Devil’s Island, the French Guiana Penal Colony

Devil's Island, Ile du Diable, In French Guiana
Devil’s Island, Ile du Diable, In French Guiana

Long before Alcatraz Prison there was Devil’s Island.  It was a living hell, not just a violent, tropical prison, but also rampant with malaria, cholera and yellow fever. From 1852 to 1953, Devil’s Island operated as part of the Îles du Salut Penal Colony in French Guiana.  Up to 90% of prisoners perished there due to its harsh and inhumane conditions. Of the 80,000 sent there, only about 2,000 returned to French territory after serving their sentences.

The notorious Devil’s Island was situated in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of French Guiana in South America. The penal colony was in fact three islands called the Îles du Salut, plus a labor camp on the mainland. The ironic name, Salvation Islands, was given to it by a group of missionaries who escaped an outbreak of plague on the mainland by hiding there.

By the 18th century, French Guiana was home to some 500 Europeans and 5,000 slaves. For half a century, the colony stagnated under the administration of three French governors and the deadly reputation of its dense, inhospitable jungles. Thickly humid and full of diseases, an idea was formulated in Paris to convert the islands and part of the mainland into a prison and labor camp for the worst criminals in the French territories.

In 1852, Emperor Napoleon III formally established the penal colony.

France send both political and career prisoners were to the Îles du Salut. Prisoners with sentences under eight years had a chance of release. That rule hardly mattered since most would not live long enough.  The vast majority never returned to France.  About forty percent of those who arrived would be dead within a year. Those with eight or more years faced lifelong exile.

Unlike European or American prisons, this was a place where society’s unwanted were sent to disappear. Thousands of alleged criminals—some innocent, most not—were sent to Devil’s Island over the next 90 years.  A prisoner’s odds of dying was extremely high, whether by the sadistic treatment by the merciless guards, a tropical disease, or the guillotine.

The largest of the 3 islands, Île Royale, in addition to housing prisoners, served as the administrative center, the reception port for new inmates, and housed the warden, who lived in a grand estate high on the island’s central hill. The worst prisoners were kept in the Crimson Barracks, so called for the vast amounts of blood spilled by prisoner and guard violence. The island’s guillotine was centrally located and used to demonstrate the warden’s absolute rule.

The southernmost island, Île Saint-Joseph, housed Camp Reclusion where prisoners were sent for solitary confinement. The place was called “the devourer of men” for the high numbers of prisoners who lost their minds or died there. The smallest and northern most island, Île du Diable, was for political prisoners. With rocky cliffs and shark-infested waters it was nearly impossible to escape from any of the islands.

Map of Devil's Island off French Guiana
Map of Devil’s Island off French Guiana

Devil’s Island became known for the harshest punishment imaginable, a reputation well-earned.

Prisoners endured cruel, hard labor in sweltering conditions, shackled in chain gangs, and forced clear dense jungle. Solitary confinement was common, with inmates locked in tiny, dark, stagnant cells for weeks or even months, often for the most minor infractions.

Life imprisonment on Devil’s Island was a common death sentence-carried out by a “dry guillotine,” a slow death from disease, malnutrition, or insanity.  Prisoners faced a daily regime designed to break both their spirits and bodies, with hard labor in the oppressive heat from dawn until dusk, clearing land, building infrastructure, or working in chain gangs.

Their living conditions were appalling. Prisoners were crowded into unsanitary barracks where clean water and proper food were scarce. Physical punishments such as beatings and floggings were handed out with little provocation, reinforcing the sense of hopelessness. Though many attempted escape, very few succeeded due to treacherous waters and hostile jungle terrain.

Despite these harsh conditions, some prisoners did manage to survive – and even escape!

Historically, the most well-known prisoner was Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French Army captain unjustly convicted in 1895. Suspicious of Dreyfus as a Jew, army officers arrested him as a spy and convicted him of treason. The army then sentenced him to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. Even when later evidence exonerated him, the French government refused to release him. The French president finally pardoned him in 1899. Dreyfus was finally released and returned to France.

French author Émile Zola wrote a famous editorial about Dreyfus, lambasting the French government for antisemitism and accusing the army of a cover-up. The public attention now pointed an international spotlight on Devil’s Island. The treatment of prisoners drew widespread criticism, both in France and abroad. The island became a symbol of the inhumanity of the French penal system, a place where men were not just punished, but systematically disappeared.

One of only two inmates to successfully escape was Clément Duval, a French anarchist who was arrested in France for robbing a mansion and stabbing a policeman in 1886. His death sentence was commuted to hard labor on Devil’s Island. In 1901, after 20 attempts, he finally made it off the island to Dutch Guiana in a fragile canoe with an improvised sail. Setting up home in New York City, he wrote Outrage: An Anarchist Memoir of the Penal Colony.

Eddie Guerin was a London bank robber, arrested in France and set to Devil’s Island in 1903.  After 5 years on the island, he was transferred to the mainland.  From there he managed to escape to Dutch Guiana in a boat made from a scooped-out tree trunk.  “Whatever I had done, it was not sufficiently bad to condemn me to a poisonous hole where men rotted away and were never heard of for ever more.”

In 1938, René Belbenoît also published his memoir of being a prisoner, entitled Dry Guillotine. Belbenoît arrived in 1920 for an eight-year sentence. His multiple, unsuccessful escape attempts extended his stay to 1934. Once released, Belbenoît found his way to New York City where he too published his memoir.

Perhaps the most famous inmate was Henri “Papillon” Charrière, convicted in 1931 of murdering a pimp, a charge he denied. He was sentenced to ten years of hard labor in the mainland penal colony. His nickname came from the butterfly tattoo on his chest. After an escape attempt, he was transferred to Devils Island and placed in solitary confinement.  He spent another 7 years on the island, finally escaping in 1941.  Papillon managed to float away in shark infested waters using a bag of coconuts as a raft, riding the tide to the shore. He wrote a famous memoir in 1969, Papillon, and was pardoned in 1970.

The French justice system stopped sending prisoners to Devil’s Island in 1938.

It would take another 15 years before it would be permanently closed in 1953.  Today, the penal colony on the mainland became home to the Guiana Space Center a spaceport for France. The remains on the islands are ironically now a macabre tourist attraction.  Boats leave Kourou for Île Royale, giving guests a day to visit the warden’s mansion (now a museum), the barracks, hospital, and chapel. Limited travel is available to Île Saint-Joseph. However, Île du Diable remains off limits to this day.

The overgrown remains of the chapel on Devils Island.
The overgrown remains of the chapel on Devils Island.

Devil’s Island has been the subject of many books and  films, most notably in the 1973 movie “Papillon” starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman, and its 2017 remake starring actors Charlie Hunnam and Rami Malek. The ruins of Devil’s Island serve as a powerful reminder of the cruel penal colony system of the last century and the misery endured by thousands of its prisoners. The French government has taken steps to preserve the ruins, ensuring that the suffering and endurance of its prisoners are not forgotten.

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The Real Musketeer d’Artagnan, Fact vs Fiction

The real Musketeer Count d'Artagnan
The real Musketeer Count d’Artagnan

The Three Musketeers is a classic novel full of intrigue, friendships, adventure and love. The central character is the brave, young hero d’Artagnan.  Les Trois Mousquetaires was published in 1844 by French novelist Alexandre Dumas.   But d’Artagnan and the Musketeers were real 17th century characters and NOT fiction.  Dumas did however take some liberties with d’Artagnan’s courageous life story.  What is the difference between fact and fiction?

The Musketeers Regiment was formed in 1622 by French King Louis XIII as his personal guard. They acted as bodyguards for the royal family and defended the Tuileries and Louvre palaces in Paris.  Originally just 100 men, it was made up of proven soldiers, gentlemen and noblemen, who had served in the regular army first, so it was an elite group. They were a mounted regiment, armed with swords and muskets.

The Musketeers were a blend of soldier, bodyguard, and enforcer of royal rule. Their dashing uniform was a blue, sleeveless tunic with a white cross on the back and front, worn over a scarlet coat. Their “captain” was the king himself; however, Musketeer command was left to a captain-lieutenant.

Dumas’ novel is based in the 1620s and tells the story of a young, poor d’Artagnan who leaves his small town in Gascony and heads to Paris to join the Musketeers. He is taken in by three famous members, Athos, Aramis, and Porthos. Together they embark on adventures countering the political maneuverings of the ambitious Cardinal Richelieu and his Cardinal’s guard.

The real d’Artagnan’s name was Charles Ogier de Batz de Castelmore, Count d’Artagnan.

He was born around 1611 near the town of Lupiac, Gascony in southwestern France. Unlike Dumas’ novel, Charles did not come from humble roots.  His family had noble blood and lived in a modest chateau estate. D’Artagnan himself was a middle child of seven children.

Young Charles grew up learning to hunt, ride, and fence. There were few career prospects at home, so around 1630, he decided to chart a new course in his life and left Gascony for Paris. Like the d’Artagnan in the Dumas novel, Charles had the ambition of joining Louis XIII’s famous Musketeers Guard.

When he arrived in Paris, Charles shrewdly began using his mother’s family name, d’Artagnan.  His uncle, Henri de Montesquiou d’Artagnan, was an influential figure in Paris. Unlike the novel, no one could join the Musketeers without having proven themselves in the military, so the real d’Artagnan joined the regular guard.  His regiment saw much action, taking part in various successful sieges across western Europe.

D’Artagnan’s reputation for cool-headed bravery in conflicts eventually caught the attention of Cardinal Mazarin, the second most powerful man in France. Mazarin was Richelieu’s successor as First Minister of France. Upon the death of Louis XIII, in 1643, Mazarin became Regent for the new five-year-old king, Louis XIV. As such, Mazarin acquired much power and garnered many enemies.

With Mazarin’s patronage, d’Artagnan finally was able to join the Musketeers in 1644 at age 33.

He was now part of an elite brotherhood of soldiers, answering only to the King, built on discipline and daring. At the time, the Musketeer captain-lieutenant was Captain Troisvilles (Tréville).  Other famous members included Armand de Sillègue d’Athos d’Autevielle (Athos), Isaac de Porteau (Porthos) and Henri d’Aramitz (Aramis).  D’Artagnan loved being a musketeer and thrived in the Guard.

He became one of the Cardinal’s few trusted agents, carrying out dangerous missions that required intelligence and a cool head. He rose steadily through the ranks, trusted for royal missions where failure was not an acceptable outcome. D’Artagnan’s loyalty and bravery made him useful during the years of The Fronde, a civil war when nobility rebelled against royal authority.

He was steadily promoted in the years that followed.  Under Mazarin’s patronage, d’Artagnan became eventually became a lieutenant in the Musketeers. D’Artagnan even acted as a go-between for the Cardinal when Mazarin was exiled from France by the King in 1651.

By the late 1650s, d’Artagnan had also gained the trust of King Louis XIV. The King was still young, barely eighteen. D’Artagnan, now in his forties, had spent years proving himself both in the field and in court.  Trust, loyalty, and friendship had grown between the two men. When Louis XIV traveled south in 1659 to marry the Infanta of Spain, d’Artagnan went with him.

Although Dumas’ hero remained a bachelor, in reality d’Artagnan married.

Once settled as a Musketeer officer, in 1659 he married Lady Anne-Charlotte Boyer de Chanlecy, the widowed baronne de Sainte-Croix in Burgundy.  They had two sons together in 1660 and 1661, both named Louis – the first after Louis XIV, and the second after Louis, the Dauphin heir. The Sun King even agreed to be godfather for his first born.  The Musketeer also succeeded to his mother’s family’s noble title and formally became Count d’Artagnan.

One of d’Artagnan’s most famous missions was in 1661, when Louis XIV removed one of the most powerful figures in France, Nicolas Fouquet, the Superintendent of Finances. Fouquet had spent years amassing wealth and power, building the magnificent Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte.  He threw dazzling parties, and forget, or did not care, that that No One outshines the Sun King.

The King had Fouquet arrested quietly after a meeting of the royal court at Nantes. After the council ended, d’Artagnan himself and a small contingent of Musketeers arrested him on charges of embezzlement and high treason. Fouquet was taken completely by surprise with no chance to flee in advance.

The king assigned d’Artagnan as Fouquet’s personal jailer for the next three years during a long trial.  D’Artagnan’s duty as gaoler ended in 1665, when Foucquet was convicted and sentenced to the prison-fortress of Pignerol in the Italian Alps. Unfortunately, d’Artagnan marriage suffered from his long and frequent assignments away from home.  The couple officially separated in 1665, his wife raising their two sons alone.  With the failure of his marriage, he threw himself into his career as a Musketeer.

D’Artagnan fought in sieges at Lancrecies and Saint-Ghislaine.  In 1667, he finally earned a promotion to captain-lieutenant of the Musketeers at 55.  D’Artagnan had reached the peak of his power.  It may have been the second highest Musketeer rank, but since captain, was reserved for the king himself, he was effectively in charge.

By the early 1670s, d’Artagnan was in sixties, quite old for a soldier during that century.

He was semi-retired when in 1672 a new war broke out between France and the Dutch Republic (United Provinces of the Nederlands) and he was called back to duty yet again. D’Artagnan was made a Brigadier and returned to the battlefield. In classic fashion, he threw himself back into action, leading from the front as he always did.

The French invasion of the Netherlands was led by Louis XIV himself and went well as the country was mostly overrun. The fighting centered around Maastricht, a fortress city whose defenses were among the strongest in Europe.  In 1673, the city was surrounded and a siege began in earnest. The artillery bombardment lasted for five days.  It was followed by an assault which included the King’s Musketeer Guard, led by d’Artagnan himself.

D’Artagnan’s company attacked a fortification protecting the Tongres Gate. Within half an hour of fierce fighting, they had control of it, a flag of the fleur-de-lis planted firmly on the parapet. D’Artagnan then led his men to the ramparts of Maastricht.  On 25 June 1673, during a vicious assault, a musket shot struck d’Artagnan in the neck. He died within minutes, at the age of 60.

The mantra of the Musketeers, was “All for one, and one for all!”  Two Musketeers dashed forward to retrieve their captain’s body, but were killed and fell at his side.  Two more men attempted the same and suffered the exact same fate. The irony is that the Musketeers were assigned rest and recuperation that day. But upon hearing that the French were losing men at the Maastricht wall, d’Artagnan and his men leapt to their rescue.

The Musketeers were grief-stricken over the loss of their beloved captain.

In 17th century wartime, it was common to bury the dead near the battlefield where they fell. Very few bodies were brought home. It was not practical or even possible. There are no records, no marked grave, of where he lies.  Somewhere near the walls of Maastricht, the real, valiant d’Artagnan found his final resting place.

Louis XIV wrote to his wife, Maria Theresa, that evening. ‘Madame, I have lost d’Artagnan, in whom I had the utmost confidence and who merited it in all occasions.’  Intelligent, loyal, and brave, d’Artagnan was as much a hero in real-life as on the printed page.  Thanks to Alexandre Dumas, his legend not only lives on, but in fact grew.

Over time, various writers picked up the threads of his real life and wove them into fiction that would make him world famous for centuries. Each version added a little more fiction, a little more swashbuckling, but underneath it all, the real D’Artagnan emerged.

A statue of the real Musketeer Count d'Artagnan near the walls of Maastricht where he died.
Statue of the real Musketeer Count d’Artagnan near the walls of Maastricht where he died.

In 1700, French novelist, Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras published Mémoires de Monsieur d’Artagnan. It claimed to be a firsthand account of d’Artagnan’s adventures, told in his own voice. It was not exactly a biography, nor pure fiction. Courtilz mixed real historical events with fiction, filling in the gaps with his own imagination.

The Mémoires painted d’Artagnan as brave, clever, and resourceful, the kind of man who could survive both court intrigues and battlefield dangers with a quick wit and sharp sword. A century and a half later, Alexandre Dumas came across Courtilz’s Mémoires and saw their potential for his new adventure novel.

Dumas’s fictional adaptation was likewise not a strict historical one. The events of The Three Musketeers take place in the 1620’s under Louis XIII and Cardinal Richeleau.  The real d’Artagnan did not arrive in Paris until the 1630’s and had his career under Louis XIV and Cardinal Mazarin.

In The Three Musketeers, he is young, poor, and quick to fight. He charges into duels and pledges loyalty to the king.  The real d’Artagnan was ten years older, wealthier and more seasoned when he became a Musketeer.  He lived a life filled with more leadership duties than swashbuckling.  But still, Dumas captured his spirit and bravery. With Dumas, d’Artagnan became a symbol of loyalty, friendship, and courage for centuries to come.

Many filmmakers created movies about the Musketeers, putting their own fictional spin on Alexandre Dumas’ novel.  One of the earliest versions was the silent film The Three Musketeers in 1921, starring Douglas Fairbanks. Hollywood kept coming back to the popular story with versions in the 1940s, 50s, 70s, 90s, and most recently in 2011.  In the end, whether it’s through memoirs, novels, movies or TV series, d’Artagnan’s story and the brave Musketeers manage to live on.

All for one and one for all!
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The Red Summer Race Riots of 1919

White mob accosts a black man during the Red Summer riots of 1919.
White mob accosts a black man during the Red Summer riots.

A wave of deadly, anti-black violence swept across the United States in the summer of 1919. The name Red Summer was coined to recognize the amount blood that was shed. During that spring to fall season, at least 26 major riots and white mob actions broke out across the country.  Hundreds of blacks were killed, thousands were injured, and even more forced to flee their destroyed neighborhoods.

World War I had just ended and racial tensions were deepened by the discharge of millions of military personnel. Competition for postwar jobs, combined with a migrated black population placed whites and blacks in conflict yet again. Black American servicemen returned from the First World War only to find a new type of violent racist conflict waiting for them.  How and why did this all come about?

During the 1910’s, cities across the north were reshaped by The Great Migration. By 1919, about 1 million blacks had fled the segregated South for northern cities in hopes of escaping poverty and discrimination. The black population grew by 200 percent or more in cities like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Philadelphia, where blacks were freer, paid better, and in some cases had political power.

This caused anxiety among whites that blacks were taking jobs, housing, and even “security” from their lives. In the South, black sharecroppers were making money because of a huge worldwide demand for cotton. They were buying houses, cars, and even land. Southern white towns suddenly felt threatened.

In 1917, thousands of young black men answered President Woodrow Wilson’s call to fight for American democracy in The Great War. Many African American soldiers returned with a determination to fight segregation and white supremacists. After fighting Germans, black veterans argued that since the Negro was fit to wear the uniform he was fit for anything. Or as one Texas official put it, “One of the principal concerns is the returned negro soldier who is not ready to fit back into his prior status.”

When the war ended, many returning white servicemen resented that their vacated jobs had been taken by lower-paid African Americans. Many whites feared that a hundred thousand returning black veterans would be unwilling to resubmit to segregation and subjugation.

Because of their military service, whites saw black veterans as a threat.

Having just returned from the battlefield trenches, black veterans were not going to take any abuse lying down. Now they had come back to a country that recognized neither their service nor their right to co-exist as equals. That summer, former soldiers would end up using their military weapons training to defend their neighborhoods against white mob violence.

Black leaders encouraged returning servicemen to assert themselves for the dignity and respect they had earned through military service.  Many black veterans were instead mistreated and even attacked while in uniform. The KKK (Ku Klux Klan), which had been shut down during Reconstruction, experienced a sudden resurgence in popularity, carrying out dozens of cross-burnings.

During the 1919 Red Summer, all that mass anxiety became mass violence. Between April and November, there would be approximately 25 riots and 97 recorded lynchings.  Racial violence broke out in some of the nation’s most populous cities. Most incidents were initiated by white civilians and veterans. They were made far worse as local, state and federal officials hesitated to take any action or turned a complete blind eye to the violence.

It began in April 1919 at Carswell Grove Baptist Church.  The Klan burns down a sharecroppers’ church in rural Georgia, killing seven. In May, an anti-black riot of 1,000 drunken white sailors erupts in the port of Charleston. In June, there is a terrible publicly-advertised lynching, corpse burning and dismemberment by a mob of 8,000 whites in Ellisville, Mississippi.

Washington D.C. had over 5,000 black veterans. It had a successful black middle class which symbolized black people’s expanding economic and social status. They made up a quarter of the population. They also held many jobs in the federal government. It was a slow but steady march forward—one that many white city leaders felt needed to be stopped.

Violence began July 19 when a false rumor spread that a ‘Negro Fiend’ had assaulted a white woman.

It incited white mobs to attack black neighborhoods and assault random African Americans on the streets.  One of the first killed was a 22-year-old black veteran. The city’s white-owned newspapers fanned the flames, reporting false instances of black men assaulting white women. The Washington Post even ran a front page story posting the locations for white servicemen to meet and carry out attacks.

“It was almost impossible for me to realize that black men and women were being mobbed, chased, dragged from buses, beaten and killed within the shadow of the Capitol dome,” wrote NAACPs James Weldon Johnson.

National Guard troops deployed during the Red Summer riots of 1919
National Guard troops deployed during the Red Summer riots of 1919

White sailors went on a four-day-long drunken rampage, assaulting, and in some cases lynching black people on the capitol’s streets.  When the police did nothing, Washington’s black veterans banded together to fight back, arming themselves with bats, clubs, pistols and knives. Back veterans grabbed their guns and stationed themselves on rooftops in black neighborhoods, prepared to act as snipers in the case of white mob violence.

As the situation escalated, President Wilson first refused to act. He worried that the riots would damage the image of the United States as a global model of justice. After four days of mob violence, 40 people were killed and dozens more were injured. The chaos was only curbed when Wilson finally deployed 2,000 federal troops onto the city streets.

Just two days after federal troops withdrew from Washington, a black teenager was killed by a white man in Chicago on July 27.  The 17-year-old teenage boy was floating on a homemade raft on Lake Michigan, trying to escape the oppressive summer heat.  A white man started pelting him with rocks from shore. The teen had drifted past an invisible line that divided the white and black beaches. One rock hit the boy in the head.  It knocked him unconscious and his body slipped into the lake, drowning the teen.

A white police officer at the scene refused to arrest the man on any crime, despite a large crowd of angry black witnesses and family members. By the time the boy’s body was recovered, a thousand black people had gathered, demanding police action.  In response, armed white men jumped in their cars and drove through the West Side streets, firing into black homes and businesses. A white mob marched down South Side streets, assaulting black pedestrians and torching black neighborhoods.

The Chicago police refused to take any action.

This murder kicked off a week of violent riots. By the end, 15 white people and 23 black people would be dead and 537 people injured.  Over 1,000 black families would be homeless after their homes and neighborhoods were burned down or destroyed by white mobs. The National Guard was eventually called in.

Chicago newspaper headline from the Red Summer 1919.
Chicago newspaper headline from the Red Summer 1919.

Black veterans in Chicago formed militias to defend black neighborhoods when the city government refused. One group of black veterans broke into an armory and stole weapons they then used to beat back a white mob. Because they had actually seen battlefield combat, they were willing and able to defend themselves. Throughout the rest of the Red Summer, black veterans around the country were inspired by Washington D.C. and Chicago vets.

The single deadliest riot occurred in Elaine, Arkanas, on Sept. 30 after a white law officer was killed outside a black sharecropper gathering.  The governor ordered 500 Army soldiers from nearby Camp Pike to march on Elaine and put down the “insurrection” of sharecroppers. White mobs went off into the fields and started shooting blacks. Upwards of 200 blacks are believed to have lost their lives.  We’ll never know how many were killed as there was no formal investigation made.

It soon became panic across America where everyone wondered, “Where’s the next race riot going to happen?” As bloodshed spread to Texas, South Carolina, Nebraska, Florida, and Ohio, black veterans continued to be targets for lynching. Those who dared wear their uniforms in public were seen by many whites as an affront to America’s racial system.

Riots broke out in August in Knoxville, Tennessee next.

A mob of 2,000 white men searched the town for a black man thought to have killed a white woman.  In September in Omaha, a black man is accused of attacking a white woman.  The man was arrested and jailed in the city courthouse. A mob of 3,000 white men surrounded the courthouse demanding he be turned over for lynching. The mayor came outside and said they were not turning this man over. The mob knocked him down, broke in, dragged the black man out, and murdered him in the square.

In Elaine, Arkansas in October, after black sharecroppers tried to organize a union for better working conditions, a three day long massacre occurred during which over 200 black men, women, and children in the town were killed.

It’s impossible to say exactly how many were killed or injured during the 1919 Red Summer—official records kept by white officials underreported deaths or never documented them. Hundreds lost their lives, thousands were injured, and ten of thousands were left homeless. The Red Summer would not be the end of mass violence against black Americans. But one of the consequences was the growing confidence of black communities in fighting back—in the streets, the courts and voting booths.

Before the war, the NAACP had 9,000 members.  By the early 1920s it had 100,000, planting the seeds of the Civil Rights Movement. The NAACP fought in the courts and started building coalitions in Congress to fight for federal laws to protect people from mobs. The simple message of the NAACP was, ‘We’re American citizens. We deserve the same rights as everyone else.’ That was considered a radical message in 1919.

The Red Summer saw black populations fight back against racial violence like never before. The mob violence did not intimidate blacks into submission. Instead, African Americans emerged with a greater sense of shared purpose, identity and pride. Eventually even racist city governments realized that riots weren’t good for business and profits.  They finally started to calm down the white mobs and the Red Summer came to an end.

World War I had become a broken promise for black veterans, who had risked their lives for America and make the world safe for democracy.  Then they came home to find that their country was still going to deny African Americans the privileges of that very democracy. Despite the events of the Red Summer, 1.2 million black men would enlist and defend their county again in World War II.

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The Tragic Death of Harry Houdini

Harry Houdini, "King of the Handcuffs," 1900
Harry Houdini, “King of the Handcuffs,” 1900

Harry Houdini was perhaps the greatest illusionist/escape artist who ever lived.  He jumped into icy rivers while in handcuffs and leg irons. He escaped from a sealed milk can filled with water. He hung by his ankles from the side of a building in a straight-jacket. And he devised the famous “Chinese Water Torture Cell,” in which he was shackled and suspended upside down by his ankles and submerged in a glass box full of water.  

Houdini had made a career out of surviving death-defying, often superhuman escapes.  It seemed that death itself could never touch the famous illusionist.  But Harry Houdini did die, on Halloween no less, of 1926 at only 52.  The circumstances of his death are all the more puzzling.  Details of his dying remain ambiguous to this day.  So what finally killed the most famous escape artist of all times?

Houdini’s real name was Erik Weisz, born in 1874 in Budapest, Hungary. The Weisz family immigrated to the U.S. when Erik was only 4 years old. He grew up in Appleton, Wisconsin, his father the rabbi of the Zion Reform Jewish Congregation. As a boy, he was better known for his acrobatic feats than rabbinical studies under his strict father.  In 1887, Rabbi Weiss moved his family to New York City, where they lived in a East 79th Street boarding house.

At the age of only 9, Erik ran away to join the circus.  He performed as a young trapeze artist, Erik – Prince of the Air!  As a teenager, he moved on to Vaudeville and magic shows. He changed his stage name to Harry Houdini after the famous French magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin. Young Harry quickly became known as The Handcuff King, marveling audiences with his ability to escape from any type of shackles.  In 1894, he fell in love and married Beatrice (Bess) Rahner, also a New York vaudeville performer.  She would become the only living soul who knew all his secrets.

“What the eyes sees, and the ear hears, the mind believes” – Harry Houdini

In 1900, he made his first European tour and conducted sensational escapes from Scotland Yard and the Washington D.C. federal prison.  By 1908, Houdini graduated to far more death-defying escapes like the sealed milk can full of water, hanging off a skyscraper in a straight jacket, or jumping into an icy river while shackled. He was proud of his toned, muscled physique and often performed escape attempts nearly naked to prove he had no concealed lock picks.

Houdini’s escapes and mesmerizing charisma made him a global super-star.

Houdini's Chinese Water Torture Cell, 1910
Houdini’s Chinese Water Torture Cell, 1910

In 1926 at only 52, Houdini was still famous and widely popular.  He had appeared in five Hollywood films and authored several books.  He was touring the country yet again, performing his daring escapes with a loving Bess at his side. But that autumn, everything went terribly wrong. The end began in October while he was on tour in Montreal, Canada. 

He did shows at the Princess Theater and held a lecture on phony spiritualists at McGill University. After the lecture, he answered questions from students.  Among them was Samuel “Smiley” Smilovitch, who made a charcoal sketch of the escape artist. Houdini was impressed enough by the drawing to invited Smilovitch to come to the Princess Theater, in between shows, on October 22nd to do a more detailed drawing.

Smilovitch came to visit Houdini at 5 PM with a friend, Jack Price, and a freshman medical student named Jocelyn Gordon Whitehead. While Smilovitch sketched Houdini relaxing on a couch, Whitehead asked Houdini about his physical strength.  The student inquired about his claim that he could withstand any punches to the stomach.

Jack Price later recalled:  “Houdini remarked rather indifferently that his stomach could resist much …. Thereupon Whitehead gave Houdini two very hammer-like blows, below the belt, after securing Houdini’s nod of permission. Houdini was reclining at the time, and the said student was more or less bending over him.”

Whitehead struck Houdini hard twice before the magician gestured for him to stop.

The student surprised Houdini and hit him before he had a chance to brace himself and tighten his abdominal muscles. The punches caused the great magician visible pain. Houdini stopped Whitehead in mid-blow on the third attempt.

Price recalled that Houdini, “looked as though he was in extreme pain and winced as each blow was struck.” Houdini obviously didn’t expect Whitehead to strike so suddenly, otherwise he would have been better prepared.  The next day, Harry and Bess travelled by train to his next set of performance in Detroit, Michigan.  He was now experiencing abdominal pain, which he blamed on the student’s surprise gut punches.

By the time Harry got to the Garrick Theatre in Detroit, the magician had severe abdominal pain, cold sweats, and a temperature of 104 degrees! The theatre called a physician to his dressing room who diagnosed Harry with acute appendicitis. He instructed Houdini to go to a hospital immediately.  But the performer insisted on doing his opening night performance. The Garrick Theater had already sold $15,000 in tickets for that evening’s show. Neither his wife nor the doctor could convince him otherwise.  Houdini said, “I’ll do this show, if it’s my last.”

Harry Houdini and his wife Bess, 1925
Harry Houdini and his wife Bess, 1925

The performance was not his best and the show would indeed be Houdini’s last. Between the first and second acts, Bess used ice packs to cool him down. He proceeded to struggle through his routine before collapsing on the stage after the final curtain.

After the performance, Houdini still refused to go to the hospital. Harry and Bess checked into his Detroit hotel as usual. But the pain was so great that Bess called for an ambulance at 3 AM and demanded he be rushed to nearby Grace Hospital.

Doctors performed emergency surgery and successfully removed Harry’s appendix.  It was already ruptured though and had infected his abdomen.  He now had severe peritonitis, a difficult-to-treat condition in 1926.  After a second, desperate operation on October 28th to try and remove the infected areas, the great Houdini succumbed to sepsis.  Antibiotics would not be discovered for another three years.  The magician clung to life until Halloween, October 31st, 1926, when he died in Bess’s arms.

His last words to her were, “I can’t fight anymore.”

The official cause of Houdini’s death was peritonitis caused by a ruptured appendix. At the time, doctors believed this was a result of Whitehead’s punches in Montreal.  However, we know today that cases of “trauma-induced appendicitis” are extremely rare—but in 1926, the diagnosis was widely accepted.

Houdini was buried at Machpelah Cemetery, a Jewish graveyard in Queens, New York on November 4th with over 2,000 fans and mourners present. An obituary in the New York Times commented on the shocking death of, “the man who so often had seemed to thousands to be cheating the very jaws of death.”

Poor J.G. Whitehead must have went through his life thinking he had killed the great Harry Houdini.  The question still remains whether Houdini’s ruptured appendix was a result of the stomach punches or not? While the timing implies a connection, it’s is more likely that Whitehead’s punches caused Houdini to ignore the pain from a worsening appendicitis. By the time Bess convinced him to go to the hospital, it had burst and was too late for him to survive.   

Rumors about his unusual death have persisted ever since. Many of the theories tend to focus on the magician’s contentious relationship with Spiritualists.  Houdini had spent much of the 1920s debunking Spiritualist mediums and exposing their frauds. He even testified in front of the U.S. Congress in support of a bill to outlaw fortune-telling in Washington, D.C.

Communication with the dead, was an absolute craze in the Roaring Twenties.

World War I had killed 16 million across the globe.  Then the Spanish Flu pandemic had taken 50 million more. The world was traumatized by so many losses.  Not surprisingly, psychic mediums who purported to contact dead loved ones quickly became celebrities. Charlatans employed clever tricks to dupe gullible people into thinking they had supernatural abilities.

Could Harry’s de-bunking have gotten him murdered by angry members of the Spiritualist community?  No autopsy was performed, however, to confirm that Houdini’s death was anything more than a burst appendix.  Even poor J.G. Gordon Whitehead was thought a suspect. Was the student perhaps in league with the Spiritualists? There is no evidence, however, to connect Whitehead to any criminal plot.

The famous Boston medium Mina Crandon, claimed to conjure the voice of her dead brother, Walter, as a spirit guide to the after life.  After being publicly de-bunked and humiliated by Houdini, Crandon said that Walter had proclaimed that “Houdini will be gone by Halloween.” Ironically and sadly he was.

To Crandon’s believers, Walter the ghost’s prediction and Houdini’s death proved Spiritualism was true. To others, it fueled a conspiracy theory that Spiritualists had poisoned Houdini to punish and silence him. There’s no evidence for this, so Crandon’s “curse” was purely coincidental.

In what amounted to his ultimate test of Spiritualism, Houdini promised Bess that he would try to communicate with her from beyond the grave. Bess dutifully held a séance for the next nine years on Halloween nights, attempting to contact the spirit of her late, beloved husband. The secret message they agreed upon, “Rosabelle Believe,” never came.   

In 1936, 10 years after Houdini’s passing, Bess held a much-anticipated Final Séance in the Hollywood Hills area of Los Angeles. She and a few close friends lit a candle, and formed a circle holding hands. She asked one last time for some sign that he could hear them. They waited half an hour and nothing happened. Alas, her beloved Harry could not escape from beyond the grave.  

“Houdini did not come through,” she declared to the public. “My last hope is gone. It is finished. Good night, Harry.”

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The German POW Great Escape of World War II

German POWs at Island Farm Camp 198, Wales in 1944
German POWs at Island Farm Camp 198, Bridgend, Wales, 1944

The biggest World War II Prisoner of War (POW) escape in Britain occurred on the 10 March 1945 when 70 German POWs tunneled their way to freedom.  The 1963 movie “The Great Escape” made famous the British POW escape from Stalag Luft III in March 1944.   But a year later, in 1945 was the largest break out of German prisoners in the UK at POW Camp 198 in Bridgend, Wales.  It was called “The German Great Escape” yet today it is all but lost in history.  How did the Germans manage their daring escape?

Bridgend was an important Welsh site for the manufacture of bombs during WWII.  Nearly 40,000 people worked at the Waterton & Brackla Munitions Factory, then the largest munitions plant and largest employer in the UK. Also in Bridgend was the Island Farm Camp, located on the outskirts of town.

Island Farm was requisitioned by the War Office at the start of the war.  In 1938, it served as accommodations for women munitions workers. In 1943, the camp became barracks for US troops training for D Day.  General Dwight Eisenhower visited the camp to rally the troops before heading to the English coast.  After the Normandy Invasion, as the Allies pushed into Nazi-occupied Europe, thousands of German POW soldiers were being captured.  Island Farm Camp was converted to a POW camp and re-designated Camp 198.

It originally held German and Italian troops, but then switched to house German Nazi officers in November 1944.  At its peak, Camp 198 housed more than 1,600 POWs in its 15 barracks/huts.  As is the case of most POWs, their minds immediately focused on escape.  The German officers hatched a daring plan to break out from the camp.

Concerns of escapes were raised by worried local residents, even before any attempts had been made.  The thought of enemy troops running about in the Welsh countryside and within a short distance of a major ordnance factory, left many folks sleepless at night.

The locals’ fears were not unfounded as the prisoners had indeed begun plotting their try at freedom. Much like the Allied troops behind the famous ‘Great Escape’ from Stalag Luft III a year earlier, the German officers chose to dig a tunnel leading from one hut to the other side of the barbed wire-topped perimeter fence.

Those with prior mining experience were quickly set to work on a design.

From the start, its construction was a challenge.  The Welsh landscape was a heavy clay soil.  Digging implements were slowly fashioned from metal bars and wooden benches, with the tunnel roof propped up with bed legs. They were the same length so guards would not notice the difference in height between the bunks. The sound of digging was drowned out by the camp’s very own prisoner choir, which rehearsed conveniently in the hut nearby.

They removed the excavated clay soil on a sledge and rolled it into small balls. To hide the evidence, the men first stowed handfuls of dirt in their kit bags, before depositing it in one of the camp’s garden plots.  Later, they dropped the dirt behind a false wall, ingeniously built at the back of the hut.

The resulting 60 foot tunnel was surprisingly advanced. To confirm that the tunnel had made it outside of the fence, a POW pushed an iron rod from inside the tunnel up through the tunnel roof to the outside, and then blew cigarette smoke through the hole. POWs above ground, inside the hut would then look for the traces of cigarette smoke.

Tin condensed milk cans were slotted together to form a ventilation tube, which was fed with fresh air from a hand-operated bellows in the hut.  The tunnel was illuminated with bulbs wired into the camp’s electricity supply! It not only lit the passageway, but also functioned as a warning light system that could be flashed three times if guards were approaching.

In January 1945, the camp’s guards uncovered the entrance to an unfinished tunnel inside Hut 16.  

The camp’s commandant Lt. Colonel Edwin Darling, warned his guards that escape tunnels often came in pairs, with one an easily discoverable decoy. The guards searched, but failed to find any others. In fact, the ‘real’ tunnel was cleverly concealed beneath a bunk bed inside Hut 9.  The German POWs were able to continue their digging. 

By March 1945, it was ready for their daring escape attempt during the next New Moon. Though only a small proportion of the POW officers would escape, every one of them was involved in the building or the distraction.  The tunnel came out in an adjacent farm field which had been recently ploughed by a local farmer.

On the day of the escape, the POWs sprinkled curry powder near the perimeter fence to throw the camp guard dogs off the scent.  The escapees were also aided by the camp’s poor design. Island Farm lacked both sentry towers and adequate spot-lighting around its long perimeter fence.  Once prisoners had made it through the tunnel, they would be nearly invisible under cover of a moonless night. The plan involved forged papers, with the men posing as Norwegian allies to explain their accents and poor English.

The German POW Great Escape tunnel at Island Farm Camp, Wales 2003
The German POW Great Escape tunnel at Island Farm Camp, Wales 2003

Around 10 pm on Saturday, March 10th, some of their fellow captives were staging a loud and raucous theater performance in a hut next door as a distraction.  The first of the escapees made their way down through the floor of Hut 9, crawled through tunnel on their hand and knees, and slipped up into the moonless night. It was a nerve wracking and agonizingly slow process.

During the early hours of Sunday, March 11th, as the last group of escapees exited the tunnel, they were finally spotted by the camp guards. Shots were fired, alarms sirens sounded, and the guards swarmed the perimeter.  Overall, 70 POWs had made it through their ingenious tunnel. However, when the alarm was raised, 14 were quickly recaptured within yards of the camp fence, hiding in the bushes.

A countryside search was not immediately ordered however. 

The camp commander, Colonel Darling, thought they had captured all the escapees, even after a roll call.  The remaining prisoners just cleverly called out the names of the prisoners who had escaped, temporarily fooling the guards. A few hours later, a shocking telephone call came in from the Bridgend police station saying they had captured two German POWs! Only then did the commander realize that dozens of prisoners were unaccounted for.

The similarity between the British Great Escape in 1944 and the German Great Escape in 1945 is amazing. They both built tunnels lit by electricity with rudimentary ventilation. Both escapes had to remove and hide the soil from the tunnel using a similar solution. Both escapes had forged documents, maps of the area, rudimentary compasses, and paid rigorous attention to secrecy around their escape plans.  Both escapes were interrupted before completion.

The German escapees formed small groups of 3 to 4 men.  Each had different plans on how they would scatter and make their way back to German territory.  Some tried to get away to Ireland, fled to the coast, and steal a boat.  Others planned on stealing a plane and flying to Germany across the channel.

Four of the men had eyed a local doctor’s car as an escape vehicle. But to their dismay, the engine would not start.  To make matters worse, they had attracted the attention of several camp guards who were wandering through Bridgend.

Fortunately for the escapees, the guards failed to realize the men were Germans. They even gave them a ‘push start’ to get the car going. The fugitives then drove off, eventually boarding a train when the car ran out of gas. They made it to Castle Bromwich at Solihull on the outskirts near Birmingham, 110 miles from Bridgend.

“This is the BBC Home Service. Here is the news for today, Sunday 11 March 1945. Seventy Germans escaped from a prisoner of war camp at Bridgend, Glamorgan, last night.”

These words first alerted the public to the largest escape by German POWs in Britain during the war. By the time the bulletin went out, only 23 had been recaptured. It was not comforting news for those Welsh families living nearby.

Thus began one of the largest manhunts in UK history, with alerts put out across mainland Britain. Soldiers, policemen, the Home Guard, and hundreds of civilians volunteers took part in the search. Even some Girl Guides reported seeing some escapees in Porthcawl.

The escape tunnel exit at Island Farm POW Camp, Wales, 1945
The escape tunnel exit at Island Farm POW Camp, Wales, 1945

The POWs were first spotted in the Aberpergwm colliery hiding amongst the trucks.  On being seen, they split up.  Two made their way to Aberpergym house where they were spotted hiding in the rhododendron bushes by the caretaker who called the police. The local constables were also on the lookout for a bunch of Germans they believed heading to the Neath Valley after crossing the mountain from Cymmer. 

On Tuesday the 14th, late in the evening, four escaped POW’s were seen creeping along the hedge-rows by the driver of the Melincourt works bus.  The driver also happened to be a Glamorgan Special Constable. He quickly informed the three male passengers on the bus to get off and capture one man apiece!  The POWs were caught, placed on the bus and driven to Glynneath police station. By now, the three POWs had been at large for three days and nights, wandering through the unfriendly countryside. 

The escapees were tired, shabby, hungry, and seemed resigned when captured.

At the station, they were met by police Inspector Andrew Jones. The inspector’s wife made them cups of hot tea and offered them some freshly baked Dundee cake. One of the SS prisoners refused the cake and bullied the other two into not accepting. He was placed in the cells until the military arrived. Once this man was removed, the other two prisoners talked freely.

One explained he was familiar with this part of Wales.  Prior to the war, he had cycled through the area in races.  He knew a lot about the hills and back roads of the parish. The POWs were very thirsty and drank glass after glass of water.  They explained they had been told all the streams in Britain had been poisoned to dissuade escape.

The fourth man of the group had jumped on a goods train on it’s way to Neath. The constable on duty at Aberdulais shone his lantern on the train and saw the man clinging precariously to the side.  He rung ahead to Neath station, who informed the police, who captured the POW as the train stopped. 

Four more POWs were captured on the 5th day of the escape.  Two Germans eluded the authorities for nearly a week. After fleeing the camp, the men had stowed away in the back of truck.  They intended to escape on a boat from Southampton, before eventually being apprehended. One group was caught in Swansea in search of a ship out of Wales, while another was found in Southampton after stowing away on a freight train.

The majority were rounded up over the following week, although some did make it an impressive distance.  By Saturday 17 March, all 70 escapees had been recovered.  Unarmed, they offered little resistance once caught. It has been claimed that a small number of the fugitives were never actually found.  A trio of escapees were apparently later sighted in the Canterbury or Kent area.  True or not, it may have been buried by the British military for propaganda reasons.

The War Office emptied Island Farm Camp of all 1,600 officers, sending them to other POW camps. 

Following the Great Escape, it took in a more elite class of German prisoner.  About 200 Nazis Generals were held there, with the camp changing names to Special German POW Base Camp 11.  After the war, the site was later used to imprison some of the most high-profile Nazis awaiting trial at Nuremberg. The camp held the likes of Field-Marshals Walther Brauchitsch, Erich von Manstein, and Gerd von Rundstedt along with many other high ranking commanders.

The War Office abandoned the camp in 1948 and left it to the harsh Wales elements, and ultimately to vandalism. The huts became home to a colony of bats rather than POW. The army leveled the camp, but a group of locals came together to save a famous piece of Island Farm. All that’s left of the camp now is Hut 9, from where the POWs dug themselves out, and the tunnel itself.  

Today, 80 years on from the breakout, visitors can get a rare chance to view what’s left of Island Farm Camp 198 in Bridgend. The tunnel was opened for the first time in 58 years in 2003. German graffiti is still visible on the walls of Hut 9. Unfortunately, during a second opening in 2013, part of the tunnel collapsed, and it’s been sealed off ever since. Gradual interest in its historical significance during WWII has grown over the years. The daring German Great Escape should be remembered as much as the British one, and not lost in history.

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The Forgotten Sook Ching Massacre of World War II

Sook Ching Massacre in Singapore 1942
Sook Ching Massacre of Chinese in Singapore 1942

The Sook Ching Massacre was a deadly Japanese military operation during World War II aimed at purging “anti-Japanese elements” from Chinese Singapore. From February to March 1942, Chinese men between 18 and 50 were ordered to mass screening centers across the region.  Those even remotely suspected of being “anti-Japanese” were trucked away at gunpoint to isolated areas.  There, the Japanese army executed them by the tens of thousands.

The Japanese military were highly suspicious of the Singapore Chinese because of their difficulty fighting in mainland China since 1937.  Japan wanted to prevent anti-Japanese guerrillas from rising up against their occupation of Singapore. Many Japanese commanders were veterans of brutal Chinese campaigns where the de facto tool used to keep the civilian population in check was executions.

In December 1941, on the same day of the Pearl Harbor bombing, the Imperial Japanese Army invaded the Malay Peninsula. The Chinese Nationalist government told Britain of their willingness to mobilize and cooperate with the British military in resisting the Japanese invasion. Local Chinese men actively responded, with the number of registrants reaching 10,000.

Unfortunately, the highly-trained Japanese army advanced rapidly through Malay.  The Singapore-Chinese volunteer army had to engage in combat before even completing their basic military training. The Chinese suffered heavy losses and were ordered to disband by the retreating British army. 

After a 70-day campaign, the British forces surrendered Singapore unconditionally.

During the siege, Japanese forces still met with a stubborn defense from Chinese irregulars. Despite being barely trained and poorly armed, they put up a good fight. They carried a personal hatred for the Japanese, who had been invading their country for years. This led to terrible reprisals once the Japanese armed forces were in full control.

The orders for the occupying Japanese army were to maintain a “high-pressure governance” to maximize their military presence on the peninsula. Chinese made up over 70 percent of Singapore’s total population, so targeting and controlling this particular group became a primary objective for Japan.

Two days later after the surrender, Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita issued a directive ordering shukusei (cleansing) activities against “undesirable elements” in Singapore.  Officers in the field interpreted the order as a license to kill, triggering the Sook Ching Massacre.  Sook Ching is a Chinese term for “purge through cleansing.”

All Chinese men age 18 to 50 were ordered to report to designated areas for Screening. The Japanese were targeting five types of Chinese:1) members of the volunteer army; 2) Communists; 3) those on lists of anti-Japanese suspects; 4) those possessing weapons; and finally 5) criminals. Japanese officers were instructed to screen all “anti-Japanese elements,” segregate, and dispose of them.

The Japanese army drove round with loudspeakers to spread the order.  Notices and posters were put up informing Chinese men to report to designated screening centers located all over the island. Some were told they were being registered for work assignments.  They had no idea they were being led to a likely execution.

The screenings were carried out by the Kempeitai (Japanese military police).

Decisions as to who were “anti-Japanese” were based on the whims of the Japanese screeners.  During the cleansing operations, Chinese men and in some cases suspected women, older children, and the elderly, assembled at various screening centers.  There they waited, sometimes for days, with little food or water. Then came the infamous screenings.

Sook Ching Massacre Screening Area, Singapore, 1942
Sook Ching Massacre Screening, Singapore, 1942

A typical screening involved filing past a Japanese officer.  Questions were asked about their languages, schooling, occupation, and residence. In some cases, no questions were asked, nothing but a suspicious glance was required to determine life or death.  Beside the officer often stood a masked informant.  The informers were often rebels turned traitors, Japanese agents, or simply those seeking revenge or favorable treatment.  

Men with tattoos were thought to be guerrillas and sent off for execution.  Those from Hainan were assumed to be communists and sent off for execution. Wearing spectacles was taken to mean a higher intellectual status and thus suspicious. Educated civil servants, lawyers, teachers, and students were also considered threats and sent to death.

The few men fortunate enough to pass the screening were allowed to leave. They were provided with a piece of paper with a stamp with the Chinese character “Jian,” meaning “examined,” proof of their cleared status.  

Thousands of other Chinese men were not so fortunate.

Still, they had no idea of their impending fate. Soldiers loaded these anti-Japanese elements into trucks and transported them to remote areas like Changi, Punggol and Bedok. There, Japanese soldiers lined up the suspects at gunpoint in front of freshly-dug trenches.  Here realization must have final dawned on the victims.   Japanese soldiers machine-gunned them all to death.  Beach massacre sites included  Punggol, Katong, and Tanah Merah. Japanese soldiers simply tossed those bodies into the sea.

At one screening center, soldiers forced them to dig their own graves before execution. At another, they ordered British prisoners of war (POWS) to bury the bodies.  In Singapore, those killed at Changi Beach were so numerous it took three weeks to bury the bodies.

Sook Ching Massacre Executions, Singapore, 1942
Sook Ching Massacre Executions, Singapore, 1942

In some cases, entire villages in Simpa, Parit Tinggi, Jelulung and Johol were massacred.  As weeks went by, screening operations were ignored.  Men, women, children and elderly were simply rounded up, trucked to execution sites and gunned down. Scholars have since argued for a redefinition of Sook Ching as an attempted genocide rather than massacre.

Any Japanese voice of moderation fell by the wayside.  Watanabe Wataru, deputy chief of the gunsei, decided that, because Chinese guerrillas were “crafty and hard to control” that they “should be dealt with unsparingly.” Japanese propaganda justified their actions as a preemptive strike against criminal, anti-Japanese elements, and communists.  

Sadly, due to a lack of records, the exact number killed is unknown.

In Singapore, about 70,000 were sent for screening. The official figure given by the Japanese is only 5,000 executed.  A Japanese newspaper correspondent wrote that the plan was to kill 50,000 Chinese.  Half that number had been reached when the order was received from Tokyo to halt the operation after 6 weeks. The exact death toll remains a topic of debate between China and Japan.

According to accounts from witnesses and testimonies from post-war trials, the so-called “cleansing” was essentially a massacre driven by severe prejudice and preconceptions, resulting in the indiscriminate slaughter of around 25,000 innocent people.

The massacre was intended to shock the Chinese population into submission.  It also generated hatred among those who might otherwise have accepted Japanese rule.  Many Chinese fled for the interior to join jungle guerrilla groups. Major General Fujimura Masuzo, who succeeded Watanabe in 1943, emphasized the perennial Chinese thorn in the side of the Japanese military for the entire war.

The massacre was sensationalized during the Singapore Chinese Massacres Trial after the war. In March 1947, a provisional war crimes tribunal began the trial of “the perpetrators of the Sook Ching Massacre.” From the testimonies of the victims and the confessions of Japanese war criminals, the world learned of numerous atrocities committed by the Japanese military throughout the Malay peninsula.

A Singapore journalist wrote, “The victims were all our compatriots, and this is indeed a great sorrow. I recall the time when fathers lost their sons, brothers lost their brothers, wives lost their husbands, and children cried for their fathers.  There were even entire families slaughtered …”

Seven Japanese officers were charged for their participation in Operation Sook Ching. All seven were found guilty. Two officers were sentenced to death while the remaining five were given life sentences. Many Chinese in Singapore were outraged by the verdict. The families of victims protested and called for the execution of all seven, and the arrest of ALL those who had participated.

The another deeply concerning matter was the proper burial of the dead.

A memorial committee for massacre victims was set up to collect the remains from various sites and rebury them in a dedicated memorial. The issue of reburial resurfaced again in 1962 following the discovery of mass graves in Siglap, an area dubbed the “Valley of Tears.” More than 30 mass graves were exhumed for reburial.

Following the Siglap discovery, the Singapore government pressed the Japanese government for compensation for the massacre. In 1963, more than 100,000 Chinese gathered to demand that Japan pay reparations for their wartime atrocities. The Japanese government refused to accept legal responsibility for the massacre, or to investigate the death toll.

The Japanese government rejected compensation demands, but agreed to provide funding as a “gesture of atonement.” Finally in 1966, the Japanese government agreed to pay out S$50 million.  Part of the money funded the building of the Civilian War Memorial.  Officially unveiled by then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew in 1967, more than 600 victim’s urns are buried at the foot of the memorial.  

As many survivors began publishing memoirs, the truth gradually came to light around the world. It was not until 1993 that Japanese Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa formally apologized for atrocities committed by Japanese forces during World War II.

Much like the far worse Jewish Holocaust, the Sook Ching Massacre was a large-scale, systematic campaign to eliminate the Singapore Chinese community.  It should be an unforgettable part of the atrocities committed by the Japanese military during WWII. The survivors of the 1942 massacre have gradually passed away, but this overlooked tragedy should not be lost in history.

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Rosalind Franklin and the DNA Double Helix

Dr. Rosalind Franklin and the DNA double helix
Dr. Rosalind Franklin and the DNA double helix

Dr. Rosalind Franklin was the trailblazing scientist whose first photo of DNA revealed its secret double-helix structure. Her critical contribution however went largely unrecognized for nearly 50 years.  James Watson and Francis Crick are the famous British scientists credited with discovering the DNA double helix. They came up with it, however, only after borrowing data from Dr. Franklin, without her permission and without recognizing her contribution.  She has since become a role model for women going into STEM.  Who was this pioneering woman scientist?

Rosalind Elsie Franklin was born in London in 1920 to a prominent Anglo-Jewish family. She attended St. Paul’s School for Girls, which emphasized preparing their graduates for careers, not just marriage. There, she demonstrated an early aptitude for math, chemistry and physics. Rosalind was an intellectually precocious child, according to her mother. The young girl decided to become a scientist when she was just 15, and told her surprised parents as much.

In 1938, she received a scholarship from Newnham College, one of two women’s colleges at Cambridge University.  Her father disapproved of university education and a career for women, and refused to pay tuition! Rosalind thrived on intellectual debate, challenging others to justify their opinions and positions.  Thankfully, an aunt recognized her niece’s potential and agreed to pay. 

At Cambridge, Rosalind Franklin majored in physical chemistry.

She pursued her education during World War II, despite the terrifying London Blitz. As the Nazis marched across Europe, she continued her studies, while also volunteering as an Air Raid Warden.

Rosalind received her BA and was awarded a research scholarship from the Dept. of Scientific & Industrial Research at Cambridge to pursue her doctorate.  For the next four years, Franklin worked to explain the micro-structures of coal and carbon, so as to use them most efficiently. She received her PhD from Cambridge in 1945 at 26. Her work is still quoted today, and helped launch the field of high-strength carbon fibers.

After the war was over, she obtained a position at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimique de l’Etat in Paris. There her mentor taught her the technique of x-ray crystallography and she went on to pioneer its use with carbon. She spent three years in France, enjoying the freedoms of peacetime, the French food, and that country’s greater appreciation of women in science.

In 1950, Franklin was awarded a three-year fellowship to work in John Randall’s Biophysics Unit at King’s College London.  She excitedly embraced the shift to biochemistry and would now apply her x-ray technique to living cells. Randall asked Franklin to investigate DNA with x-ray crystallography in the laboratory of Assistant Lab Chief Maurice Wilkins. But Randall’s communication to Franklin did not convey much detail. 

She expected to work independently. He expected that Franklin would work as his assistant. Their working relationship was forever muddled. They had personality differences as well: Franklin was direct and decisive. Wilkins was introverted and insecure. Within six months at Kings, they avoided each other at all costs.

In the early 1950s, the structure of DNA remained a tantalizing mystery.

DNA had been found in every cell type investigated, and was known to consist of phosphate, ribose, and four kinds of bases. Laboratories in the United States and United Kingdom competed in the race to be first to decode its elusive structure.  Rosalind Franklin enthusiastically joined the hunt.

Working with a graduate student in 1952, Raymond Gosling, Franklin took high resolution diffraction photos of thin DNA fibers using a fine beam of x-rays for 100 hours of exposure.  From the resulting black and white photo, she deduced the basic dimensions of DNA strands, and that the phosphates and riboses were on the outside of what was likely a helical structure.

Rosalind Franklin X-ray Photograph 51 of DNA
Rosalind Franklin X-ray Photograph 51 of DNA, 1952

In January 1953, Franklin submitted her Photograph 51 and her unpublished dimensional data to the Medical Research Council (MRC).  She then presented it at a lecture in King’s College at which James Watson was in attendance. Watson and Francis Crick were at the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge University.  They had been working separately on solving the DNA structure mystery. Rosalind did not know Watson or Crick and never formally collaborated with either of them.  Maurice Wilkins did. 

Without her knowledge or asking for permission, he asked her grad student Raymond Gosling for Photo 51 and the data; then gave them both to Watson and Crick. In her data, Franklin had confirmed the key spacing distance of the helix twists, with sugar-phosphate strands running in opposite directions. With it, Watson & Crick spent the next six weeks making chemical calculations and manipulating cardboard and wire models.

They realized crucial insights about DNA’s 3D structure – the now famous double helix.  

The pair pulled ahead in the race, quickly publishing their proposed structure of DNA in the prestigious journal Nature in April, 1953.  They had yet to realize that the structure itself provided the understanding how genetic information is transferred from parent to child.

Franklin had grasped, independently, one of the fundamental insights of the structure: how DNA could specify proteins via RNA. She noted, “An infinite variety of base sequences would be possible to explain the biological specificity of DNA. Science and life cannot and should not be separated.”

In the same issue of Nature, Dr. Franklin published a paper on her DNA X-ray photos. Watson and Crick never communicated with Franklin that they had seen her photo in advance.  They did not reference her data nor did they acknowledge her contribution in the paper.  Dr. Franklin was unaware that her unpublished research had helped construct Watson & Crick’s model.

James Watson and Francis Crick and their DNA model
James Watson and Francis Crick and their DNA model

Due to her strained relationship with Wilkins, and the less than collegial attitude towards women at Kings College, Franklin decided to leave later that year.  She arranged to transfer her fellowship to the crystallography laboratory at Birkbeck College in London.  There she would head her own research group.  Unlike Kings College, Birkbeck was known for its classless atmosphere.

In a follow-up paper published a year later in 1954, Crick and Watson did finally acknowledge that, without Dr. Franklin’s data, “the formulation of our structure would have been most unlikely,” and referred to her own 1953 paper that had “independently suggested that the basic structure is helical with two regularly spaced intertwined chains.”

This acknowledgement, though belatedly published, has unfortunately been overlooked in accounts of the discovery.  She was finally recognized by her colleagues as a contributor, although late and meekly stated. In reality, the discovery was not a race won by Watson and Crick, but a joint effort. This may explain why Rosalind Franklin never publicly challenged how the structure had been discovered.

She moved on and turned her attention to another biological mystery – Viruses. 

She shifted her research to their unknown structure, using the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) as a model to work with.  Working with her new team, Franklin made meticulous x-ray diffraction photos of the the virus and determined it was a single-helix RNA virus.

Her group’s findings laid the foundation for modern virology. Dr. Franklin’s expertise in virus structures became globally recognized. She was requested to construct a large-scale model of the virus for the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair Exhibition.

In spite of her growing reputation, as a female scientist, she struggled to obtain funding and equipment for her research.  In an extended trip to the United States, Dr. Franklin visited laboratories, both sharing and gathering information.  She obtained funding, got given to her in England, from the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

By the mid-1950s, she was at the top of her field and sought after as a speaker throughout the world – frequently the only woman presenter. While on an invitation to speak in the U. S. in 1956, Franklin experienced episodes of severe abdominal pain.  She soon learned it was due to late stage ovarian cancer, likely caused by her repeated exposure to X-rays. For the next 18 months, she underwent three painful surgeries and experimental chemotherapy, still in its infancy at the time.  

During a brief 10 month remission, she continued work and sought funding for her research team. 

She worked up until a few weeks before her death. Rosalind Franklin died in London on April 16, 1958 at the age of only 37. She died the day before the opening of the Brussels Worlds Fair, where her model drew great interest. In a moving tribute, Birkbeck College lauded Dr. Franklin’s “single-minded devotion to scientific research.”

Throughout her short 16-year career, Franklin published 29 research articles, 5 on DNA, and 19 on viruses. Personally, Rosalind remained loyal to her family, friends and colleagues. Religiously, she described herself as an agnostic Jew. Though a scientist at heart, she possessed a lively sense of humor, a love of cooking and nature, and was an experienced mountain climber who loved to travel. She never married, though later confessed to being in love with her French (and married) mentor in Paris. 

In 1962, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins for solving the structure of the DNA molecule.  None of them gave Rosalind Franklin any credit for her contributions at that time.

Dr. Franklin’s work on DNA may have remained forgotten had Watson himself not mentioned her in his 1968 memoir, The Double Helix. In it, he called Franklin “Rosy,” a hostile, arrogant woman who jealously guarded her data from colleagues and was not competent enough to interpret it herself! Maurice Wilkins became the forgotten third man who discovered DNA, overshadowed by the more famous Watson and Crick.

In 1975, Franklin’s loyal friend Anne Sayre published a biography of Franklin, Rosalind Franklin and DNA, contrary  to Watson’s account.  At long last, Franklin’s role in the race for the double helix finally became well known.  It caste her as an equal contributor, deprived of a Nobel prize both by her colleagues and by her early death. The biography focused primarily on a brilliant scientific career and the woman herself.

Today, Photograph 51 is treated as the Philosopher’s Stone of molecular biology. Actress Nicole Kidman starred in a play of the same name in London’s West End, playing Rosalind Franklin. The discovery of DNA’s structure sparked a revolution in the biological sciences. The new science of molecular biology was born, leading to innovation, prevention, diagnosis and treatment in ways that were unimaginable in the 1950’s.

Rosalind Franklin University in Chicago
Rosalind Franklin University in Chicago

In 2004, Finch University of Chicago changed its name to Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science , becoming the first medical institution in the U.S. to recognize a female scientist. Dr. Franklin was hailed as  “a role model for our students, researchers, faculty and all aspiring scientists throughout the world.” Her Photo 51 was chosen as the university’s logo. The image also graces a British 50 pence coin that marked the 100 year anniversary of Franklin’s birth in 2020.  

Despite discrimination and cancer, Dr. Rosalind Franklin relentlessly pursued the answers to scientific questions that have improved health for millions of people around the world. Her perseverance and determination in the face of entrenched prejudice offers a glimmer of hope to all the underrepresented groups across STEM, and across nations as well. 

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The Hunt for the Source of the Nile River

Victorian era map of the Nile River
Victorian era map of the Nile River

For centuries, the quest to discover the source of Africa’s great Nile River has captivated explorers, much like the race to reach the North Pole or climb Mt. Everest first. The river’s vast expanse across central Africa complicated matters though, making exploration both daunting and dangerous. 

Egyptian and Sudanese kingdoms depended on the river and its annual flooding since ancient times. From rulers like Emperor Nero, to later Victorian explorers like Stanley and Livingstone, the pursuit of the Nile’s origin has been marked by determination and perseverance. In the 19th century, it was one of last geographical mysteries left on Earth to discover.

The Nile River is the longest river in the world.  It spans over 4,000 miles and flows through no less than 11 African countries.  Its expansive basin is one of the largest and most complex. The river’s two primary branches are the White Nile and the Blue Nile.  They converge in Khartoum, Sudan, to form the main Nile which then flows north through Egypt and into the Mediterranean. This led to uncertainly over the centuries about which tributary concealed its true origin. 12th century explorers identified the source of the shorter Blue Nile in the Ethiopian highlands at Lake Tana.

The White Nile River flows from the south through mountains, deserts, savannahs and swamps. Its source is buried within dense equatorial rainforests and a complex system of interconnected lakes and rivers. This challenging landscape made navigation both difficult and dangerous for early explorers.  They had to contend with equatorial weather, hungry wildlife, diseases, and predatory tribes.

The ancient Egyptians relied heavily on the Nile, so they guarded it jealously.  

They restricted access, and the knowledge of its course was a state secret. The Egyptians believed its source was the “Nile’s Eye,” a divine underground cavern guarded by the god Hapi.  Farther upriver, the Nile was a integral part of the religion and culture of the civilizations it supported.  Myths and legends about the ‘Mother River’ were found in every nation.

In ancient times, technology was rudimentary, limiting the ability to chart its course. Without reliable maps and navigation tools, explorers could not determine their true position. Even during Victorian times, there were no motorized cars, boats, or aircraft. These early explorers had to rely on compass, canoes, guides, and their own personal resolve.

The 19th century was a new era of exploration.  European adventurers ventured into remote areas of the Earth seeking both knowledge and fame. The race to discover the elusive source of the River Nile attracted numerous explorers.  Among them were figures like David Livingstone and Henry Stanley, Samuel Baker and his wife Florenz, Sir Richard Burton, and John Speke. Only one was successful.

John Hanning Speke was an army officer’s son from Devon, England born in 1827. 

He was commissioned into the East India Company army in 1844 at the age of only seventeen. In 1854, after ten years on the subcontinent and now a captain, he eagerly joined an expedition to explore east Africa.  It was under the command of Captain Richard Burton.  Burton was a British officer famous for a dramatic visit to Mecca during the Hajj.  He went disguised as an Arab pilgrim, a risky endeavor for a non-Muslim European.

In early 1855, Speke accompanied Burton on a voyage to Somalia, with the intention of heading south into East Africa.  In Somalia however, their caravan came under a fierce attack by Berbera tribesmen.  Both Speke and Burton were seriously wounded by spears.  Burton in the face and Speke almost fatally in the thigh.

Following the attack, Burton questioned Speke’s nerve. Speke considering this a personal insult to his courage. This resentment festered and caused a growing hostility between these two very different men. Compared to the daring and adventurous Burton, Jack Speke seemed like a cautious slogger and a follower. Burton could speak more languages, but Speke was the better hunter. Regardless, the expedition was a failure.

Despite their mutual animosity, in June 1857 Speke joined Burton again on a second, much larger expedition to the fabled ‘Great Lakes’ region of east Africa.  This particular search was arranged by the Royal Geographical Society in London. The stated purpose was to follow up on rumors of a great interior lake, called the Sea of Ujiji by Africans. 

In reality,  Burton and Speke would be searching for the source of the Nile River. 

This time, the expedition moved inland from the East African coast opposite the Zanzibar islands (present day Tanzania).  In February 1858, they ‘discovered’ Lake Tanganyika. After three months exploring the long lake’s shoreline for the Nile’s source, both Burton and Speke became dangerously sick with malaria.  The expedition regrettably started back towards the coast.

At Lake Tanganyika, they had heard from local tribesmen of an even larger lake to the north. Speke recovered from his bought of malaria and decided to break off from Burton in search of the bigger lake.  Burton grudging gave him command of a much smaller, 34 member search party which headed north. 

British explorer John Manning Speke
British explorer John Manning Speke

In August, Speke came upon the southern end of a truly enormous lake.  He later described as ‘a vast expanse of the pale-blue waters.’ He named it Victoria Nyanza after his British queen. He correctly surmised that this was the true source of the White Nile. What led to this theory was well documented in his meticulous journals.

Not surprisingly, once both men were back on the African coast, Burton would not accept Speke’s claim.  He rejected it outright, stating there was no convincing evidence for Lake Victoria. He believed, without his own evidence, that the true source was ‘his’ expedition’s Lake Tanganyika.

Speke and Burton sailed back to England separately. 

Speke got back first in May 1859.  He announced to the RGS that he alone had found the source of the Nile, Lake Victoria! He published his account in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. When Burton arrived, he was infuriated by Speke’s account and felt disparaged.  The divide between them grew even larger. The two presented joint papers to the Royal Geographical Society on June 1859.

Speke published a book in two parts: the “Journal of Adventures in Somali Land” and the “Journal of a Cruise on the Tanganyika Lake.” Speke’s journal entry on August 3, 1858 recounts his first sight of the enormous Lake Victoria: “I no longer felt any doubt that the lake at my feet gave birth to that most interesting river, the source of which has been the subject of so much speculation, and the object of so many great explorers.”

The RGS sent Speke back to Africa to substantiate his claim, this time with Scottish explorer James Grant. This expedition left the East African coast in September 1860 with 176 men.  His two interpreters squabbled incessantly, complicating negotiations with local rulers and Arab traders. After months delays, they reached Gondokoro (in South Sudan) in February 1862. [Here, the unmarried Speke is rumored to have fallen in love with a girl in the royal court and even fathered a daughter.] 

After lobbying Mutesa, King of Buganda, they were finally allowed to travel south.  The expedition left to find the northern point on Lake Victoria, where the Nile hopefully flowed from the lake.  On July 28, 1862, they reached the point at which the Nile issues from Lake Victoria into the White Nile. It was the crowning achievement of Speke’s life and he was only thirty-five years old. Speke named it Ripon Falls, after the President of the RGS.  

Ripon Falls where Lake Victoria enters the Nile River
Ripon Falls where Lake Victoria enters the Nile River

Speke and Grant got back to Gondokoro in February 1863 and by May was in Cairo.  There he announced to the British press and the world that he now had proof he’d discovered the true source of the Nile.  As far as he was concerned, the matter was now ‘settled.’

Speke returned to England where he was proclaimed a hero. In December 1863, he published The Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile.  It was intended to both bolster Speke’s claim and his reputation as an explorer, having been tainted by Richard Burton.  Unfortunately, it had been badly edited and appeared inappropriately ‘boastful.’ Burton continued to claim, without substantiation, that ‘his’ Lake Tanganyika was the true source of the Nile.

Speke and Grant did not follow the young White Nile River through its every twist and turn on their journey to Cairo.  This shortcoming enabled doubters in Britain, like Richard Burton, to question whether ‘his’ river really was the White Nile. The two famous explorers were once again completely at odds. 

A public debate between the two was scheduled at the British Association for September 1864.

The week before, Speke went shooting partridges with his cousin and a gamekeeper in Wiltshire.  While climbing over a stone wall with his gun cocked, he slipped and accidentally shot himself in the chest. Speke must have known the severity of his wound for his only words were, “Do not move me.”  He died on the ground before his cousin could return with help.  John Hanning Speke was just thirty-seven.

Rumors, spread by Richard Burton, said that Speke had committed suicide.  Supposedly it was because he was scared to face Burton in a public debate with a false claim of discovery. A jury later ruled Speke’s death was indeed a terrible accident. 

Lingering skepticism over Speke’s accomplishment lead to an 1866 expedition.  This one lead by the famous British missionary David Livingstone to confirm, once and for all, the source of the River Nile. Livingstone’s expedition however famously vanished in central Africa for six years.  He was eventually discovered by American journalist Henry Stanley in Tanzania.  Livingstone refused to leave and died in Africa of malaria.  Stanley returned to Africa for yet another expedition and this time confirmed Speke’s Lake Victoria-White Nile claim.

Richard Burton married and joined the Diplomatic Service, serving as British consul in Guinea, Brazil, and Damascus.  He had a lifelong obsession with the sexual practices of the tribes he encountered and published detailed accounts in various travel journals.  This led to public speculation that he had not just observed, but enthusiastically participated in, the acts he so vividly described.  Burton would carry this scandal to his death in 1890.

In 1951, American adventurer John Goddard and two French friends became the first people to successfully navigate the entire Nile River. They kayaked for nine months from its source at Ripon Falls to its mouth at Alexandria on the Mediterranean Sea, a journey of 4,200 mi (6,800 km). Sadly, a new dam submerged Ripon Falls in 1954 and it is no longer visible.

Today, satellite imagery allows modern geographers to accurately map and study the vast Nile River Basin. The River Nile has eleven hydroelectric dams and dozens of bridge crossings scattered throughout its voluminous length.  Researchers have identified several sources that feed into Lake Victoria, including the Kagera River in Rwanda, which is now considered the true source of the River Nile.

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Were the Luddites right all along?

Luddites attack an English mill in 1812
Luddites attack an English mill in 1812

Today, Luddite is often used as a derogatory term to describe a technophobe, any person who scorns new technology. But its origin dates back over two hundred years to an early 19th-century English labor rebellion.  Luddites railed against mechanized manufacturing that threatened the livelihood of skilled craftsmen and artisans during the Industrial Revolution.

The original Luddites were British cotton/wool weavers and textile makers.  They objected to the increased use of new mechanized looms and knitting frames to create cloth. After all, they were trained artisans who had spent years honing their craft.  They believed the machinery and the lower-paid, unskilled machine workers were robbing them of their livelihood. Sound familiar? 

Their argument was not one against all modernization, but with the way that wealthy factory owners were robbing them of their historic way of life. Angry weavers began breaking into factories and smashing textile machines.  The disturbances became known as the Luddite Riots.

The movement began with a folk hero-like figure called Ned Ludd.  

He was an angry, young apprentice who in 1799 destroyed the new, stocking knitting frames in Leicester. Ironically, its not clear if Ned Ludd ever existed.  But much like Robin Hood, he became a folk hero. He also evolved into the legend others would rally behind years later.  His name became synonymous with rejecting new technology that disrupted society – an association that lasts to this day.

Fast forward a decade when British worker frustrations finally came to a head. These weavers and textile workers were highly-skilled, middle-class craftsmen. The advent of factories with new machinery also introduced the employment of lower-skilled and poorly-paid laborers.

The momentum of the Industrial Revolution was impossible to halt.  As it grew, so did the level of worker discontent.  Weavers protested against this new type of market, based on how much profit the rich factory owners could garner, rather than recognizing skilled craftsmanship. New steam-powered mills fueled by Welsh coal threatened their profession and the livelihood of thousands of textile makers.

The craftsmen initially tried negotiating with the owners. This included demands for a minimum wage, labor standards, and taxes for workers’ pensions. While not unreasonable requests in today’s world, wealthy factory owners at the time balked at the very idea.

After receiving no support from their local government, they took matters into their own hands. With their valid concerns ignored, and no unions yet to fall back on, the first riots of machine vandalism occurred in Arnold, Nottingham in 1811.  Here is where the name Ned Ludd resurfaced.

Depiction of Ned Ludd leading the Luddites
Depiction of Ned Ludd leading the Luddites

The rebel workers called themselves Luddites and claimed they were taking orders from “General Ludd” or “King Ludd.”  They even issued threats and a manifesto in his name. Luddites used Ned Ludd’s legend to frighten owners and hopefully shock their government into submission.

The rebellion that began in Nottingham quickly spread throughout the countryside, to factories in Yorkshire and Lancashire in 1812, and to Leicestershire and Derbyshire in 1813. They protested against wage reductions for craftsmen and wanted the new power looms causing unemployment removed from factories.

The Luddites met at night in secret at isolated locations to organize their attacks.

They destroyed factory machines and even burnt entire mills to the ground. Luddites demolished or damaged hundreds of machines in the first year.  The attackers used long, heavy sledgehammers, axes and in some cases guns when factory guards arrived to shoot protesters. The Luddites were very effective, some of their biggest attacks involved as many as 100 men, and there were relatively few arrests.

Workers sent threatening letters to employers, signed Ned Ludd. When that had no effect, they attacked employers, magistrates, and textile merchants. Parliament realized that the Luddite movement was getting worse by the day. Their first response was the Protection of Stocking Frames Act, which increased penalties for destroying factory equipment. This had little effect.  Luddites wanted a ban of all mechanical weaving machines. 

Parliament had no intention of doing that. The wealthy factory owners held great sway over London, so the government responded to help owners not workers. Parliament instead moved to quash the uprisings by making machine breaking punishable by DEATH. Seventeen men were arrested and executed the following year.

The Luddite unrest nevertheless escalated and there seemed to be no end in sight.  To catch the culprits, owners hired guards to protect the factories and offered rewards for information. Parliament sent 14,000 soldiers into the manufacturing cities and towns.  Luddites actually battled with the Redcoats at Burton’s Mill in Greater Manchester. The military also infiltrated the group with spies.

The Luddite rebellion reached its peak in April 1812, when Redcoats gunned down a dozen Luddites during an attack on a mill near Huddersfield in Yorkshire. Several thousand troops rounded up most of the dissidents in the days that followed.

Dozens of Luddite leaders were publicly hanged.

Groups of Luddites were sent around the world to the dreaded Australia penal colony as punishment. The combined harsh response was enough to finally quell the Luddites. By the end of 1813, their activities had dwindled, and by 1814 the group had more or less vanished.  The Industrial Revolution had prevailed. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the British woolen industry had completely moved away from hand-production.

It wasn’t until the 20th century that the name Luddite re-entered popular speech as a synonym for “technophobe.”  Today, anyone called a Luddite is often considered a technically incompetent or tech-resistant person, or even an entire older generation.  Think, ‘I can’t figure out how to use this mobile phone!’ Or, ‘Hand me a piece of paper, I refuse to scan a QR code!’

In 2015, Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking jointly were nominated for a Luddite Award by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation.  Why?  Because at the time, they raised concerns about the future dangers of AI, artificial intelligence. As innovators, they obviously weren’t rejecting tech, but rather presented a cautious view that not every advance is ultimately good for humanity.

Silicon Valley’s “Launch, then Learn” approach towards new tech has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years.  But just like the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, it has been largely unstoppable either at the corporate or government level.  Robotic assembly lines have cost thousands of jobs around the world.  AI will soon replace even more jobs in the unceasing demand for higher profits.

In an age of exponential development of robots, augmented reality, self-driving vehicles, CRISPR, and other futuristic tech, maybe a little Luddite “pumping of the breaks” would not be such a bad thing?  That is, before we end up with a worse-case scenario of a Terminator-movie like hellscape.

 ‘Neo-Luddites’ emerged at the beginning of our 21st century.

Neo-Luddites recognized the motivation of the Luddites and relate it to a growing disconnect between tech and impacts on society. They believe that powerful, responsible tech can positively change the future for the better.  But they are also leery of the potential dangers of too rapid, “leap before you look” innovation.  They worry that technologies being rapidly launched by unchecked corporations are putting our fragile Earth at risk. Like the Luddites or yore, they too are simply trying to protect livelihoods and communities soon to be obsolete and abandoned on the technology roadside.

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Diane de Poitiers, Royal Mistress Extraordinaire

French Courtesan Diane de Poitiers
French Courtesan Diane de Poitiers

Diane de Poitiers was a remarkable 16th century courtesan, the mistress of French King Henri II.  She wielded considerable power and influence at the French court, garnering considerable wealth along the way. All this, despite a royal rivalry between Diane and Henry’s wife, Queen Catherine de Medici.  The Queen and Diane loathed each other and competed for the attention of King Henri and his court. When the king died suddenly after a jousting match, Diane quickly lost power, banished instead by the late king’s wife. Who was Diane de Poitiers and how did she manage to maintain such unusual control?

Diane was born in 1499, the daughter of Jean de Poitiers, the Seigneur of St. Vallier.  At the young age of only fifteen, she became the second wife of Louis de Brézé, Seneschal of Normandy, thirty-nine years her senior.  At the time, he was also supposedly the ugliest man in all of France. Nevertheless, they had two children together. 

Diane entered the French court in Paris as a lady-in-waiting to the mother of King Francis I – then later the king’s first and second wives.  Young Diane exuded a shimmering, natural beauty rivaling that of Diana, Goddess of the Moon. Praised as “le belle des belles,” Diane was careful of preserving her valuable good looks. She never used make-up, like the other courtiers, applying only cold water on her face and body.  Diane went to bed early and took regular exercise outdoors, avoiding excesses of food or wine.  She was centuries before her time!

In 1529, the future Henry II and his elder brother Francis returned to France after four years of captivity in Spain. The king asked Diane de Poitiers to be his young son’s tutor. It would be an appointment that changed her life forever.  She and the 11-year-old prince developed a strong bond.  As Henry grew into a teenager, he fell in deeply love with his beautiful mentor. They fell into a romantic relationship, despite a 19 year gap in their ages. 

Diane’s husband died in 1531 and she would wear combinations of black and white mourning colors the rest of her life. She succeeded in having his title passed onto her, rather than be traditionally returned to the king for reappoint.  King Francis was impressed with Diane and allowed her to manage all her inherited estates without male supervision. This allowing Diane to be a rare, financially independent 16th century woman.

In 1533, Prince Henri was married to Catherine de Medici at the age of 15. 

A year later, Diane formally became one of his mistresses and a permanent fixture in the French court. In 1536, Henri’s older brother and the heir apparent, Francis, died suddenly, making the young prince Henri dauphin of France!   Diane de Poitiers found herself mistress of the future king.

Henri and Catherine had yet to conceive a child, and once Henri was heir, this became a serious concern. Talk at court began to center around the possibility that Catherine was barren – a very public humiliation. Catherine had sophisticated taste and knowledge in art from an early age and greatly impressed King Francis.  She had grown up in the Medici household and knew fine art, sculpture and painting. That said, her first role was to produce an heir.

Wary of a new bride for Henri (and a new threat), Diane decided to help her rival. The two courtiers formed an unusual truce to ward off attempts to force Henri and Catherine to divorce.  His feeling towards her were not as ‘passionate,’ as they were with Diane.  So Diane offered the princess advice on how to arouse the prince’s passion from her own experience with him. One can only imagine those awkward conversations.  Catherine soon realized that Henri did not have intercourse with her with the same enthusiasm as he did with his mistress.

Diane even eventually offered to “stimulate” the prince before he entered his wife’s bedchamber.  It worked and Catherine eventually became pregnant. She gave birth to a baby boy in 1544, named Francis after his grandfather.  A year later, a baby girl, Elisabeth, was born. Ten children would eventually fill the royal household, seven reaching adulthood.

Upon the death of Francis in 1547, he became King Henri II of France.

But while Catherine was now queen, she wielded little influence over the king.  It was rather Diane’s star that rose higher, eclipsing that of the queen. Diane was made a permanent member of Henri’s privy council. She was given custody of the crown jewels, as well as the Château de Chenonceau (which the queen had coveted). Diane did not exercise her influence in matters of state, but rather matters of court, increasing her wealth and power along the way, as insurance for her own future, and that of her two children.

French King Henri II
French King Henri II

The deep relationship between King Henri II and Diane de Poitiers has testimonials embedded in the walls of Louvre, the Chateau de Chenonceau, and even military cannons. Henri II created a royal insignia to display his absolute reign over France.  At first glance, the symbol appeared to be two interwoven C’s overlapping to form an H. However, on closer inspection, Henri had in fact encrypted two interlaced D’s. The King even went so far as to sign official documents and letters, “HenriDiane.”

Queen Catherine was no longer a naïve princess. She was shrewd enough to develop a deep jealously and resentment of Diane that would last their respective lifetimes.  The Queen had a large portrait of herself placed over the fireplace of the mistress’ chamber at the Château de Chenonceau.  Nevetheless, Catherine remained in the shadow of Henri and Diane throughout their marriage.  The king continued to shower his mistress with gifts, estates and patronage.

Wherever the king and queen were seen, so too was Diane de Poitiers, walking closely behind them. Diane was named in the same rank as the princesses of France. Henri ignored Catherine’s protests that a mistress should hold the same level in court as their daughters.  It was another public humiliation for the queen.

The king gave Diane the responsibility of entertaining foreign ambassadors. English ambassador, William Pickering, and Venetian ambassador Lorenzo Contarini, remarked on Diane’s amazing influence at court.  ‘She knows everything; and every single day, after dinner, the king spends an hour with her to discuss everything that has happened,’ Contarini commented.

At tournaments, it was Diane’s colors that the king wore while participating, not those of his queen. Diane de Poitiers oversaw the expansion of Chenonceau, adding the famous arched bridge joining the château to opposite bank of the River Cher. She was, quite literally, the love of his life, although the king never had children with his favored maitresse en titre.

When Henri was out of the country on campaigns, he did entrust Catherine with the regency. However, Diane managed to persuade Henri to appoint Chancellor Bertrandi as co-regent, effectively forcing the Queen to answer to him. Catherine would however, eventually get the upper hand on her hated competitor.

The women’s rivalry came to an abrupt end in the summer of 1559.   

Henri had just turned 40. He had spent 26 years married to Catherine de Medici; though in love with Diane de Poitiers. In June, Princess Elisabeth, was married to Philip II, King of Spain, at Notre Dame in Paris. The wedding was followed by a celebratory tournament. Catherine had been warned by an astrologer, that Henri would die in a duel in his 40th year! This knowledge made the superstitious Queen Catherine worried as the jousts started – with the king himself participating.

Queen Catherine de Medici of France
Queen Catherine de Medici of France

Henri was always eager to single out his mistress and wore her colors of black and white. The king performed well against his first opponent, hitting the Duke of Savoy in the chest and unhorsing him. Their second bout was a draw.  Catherine intervened here and pleaded with him to retire.  Henri turned to Diane of course, who smiled and encouraged the king to continue.  In the next joust, against Gabriel de Montgomery, Henri fell off his horse unhurt. The king insisted on going again, but his luck had sadly run out.

Montgomery’s lance struck the king’s helmet and the crowd gasped in horror.  Both women stood from their seats in shock.  The king fell from his horse and his squires quickly removed his helmet.  They found Henri’s’ face covered in blood. A piece of Gabriel’s splintered lance had pierced Henri’s eye and entered his skull. The mortally wounded king was carried to his chambers and placed in his bed.  Diane and Catherine followed, one at either side, both in tears.

Catherine called for a surgeon to attend the king, but the physician told her he could not be saved. The queen then had Diane removed from the room.  Henri lived for 10 more days, in excruciating pain, before dying of infection. Henri is said to have called out for Diane numerous times, but the queen would not allow it.  Diane de Poitiers’ influence ended with her lover the king’s death.  Power now rested in the hands of her rival Queen Catherine, mother and regent to her son Francis II.

Catherine refused to allow Diane to attend his funeral.

On hearing of Henri’s death, Diane knew she was in jeopardy. She quickly wrote to Catherine.  She pleaded for ‘pardon for my past offences against your person,’ signing the letter ‘your most obedient and loyal subject.’ Diane returned the crown jewels in her possession in the hope that it would influence the queen. Diane’s downfall, however, was quick. Catherine banished her from court. She allowed Diane to keep some of what she had acquired over the years, except of course, for Château Chenonceau.

Diane retreated to Château Anet, her late husband’s property, where she lived in comfort, though a virtual exile. After seven years, she would die there in 1566, a year after falling from her horse and injuring herself.  She was 66.  In accordance with her wishes, her daughter Louise had a tomb and funeral chapel built near the castle for her remains.

For a quarter of a century, Diane de Poitiers had wielded more influence as the French king’s mistress than the queen herself. Henri II showered her with his affection, riches, and power – the only woman he truly loved.  Doing so, he ignored the humiliations he was heaping upon his uLOST in HISTORYnfortunate queen. Not expecting to outlive the much younger king, Diane de Poitiers eventually suffered the consequences of Catherine de Medici’s scorn.

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