Attacking the Queen
On 13th June 1981, a tourist in London photographed the Queen of England reviewing her troops at the annual Trooping the Colour. Six shots rang out and the Queen’s horse shied. Members of the crowd, police and troops guarding the ceremony quickly subdued the shooter, who told them “I wanted to be famous. I wanted to be a somebody”.
On his return home, the tourist, Georg P. Uebel, developed his film and discovered the above picture, which he turned over to the British police. They used it to prosecute Marcus Sarjeant, an unemployed 17-year-old, inspired by the recent shootings of the Pope, Ronald Reagan and John Lennon, to attempt an assassination on the Queen. He only fired blanks, and the Treason Act sentenced to five years in prison, a sentence for what he did, not for what he might have done.
The picture was made public at his trial in May 1982 but did not attract that much attention. It was as LIFE magazine called it, “a misfired moment of minor note”. More shocking however was the fact that at the time of his arrest, Sarjeant had on him a tape noting his intent to attack the Queen again with a loaded weapon.
Sarjeant wrote to the Queen from prison to apologise, but he never received a reply. Released in October 1984, at the age of 20, he changed his name and disappeared into history, a mere footnote.
The Seddon Trial
In 1911, Frederick and Margaret Seddon were tried for the murder of Miss Eliza Barrow, their wealthy lodger. Miss Barrow’s death was originally certified as being due to natural causes. No suspicion was aroused until relatives enquired about her property and the money she was known to have had in her possession. Seddon explained that she had parted with her property to him for an annuity, and that he had found a sum of only 100 pounds in her possession. Two months later Miss Barrow’s body was exhumed, and it was found that arsenic was present in the remains.
What would be the greatest trial in London since Dr. Crippen stood in the same dock ensued. It went on for ten days at the Old Bailey. The defense–led by formidable Sir Edward Marshall-Hall–claimed arsenic comes from her medicine, while Seddon maintained that Ms Barrow might have drunk water from the dishes of flypaper placed in her room to keep away flies.
The jury convicted Seddon and acquitted his wife, although the evidence against him pressed just as heavily upon her. It was one of the few cases where one of the defendants was acquitted while the other was convicted on the same evidence. The deciding factor was the arrogant behavior of Frederick Seddon displayed in the court. A member of the Masons, Seddon appealed to Justice Bucknill who was a Grand Master Mason. Bucknill, moved to tears, said that the Masons will not tolerate murder, and to try to make his peace with God.
One of the consequences of the case was a law banning photography in the courtroom. During the trial, several photographs were taken of Mr. Seddon and his wife. One in particular, showing Mr. Justice Bucknill, with black cap on and his chaplain at his side, condemning the prisoner, was printed on the cover of the Daily Mirror on March 15th, 1912. The sensation caused by it led to questions in the House of Commons and a promise by the Home Secretary to change the law.
The Man Who Never Was
Early morning on the 1st of May 1943, a Spanish fisherman discovered a corpse clothed in British military attire which had washed ashore. Apparently a casualty of an airplane accident at sea, he had a briefcase chained to him. Identified as Major William Martin of the British Royal Marines, the body and the briefcase was demanded by the British Admiralty.
Spain, technically a neutral party during WWII, turned them in, but not before letting the Abwehr– the German intelligence organization– examine everything. Inside the suitcase was the letter from Sir Archibald Nye, vice chief of the Imperial General Staff to Sir Harold Alexander, the British commander in North Africa, which outlined the Allies’ plans to invade Europe from Sardinia, Corsica and Greece. This vital information was rushed to Berlin.
On May 12th, Hitler sent an order: “Measures regarding Sardinia and the Peloponnese take precedence over everything else,” diverting resources away from Sicily, through which the Allied Forces eventually invaded. This was because Germans had fallen for an elaborate deception: Major Martin never existed, and was part of a ruse named, “Operation Mincemeat”.
The British Intelligence procured the body of a 34-year-old man who had recently died with pneumonia, with lungs full of fluid as a drowned man’s would. To create the aura of authenticity, the corpse was given IDs, keys, personal letters, and other possessions such as overdue bills and a letter from his fiance.
Considering the deliberate efforts to protect the true identity of Major Martin at the time, and the wishes of his real family who granted permission to use the body on the condition that the man’s identity never be revealed, it is quite possible that we will never know the real name of Major Martin.
The Solvay Conference
In 1911, Ernest Solvay, the Belgian chemist and industrialist founded Conseil Solvay, the world’s first physics conference. Initially aimed at solving problems in physics and chemistry, the conferences are held every three years.
The above group photo was taken at the end of the October 1927 Fifth Solvay International Conference. The tensions were high: Einstein sparred with Heisenberg over the latter’s Uncertainty Principle. The attendees disagreed on the Copenhagen interpretation of atom, was promoted by a faction led by Niels Bohr, and opposed by more conservative faction lead by Albert Einstein. By the end of the conference, Bohr’s faction had prevailed.
First Row (l to r): Irving Langmuir, Max Planck, Marie Curie, Hendrik Lorentz, Albert Einstein, Pierre Langevin, Charles Eugene Guye, C. T. R. Wilson, Owen W. Richardson
Second Row (l to r): Peter Debye, Martin Knudson, W. Lawrence Bragg, Hans Kramer, Paul Dirac, Arthur Compton, Louis de Broglie, Max Born, Niels Bohr
Third Row (l to r): Auguste Piccard, Émile Henriot, Paul Ehrenfest, Edouard Herzen,Théophile de Donder, Erwin Schrodinger, Jules-Emile Vershaffelt, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, Ralph Howard Fowler, Leon Brillouin.
Seventeen of the twenty-nine attendees were or became Nobel Prize winners.
On Times Square
A cynical curmudgeon, protege of Henri Cartier Bresson and chronicler of post-war Hollywood, Dennis Stock–who died last week in Florida–was more famous for the iconic photograph he posed for Andreas Feininger. Stock’s own most famous photograph is probably that of James Dean hunched on the Times Square, ‘bearing the weight of a generation on his shoulders,’ according to Adam Gopnik writing for The New Yorker. The Independent has this to say:
“Though Stock prosaically titled it On Times Square, it was renamed Boulevard of Broken Dreams* and adorned thousands of student walls from the 1950s onwards. The image of Dean trudging through Times Square in the rain, his body reflected in a puddle, shoulders hunched, cigarette dangling from lip has become an enduring image of the lonesome outsider.
“Stock met Dean in 1955, even before his first film, East of Eden, had been released. They got on so well that he was asked by Nicholas Ray, director of Rebel Without a Cause, to be Dean’s dialogue coach. Stock once explained the reason for Dean’s haggard good looks. “He wasn’t a drinker. He smoked a lot but everyone did in those days. What he was was an insomniac. He went to parties because he couldn’t sleep.”
*To be precise, “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” is a lithograph by Gottfried Helnwein of “On Times Square”.
McMinnville UFO
McMinnville, Oregon. 7:30 pm. May 11, 1950. Evelyn Trent was walking back to her farmhouse after feeding rabbits on her farm while she saw an unidentified flying object in the sky. She called out to her husband, Paul, who took the above picture. At the urging of a friend, they later submitted the photo to the local newspaper the Telephone-Register, which put it on the front page on June 9th. The Oregonian published the photographs the next day, and within a month they were published in LIFE magazine (June 26 1950).
LIFE subsequently misplaced the negatives and they were through to be lost for 17 years. Since its rediscovery, the photograph had since been subjected to intense scrutiny involving computer analysis and sophisticated scanning and stretching procedures. The Trents’ background was also thoroughly checked. Some thought they hanged an object from the power lines. Some measured the shadows and assumed it was ’staged’ in the morning time. Others insist the Trents’ original resistance to publish the photo was a testament to their honesty. It has never been satisfactorily explained, and some believe it is the best (if not only) authentic UFO photograph. The affair led to a “UFO Festival” being held in McMinnville each year, which is the biggest such gathering apart from Roswell, New Mexico’s.
Anne Frank
If a single individual could be held up to “personify” the Holocaust, that person would be Anne Frank. On June 12th, 1942, Anne received a modest red-and-white-checkered, clothed covered diary for her 13th birthday. On that day, she wrote in neat schoolgirl hand: “I hope I shall be able to confide in you completely, as I have never been able to do in anyone before, and I hope that you will be a great support and comfort to me.”
Three weeks later, to escape an order of deportation to Germany, Anne and her family went into hiding. Their home for the next 25 months was a secret attic behind a bookcase at an old building at 263 Prinsengracht Street in Amsterdam (now renamed Annefrankhuis, and is a memorial to the 100,000 Dutch Jews who perished in concentration camps). Anne Frank retained both her diary and sunny look to life behind her confined quarters. Her ambition was to be a writer and she used her diary to deal with both the boredom and her youthful array of thoughts, which had as much to do with personal relationships as with the war and the Nazi terror raging outside.
On Tuesday, August 1st, 1944, Anne wrote her final entry in her faithfully kept diary. The hiding place that Otto Frank found for his family, the Van Pels family, and Fritz Pfeffer was raided by Nazi forces three days later. They were betrayed by Gestapo informers and its occupants were deported to Auschwitz. The Allied forces which had landed in Normandy two months before arrived too late to save the Franks. Anne died in Bergen-Belsen three months before her 16th birthday.
Her diary was discovered by friends, and published by her father, the only member of the family to survive. The Diary of a Young Girl, published in 1947, includes photos of Anne and the people she hid with, plus a map of the secret annex in the house on Prinsengracht. On the cover was the above haunting photograph taken by an automatic photovending machine in 1939. The simple photograph of Anne gazing away with wistful innocence into distant dreams that never materialized seems to be asking ‘why?’ to incomprehensible horrors unleashed by the Holocaust.
Close Encounters: David Douglas Duncan & John Dillinger
[Don't Adjust Your Screens. There is No Picture Here]
The story goes like this: for his 18th birthday, David Douglas Duncan, who would later grow up to be one of the most celebrated photographers of his day, was given a 39-cent Bakelite plastic camera. He was then studying archeology at the University of Arizona, Tucson.
On January 22nd 1934, at around 7:30 a.m., he heard on the radio that the Congress Hotel–the biggest hotel in Tucson–was burning. Having no classes that day, he ran down to the city from his fraternity house. There amidst the chaos, he saw a man in suspenders, “middle-aged, half-dressed, rather meek-looking fellow” who was convincing a fireman to let him reenter the hotel to retrieve his suitcase, which he dropped in one of the sections that hadn’t burned down yet.
The next day, Duncan saw headlines that America’s Public Enemy No. 1, the bank robber John Dillinger and gang were arrested at the Congress Hotel. The meek-looking fellow he photographed was John Dillinger, on whose request two firemen retrieved their luggage, thereby identifying who the gang was.
However, the photos Duncan shot that day were never published. He turned the film over to the Tuscon Citizen, which lost the film.
Matthias Rust’s Daring Flight
Throughout the most of the Cold War, the Soviet Union was deemed to have been surrounded by an impenetrable airspace. There was that U2 incident in 1960, and in 1983, a civilian airliner was shot down for failing to respond to Soviet interceptors. But on May 28, 1987, this myth of Soviet might would be challenged by a West German teenager.
Matthais Rust spent his allowances to take 50 hours worth of flying lessons before embarking on an unauthorized flight from Helsinki to the heart of Moscow. Rust was picked up by radar. A Soviet fighter jet was in pursuit, but it could only communicate on military frequencies that Rust’s Cessna couldn’t receive. The Soviets assumed that he was either on a search-and-rescue mission or a student pilot. Six hours later, he made it to Moscow, and decided to land just outside the Kremlin walls. (He worried that if he had landed inside, the Soviets would arrest him and deny the whole thing). He landed by St. Basil’s Cathedral and taxied into the Red Square. Although he mingled with the people there–who thought he was part of an airshow–the KGB was also on spot to arrest him.
For violation of the Soviet airspace and oddly enough, hooliganism, Rust was put on trial. He served 432 days of his four-year sentence. The boy whom the media called “the new Red Baron” or “Don Quixote of the skies” never flew again. Inside the Kremlin walls, Mikhail Gorbechev would use the incident to shake up the Soviet military industrial complex and sack his top-brass.
Mathrew Brady’s Lincoln
Despite being a homely man, Abraham Lincoln enjoyed being photographed. He recognized the compelling power of the photograph, and frequented emerging photostudios. There are over 120 daugerreotypes, tintypes, ambrotypes, stereographic cards and cartes de visites of Lincoln.
His favorite photographer was of course Mathew Brady, whose above photo changed the course of the nation. Taken on February 27th 1860–just hours after Lincoln’s famous Cooper Union speech, the photo of the obscure presidential candidates dispelled the notion that hideous Lincoln was unelectable. Three months after it was taken, and publicly circulated, Lincoln was nominated as the GOP presidential candidate. The photograph was widely circulated during the national campaign, both in the illustrated press and through the popular Currier and Ives prints.
A month before the election day, Lincoln received a letter from one Grace Bedell, an 11-year-old girl from Westfield, New York, which urged him to grow a beard because “[growing a beard would] look a great deal better for your face is so thin,” and it would make him more popular. It would prove to be so. When Lincoln left Springfield on February 11th, 1861, bound for the White House, he was fully bearded. On route, he stopped in Westfield and met Grace and he said he took her advice.
Lincoln would also later admitted that “Brady and the Cooper Union speech made me president of the United States,” adding the photograph “dispelled the opposition base on the rumours of my long ungainly figure, large feet, clumsy hands, and long, gaunt head; making me into a man of human aspect and dignified bearing.”
The Yomper
On 2 April 1982, after a period of rising tension, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands. Although Argentina viewed the islands as theirs, the islanders, almost all of British descent, did not want to be ruled by a junta from Argentina. In a decision supported by the both sides of the aisle, Britain sent a naval task force that would ultimately consist of 38 warships, 77 merchant and auxiliary vessels, 11,000 military personal, and 261 aircraft. The Argentineans were already numerically superior and the United States believed that the British were attempting ‘mission impossible’, a view shared by many in the British Ministry of Defence.
The British public was overwhelming behind the deployment, but the government worried that the support would wither away if some bad news from the front reached home. Thus, all the significant news, good or bad, were censored or at least delayed; in those days before internet, the reporters had to use the Royal Navy carriers to send their reports back home, which make the task easier. Only few photographers were onboard the task force too. Don McCullin was refused accreditation, and there were no pictures for 54 of the 74 days the conflict lasted.
In their place were jingoistic headlines: Yomp, Rejoice, I Counted Them All Out, I Counted Them All Back, Invasion, In We Go, Stick It Up Your Junta and the worst of all, Gotcha. The memorable images of the conflict included the departure of the fleet, a file photo of the Belgrano, the camouflaged Max Hastings, the reconstructed face of Simon Weston, burial of the dead at Goose Green, and Argentinian prisoners with P&O cruise labels around their necks.
The iconic image of the conflict was reprinted above: the original photograph taken by Petty Officer Peter Holdgate, Commando Forces Photographer, showed 24 year old Corporal Peter Robinson ‘yomping’, the Royal Marine slang for a long distance march carrying full kit. Taken in June 1982 as the Royal Marines proceeded along the Moody Brook track towards Port Stanley, Robinson took out Union Flag from his pack and attached it to the aerial of his radio with masking tape when he heard the news of the Argentine surrender. It was used by every British national newspaper, including The Sun which used its as its Falklands War logo. On the 10th anniversary of the occasion, Mrs. Thatcher unveiled a statue in front of the Royal Marines Museum honoring this iconic moment.
Stalin Is Dead
On March 1st, 1953, the morning after an all-night dinner in his country estate outside Moscow centre, Joseph Stalin failed to rise at his usual time. He was discovered lying on the floor of his room only at about 10 p.m. in the evening. The Deputy Prime Minister Lavrentiy Beria was summoned, but neither he nor the politburo called the doctors until the next day. (A few months earlier, aging and paranoid Marshal Stalin fabricated a “Doctors Plot” to assassinate top Soviet leaders). With his drunken son Vasili storming around the room, and the members of the Politburo haplessly wringing their hands, Stalin died on 5th March, and his body was transported back to the city to lay in state at the Hall of Columns, the grand ballroom of the House of Trade Unions, where Lenin had lain in state too.
(It has been suggested that Stalin was assassinated. His Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov claimed that Beria had boasted to him that he poisoned Stalin: “I took him out.” Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that Beria had, immediately after the stroke, gone about “spewing hatred against [Stalin] and mocking him”, and then, when Stalin showed signs of consciousness, dropped to his knees and kissed his hand. When Stalin fell unconscious again, Beria immediately stood and spat. Later autopsies found that Stalin ingested a favorless and powerful rat poison. Indeed, Stalin’s death arrived at a convenient time for many who feared an imminent purge).
The Moscow Radio announced the news in a 47-minutes long bulletin. The next day, red flags went up all over the country in mourning. Those who were indeed not mourning were the motley crew that assembled at his bierside in the above historic photo. On the bier, Stalin was clad in a marshal’s uniform, with only one of his innumerable decorations–the “Hero of Socialist Labor”–on the breast. From left to right are: Molotov, Voroshilov, Beria, Malenkov, Bulganin, Khrushchev, Kaganovich and Mikoyan.
Everyone was stiff and formal but everything was not well within the walls of Kremlin. They found Stalin’s shoes too big to fill. Stalin was succeeded first by a ruling “troika” with Beria, Molotov and Malenkov. Soon afterwards, Beria was purged and replaced by Khrushchev. When Molotov, Malenkov, Bulganin and Kaganovich attempted to pull the same trick of Khrushchev, the latter outmaneuvered them and they were dismissed. Khrushchev in turn was replaced by Leonid Brezhnev, who succeeded Voroshilov as the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet when Voroshilov retired.
Most of them (Khrushchev included) would spend the rest of their lives in obscure retirements. By the time Molotov died in 1986, he was the last of the ‘17ers. “Iron Lazar” Kaganovich would nearly outlast the Soviet Union itself, living until 1991. The true survivor, politically wise, was Anastas Mikoyan, who consistently betted on the right horse: he supported Stalin when Lenin died; he denounced Beria’s and Molotov’s attempt to oust Khrushchev, and organized the latter’s de-Stalinization speech. When Mikoyan himself abandoned his support, Khrushchev knew it was the time to leave. Under Brezhnev, he was the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet, and retired with six Orders of Lenin.
