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Alex Deane

@ajcdeane

24 Feb

@gavinesler

This is the 36th instalment of #deanehistory. Hat tip @gavinesler.

A Göring is our subject today. Not Hermann the Nazi Göring. Albert the anti-Nazi Göring, his younger brother.

The Görings were a well established family, but lacked cash. They lived in a couple of fine properties with Albert & Hermann’s godfather, who was, as it happens, of Jewish descent.

Said godfather had an affair with their mother, before Albert was born, & Albert may or may not have been his son.

(Albert’s daughter says he believed it. The dates don’t work given time spent in different countries by the parties concerned… Perhaps he just devoutly wished it.)

Read 18 tweets

Alex Deane

@ajcdeane

23 Feb

@CaptnCrash

This is the 35th instalment of #deanehistory. After yesterdays bunkerbuster of an instalment, this one is a little shorter.

With a grateful hat tip to @CaptnCrash, this is the story of The White Mouse – Nancy Wake.

Kiwi-born & Australia-bred, Wake was a free spirit from the word go. When she was 16 she ran away from home in Sydney to work as a nurse, then went to London to train as a journalist. She worked as a foreign correspondent in Paris & Vienna, seeing the rise of the Nazis firsthand.

When the war broke out, she was living in Marseille. She was an ambulance driver until France fell, when she joined the Resistance. Her work was known to the Gestapo but her skilfulness is avoiding them was 2nd to none– they christened this mysterious operative “The White Mouse.”

Read 13 tweets

Alex Deane

@ajcdeane

22 Feb

This is the 34th instalment of #deanehistory.

Admiral Maximilian von Spee was a good sailor who died in the 1st World War during the destruction of the East Asia Fleet he commanded , along with both of his sons & circa 2,000 other Germans, at the Battle of the Falkland Islands.

Before that fateful battle took place, and indeed even before the Battle of Coronel prior to it, in which he gave us a pasting, Spee did something interesting.

He feared – rightly – that the time would come when he would be outnumbered and outgunned by a combined Allied fleet.

At that point, his battleships would either prevail or they wouldn’t. The presence of the ancillary ships would make little difference to the outcome of the battle, and might well entail their destruction.

Read 43 tweets

Alex Deane

@ajcdeane

21 Feb

https://twitter.com/911Amelia/status/1363426703171858432

Fair enough. I'll keep a spreadsheet of entries. One guess per person. Closest gets a free signed copy of the #deanehistory book.

https://twitter.com/911Amelia/status/1363426703171858432

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.

Read 4 tweets

Alex Deane

@ajcdeane

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

@ajcdeane

19 Feb

@FredTitmus

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

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