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Alex Deane Profile picture
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21 Feb, 4 tweets, 1 min read
Fair enough. I'll keep a spreadsheet of entries. One guess per person. Closest gets a free signed copy of the #deanehistory book.
As this is picking up entries, one additional "rule" - if you guess a number that's already been taken I'll invite you to go one higher or lower so everyone, we hope, has a unique number...
Knowing you lot, I realise I need a new rule.

If, at the time that the competition is decided, the winner's twitter account is suspended and he or she cannot be contacted, the next closest guess wins.
I've created a monster

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More from @ajcdeane

Alex Deane Profile picture
21 Feb
This is the 33rd instalment of #deanehistory. It’s about sport and I promise that you don’t have to like sport to like it. Hat tip: Andrew MacAllister.

This is the story of a highest ever score. A score that will never, ever be beaten.

It is the story of Maurice Flitcroft.
Maurice had been an ice cream man. A shoe polish salesman. A gopher on a building site. A crane operator. But with all due respect to these roles, they were the warm up to his crowning achievement– his appearance in the qualifiers for the 1976 Open, the holiest of golfing holies.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that he had never played. He’d had a go in a field, & on a beach. He’d read a couple of articles. He had half a set of clubs, which is half a set more than me. But entering himself as a professional in the ultimate tournament was going some.
Read 10 tweets
Alex Deane Profile picture
19 Feb
This is the 32nd instalment of #deanehistory.Hat tip: @FredTitmus.

Ignaz Trebitsch-Lincoln was born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Hungary. It was the last orthodox thing he ever did.
Whilst he did not complete his studies at the Royal Hungarian Academy of Dramatic Art, I think you’ll agree that what follows confirms a flair for the dramatic.
Regular arrested for theft, he abandoned his course and moved to England where he converted to Christianity & was sent to Germany by missionaries to train for religious orders, a vocation for which subsequent events showed him to be singularly ill-suited.
Read 22 tweets
Alex Deane Profile picture
18 Feb
This is the 31st instalment of #deanehistory.

Adeline, Countess of Cardigan and Lancastre, (not a typo, albeit it's sometimes anglicised) played fast & loose with naming conventions.
This habit may have stemmed from her father’s use in later life of her mother’s cool maiden name, “de Horsey.” Nicer than the apian cruelty of his own name, Kilderbee.
Briefly engaged to a pretender to the Spanish throne, she scandalised society by being out & about with the notorious rake the 7th Earl of Cardigan, without a chaperone – quelle horreur! After the death of the Earl’s wife, they formalised things by getting married themselves.
Read 15 tweets
Alex Deane Profile picture
17 Feb
This is the 30th instalment of #deanehistory

My grandfather was a glider pilot at Arnhem, so I have always taken an interest in paratroopers. But the first Allied parachute drop in enemy territory wasn’t by British troops.
The Cichociemni (chick-a-chem-ney) were Polish paratroopers. Cichociemni means “the silent and unseen.” They trained in exile at Audley End, a beautiful stately home in Essex perhaps best known to you because a nearby railway station is named after it.
Our heroes generally trained in secret in Audley End’s grounds, but one foray further afield involved doing a mock raid on the train station. Spare them a thought the next time you pass through it on the way to Cambridge.
Read 10 tweets
Alex Deane Profile picture
31 Jan
This is the 22nd instalment of #deanehistory.

If you are of a squeamish disposition, look away now.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Leonid Rogozov served as the doctor on the 6th Soviet Antarctic Expedition, September 1960 to October 1961. This expedition established the Novolazarevskaya Station, on the Schirmacher Oasis- nominative false advertising if ever there was.
They’d come by ship from Russia; it took over a month. The ship wouldn’t be back for a year.

Setting up the base was OK; winter struck by February & the dozen men hunkered down to see it out, hoping not to recreate The Thing no doubt.
Read 14 tweets
Alex Deane Profile picture
30 Jan
This is the 21st instalment of #deanehistory.

In this challenging time people are understandably reflecting on things & realising that there are things that they regret.

Looking back, I realise that I was insufficiently rude to two people. The first was Geoffrey Howe.
I partially owe that conclusion, and the existence of this thread, to the brilliant “The Spy & the Traitor,” by @BenMacintyre1, which you should read.
In the dark days of Soviet Russia, Oleg Gordievsky spied for us for a generation. He was blown because of a CIA traitor. Whilst he thought he was probably discovered, he still went back to Moscow from London (where he could have claimed asylum and all would be fine) because…
Read 16 tweets

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