Apart from the gods, the Anglo-Saxons believed in many other classes of supernatural beings, including Elves and Dwarves. These beings were regarded with wary respect: they could occasionally be helpful to people, but they were more likely to do them harm.
This was something particularly associated with Elves (‘ælf’ in Old English). There were charms against ‘elf shot’, the invisible darts the Elves could shoot into people that caused sudden illnesses, and propitiatory rituals that were practised near sites associated with Elves. While Elves were clearly seen as dangerous, there must have been good fortune associated with them also, since so many parents gave their children names using the ‘ælf’ prefix, ‘Ælfred’ the Great not least among them, and it seems passing unlikely that parents would name their sons after implacably malevolent beings.
Dweorgas (dwarves) were creatures of barrows and mountains, smiths who might help people if aid was sought from them. Less fickle than the Elves, the service of a Dwarf might be bought by offering the Dwarf something he wanted in exchange for his skills as a smith. But woe to you if you tried to cheat a Dwarf of his due: their memories of double dealing were long and they liked revenge served cold.
Oliver Haugh became addicted to cocaine infused toothache medicine.
The young Wilbur Wright, a brilliant scholar and athlete, seemed destined to leave his little home town, go to Yale University and embark on a famous career. Then, when playing an ice hockey match, a player from the opposing team smashed Wilbur in the face with his hockey stick, knocking out most of his upper front teeth. Wilbur suffered months of pain, followed by bouts of depression and withdrawal. Yale was out of the question. What’s more, their mother, Katharine, was ill with tuberculosis. Wilbur became her carer and, having retreated to the confines of the house, he read and read and read.
The 15-year-old boy who smashed Wilbur Wright’s face and changed the history of aviation grew up to become one of Ohio’s most notorious serial killers. Oliver Crook Haugh was three years younger than Wilbur and lived a couple of blocks away, but was known as the neighbourhood bully. It’s not clear whether he meant to hit Wilbur, but the course of his later life suggests it was a premeditated strike. While a bully, Haugh was not a steretypical oaf: he qualified as a doctor and began practising in Dayton, Ohio (presumably Wilbur was not among his patients).
Obsessed with Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Haugh began experimenting on himself, seeking to prove that “two beings can exist in one body”. He also experimented with marriages – he had at least nine, many simultaneously, and four of his wives did not survive the union – and, as there were unexplained deaths among his patients, started to move around, opening up new practices, then moving on when the questions became too pressing. Haugh returned to Dayton in 1905, moving in with his parents and brother.
But then he learned that his parents had cut him out of their will. On the night of 5 November 1905, the Haugh family home caught fire. Oliver Haugh escaped, but his parents and brother did not. In the subsequent trial, Haugh pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity but he was found guilty and sentenced to death. He was executed by electric chair on 19 April 1907. At the time of Haugh’s death, Wilbur was in Europe, negotiating with interested governments over the sale of the brothers’ technology.
My list of the top 5 overlooked and/or largely forgotten historical fiction novels is up now on Shepherd, the book recommendation site. If you want to know what’s on my list, follow this link!
The electrocution of Western Union Lineman John Feeks became part of the propaganda during the Current War.
Edison had invented the light bulb, but he needed to devise a system to distribute electricity to houses and businesses so that they could use his light bulbs. The system he developed used DC (direct current), a low voltage, high current system. George Westinghouse, using ideas developed by Nikola Tesla, came up with a competing system that used AC (alternating current), which used high voltages and low currents.
The battle was on. Tesla had first worked for Edison, but Edison had dismissed his ideas as impractical. However, it soon became clear that the AC system was superior, particularly over longer distances, allowing electricity to be run to remote and rural districts. To fight back, Edison started a campaign highlighting the safety implications of a high-voltage system, going so far as to demonstrate its dangers by inviting journalists to watch when he got a stray dog to stand on a sheet of tin attached to an AC generator. The switch was flipped and the dog yelped and died.
Further support for Edison’s view that AC was a lethal technology was provided when it was used in the first execution of a prisoner by the electric chair. On 6 August 1890, William Kemmler, who had been convicted of murdering his common-law wife, was strapped to a chair and electrocuted. But the first shock did not kill him; it required a second, higher voltage burst to finish Kemmler off, although this set his hair and coat on fire.
Despite Edison’s attempts to tie AC to Kemmler’s execution and brand it dangerous, the system’s superiority prevailed, and in one of Edison’s few failures, the world today runs on AC.
Buzz Aldrin working outside the Gemini 12 spacecraft in Earth orbit
On 4 October 1957, the Soviet Union stunned the world, and in particular the United States, by launching Sputnik 1 into orbit. On 12 April 1961, the Soviet Union sent Yuri Gagarin into space and brought him safely back to earth. The space race had begun and the Soviet Union had a clear lead. In a time when the world was locked into a confrontation between the communist Soviet bloc and the West, the propaganda advantage in leading the race into space was immense.
In response, on 25 May 1961 President John F. Kennedy asked Congress to commit the nation to, “before this decade is out, […] landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth”. Following Kennedy’s assassination, this pledge became sacrosanct. To catch up with the Soviet lead, the Americans planned a series of manned spacecraft, beginning with the Mercury rockets crewed by a single astronaut, going on to the two-man Gemini missions that pioneered many of the technologies and techniques necessary for a flight to the Moon, and culminating with the three-man Apollo programme designed to take men to the Moon. Despite the Apollo 1 disaster, when three astronauts were killed in the Command Module during testing on the launch pad when a fire broke out, by the late 1960s the American space programme had overtaken the Soviets. Now all that remained was to fulfil Kennedy’s pledge.
Sailing back from Europe aboard the good ship Quaker City, a fellow traveller showed Samuel Clemens (the real name of Mark Twain) a photograph of his sister, Olivia. Of course, Twain later said it was love at first sight – it wouldn’t be nearly so good a story otherwise – but nevertheless he accepted an invitation to visit the home of his shipboard companion and there met, in the flesh, Olivia Langdon, the daughter of a wealthy merchant family which was also ardently abolitionist: her father was a conductor on the Underground Railroad, the network of routes and safe houses that helped slaves escape to freedom. Clemens soon fell in love with her, but Olivia turned down his proposal. A devout Christian, she would reform the hard-drinking, hard gambling son of the Mississippi, and agreed to their corresponding. Clemens agreed, thinking that by doing so “she would unwittingly dig a matrimonial pit and end by tumbling into it”.
Olivia’s parents were hardly reassured when they sought the opinions of Clemens’ friends. He was, they reported, an unsettled rover “who got drunk oftener than was necessary”. But then, that was what Clemens had already told them. At least he was honest in his self reporting.
It was this honesty that won over Olivia’s parents, and the object of Clemens’ love herself fell into the pit of correspondence between them (over 180 letters). Samuel Clemens and Olivia Langdon were engaged in February 1869 and married the following year. Livy became his editor and first reader; a vital influence in his work. After Livy died, in 1904, Clemens wrote a story of the first human couple, Adam and Eve. In the story, when Eve dies, Adam says, “Wheresoever she was, there was Eden.” They were words for his wife too.
It’s quite something to see the book that you’ve worked on for so long rolling off the presses – but that is what I did last Thursday. I went with Granta’s publishing director, Bella Lacey, to CPI Books in Kent to visit their plant and to watch the printing of all the 5,000 hardbacks that were to be printed for the first print run of Warrior: A Life of War in Anglo-Saxon Britain.
Having heard for so many years about the death of manufacturing industry in Britain, it was great to see a factory, employing 150 people, that has gone from strength to strength. Indeed, talking to Mark, the sales director, who took us round the plant, we learned that they have had to employ more people to cope with the demand. Because of their ability to print anywhere from one to a million books, the very quick turnaround they provide from receiving the files to printing the books, and the much lower transportation costs, CPI has turned back the tide of jobs flowing to China. The presses are rolling 24 hours a day, six days a week, with the company producing between two and three million books a week!
We were taken through the whole print cycle, from the production of the print type for 32 pages of the book (which is why books are produced in multiples and factors of 32), through to printing, folding, cutting, binding and covering the books. For the last stage, we got to see Warrior itself go from a shrink wrapped pile of bound pages to the fully jacketed finished product, ready to go off to the booksellers. It was a fascinating and enlightening day: my thanks to Granta and CPI Books for making it possible. Here are some photos of the process.
Bella inspecting the photo typeset
The typeset from which the book is printed.
Pages being printed.
Printed pages running through the production line.
Pages being made ready for cutting.
Pages now cut into 32 page sections ready for binding.
All the printed sections of a book, ready for binding.
One of the huge rolls of paper used to print books.
Warrior, with its cover on, ready for it to be bound tightly.
The next pallet of Warriors, waiting to be bound.
An author with his books (the gentleman behind has seen it all before!).
Printed Warriors, ready for the final stages of binding.
Finished copy of Warrior. Now all it needs is its jacket.
Putting on the jackets.
Jacketed and bound copies of Warrior rolling off to be stacked, ready for shipping.
Notice how the hardback cover gradually settles under its own weight.
Author and the final product: a printed, bound and covered book.
8 copies of Warrior, ready to be stacked on the pallet for shipping.
As a teenager in the late ’70s and early ’80s I remember attending quite a few house parties, with varying amounts of parental supervision. But, so far as I can see, teenagers today don’t hold house parties. Is it because their parents, having attended house parties themselves when they were younger, are saying, “Absolutely not!” Knowing what went on at some of those parties (and the state of the house afterwards), that’s certainly what I would say if any of my sons intimated they wanted to have a house party. So, are house parties a thing of the past or are they still going on?
