The Price of Freedom

What price freedom? Some people could answer that better than others. When it comes to Irish freedom that price was paid in 1916 in the stonebreakers’ yard of Kilmainham Gaol, where the leaders of the insurrection were executed. It was also paid throughout the War of Independence and the subsequent civil war. They were times that defined a nation.

My grandfather fought in those times… killed people for a cause and suffered for it, too. I have often thought of how he was tortured by the Black and Tans and of the day he threw a hand grenade into a British armoured truck. I have thought, too, of the firing squad he was part of and the man that he killed. They were bloody times… times that must have left their mark on his psyche in the years that followed.

My grandfather was just one ordinary man who did some extraordinary things in the name of freedom. There were plenty more like him – and there were those who continued to pay the price for their actions long after the last bullet had been fired.

George Lennon (left) seen here with a former IRA comrade, Roger McCorley

George Lennon was one such man. His war of freedom began at the ripe age of 16 when he helped hold up a military train on Easter Monday, 1916. He served a jail term for robbing a British soldier of his rifle, and another term – three months in solitary confinement – led to him being hospitalised suffering from consumption. He came out of prison in a state of physical breakdown.

But George was tough. He recuperated over that summer and was soon back in the fight. By the time he was 20, George Lennon was commanding his own Flying Column – a guerrilla active service unit – in Waterford.

Those were heady times for a young man… dangerous ones, too.  George spent his days seizing weapons and holding up troop trains. His role as a commander meant he also made life and death decisions – decisions that would have a profound impact on him in the years ahead.  One of those decisions involved the capture of a member of the Royal Irish Constabulary during an ambush at The Burgery, outside Dungarvan.

The RIC man – Sergeant Michael Hickey – was a childhood acquaintance of George’s. But there is little room for sentiment in war, and George ordered that Hickey be executed.

Hickey was Catholic and Irish, but that wouldn’t save him. The fact was that he could identify several of the attackers and they couldn’t risk letting him go. Before he was shot, Sergeant Hickey pleaded for his life, as George recalled in his memoir, Trauma in Time.

“I knew you as a child,” the policeman said. “… You are the only person in the world that can save me.”

“I would give anything in the world to save you,” Lennon replied. “But I cannot.”

As George Lennon later recalled, the two men exchanged a “glance of understanding.”

Hickey, who had turned 36 the day before and was soon to wed, squared his shoulders. Lennon blindfolded the RIC man and ordered the executioners to fire. Shots rang out. Hickey slumped to the ground, dead.

Lennon walked over to his body and fired one shot into Hickey’s head, before having a tag placed on his body that said “Police Spy.”

It was a brutal act, but war breeds brutality.

Members of Dungarvan RIC

The blood-letting wouldn’t end there. Crown forces later attacked George’s IRA party, killing two Volunteers and losing one of their own in the process.  Shortly after this George and other IRA members were ambushed by soldiers from the Devon Regiment. He received several blows to the head from rifle butts and, though initially captured, he somehow managed to escape, reaching a farmhouse in “a dazed and shaken condition” as he later wrote. It “shook me badly and my health began to decline”.

By 1921, at the age of 20, George had already lived a life – and he had the physical and mental scars to prove it.  His health would suffer even further in the years to come.

When the treaty ending the War of Independence was signed it lead to civil war. George fought with the anti-treaty side. Between March and August 1922, he led three hundred IRA men in the occupation of Waterford city. During this time he was so sick he had to be confined to bed for two weeks.

Free State soldiers bombarded the city defences with artillery fire, eventually forcing George and his men to retreat. At this point he suffered a complete breakdown and had to resign from the army.

It was only after the war that the full effects of George’s traumatic experiences became clear. There followed a series of jobs and a sad but predictable pattern. In 1923, he secured a temporary job as a County Council clerk.  A year later, his mother died, which only added to what George’s doctor described as his ‘debility and progressive neurasthenia’ (post-traumatic stress in today’s language).

Not only did George have to contend with his mental frailty, he also had to look after his three younger siblings, all of whom eventually emigrated to America. He joined them there in 1927.

The following year found him promoted to a “responsible position” in Prudential Insurance, in Newark, New Jersey. Almost at once he had a nervous breakdown, leading him to give up the post. He refused further offers of promotion for fear of how he might react.

In 1928, George had another breakdown, on top of which he suffered insomnia and gastric problems. These led to him taking a three-week stay in the New England Rest Haven.

He left Prudential at the end of that year and took an ‘easier job’ in January, 1929 as night auditor in a large hotel. He was working well until a promotion resulted in him having another breakdown. “Lack of concentration, memory lapses and an intense desire to escape” were how he described his symptoms. George took time off in health resorts and was treated by various doctors between 1930 and 1931. By 1935, he was chief cashier at the hotel. His doctor advised three months leave of absence due to his frail state.

Sick “from intense nervous irritation and exhaustion”, he resigned from the job and returned to Ireland where he was treated for neurasthenia and tuberculosis. Despite his ailments, he did find time for love and, in 1939, George Lennon married May Sibbald.

He clearly had ability, despite his sickness, and in 1940 he headed the Topographical Survey of Ireland. In 1943, May gave birth to their son Ivan. The same year, George was appointed Acting Secretary to the National Planning Conference. Unfortunately, this triggered another bout of anxiety.

In early 1946, he returned to the US, followed soon after by a reluctant May and Ivan.  George got work in the Lexington hotel but was fired in 1948 for union activities. He then worked as a machine operator but left that position after a few months and took a janitor job with the Kodak Company.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he wrote a play (Down by The Glen Side) and his memoir, Trauma in Time, but the trauma of those early years stayed with him. So painful were the memories that George sometimes resorted to drink to alleviate them. He did find peace eventually when he adopted Zen Buddhism and became one of the founders of the Rochester Zen Center.

There’s no doubt that George Lennon walked a hard road… a road that would eventually leave him feeling disillusioned with the whole journey. He would later recall his freedom-fighting days as a “tuppence ha’penny revolution’. One that was best consigned to the “dustbin of history”.

Thankfully, he is beginning to get some recognition for his important role in Ireland’s past, with the publication of Rebel Heart: George Lennon Flying Column Commander, by Terence O’Reilly and with Ulster to the Deise: Lennons in Time, by his son, Ivan. There has even been a TV documentary chronicling George’s role in the War of Independence.

It has all come late in the day but, hopefully, other historians will also acknowledge his service to the country.

This post isn’t just about one of our forgotten heroes, it’s about the cost of war – and about all those other George Lennon’s out there who lived fractured lives once the dust had settled… men who, along with their families, paid the toll, day in, day out.

I never knew my grandfather, but I’ve thought of him and I’ve wondered how I would have fared had I been in his shoes. I’ve wondered how he coped in the aftermath of war and whether he was haunted by his actions.

What price freedom?  Philosophers, historians and academics could give all sorts of nuanced answers to that question, but I think the best answer – the most real – would come from those who actually fought for it in the first place.

  George Lennon died in 1991. His wife, May, passed away eight years earlier. Their son, Ivan, lives in New York.

 To read more about George…

http://goo.gl/VBcrFj

Childhood – the forgotten casualty of war

I’d like to welcome Ian Skillcorn, a publisher of women’s and historical fiction, to History With A Twist. Ian’s fiction imprint Corazon Books has already notched up a Top 10 bestseller on Amazon and a #1 in the Women Writers and Fiction category. Ian is re-publishing a novel by author Diana Raymond, which is set in 1930s’ England.     
Diana was born during the First World War, and lost her father to the fighting a year later. 

Here, Ian shows how that tragic event impacted on her life. We hear so much about the casualties of war and precious little about the widows and children who must cope with those losses. Ian’s article redresses that imbalance and highlights the achievements of a fascinating woman…

We are all familiar with the images of destruction on the battlefields during the Great War, but the fighting also had a devastating effect on the youngest lives on the home front. Over half a million children in the UK lost their fathers during the First World War.

The financial and psychological impact on them was profound. For many, it marked the end of childhood. They were required to take on adult roles, to leave school early and start working; young boys suddenly found themselves the ‘man of the house’.

Author Diana Raymond

Some children, born during or just after the war, were never to know their fathers; the author Diana Raymond was one of those children. She was born one year before her father, William Thomas Young, was killed at the age of thirty six, in the preliminary bombardment to The Third Battle of Ypres (or The Battle of Passchendaele). This loss affected both the course of her life, and her writing career.

In the immediate post-war years, newspapers published frequent appeals for help for the children of those who had made ‘the supreme sacrifice’. Orphan Schools, Orphanages and Funds beseeched the public to support and educate the fatherless children of the fallen. One such charity was the

Officers’ Families Fund, established by the Marchioness of Lansdowne. It was thanks to this fund that Diana benefited from an education at Cheltenham Ladies’ College. The college was both a boarding school and a day school. Diana went as a ‘Day Girl’ and said that one of the greatest skills she learned there was working on her own.

On leaving, like many young women of the era, she learned shorthand and typing. During her lunch-hours she would sit in an ABC café, writing her first novel in notebooks.

While financial hardship could be addressed by aid from charitable bodies, the psychological effect of losing a father in conflict was life-long. Diana recounted that during her childhood, so many children had lost a father that ‘one looked on families with fathers in a kind of puzzled surprise’.

She and her mother did not talk much about her father, and this was a background which Diana later gave to a character in her fiction.

Diana suggested that spending a great deal of her childhood alone was probably responsible for her being a somewhat private person; perhaps finding it easier to write than talk, although she liked to think she could listen. In fact, in a recent interview, her daughter-in-law Margaret said that Diana was ‘a wonderful listener’.

By the time Diana visited her father’s grave for the first time, she was a grown woman. Her husband, the acclaimed novelist Ernest Raymond, traced it to the Brandhoek Military Cemetery in Belgium.

Previously, Diana had never attached particular importance to graves, viewing them as no more than ‘stone-silent’, but the visit to her father’s final resting place moved her deeply, and she felt that the trip brought her closer to the man she had never known.

Ernest Raymond lived through, and survived, the Great War, during which he was a padre.

In contrast to Diana’s childhood, their son Peter was able to talk to his father about the war, particularly about Ernest’s experiences in Gallipoli.

Ultimately, it was a shared love of the poet Keats which bridged time to connect Diana to her father.

Before enlisting, William Young had been a Lecturer in English at Goldsmiths College, London University. His last book, published posthumously, was an anthology of Keats. For almost 60 years, Diana lived in Hampstead, and was a frequent visitor to the nearby Keats House.

In the 1940s she wrote a play, John Keats Lived Here, which was performed by the Hampstead Players to mark the bicentenary of Keats birth, in 1995. Although Diana always felt her father’s absence, his introduction to the anthology of Keats served as a comforting presence.

In Diana’s possession throughout her life was a bronze medallion ‒ this was The Memorial Plaque (also known as the ‘Dead Man’s Penny’), which was given to the next-of-kin of servicepeople killed in the First World War. Engraved on the medallion ‘the figure of Britannia stands with arms outstretched, holding a laurel wreath, a lion at her feet’.

Beneath the wreath are her father’s name and the words ‘He Died for Freedom and Honour’. In later life, Diana reflected that her father would have believed this was what he fought for, but ‘the subsequent years seem to question such certainty’.

Diana Raymond (1916-2009) wrote 24 novels, as well as theatre criticism, poetry and a play about Keats.

The Tsarevich’s Dog

Crown Prince Alexei with his dog, Joy (picture from The SIberian TImes)

We all love a good mystery, and if it’s tied to an historic event then even better. From Roswell to JFK, the theorists have had a field day speculating on endless scenarios and supposed cover-ups.

Such momentous mysteries are few and far between, but there was one which over the decades generated as much fodder for conspiracy theorists as the Kennedy assassination or UFOs.  It concerned the fate of Grand Duchess Anastasia, daughter to Tsar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra of Russia.

The story begins on July 17, 1918 when the Tsar and Tsarina, their son, the Tsarevich Crown Prince Alexei, his four sisters, and four servants were ruthlessly gunned down and bayoneted by Red Army soldiers in the cellar of Ipatiev House, in Yekaterinburg,  just as opposing White Army forces were closing in.

It was a brutal act that stunned many in a time when brutality was the norm. The youth of the victims – the Tsarevich, Alexei, was just 13 years old – together with the allure of their royal pedigree and the ruthless nature of the executions made for a compelling reading.

Tsar Nicholas II, Empress Alexandra and their family

Gathered together in that cellar, unaware of their fate until the last moment, the royal Romanovs were wiped out in a hail of gunfire. Some died instantly. Others took a little longer. The Empress’s maid, Anna Dermidova, was stabbed trying to defend herself with a cushion stuffed with jewels.

Alexei was shot twice in the head after the killers noticed that he had survived the first bullet.

Grand Duchess Maria is said to have been the last to die, protected as she was by diamonds sewn into her clothing. She cowered against the wall, covering her head in terror before being stabbed with a bayonet.

For years after this brutal event, however, rumours circulated that the youngest daughter, Anastasia, had actually survived the cellar atrocity. Over time, a number of women came forward claiming to be her, each one offering a story as to how she had survived the killings of the rest of the family.

Anna Anderson became the best known. She first appeared publicly between 1920 and 1922, asserting that she had feigned death amongst all the bodies in the cellar, and had managed to flee with the help of a compassionate guard.

Anderson was a stubborn  (or just deluded) woman, and her legal battle for recognition lasted from 1938 up to 1970. It only ended with her being deemed having failed to provide sufficient proof that she was indeed the Grand Duchess.

She died in 1984 and her body was cremated. Ten years later, DNA tests compared a tissue sample from Anderson, located in a hospital, with that of the blood of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, a great-nephew of Empress Alexandra. There was no match.

It had taken over 70 years to finally put the speculation to rest. The experts agreed that there never was a survivor from the Yekaterinburg executions.

But the experts were wrong…a flop-eared spaniel called Joy – the beloved pet of the Tsarevich Alexei – really had been there that day.

Two other dogs present in that cellar weren’t so lucky to escape the revolutionaries’ bullets, but Joy was somehow overlooked. According to The Siberian Times, a week after the royals were murdered, he was found by a soldier in the yard of Ipatiev House.

The malnourished dog was eventually homed with Colonel Pavel Rodzianko, a member of the British Expeditionary Force in Siberia, who took Joy back to England with him.

In his book Tattered Banners, Rodzianko wrote: ‘With heavy hearts we sailed away from Vladivostok. Joy, the little ill-named spaniel who had seen his master murdered, that fateful night, traveled with me. I have never seen Russia again.’

Joy lived out his days in a house on Clewer Hill Road in Windsor, in a happy, safe environment.

It was all a far cry from the horrors of those final moments in Yekaterinburg when he saw the Russian royal family shot and bayoneted before his eyes.

The little dog was eventually buried close to Windsor Castle, home to the Duke of Edinburgh – great-cousin to Joy’s beloved master, the murdered Tsarevich.

Whenever you hear of the Russian royals, remember Joy – the Crown Prince’s dog who survived a massacre… and lived to bark another day.

Trench warfare, but not as we know it…

War may come and go, but its aftermath can linger for a lifetime – or more, to judge by a recent newspaper article.

According to reports, a fungus that was found growing in the grounds of the former Craiglockhart War Hospital (which is now part of Edinburgh Napier University, in Scotland) is thought to have been brought there on the boots of First World War soldiers, who were being treated for shell shock.

Ecologist Abbie Patterson found the fungus, Clavulinopsis cinereoide (which is common in mainland Europe but rare to that part of Britain), on a lawn at the university while carrying out a biodiversity audit of the campus. When looking at old photographs taken during World War One, he noticed that soldiers and nurses were standing in the exact spot where the fungus was found.

That little nugget of information got me thinking of what other ‘souvenirs’ World War 1 soldiers might have brought back from the trenches. The list makes for quite depressing reading…

A flooded trench during World War One

One of the most common and debilitating conditions suffered by soldiers was that of ‘Trench Foot’. Due to poorly constructed trench systems (particularly in the early phase of the war), British troops were required to spend long hours in the cold with their feet submerged in mud and water.

Such conditions led to soldiers’ feet becoming waterlogged. Circulation was restricted and feet became extremely painful, causing them to swell and blister. Nerves were damaged and numbness set in. Over time, skin became infected with fungus. If the feet were not dried and circulation re-established, gangrene would set in.

On the Western Front alone in the first winter of 1914/15 over 20,000 men suffered from the condition.

Measures were taken to halt the occurrence – feet were regularly inspected (see picture) and fresh socks issued so they could be changed several times a day.

The troops operated a buddy system whereby they would rub whale oil into each other’s feet to stimulate circulation and waterproof the skin. Better trench drainage and the issuing of gum-boots also alleviated the problem.

A severe case of ‘Trench Foot’

Nevertheless, by the war’s end 74,000 British servicemen fell victim to ‘Trench Foot’. That figure is, no doubt, an underestimation as neglect of the feet was a chargeable offence in many units, thus suggesting that other cases went unrecorded.

As if that wasn’t enough to contend with, body lice – or chats as the soldiers called them – also presented a terrible problem.  The lice nestled in the crevices of uniforms and would only emerge to feed.

Soldiers scratched lice bites, forcing the infected faeces of the louse into the lesions caused by the bites… and that’s when the problems really began.

A soldier might not show any sign of infection for up to a month, at which point he would suffer severe headaches and debilitating muscle pains. This ‘Trench Fever’ could last for five days before subsiding, but could then reoccur at a later date.

The condition commonly led to depression. Up to 80pc of sufferers remained unfit for duty for up to three months.

To counter the lice, men would run a flame along the seams of their uniforms in a bid to kill their unwelcome guests.

Disinfecting baths were also set up in the rear lines where men could take a quick wash while their uniforms were de-loused, but the lice always returned.

An incredible 800,000 cases of ‘Trench Fever’ were recorded in the British Army alone during the war. Its effect on the other armies in the theatre must have been equally devastating.

Acute Necrotizing Ulcerative Gingivitis or ‘Trench Mouth’ was another common ailment. Poor hygiene, stress bad diet and heavy smoking caused a huge increase in oral bacteria, which would attack the gums, causing bleeding, ulceration and – probably the least of a soldier’s worries – bad breath.

Pain was such that eating, swallowing and talking were difficult. Often, painful swellings in the glands in the throat and neck occurred.

The only cure was a return to a decent diet, plenty of rest and good hygiene – in short, all the things unavailable to a front-line soldier.

When we think of war our minds, inevitably, turn to its noisy carnage – the thunderous explosions, the rattle of machine guns and the screams of wounded men.

However, we should also bear in mind the silent, hidden enemies – the ones that never ceased in their attacks and which, in their own way, caused as much havoc as the hot lead and cold steel of the battlefield.

Hitler’s Female Accomplices

When one thinks of the Nazi killing machine one tends to imagine armies of jackbooted soldiers marching inexorably from one torched and plundered village to the next, herding people together for transportation to the camps or, perhaps, to be hastily murdered in freshly dug pits.

There was another section of Nazi society just as culpable, though to this day they have somehow evaded the cold scrutiny that their actions deserve. To put it mildly, the women of the Third Reich have a lot to answer for.

Thirteen million of them were actively engaged in work for the Nazi party. Half a million of them went eastwards, to Poland and the Ukraine, in the wake of the German advance and they went in many guises

They were secretaries who typed orders to kill, nurses who euthanised patients or aborted unborn children with ‘defects’. They were wives and mothers, willing to ensure the Nazi ideal was promulgated to its nth degree, and they were camp guards who tortured and murdered for pleasure.

The novel, The Reader, by Bernhard Schlink explored these issues through the tale of one young man’s infatuation with a former Nazi camp guard.  It presented us with a simple woman who helped to do monstrous things. It showed us evil in its most ordinary form and asked ‘why’.

A fascinating book by Professor Wendy Lower, called Hitler’s Furies: German Women In The Nazi Killing Fields, explores the very same subject to devastating effect. Lower cites case after case of how members of the fair sex were just as depraved as some of their male companions. The evil that they did was hideous.

The few ever called to account were notorious concentration camp guards —such as Irma Grese and Ilse Koch. Now, though, others are being probed by German prosecutors for their wartime roles.

A little old lady by the name of Gertru Elli Schmid (now 92) is one such suspect.  She was once an SS guard at Majdanek where an estimated 235,000 people were murdered during the war. After service there she was sent to Auschwitz, where over a million people were exterminated.

Another woman, Charlotte S. (now 94), was a guard at Ravensbrueck concentration camp, where she was remembered for beating prisoners and using her Alsatian dog to attack them.

Such women are the exception in that they may well be punished for their ancient crimes.  Most of the following, though, got away with murder.

Pauline Kneissler worked at Grafeneck Castle, a euthanasia ‘hospital’ in southern Germany, and toured mental institutions selecting 70 ‘patients’ a day to be gassed.

Lisolotte Meirer

Liselotte Meier, an administrator in Belarus, would accompany her SS officer boss on shooting parties to hunt and kill Jews for ‘fun’. She also coordinated arrangements for massacres and decided who lived or died.

Erna Petri followed her husband to Poland where she lived in a mansion and managed a huge slave estate for the SS . On one occasion she found six starving children who had somehow managed to escape. She took them home gave them something warm to drink then led them out to the garden where she shot all six in the head.

Lisel Willhaus, the wife of an SS camp commandant, used to sit on the balcony of their house and take pot shots at Jewish prisoners with her rifle.

Johanner Altvater

Johanna Altvater worked in the Ukraine as a secretary for a regional Nazi leader.  During the liquidation of a Jewish ghetto, Fräulein Hanna as she was known marched through the children’s ward of a makeshift hospital. She stopped, picked a child up, took it to the balcony and threw the child to the pavement three floors below. She did the same with other children.

Altvater is said to have often lured children with sweets, shooting them in the mouth when they opened wide to receive their treat. On another occasion she grabbed a child by the ankles and swung her through the air, smashing her head against a wall before depositing her lifeless form at the feet of her horrified father.

There are many more examples of crimes by these and other vile women, but I can’t write them anymore. Apart from Petri, who served over 30 years in prison, all the others escaped punishment.

Of course, not all women of the time were so evil, but they were far from being simple pawns either. They bought into the Nazi ideal wholeheartedly and were placed on a pedestal by its ringleaders.

Simply put, a woman’s role in Nazi Germany was considered sacred – they were the breeding ground for the master race. Special pre-marriage courses were even set up to ensure they became the perfect partner for SS soldiers.

Gertrud Scholtz-Klink

The six-week training programme was run by Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, chief of the Nazi bride schools. The courses, which were run under the close supervision of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, ensured women learned how to become ‘good wives’, but they would also ‘acquire special knowledge of race and genetics’, according to a bridal rulebook of the time.

Females with Jewish or gypsy blood, mental illness or physcial deformity were barred from attending the schools.

Thirteen million women provided idealogical and practical support to one of the world’s most evil social programmes. Not all of them were innocent bystanders to what took place.

Yet, when Hitler’s forces were finally defeated, these same women returned to their lives and never really had to deal with the consequences of their actions. Lower’s book is important because it addresses this oversight and finally calls them to account.

Hitler’s Furies, by Wendy Lower http://goo.gl/ahzrsF

How Santa’s helpers beat the Nazis

Winter War, Reindeer patrol in Jäniskoski near Petsamo 20th Feb. 1940

In the stillness of night they wait, antler horns gently clacking as heads turn, unfazed, towards their master. Hot air plumes from flared nostrils, hooves dig at the packed snow beneath. They wait; ready to move on his command, ready to be sent into the icy darkness with their sleigh full of longed-for items, to be delivered into expectant hands.

You might be thinking of Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen and, possibly, a certain Rudolph, but me…I’m thinking of the nameless reindeer – the ones who gave their lives in the fight for freedom from Nazi domination.

What do you mean you never heard of the reindeer that went to war…?

Well, it’s a little-known fact but in 1941, during World War II,  approximately 6,000 reindeer and more than 1,000 reindeer herders (mainly Nenets) from Murmansk, Arkhangelsk and Komi began risking their lives to transport ammunition, food and communications for the Soviet Army.

It is estimated that 25 per cent of war supplies and munitions manufactured in North America during the war were shipped across the Arctic to America’s Soviet allies. The supply route used was under constant siege from the weather as much as the Germans.

Reindeer were the perfect beast of burden in this environment, but their use wasn’t a Soviet innovation – Finnish troops had used Sámi reindeer to transport equipment on sledges during the Winter War.

The Soviet reindeer corps worked an area from Murmansk to the Karelian front. It was an arduous and highly dangerous journey in harsh conditions and one which was constantly subject to German attack. Of the 800 herders who went to the northern front in 1941, only 600 returned. By the end of the war almost half the herders and their reindeer had perished.

According to one reindeer herder, Vladimir Kanev (as recorded in Running With Reindeer – Adventures in Russian Lapland), he and his compatriots “rushed to the front, transporting as many shells and mines as we could load on the sledges. After that we spent all winter running between Murmansk and Litsa”.

When they weren’t carrying much-needed equipment, the reindeer were put to other, vital uses. The herders sometimes found pilots who had been shot down, and the reindeer helped carry them out of danger. Kanev said: “Often working under fire, we wrapped the wounded in deer skins, tied them down on the sledges and ran them to the hospitals.”

Reindeer were even used to tow downed aircraft back to base in order to salvage the parts. Reindeer pulling a sleigh, I can imagine, but pulling a fighter  plane… now that’s an image to conjure.

At this time of year it’s only right to spare a thought for the portly gentleman in the red suit who is probably tearing his beard out in the rush to deliver all those presents.  The real heroes, though, are the reindeer that take him on his trip around the world, ensuring that boys and girls everywhere get a little Yuletide magic.

Remember them this Christmas week and remember, too, their cousins who gave their lives on the battlefield in the fight for freedom.

Happy Christmas…

HHH – Sherlock’s Evil Namesake

In the lexicon of crime writing the name ‘Holmes’ conjures up deerstalker hats, pipe tobacco and some quite terrible violin playing. We envisage a man of startling intelligence, at the peak of his powers, doing battle with the forces of evil.

But there was another Holmes… one who was equally immersed in the criminal world, except his passion was for committing crimes not solving them. His name was Henry, not Sherlock – Henry Howard Holmes: at best a bigamist and fraudster, at worst possibly one of the world’s most prolific and devilish serial killers.

Dr Henry Howard Holmes

Dr. Henry Howard Holmes… the name has certain grandeur. It may not be to everyone’s taste but it was a lot better than Herman Webster Mudgett, this criminal’s true identity.

Mudgett was born in Gilmanton, New Hampshire on May 16, 1861. He would die by the hangman’s rope in Philadelphia on May 7, 1896, a week shy of his 35^th birthday.

In between those momentous dates he would perpetrate insurance fraud, steal and sell corpses to medical schools, become a bigamist several times over and commit murder… lots of murder In fact, Mudgett could well have been responsible for over 200 killings in a six-year period.

In July, 1878, he married Clara Lovering. They had a son, Robert, who was born in February, 1880. During this time Mudgett was studying at the University of Michigan Medical School. It was while there that he began his life of crime.

The young medical student noted the names of the deceased who lay in the hospital lab.  He would then take out insurance policies in their names, steal the bodies and disfigure them before claiming they had died in accidents.

After graduating, Mudgett moved to Chicago to pursue a career as a pharmacist. It was at this point that he began using the alias “H. H. Holmes”.

Despite the small matter of a wife and child, Holmes married again in 1889. Wife Number Two was Myrta Belknap. Their daughter, Lucy, was born the same year.  In 1894, he married Georgiana Yoke, even managing to squeeze in a relationship along the way with Julia Smythe (a future victim and the wife of one of his former employees).

During the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, Holmes designed and had built what could only be described as a murder hotel just two miles from the fair itself. The three-story, block-long “Castle” as it was dubbed by those in the neighborhood had a ground floor containing his drugstore and various shops.

But it was the upper floors that were reserved for special activities. Holmes’s office was there but so, too, were a maze of over one hundred windowless rooms.

If ever a building could encapsulate the warped workings of Holmes’ mind then this was it. The hallways were deliberately skewed, some doors opened to brick walls, while others only opened from the outside. There were stairways that lead nowhere and rooms that were completely air tight. Because Holmes changed builders on several occasions during construction, only he fully understood the design.

When the hotel was finally finished, so the killings commenced. He chose mostly female victims from among his staff (as a condition of employment many of them had to take out life insurance policies. Holmes would pay the premiums but he was also the beneficiary). Other victims included lovers and hotel guests.

Some were locked in bedrooms fitted with gas pipes, others were imprisoned in a huge sound-proof bank vault and left to suffocate. Their bodies were then dropped down a hidden chute to the basement, where some were dissected and stripped of flesh, their skeletons and organs sold to medical schools.

I could go on to detail the lime pits he used – the acids, the poisons and the cremation techniques, not to mention the stretching rack – a panopoly of sadistic devices – but I think I’ll stop here.

Following the World’s Fair, Holmes left Chicago. Along the way he murdered men, women and children, but the police were on his trail and he was finally arrested in Boston on November 17, 1894, after being tracked there from Philadelphia by the Pinkerton detectives.

The number of his victims has been estimated between 20 and 100, and even as high as 200, based upon missing persons’ reports of the time. The only verified number is 27, although police said that such was the state of the bodies in The Castle’s basement it was difficult to tell how many there actually were.

On May 7, 1896, Holmes was hanged at Philadelphia County Prison. It may have come as some consolation to the relatives of his victims to learn that it took a full 15 minutes for him to die as he dangled there.

Up until now I’d never heard of this particular Holmes. History is strange in that respect… some heroes and villains are embedded on our consciousness while others, far more worth celebrating or denigrating, are somehow lost to time.

In the case of HHH perhaps that’s a good thing.