The executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, 1927

On 23rd August 1927 two men were executed in the electric chair at Charlestown State Prison in Massachusetts. They were Nicola Sacco (born 1891) and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (born 1888), two Italian immigrants, who had been convicted in 1921 of the murder of two men during a factory robbery in 1920.

However, serious doubts were raised at the time about the safety of the convictions, which have not been eased in the intervening years, with the real possibility that the men were condemned more for their political beliefs and social status than their actual guilt or otherwise based on real evidence.

The United States was, at the time, in the grip of one of its periodic “red scares”, this one based on fears that Communist plotters sought to copy the Russian Revolution of 1917 on the western side of the Atlantic. The problem for Sacco and Vanzetti was that they were admitted anarchists. Their politics, plus the strong anti-immigrant feelings current at the time, ensured that it would be extremely difficult for them to get a fair trial.

As it was, the jury did not take long to reach guilty verdicts and all appeals against the death sentence were subsequently rejected.

There was contrary evidence pointing to the men’s innocence, including ballistics evidence and a confession by another man, but none of this made any difference.

The storm aroused by the convictions and executions was such that the case became a noted “cause celebre” in the United States, as well as the inspiration (in whole or in part) for several literary works.

These included:

• “Boston”, a novel by Upton Sinclair
• “Winterset”, a play by Maxwell Anderson
• “U.S.A.” trilogy by John Dos Passos

The poet Edna St Vincent Millay joined a protest on the day before the executions and held a placard that read “If these men are executed, justice is dead in Massachusetts”, and was arrested for doing so.

The case was not forgotten for many years, becoming seen as an archtype of the prejudice of the American judicial system against the Left and ordinary working people. It would certainly appear to have been a clear case of a miscarriage of justice, and it might have been hoped that it would have led to such instances becoming a thing of the past. However, there have been plenty of other cases that suggest that Sacco and Vanzetti were by no means the last Americans to suffer from a deeply flawed legal system.

© John Welford

The Act Against Multipliers, 1404

The Act Against Multipliers was signed into law by King Henry IV of England on 13th January 1404. It ordered that “None from hereafter shall use to multiply gold or silver, or use the craft of multiplication; and if any the same do, they incur the pain of felony”. 

This had nothing to do with mathematics but everything to do with alchemy, which was the forerunner of modern chemistry. The idea of alchemy was that it was possible to turn base metals into precious ones, particularly gold. We know today that this is impossible, except possibly during massive stellar explosions, but that was not the case in 1404, when many people labored long and hard to achieve this aim. 

The Act was not passed out of a desire to stop people wasting their time on something that could never work, but from fear that it actually might do so. The last thing a medieval king wanted was somebody getting very rich and not only upsetting the economic order but becoming more powerful than the monarch. 

In practice, the law provided a loophole for would-be alchemists in that they could apply for a very expensive licence that allowed them to pursue their dark art. However, it has to be assumed that not many such licences were applied for. 

The Act was eventually repealed in 1689, partly due to the lobbying efforts of Robert Boyle, the father of modern chemistry. Surprising as it might seem, he was also a keen alchemist!

© John Welford

The explosion of Mount Tambora, 1815

The explosion of Mount Tambora, a volcano, in April 1815 is generally regarded as the largest explosion ever recorded. Not only did it kill thousands of people, but it also had lasting effects on a worldwide scale.

Before the explosion, Mount Tambora rose to 13,500 feet on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa. However, after the mountain blew itself apart it would be 4,500 feet shorter. This happened after three huge columns of fire rose from the volcano’s crater followed by the explosion which has been estimated as having had the power of 60,000 Hiroshima-type atom bombs. The blast could be heard up to 1,000 miles away.

The eruption of the volcano lasted for two days, during which time some twelve cubic miles of ash were pumped skywards. This was more than double the amount that would be ejected by the more famous eruption of Krakatoa 68 years later.

When the ash fell to earth it covered the area nearest the volcano to a depth of 90 feet. The area of land and sea that received at least half an inch of ash was around 200,000 square miles, which was roughly the size of France. This coverage was enough to destroy growing crops and lead to mass starvation. Around 12,000 people were killed by the original explosion but another 50,000 died as a result of crop failures caused by the ash.

Much of the ash was sent so high into the atmosphere that it was taken right round the world by air currents moving at high latitudes. This had the effect of dimming the sun and causing spectacular sunsets with brilliant orange and red colours. These were featured in a number of paintings produced by the famous British artist J M W Turner.

The following year was known in northern latitudes as the “year without a summer”, due to the disruption of weather cycles caused by the ash cloud. The temperatures were abnormally low and in parts of Europe the rainfall was up to three times what it should have been. This led to disastrous harvests and agricultural distress, and must count as an important factor in the rise of radical protests and riots in the period up to 1820.

The 1815 eruption was followed by smaller Tambora eruptions in 1819, 1880 and 1967. Could the monster roar again at some time in the future? Maybe!

© John Welford

How China's emperors selected their civil servants

Senior civil servants in the United Kingdom (and possibly elsewhere) are often referred to as Mandarins, and Mandarin is the most widely-spoken dialect of Chinese. Is there a connection? There certainly is!

The Qin emperors of China, who ruled from 221 BC to 206 BC, were the first to establish a civil service to enable the emperors to administer their territories. Subsequent Chinese dynasties refined the process of selecting the people who would take up positions in the civil service, and by the time that the Song dynasty was in power (AD 960-1279) a system of competitive examinations was well established. The Song emperors refined the process to make sure that successful candidates were selected without fear or favour and entirely on merit.

A candidate would begin by taking a local test which would qualify them for progressing to the second stage in the provincial capital. Only those who cleared this hurdle would be allowed to travel to the imperial capital to sit the final exam, after which the best candidates would be awarded the “Jinshi” that signified their admission to the civil service. Only about one in a hundred candidates would get all the way through, and there was a three-year wait before one was able to try again, which many people did.

The Song emperors instituted a marking system according to which three examiners would mark each paper independently and the name of the candidate would not be made known to the markers, thus ensuring that nobody could win the Jinshi through favouritism or corruption. 

A later development, under the Ming emperors who ruled from 1368 to 1644, was to make the candidates write an essay of limited length that was split into eight sections, each with a specific function. 

The Song tradition of competitive examination was so successful in getting the best people into high office that it was still in use up to the end of imperial China in 1912. That was why it was copied by western governments, including that of the United Kingdom.

However, the subject of the examinations was very different when the system was taken up by Europeans. Chinese civil servants had to be extremely well versed in the philosophy of Confucius, who flourished in the 5^th century BC, and his later interpreters.

© John Welford

The bizarre origin of the Tour de France

The Tour de France is surely the World’s best-known and most celebrated cycle race. It takes 23 days to stage, with the competitors, who come from many countries, completing a series of grueling stages that take them all round France and usually across borders to visit neighbouring countries en route. 

Most people are not aware that the race began as a competition between two daily sporting newspapers, and was linked to the notorious Dreyfus case and the death of one of France’s most famous writers.

Alfred Dreyfus was a captain in the French army who was tried and convicted of spying for Germany in 1894. The problem was that Dreyfus was completely innocent. The evidence against him was weak in the extreme, but he was not only a native of Alsace – which was then part of Germany – but he was also Jewish. It did not take much for an anti-Semitic and anti-German military court to find Dreyfus guilty and pack him off to the penal colony of Devil’s Island.

Many people in France were far from satisfied that justice had been done, and one of these was the writer Emile Zola, who in 1898 wrote a piece that condemned the French establishment over the Dreyfus case. This was splashed across the front page of L’Aurore newspaper under the heading “J`Accuse” (I accuse). 

This made Zola extremely unpopular with the anti-Dreyfus faction in France, and Zola was forced to flee to London until the situation calmed down.

Zola was still a marked man in the eyes of some extreme anti-Semites, and his support for Dreyfus – who in 1899 had been allowed to return to France but without a full pardon – was not forgotten. 

In 1902 Emile Zola died as the result of what appeared to be a tragic accident, when he and his wife were overcome by carbon monoxide fumes after lighting a fire in their Paris apartment. It was not until 1928 that it emerged that their chimney had been blocked deliberately by a right-wing fanatic and that Zola’s death (his wife survived) had been murder.

However, this was far from clear at the time, especially as tests carried out the day after Zola’s death showed that there was nothing wrong with the chimney. Of course there wasn’t – the killer had by then removed the obstruction.

The fact that there was still a huge amount of controversy in France about the whole Dreyfus affair led to accusations flying in all directions. In particular, two sporting daily newspapers, Le Velo and L’Auto, took opposite sides on the question of whether Emile Zola’s death was related to the Dreyfus case. The arguments went on right through the winter of 1902-3, but eventually tempers died down and the two newspapers decided to settle their differences in a way that might have been expected of publications devoted mainly to sport – a bicycle race!

And so the first Tour de France took place in July 1903 and it has been run ever since, apart from during the two World Wars. The event soon caught the attention of the French public and sales of L’Auto (the original main sponsor) went through the roof.

A particular feature of the Tour de France is the wearing of coloured jerseys by certain competitors. A yellow jersey is worn by the overall leader. The colour is no accident, being a recognition of the fact that L’Auto was printed on yellow paper. In the early days the rider with the lowest standing wore a green jersey, although from 1953 this became a mark of pride rather than shame, because it is worn by the leader of the various sprint stages on the Tour. Green was the colour of paper used by Le Velo!

© John Welford

The seven kingdoms of old England

If you have ever wondered about the names of the English counties Essex and Sussex, not to mention the region of Wessex as beloved by the novelist Thomas Hardy, you might be interested to know that they are not as “sexy” as might be imagined. They were all ruled by their own kings many centuries ago, and the names are relics of those times.

The seven kingdoms were established by the Germanic tribes that moved into what is now England as the Roman Empire faded away and left a power vacuum. In 410 AD the last Roman troops departed and left the “Romano-British” to fend for themselves. 

One account states that in about 450 a chieftain named Vortigern invited two brothers named Hengist and Horsa to bring an army to Britain to defend the British against the Picts who were invading from the far north. However, once this threat had been seen off the invited mercenaries decided not to go home but to settle in what became the Kingdom of Kent in the south-east corner of Britain.

Not long after, settlers from Saxony (modern Germany) arrived on the south coast and spread across a wide area, eventually creating the kingdoms of the East Saxons (Essex) South Saxons (Sussex) and West Saxons (Wessex). 

Other settlers, who are generally referred to as Angles, arrived in what is now Norfolk and Suffolk, leading to the founding of the Kingdom of East Anglia. Despite their relative unimportance in the overall history of the country, it was the Angles who would eventually give their name to the whole country south of Scotland and east of Wales, namely England.

The last kingdoms to be established were those of Mercia (the Midlands) and Northumbria (north of the River Humber).

The seven kingdoms that emerged in the 5^th to 7^th centuries are generally known as the Heptarchy. They would remain in place for about 200 years until Danish invaders put an end to the eastern kingdoms and were only kept from taking over the whole of England by the obduracy of Wessex.

During the period of the Heptarchy the kings spent much of their time warring against each other. Their aim was not so much to absorb each others’ territory as to establish themselves as ‘senior king’. The king who achieved temporary domination was known as the Bretwalda which translated as ‘ruler of Britain’ but it did not signify anything other than that the holder was more powerful than the other kings and could make demands on them. The title was not hereditary, and any other king might become Bretwalda when the holder died or was defeated in battle.

During the period of the Heptarchy only Essex failed to produce a Bretwalda at some time or another. The only Bretwalda of the 8^th century who came close to being ruler of all England in any meaningful sense was Offa of Mercia (757-96), who used the title ‘King of the English’ but was never completely dominant.

The last Bretwalda was Egbert of Wessex (802-39), who can be titled the first true ‘King of the English’, in that he united Wessex and Kent (Sussex, Essex and East Anglia had already been absorbed by their neighbours) and then conquered Mercia and received the formal submission of Northumbria. However, he could not hold on to his gains for long and Mercia again became independent.

The end of the Heptarchy came with the Danish invasions of the 9^th century that left Wessex, led by Egbert’s grandson Alfred, as the sole bastion of the English in resisting the onslaught.

© John Welford

Crossbow pages

In medieval times it was common for aristocrats to employ boys as young as seven in their households. These were often the sons of other nobles, and the practice of passing one’s son on to a neighbouring lord would be a means of establishing friendly relationships or maybe of discharging a debt. 

The boys would work as “pages”, doing menial jobs within the household, but would also be treated well and be given education and military training, including being taught to ride a horse. 

One aspect of the military training would be learning to use weapons, but there would be limits on what weapons boys could use, given that lances and longbows were large weapons that required considerable physical force to operate them. However, one weapon that a young boy could use was the crossbow. 

Crossbows were operated by winding the “string” back with a handle, which needed far less physical effort than that involved in firing a longbow. Boy pages were therefore expected to be able to use a crossbow should an aristocrat’s castle come under siege. A child could thus be an effective killer without having to engage in hand-to-hand combat with an enemy. 

Boy pages would also be expected to accompany their lord into battle, their main duties being to dress and arm their employer. Even if they did not use a crossbow in the field, they could assist the archers by winding the crossbows between shots. 

Medieval military etiquette decreed that boy pages could not be targeted during a battle. This convention was ignored by the French side during the Bartle of Agincourt in 1415, a circumstance that so annoyed King Henry V that he absolved himself from another aspect of the military code and proceeded to slit the throats of his prisoners.

© John Welford