John, Paul, George and . . . Norman!

WHAT IFS THAT WOULD HAVE CHANGED HISTORY

Adrian Tinniswood’s enjoyable new book, The Long Weekend, tells the intriguing story of an accident at a shooting party in the winter of 1913.

The shoot took place at Welbeck abbey in nottinghamshire, the family seat of the duke of Portland. during the course of the afternoon, one of the men who was employed to load the guns accidentally tripped over, causing both barrels of his gun to go off.

The blast went within a couple of feet of the grandest guest, and thus narrowly missed killing him.

This particular guest was archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination by a Bosnian Serb in Sarajevo the following year is widely believed to have led to World War i. What if the archduke had been killed in that shooting accident at Welbeck abbey?

For the rest of his life, this question nagged away at the duke of Portland. ‘i have often wondered whether the Great War might not have been averted, or at least postponed, had the archduke met his death then and not at Sarajevo the following year,’ he wrote.

a similar story, triggering another great ‘what if?’, occurred 17 years later on a main road in Munich. i recounted it in my last book, One On One. On august 22, 1931, the 18-year-old John Scott-Ellis (later to become Lord Howard de Walden) was being taught to drive by his friendly landlord.

as Scott-Ellis made a right turn into Briennerstrasse in his little red Fiat, a pedestrian forgot to look left, causing the car to run into him.

‘although i was going very slowly, a man walked off the pavement, more or less straight into my car,’ recalled Scott-Ellis many years later. The pedestrian fell to his knees, but managed to heave himself up. ‘He was soon up and i knew that he wasn’t hurt.’

By this time, Scott-Ellis and his landlord had got out of the car and rushed to his aid. The pedestrian — in his early 40s and sporting a little square moustache — assured them that he was fine, shook their hands and strode off.

Being new to Munich, Scott-Ellis hadn’t recognised him, but he was told by his landlord that he was the controversial leader of a new political party, who went by the name of adolf Hitler.

Scott-Ellis died in 1999, aged 86. ‘For a few seconds, perhaps, i held the history of Europe in my rather clumsy hands,’ he reflected in old age. ‘He was only shaken up, but had i killed him, it would have changed the history of the world.’

and what of norman Chapman? i don’t suppose that name rings a bell with more than a handful of people. But if fate had taken a different turn, we would now remember the four Beatles as John, Paul, George . . . and norman.

For a few weeks in June 1960, norman was the drummer with The Beatles, and apparently a very good drummer, too. He was due to go to Hamburg with them, but a few days before they set off he received his call-up papers for national Service. This meant the others were obliged to replace him with Pete Best, who was himself replaced by ringo Starr.

it could also be argued that the career of another Beatle would never have got off the ground if Paul McCartney had not failed his first Latin GCE. Had he passed the exam, he would have been put up a year, to the Lower Sixth.

This in turn would have meant that he would not have been forced to remain in the remove and make friends with boys a year younger, such as George Harrison.

Closer to the present day, there is every reason to suppose that Jeremy Corbyn would never have become the Leader of the Opposition had one man remained sober three years before.

On February 22, 2012, Eric Joyce, Labour MP for Falkirk, drinking in the Strangers’ Bar of the House of Commons, turned on a group of Conservatives, saying the place was ‘too full of f ***** g Tories’. He then head-butted the Conservative MP for Pudsey and assaulted three others.

‘Unwittingly that night, the intoxicated Joyce set off a chain of events that would lead directly to Jeremy Corbyn’s election in the Labour leadership contest more than three years later,’ writes Corbyn’s biographer, rosa Prince.

BriEFLy: Joyce was suspended by the Labour Party for his behaviour and stood down as an MP. The selection procedure for his replacement became so marred in rumours of trades union interference that, in order to show his own independence from the unions, the then leader, Ed Miliband, vastly broadened the Labour electorate.

This in turn meant that a rank outsider, Jeremy Corbyn, won the leadership election.

a loader stumbling; a teenager driving; an exam failed; a politician drinking one too many. ‘We live by chance, and by chance are we governed,’ noted Seneca 2,000 years ago.