completed 450 years ago and a thing of wonder for centuries. Then, on an infamous November day in 1993, Croatian forces destroyed it, allegedly because they wanted to obliterate cultural objects symbolising peaceful coexistence with the Bosnians. A decade later it was painstakingly rebuilt.
The Triumph of Cnut, 1016
Absurdly we have commemorated the 950th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings but completely overlooked the 1000th anniversary of an even more momentous and turbulent year in English history: 1016, the year of three kings. The army of the all-conquering Danish warlord Cnut (or Canute, if you went to school before about 1980) swept across the country in classic Viking fashion: raping, pillaging, and dethroning monarchs wherever they found them - first Aethelred the Unready, then his son, Edmund Ironside. Finally, Cnut (still only 21) was crowned king, and proved far more successful at running a country than he did at turning back tides. He reigned for nearly 20 years.
Bigger than Jesus, 1966
Not quite what John Lennon said 50 years ago in a notorious Evening Standard newspaper interview with Maureen Cleave, but close enough. Referring to the Beatles, Lennon declared: ‘‘We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first rock’n’roll or Christianity.’’ Half a century on, the jury’s still out. Few people in the United Kingdom go to church these days, but even fewer buy Beatles records. - The Times