Beyond Coincidence (24 page)

B
AD
L
UCK AT
S
EA

Those who find even a short ferry trip an unsettling experience will have the utmost sympathy for the crew and passengers involved in this extraordinary tale of maritime misfortune.

On October 16, 1829, the schooner
Mermaid
left Sydney bound for Collier Bay on the northwest coast of Western Australia. On board were eighteen crew and three passengers. The captain's name was Samuel Nolbrow.

Four days later a gale in the Torres Straits blew the vessel onto reefs, marooning all on board for three days until they were rescued by the barque
Swiftsure.

Five days later, the
Swiftsure
was caught in a strong current off New Guinea and was wrecked on rocks, though the combined crews and passengers made it safely to land.

Eight hours later they were all rescued by the schooner
Governor Ready,
but within three hours, the timber cargo caught fire sending everyone rushing for the lifeboats.

The cutter
Comet
picked them all up without loss of life. A week later, the
Comet
ran into a squall and snapped her mast. Her crew took the only serviceable boat, leaving the previously rescued crews and passengers to fend for themselves. For eighteen hours they clung to the wrecked ship until they were eventually rescued by the packet
Jupiter.

By a further strange coincidence, a passenger on the
Jupiter
was an elderly woman from England who was on her way to Australia to look for her son who'd been missing for fifteen years. She found him—he was a crewman from the
Mermaid.

P
LUM
P
UDDING

A certain M. Deschamps, when a boy in Orleans, was once given a piece of plum pudding by a M. de Fortgibu. Ten years later he tried to buy a slice of plum pudding in a Paris restaurant but was told that it was already sold—to M. de Fortgibu.

Many years afterward, M. Deschamps was enjoying some plum pudding with friends and remarked that the only thing missing was M. de Fortgibu. At that moment the door opened and an old, somewhat confused man walked in. He apologized, explaining that he had got the wrong address. It was M. de Fortgibu.

D
EATH ON THE
B
RIDGE

In February 1957, Richard Besinger, aged ninety, was run over and killed while walking in the middle of the Big Lagoon Bridge in Eureka, California. Two years later his son Hiram was killed on the same bridge when a timber truck overturned on him. Six years after that, his great-grandson David Whisler, aged fourteen, was killed by a car—on the same bridge.

G
OOD AND
B
AD
I
NTELLIGENCE

The bulky National Commission report into the circumstances surrounding the 9/11 terrorist attack has the benefit of hindsight, but what shines out amid all the confusion, unpreparedness, inefficiencies, and wrong responses of intelligence and law enforcement agencies in the events leading up to the attack, are those few instances when officials judged the situation exactly right. Kenneth Williams, an FBI agent in Phoenix, Arizona, sent a memo to the agency headquarters on July 10, 2001. He had noted the arrival of Middle Eastern students at a local flight school. His suspicion: terrorists might be trying to infiltrate the civil aviation system. Williams's memo was ignored.

On August, 16, FBI agents arrested Zacharias Moussaoui for suspicious activity at a flight school. Moussaoui had shown little interest in learning to take off or land. The arresting agent actually wrote that he was the “type of person who could fly something into the World Trade Center.” Another FBI agent on the case speculated that a large aircraft could be used as a weapon. Security officials gave briefings at the White House in the summer of 2001 in which President Bush was informed that bin Laden's terrorist network might try to hijack American planes, that attacks might take place in the coming weeks, that they would be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties, and that the FBI was aware of terrorist preparations, including the surveillance of buildings in New York.

Such prescience is the product of good analysis of evidence and sound intuition, though there may be a measure of coincidental guesswork in there, too. Whatever, had the government taken the warnings of these agents seriously, the 9/11 terrorist attack might have been averted.

10

NAMES

Just as we take delight in learning that an acquaintance shares our birthday, we can gain as much pleasure from learning that he or she shares our name. But if someone shares our name and our birthday—we might have a problem. As was the case in the story of the two Belindas.

The women were born on January 7, 1969, and both were named Belinda Lee Perry. They became aware of each other when both joined the same library—and Belinda One's card was canceled, causing problems for Belinda Two. Later they were both investigated for fraud when both made applications for student grants.

When Belinda Two moved home, Belinda One got struck off the electoral roll. After finishing school, both went to work as clerks in public service for about eighteen months, then both worked at the same university for about the same length of time. They finally met when they both enrolled as students at the university. They found they had a lot in common.

B
IRDS OF A
F
EATHER
C
RASH
T
OGETHER

Margaret Bird's car was involved in a collision with another car and a van. All three drivers were called Bird.

P
ECKING
O
RDER

On the list of employees of a duck farmer were two people called Crow, four called Robbins, a Sparrow, a Gosling, and a Dickie Bird.

C
HARMED
N
AME

Life jackets, lifeboats, and emergency rations are all useful things in the event of a shipwreck, but having the right name can also help. Hugh Williams was the only survivor of a vessel that sank in the Straits of Dover on December 5, 1660. One hundred and twenty-one years later to the day, another shipping disaster in the same waters claimed the lives of all on board, except a man with the seemingly charmed name of Hugh Williams. On August 5, 1820, when a picnic boat capsized on the Thames, all drowned with the exception of a five-year-old boy—Hugh Williams. On July 10, 1940, a British trawler was destroyed by a German mine. Only two men survived, an uncle and nephew, both named Hugh Williams.

T
HESE
Y
OUR
D
WARFS
, M
ADAM
?

A series of shotgun raids in Barcelona, Spain, turned out to be the work of a gang of seven dwarfs masterminded by a tall, good-looking blond whose name was Nieves, which means snow in Spanish.

L
IKE
D
RAWN TO
L
IKE

A golfer watched his perfect drive collide mid-flight with another ball—a recovery shot by another player in the opposite direction. Astounded by the coincidence, the golfer and the other player ran to the collision point to introduce themselves. They were both named Kevin O'Brien.

G
REENBERRY
H
ILL

A magistrate was murdered in 1678. Three men were arrested, tried, and found guilty of the killing of Sir Edmund Godfrey. They were hanged at Greenberry Hill. Their names were Green, Berry, and Hill.

L
ETTER FOR
M
R.
B
RYSON

George D. Bryson was on a business trip to Louisville in Kentucky and had booked to stay at the local Brown Hotel. He checked in, received the keys to room 307, and asked if any letters had arrived for him. He was handed a letter addressed to Mr. George D. Bryson, room 307. But the letter wasn't for him. It was intended for the previous occupant of room 307—another George D. Bryson.

W.C.

During World War II, Winston Churchill visited a naval base to see a demonstration of the “Asdic” antisubmarine defence system.

He was taken to an area of submerged wrecks and watched as a target was located on the seabed and a depth charge dropped. There was an enormous explosion and the ship swayed sickeningly. A few moments later a door floated to the surface bearing the letters “W.C.”

“The navy always knew,” said Churchill, “how to pay proper compliments.”

D
OUBLE
C
HANCE

It had to be a chance in a million. Motorcyclist Frederick Chance collided with a car being driven by none other than Frederick Chance. Neither Fred nor Fred was, by chance, seriously hurt.

G
UESS
W
HO
I R
AN
I
NTO

Dr. Alan McGlashan recalls the coincidence that happened to his stepson Bunny as he was driving home to his seaside cottage at about 2 a.m. one morning.

“A man driving out of a side road ran straight into his car. It was on the outskirts of a town and the town sheriff happened to be nearby on his night rounds. He took out his notebook and said to the driver of the other car, ‘Your name please?' The man said, ‘Ian Purvis.' My stepson, who likes to play things deadpan, said nothing. The policeman then turned to Bunny and said, ‘And your name, sir?' And Bunny said, ‘Ian Purvis' ‘Look here,' said the bobby, ‘this is no time for silly jokes.' But it was the truth. One Ian Purvis had run into another Ian Purvis.”

T
WIN
D
EATHS

Seventy-one-year-old Finnish twin brothers were killed in identical bicycle accidents along the same stretch of road just two hours apart. “Although the road is a busy one, accidents don't occur every day,” said police officer Marja-Leena Huhtala. “It made my hair stand on end when I heard the two were brothers, and identical twins at that. It's an incredible coincidence. It makes you think that perhaps someone upstairs had a say in this.”

P
UZZLE
P
ATTERN

Keen mah jong player Jill Newton advertised for a mah jong set in a newspaper and got a response from a family in Gillingham. On the way to look at the game, her car was involved in a minor traffic accident. She exchanged addresses with the other driver. The name of his house was Mah Jong.

A T
ALE OF
T
WO
T
URPINS

An air mail letter addressed to Miss S. Turpin was delivered in 1955 to the home of the Marquesa de Cabriñana, at Calle Goya 8, Madrid, and opened by Sallie Turpin, the English governess to the marquesa's children. But Sallie couldn't make head nor tail of the letter, which referred to people she had never heard of and was signed “Your loving Mom.” Enquiries with the caretakers of neighboring houses revealed that an American girl named Susie Turpin lived at Calle Goya 12.

The wrongly addressed letter created a friendship between the two girls, who even went on vacation together. Sallie (now Sallie Colak-Antic) says, “I have often wondered what the odds were of two girls, one from England and the other from America, with the same surname and first initial, finding that they were living in a foreign country two doors away from each other.”

T
OILET
T
ALK

For too long controversy has raged among scholars and drunkards about the origin of the word “crap.” It's time to clear it up.

The popular notion is that the word derives from the name of Thomas Crapper, who ran a highly successful sanitary ware business in England in the nineteenth century and is said to have invented the flush lavatory. It does not. The connection is pure coincidence.

The word probably derives from the Middle English “crappe,” or “chaff” (possibly related to the Dutch “crappen,” to break off). From there it was applied to other unwanted residues.

It had long settled into its vulgar use by the time Thomas Crapper was born in 1836, and had made its first appearance in a slang dictionary in 1846, when he was but ten years old, far too young even for an able person such as him to have founded a plumbing legend.

It's easy just to say “coincidence” and wrap it up in a one-word explanation, but there's a price to pay in doing so, for we rob the story of its romance. Who's to say, given its associations, that his name played no part in the boy's choice of career? Who's to say that the young Crapper was not predisposed to see his destiny written, if not in the stars, then in something more reliably solid upon which a toilet empire might be built? Certainly some sense of mission must have sped the boy south from his native Yorkshire at the age of fourteen, to be apprenticed to a master plumber in Chelsea, London.

Thomas Crapper joined a celebrated band of professionals whose names bolt them to their jobs, including Mr. Rose, the Birmingham School gardener; Dr. Zoltan Ovary, the New York gynaecologist; A. Moron, the Virgin Islands Commissioner for Education; the Reverend God of Congaree; Doctor Doctor the doctor; Mrs. Screech the Canadian singing teacher; I. C. Shivers the iceman; Lawless and Lynch the lawyers from Jamaica, Queens; Shine Soon Sun the Texan geophysicist; Wyre and Tapping the New York private detectives; Mr. Vroom the South African motorcycle dealer; Ronald Supena, the Philadelphia lawyer; Preserved Fish Jr., the Massachusetts whale oil dealer; Major Minor of the U.S. army; Justin Tune, the Princeton chorister; Groaner Digger, the Houston undertaker; and Mr. Vice of New Orleans, who, according to the
International Herald Tribune,
was arrested 890 times and convicted 421.

A lesser man might have changed his name to Thomas Powder-My-Nose, but Crapper was never shy. He proclaimed the name on the roof of the company he founded. In fact he was something of a self-publicist and pioneered the bathroom showroom, in which his wares were displayed to the street, causing refined ladies to faint at the vulgarity of it all. None of this prevented a flush of royal commissions from two kings in succession. He was the Richard Branson of his day.