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The FBI sketch of D.B. Cooper It all started on a grey Wednesday afternoon—24 November 1971—when a man walked into the Portland International Airport wearing a black suit, white shirt, narrow black tie, and carrying a briefcase. He was entirely unremarkable in appearance, described by witnesses as “mid-forties,” “businesslike,” and “polite.” At the counter for Northwest Orient Airlines, he gave his name as Dan Cooper  and paid in cash for a one-way ticket on Flight 305 to Seattle. The trip would take just 30 minutes. Back then, air travel in the United States was relatively casual. There were no security checks. No ID was required to purchase a ticket. People could smoke freely on board and drinks flowed liberally. And so it was that Dan Cooper , later misidentified in the press as D.B. Cooper , boarded the Boeing 727 and settled quietly into seat 18C at the rear of the plane. He ordered a bourbon and soda and lit a cigarette. The flight attendants, including one named Florence Schaffner, assumed he was just another businessman on the go. The wanted poster for D.B. Cooper, which describes his seemingly ordinary appearance. “Miss, You’d Better Look at That Note” Not long into the flight, Schaffner walked by Cooper’s seat. He handed her a folded slip of paper. Expecting it to be the usual mid-air flirtation—a phone number or an awkward pick-up line—she slipped it into her pocket without looking. But Cooper leaned in calmly and said: “Miss, you’d better look at that note. I have a bomb.” Schaffner did. The message was written in felt-tip pen, all in block capitals: “I have a bomb in my briefcase. I want you to sit next to me.” She did as instructed. Cooper opened the briefcase just enough for her to glimpse what appeared to be eight red cylinders, wires, and a battery—enough to look convincingly like dynamite. There was no hysteria, no raised voice. Cooper remained calm and composed as he issued his demands: “ I want $200,000 by 5:00 p.m . In cash. Put in a knapsack. I want two back parachutes and two front parachutes. When we land, I want a fuel truck ready to refuel. No funny stuff or I’ll do the job.” Money recovered in 1980 that matched the ransom money serial numbers. A Calm Cabin, an Unseen Crisis Schaffner relayed the demands to the pilot in the cockpit. Meanwhile, passengers remained entirely unaware of what was happening behind them. The crew informed them only that there was a minor mechanical problem, and they would be circling the airport for a little while. Across the aisle from Cooper sat 20-year-old Bill Mitchell, a student at the University of Oregon. He noticed nothing suspicious—just that the flight attendant seemed to be paying an awful lot of attention to the quiet, older man across the aisle. “My ego got in the way of this,” Mitchell admitted in 2019. “It sort of bugged me that this flight attendant was talking with this older guy with a suit and smoking, and here you had a University of Oregon sophomore sitting right across the aisle and she wouldn’t make any eye contact or anything.” Despite the close proximity, Mitchell had no idea he was sitting just feet away from one of the most audacious criminals in U.S. history. But he would later be instrumental in helping the FBI piece together a sketch of the suspect. During the hijacking, Cooper was wearing this black J.C. Penney tie, which he removed before jumping; it later provided the FBI with a DNA sample. As the plane circled in the air for about two hours, officials on the ground scrambled to satisfy D.B. Cooper’s demands. The plane landed in Seattle at 5:39 p.m. Around that time, the airline staff approached Cooper with the money and the parachutes. The first two parachutes were provided by McChord Air Force Base. After receiving them, Cooper demanded two more. Perhaps the first parachutes wouldn’t have worked for his mission — they were military-grade, and the chutes would open after a 200-foot fall. But the second set of parachutes were sports parachutes, brought from a nearby skydiving field. These would allow someone to free-fall for several thousand feet before the parachute opened. At this point, the hijacker released the 36 passengers. He also let two crew members go, including Florence Schaffner. Then, D.B. Cooper told the pilot he wanted to fly to Mexico City. But the plane did not have the range to fly 2,200 miles to this destination, so Cooper agreed with the pilot to make a refuelling stop in Reno along the way. Before they took off, he laid out specific demands for the flight. They must fly below 10,000 feet, with the wing flaps at 15 degrees, and keep the speed slower than 200 knots. And the rear door was to remain open. As the plane rose into the sky around 7:40 p.m., several Air Force jets followed at a stealthy distance. Cooper sent the crew to the cockpit as it became deeply cold inside the plane. The four crew members on board later claimed that the temperature dropped to below zero . Then, at 8:00 p.m., a warning light flashed in the cockpit, notifying them that the rear airstairs had been lowered. About 15 minutes later, the crew members noticed a sudden upward motion from the back of the plane. They remained huddled together, freezing, for nearly two hours. Upon landing in Reno around 10:15 p.m., the plane was immediately surrounded by the local police and the FBI. They entered the plane and searched it from nose to tail. But there was no sign of D.B. Cooper — or the stolen money. Authorities were convinced that the hijacker could not have exited the plane on the ground without anyone seeing him. This is the plane ticket hijacker D.B. Cooper bought under the name Dan Cooper for the flight to Seattle. Now in the FBI archives. The Manhunt Begins: Operation NORJAK The FBI called it Operation NORJAK (Northwest Hijacking), and it quickly became one of the most exhaustive investigations in American law enforcement history. Agents interviewed over 800 suspects in the first five years. Dozens of promising leads came to nothing. Lead agent Ralph Himmelsbach recalled: “Real, real good ones; real, real poor ones. A lot of both. And many in between.” In 1980, a glimmer of hope surfaced. An 8-year-old boy named Brian Ingram was digging a fire pit on the banks of the Columbia River when he uncovered three bundles of decaying twenty-dollar bills—totalling $5,880. The serial numbers matched the ransom money. But the find only deepened the mystery. How had the money got there? Why only part of it? And where was the rest? Theories, Suspects, and Dead Ends Over the years, several suspects rose to notoriety. Richard McCoy , a former Army helicopter pilot, hijacked a plane in 1972 in a remarkably similar manner and parachuted out with $500,000. But he didn’t match the FBI’s composite sketch or witness descriptions and was eventually ruled out. Robert Rackstraw , a decorated Vietnam veteran with parachute training, became another suspect. His alleged links to CIA operations, military expertise, and cryptic messages sent to newspapers drew attention. Filmmaker Thomas Colbert remains convinced Rackstraw was Cooper, saying: “[The FBI is] stonewalling and covering up Rackstraw’s tracks due to his possible ties to the CIA.” A sketch of D.B. Cooper next to a photograph of Robert Rackstraw. But journalist Geoffrey Gray, author of Skyjack , disagrees. He doesn’t even include Rackstraw in his book. DNA lifted from Cooper’s tie in 2001 helped eliminate more suspects, including Duane Weber, who had claimed to be Cooper on his deathbed. Another potential hijacker, Kenneth Christiansen, was a trained paratrooper, but also didn’t match the physical description. By 2007, even the FBI was rethinking its assumptions. Agent Larry Carr, who had taken over the case, admitted: “We originally thought Cooper was an experienced jumper, perhaps even a paratrooper. We concluded after a few years this was simply not true… No experienced parachutist would have jumped in the pitch-black night, in the rain, with a 200-mile-an-hour wind in his face, wearing loafers and a trench coat. It was simply too risky.” Left: An FBI sketch of "D.B. Cooper." Right: Kenneth Christiansen, Northwest purser and former paratrooper A Legend Cemented in Pop Culture Despite the dead ends, Cooper’s legacy endured. He became a cult figure—a kind of modern-day outlaw. Songs were written. Films made. The mystery seeped into pop culture, with perhaps the most enduring reference being FBI Special Agent Dale Bartholomew  Coope r in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks . And the amateur sleuths—dubbed “Cooperites”—kept digging. They pore over flight records, analyse parachute design, debate skydiving physics, and argue over maps. Entire conferences, like “ CooperCon ,” are now dedicated to the man who disappeared into legend. The FBI Closes the Case—But Not the Mystery In July 2016, after nearly 45 years, the FBI announced it was closing the active investigation. “Following one of the longest and most exhaustive investigations in our history,” the Bureau said, “the FBI redirected resources allocated to the D.B. Cooper case in order to focus on other investigative priorities.” But they left a sliver of hope: if anyone finds physical evidence—money, a parachute, clothing—they should contact their nearest field office. In truth, the case is no longer just a crime story. It’s an American myth. Whether D.B. Cooper survived the jump or perished in the woods remains unknown. Perhaps his bones lie scattered in some forgotten corner of the Pacific Northwest. Or maybe, as Larry Carr once suggested, it’ll all come down to someone who “just remembers that odd uncle.” Until then, the legend of D.B. Cooper endures—aloof, airborne, and just out of reach.

A bacteriological experiment being conducted on a test subject in Nong’an County of northeast China’s Jilin Province by Unit 731 personnel. November 1940. Officially known as the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army, Unit 731 was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. Located in the Pingfang district of Harbin, in the puppet state of Manchukuo (now Northeast China), the facility was the epicentre of some of the most grotesque and inhumane experiments ever conducted on human beings. Unit 731 was established under the command of General Shiro Ishii, a microbiologist and a fervent advocate of biological warfare. Ishii persuaded the Japanese military of the strategic advantages of developing biological weapons, and thus, in 1936, Unit 731 was officially formed. The facility, which encompassed more than 150 buildings spread over six square kilometres, was shrouded in secrecy, its true purpose concealed under the guise of water purification and disease prevention research. The frostbitten hands of a Chinese person who was taken outside in winter by Unit 731 personnel for an experiment on how best to treat frostbite. Date unspecified. Human experiments involved intentionally infecting captives, especially Chinese prisoners of war and civilians, to disease-causing agents and exposing them to bombs designed to disperse infectious substances upon contact with the skin. There are no records indicating any survivors from these experiments; those who didn't die from infection were euthanized for autopsy analysis. After human experimentations, researchers commonly used either potassium cyanide or chloroform to kill survivors. According to American historian Sheldon H. Harris: The Togo Unit employed gruesome tactics to secure specimens of select body organs. If Ishii or one of his co-workers wished to do research on the human brain, then they would order the guards to find them a useful sample. A prisoner would be taken from his cell. Guards would hold him while another guard would smash the victim's head open with an axe. His brain would be extracted off to the pathologist, and then to the crematorium for the usual disposal. Yoshimura Hisato, a physiologist with Unit 731, had a particular fascination with hypothermia. In his investigations into limb injuries as part of the Maruta experiments, Hisato routinely immersed prisoners' limbs in ice-filled water until they were frozen solid, forming a layer of ice over the skin. An eyewitness recounted that when these frozen limbs were struck with a cane, they produced a sound akin to hitting a wooden plank. Following the freezing process, Hisato experimented with various methods to rapidly rewarm the frozen limbs. Sometimes he poured hot water over them, at other times he held them near an open flame, and occasionally he left the subjects untreated overnight to observe how long it took for their blood to thaw the frozen limbs naturally. Atrocities Committed A Unit 731 doctor operates on a patient that is part of a bacteriological experiment. Date unspecified. Nakagawa Yonezo, professor emeritus at Osaka University, studied at Kyoto University during the war. While he was there, he watched footage of human experiments and executions from Unit 731. He later testified about the playfulness of the experimenters: Some of the experiments had nothing to do with advancing the capability of germ warfare, or of medicine. There is such a thing as professional curiosity: ‘What would happen if we did such and such?’ What medical purpose was served by performing and studying beheadings? None at all. That was just playing around. Professional people, too, like to play." Prisoners were injected with diseases, disguised as vaccinations, to study their effects. To study the effects of untreated venereal diseases, male and female prisoners were deliberately infected with syphilis and gonorrhoea, then studied. Prisoners were also repeatedly subjected to rape by guards. A special project, codenamed Maruta, used human beings for experiments. Test subjects were gathered from the surrounding population and sometimes euphemistically referred to as "logs" (丸太, maruta), used in such contexts as "How many logs fell?" This term originated as a joke on the part of the staff because the official cover story for the facility given to local authorities was that it was a lumber mill. A Japanese soldier uses a Chinese man’s body for bayonet practice near Tianjin, China. September 1937. According to a junior uniformed civilian employee of the Imperial Japanese Army working in Unit 731, the project was internally called "Holzklotz", from the German word for log. In a further parallel, the corpses of "sacrificed" subjects were disposed of by incineration. Researchers in Unit 731 also published some of their results in peer-reviewed journals, writing as though the research had been conducted on nonhuman primates called "Manchurian monkeys" or "long-tailed monkeys." The experiments conducted at Unit 731 were as diverse as they were depraved. Prisoners, euphemistically referred to as "logs" (maruta) by the personnel, were subjected to a litany of barbaric procedures: Vivisection: Prisoners, often without anaesthesia, were dissected alive to study the effects of diseases on the human body. Limbs were amputated to observe blood loss, organs were removed to understand their functions, and some subjects had parts of their stomachs removed and the oesophagus reattached directly to the intestines. The New York Times interviewed a former member of Unit 731. Insisting on anonymity, the former Japanese medical assistant recounted his first experience in vivisecting a live human being, who had been deliberately infected with the plague, for the purpose of developing "plague bombs" for war. "The fellow knew that it was over for him, and so he didn't struggle when they led him into the room and tied him down, but when I picked up the scalpel, that's when he began screaming. I cut him open from the chest to the stomach, and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony. He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped. This was all in a day's work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time." Biological Warfare Testing: Victims were intentionally infected with deadly pathogens such as anthrax, plague, and cholera. The spread and effects of these diseases were meticulously documented. Some prisoners were exposed to bomb blasts containing biological agents to study infection patterns and lethality. Unit 731 were involved in research, development and experimental deployment of epidemic-creating biological weapons in assaults against the Chinese. Plague-infected fleas, bred in the laboratories of Unit 731 and Unit 1644, were spread by low-flying airplanes over Chinese cities. These operations killed tens of thousands with bubonic plague epidemics. An expedition to Nanjing involved spreading typhoid and paratyphoid germs into the wells, marshes, and houses of the city, as well as infusing them in snacks distributed to locals. Frostbite Testing: In experiments designed to understand how to treat frostbite, prisoners were subjected to extreme cold. Their limbs were frozen and then thawed to study the progression and treatment of gangrene. Army Engineer Hisato Yoshimura was in charge of these experiments, Military personnel of the Unit referred to Yoshimura as a "scientific devil" and a "cold-blooded animal" due to his strictness and involvement in mass killings and inhumane scientific test, which included soaking the fingers of a three-day-old child in water containing ice and salt. Naoji Uezono, a member of Unit 731, described in a 1980s interview a grisly scene where Yoshimura had "two naked men put in an area 40–50 degrees below zero and researchers filmed the whole process until [the subjects] died. [The subjects] suffered such agony they were digging their nails into each other's flesh." Yoshimura's lack of remorse was evident in an article he wrote for the Japanese Journal of Physiology in 1950 in which he admitted to using 20 children and a three-day-old infant in experiments which exposed them to zero-degree-Celsius ice and salt water. Although this article drew criticism, Yoshimura denied any guilt when contacted by a reporter from the Mainichi Shimbun. Syphilis and Rape: In an effort to understand the transmission of venereal diseases, prisoners were deliberately infected with syphilis through forced rape, often under the guise of examining wartime medical conditions. Female prisoners were forced to become pregnant for use in experiments. The hypothetical possibility of vertical transmission (from mother to child) of diseases, particularly syphilis, was the stated reason for the torture. Fetal survival and damage to mother's reproductive organs were objects of interest. Though "a large number of babies were born in captivity," there have been no accounts of any survivors of Unit 731, children included. It is suspected that the children of female prisoners were killed after birth or aborted. While male prisoners were often used in single studies, so that the results of the experimentation on them would not be clouded by other variables, women were sometimes used in bacteriological or physiological experiments, sex experiments, and as the victims of sex crimes. The testimony of a unit member that served as a guard graphically demonstrated this reality: One of the former researchers I located told me that one day he had a human experiment scheduled, but there was still time to kill. So he and another unit member took the keys to the cells and opened one that housed a Chinese woman. One of the unit members raped her; the other member took the keys and opened another cell. There was a Chinese woman in there who had been used in a frostbite experiment. She had several fingers missing and her bones were black, with gangrene set in. He was about to rape her anyway, then he saw that her sex organ was festering, with pus oozing to the surface. He gave up the idea, left and locked the door, then later went on to his experimental work General Shiro Ishii, the commander of Unit 731. Chemical Weapons Testing: Unit 731 also tested chemical weapons on living subjects. Prisoners were exposed to various gases, including mustard gas and cyanide, to evaluate their effects and develop countermeasures. Some of the agents tested were mustard gas, lewisite, cyanic acid gas, white phosphorus, adamsite, and phosgene gas. A former army major and technician gave the following testimony anonymously (at the time of the interview, this man was a professor emeritus at a national university): In 1943, I attended a poison gas test held at the Unit 731 test facilities. A glass-walled chamber about three meters square [97 sq ft] and two meters [6.6 ft] high was used. Inside of it, a Chinese man was blindfolded, with his hands tied around a post behind him. The gas was adamsite (sneezing gas), and as the gas filled the chamber the man went into violent coughing convulsions and began to suffer excruciating pain. More than ten doctors and technicians were present. After I had watched for about ten minutes, I could not stand it any more, and left the area. I understand that other types of gasses were also tested there. — Hal Gold, Japan's Infamous Unit 731, p. 349 (2019) Unit 731 also tested chemical weapons on prisoners in field conditions. A report authored by unknown researcher in the Kamo Unit (Unit 731) describes a large human experiment of yperite gas (mustard gas) on 7–10 September 1940. Twenty subjects were divided into three groups and placed in combat emplacements, trenches, gazebos, and observatories. One group was clothed with Chinese underwear, no hat, and no mask and was subjected to as much as 1,800 field gun rounds of yperite gas over 25 minutes. Another group was clothed in summer military uniform and shoes; three had masks and another three had no mask. They also were exposed to as much as 1,800 rounds of yperite gas. A third group was clothed in summer military uniform, three with masks and two without masks, and were exposed to as much as 4,800 rounds. Then their general symptoms and damage to skin, eye, respiratory organs, and digestive organs were observed at 4 hours, 24 hours, and 2, 3, and 5 days after the shots. Injecting the blister fluid from one subject into another subject and analyses of blood and soil were also performed. Five subjects were forced to drink a solution of yperite and lewisite gas in water, with or without decontamination. The report describes conditions of every subject precisely without mentioning what happened to them in the long run. The following is an excerpt of one of these reports: Number 376, dugout of the first area: September 7, 1940, 6 pm: Tired and exhausted. Looks with hollow eyes. Weeping redness of the skin of the upper part of the body. Eyelids edematous, swollen. Epiphora. Hyperemic conjunctivae. September 8, 6 am: Neck, breast, upper abdomen and scrotum weeping, reddened, swollen. Covered with millet-seed-size to bean-size blisters. Eyelids and conjunctivae hyperemic and edematous. Had difficulties opening the eyes. September 8, 6 pm: Tired and exhausted. Feels sick. Body temperature 37 degrees Celsius. Mucous and bloody erosions across the shoulder girdle. Abundant mucous nose secretions. Abdominal pain. Mucous and bloody diarrhea. Proteinuria. September 9, 7 am: Tired and exhausted. Weakness of all four extremities. Low morale. Body temperature 37 degrees Celsius. Skin of the face still weeping. — Man, Medicine, and the State: The Human Body as an Object of Government Sponsored Medical Research in the 20th Century (2006) p. 187 Unit 731’s Harbin facility. During the war, the activities of Unit 731 were a closely guarded secret. The Japanese government and military meticulously concealed the true nature of the unit's operations, and its existence was known only to a select few within the highest echelons of power. Even within the unit, personnel were often kept in the dark about the broader scope of their work, with duties compartmentalized to prevent leaks. In the aftermath of Japan’s defeat in 1945, the horrors of Unit 731 began to surface. The Soviet Union conducted trials of some Japanese military personnel in Khabarovsk in 1949, revealing gruesome details of the experiments. However, the United States, seeking valuable research data, offered immunity to General Ishii and other key figures in exchange for their findings. Consequently, many perpetrators evaded justice, and the full extent of their crimes remained obscured for decades. Japan’s acknowledgment of Unit 731 has been a contentious and gradual process. For many years, the Japanese government maintained a stance of denial or obfuscation regarding the unit’s activities. It was only in the 1980s and 1990s, under pressure from researchers, historians, and international bodies, that Japan began to confront this dark chapter of its past more openly. Unit 731 researchers conduct bacteriological experiments with captive child subjects in Nongan County of northeast China’s Jilin Province. November 1940. In 1997, the Japanese court recognised the existence of Unit 731 and the suffering of its victims, although it stopped short of issuing a formal apology or providing compensation. Over the years, various documentaries, books, and academic studies have shed light on the atrocities committed, fostering a more nuanced understanding of the extent of Japan’s wartime conduct. However, official apologies have remained insufficient for many survivors and their families. In 2002, a group of Chinese plaintiffs sued the Japanese government for compensation and an apology. The Tokyo District Court acknowledged the atrocities but ruled that individual victims had no right to seek compensation under international law. Japanese personnel in protective suits carry a stretcher through Yiwu, China during Unit 731’s germ warfare tests. June 1942.

Yuri with Asya When the Russian linguist Yuri Knorozov finally visited Mexico in the early 1990s, he was received with the reverence normally reserved for heads of state or pop stars. Children recognised him, scholars celebrated him, and politicians honoured him. Yet in his native Russia, few knew his name, let alone his achievement. Forty years earlier, in relative obscurity, Knorozov had accomplished what generations of European and Latin American scholars had failed to do: he cracked the code of the Maya script. His methods were unconventional, his personality reclusive, and his story largely unknown outside specialist circles. But in the world of Mesoamerican studies, Yuri Knorozov occupies a place as significant as Jean-François Champollion, who deciphered the Rosetta Stone and opened the door to Ancient Egypt. Knorozov, working in the austere post-war Soviet Union, unlocked the language of a civilisation across the ocean, one he wouldn’t see with his own eyes until the final years of his life. A Child of the Stalin Era Born in 1922 in Kharkiv, then part of Soviet Ukraine, Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov was the son of educated parents and came of age during one of the darkest chapters in the USSR’s history. He survived the catastrophic Holodomor famine of the 1930s and was still a student when the Second World War tore through Eastern Europe. When Nazi forces occupied Kharkiv, Knorozov was in his second year at the city's university, studying history. Little is known about his life under occupation. It was not something one spoke about after the war, and association with enemy-controlled territories could cast a lifelong shadow. After Kharkiv was liberated, his family relocated to Moscow, and he continued his studies at Moscow State University. But the stain of occupation clung to him. Like many who had lived under Nazi rule, he was viewed with suspicion and barred from postgraduate study or travel abroad. “A typical child of the Stalin times,” he later said, not without a trace of bitterness. Maya stucco glyphs displayed in the Palenque museum, Mexico After university, Knorozov moved to Leningrad, where he worked at the Ethnographic Museum under the protection of more senior scholars. His life was sparse and largely academic. He was given a small room near the museum, wore the same modest clothes, and shared an office filled with towering stacks of books. In this quiet space, surrounded by dust and obscurity, he began to unravel one of the great archaeological mysteries of the Americas. The Mayan Challenge It began, by chance, with a German article. While in Moscow, Knorozov came across a paper by the German scholar Paul Schellhas, which asserted that the Maya script was impossible to decipher. To Knorozov, this was less a statement of fact than a challenge. “What was invented by a human mind,” he later said, “can be unravelled by another human mind.” At the time, no one in the Soviet Union was seriously studying the Maya. Knorozov, trained as an ethnographer, decided to tackle the problem alone. While working through war trophy archives from Germany, seized by Soviet forces after the fall of Berlin, he discovered reproductions of three surviving Maya codices published in 1930. These books, filled with intricate glyphs, would become the foundation of his research. Even more crucial was his discovery of a 16th-century Spanish manuscript: Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, written by the Franciscan bishop Diego de Landa. In this document, de Landa attempted to describe the Maya culture and language, including a crude attempt to match Maya glyphs with letters of the Latin alphabet. Though riddled with errors, it was the closest thing to a bilingual key. Using a statistical method known as positional analysis, Knorozov counted how often particular glyphs appeared at the beginnings and ends of words. His radical breakthrough was the realisation that the Maya script was not an alphabet, as earlier scholars had assumed, but a syllabary, each glyph represented a syllable rather than a letter or an entire word. A page from Diego de Landa's manuscript, Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, in which he describes the famous "de Landa alphabet" In 1952, he published his findings in a Soviet ethnographic journal under the title Ancient Writing of Central America. The paper caused a quiet stir. His academic supervisor was so impressed that he petitioned for Knorozov to be awarded a doctorate directly, bypassing the usual prerequisite of a candidate's degree, a rare honour in Soviet academia. Recognition Abroad, Obscurity at Home In the West, Knorozov’s work gained attention following the publication of The Mysteries of the Maya in Sovetsky Soyuz in 1956. He followed this with a monograph on the decipherment of Maya writing and, almost miraculously, was granted permission to attend an international congress in Copenhagen. There, for the first time, he was able to share his research with foreign scholars. The Spanish-speaking world, especially Mexico and Guatemala, embraced him. Mexican students and officials travelled to Leningrad to meet the man who had unlocked their ancestral language. Even Jacobo Árbenz, the exiled president of Guatemala, visited him and wrote in the museum guestbook, calling Knorozov “a kind Soviet scientist to whom our nation of Maya owes so much.” In the 1970s, Knorozov translated the deciphered Maya texts and received the USSR’s State Prize. Internationally, scholars began comparing him to Champollion, much to his amusement. Yet despite these accolades, travel restrictions and bureaucratic suspicion meant he remained in the Soviet Union for decades. The Long Road to Mexico It wasn’t until the early 1990s, some 40 years after his original publication, that Yuri Knorozov finally set foot on the land of the Maya. He was invited by the president of Guatemala, and soon after made three visits to Mexico, where he was given a hero’s welcome. In his old age, he was finally able to walk among the temples of Palenque, Mérida, Uxmal and Dzibilchaltun, reading the glyphs he had once only seen in photographs. Mexico awarded him its highest honour for foreigners: the Order of the Aztec Eagle. He accepted it with quiet pride. The Eccentric Genius Knorozov’s eccentricities are the stuff of legend. He was famously reclusive and mystical, and often said to have a deep interest in shamanism. He pursued studies into the linguistic connections between the Ainu of Japan and Native American peoples, and even tried his hand at deciphering Easter Island’s enigmatic Rongorongo script and Proto-Indian writing systems. But perhaps the most endearing aspect of his personality was his affection for cats. In every published article, he tried — often unsuccessfully — to include a photograph of himself with his cat Aspid (later referred to as Asya). He even listed her as co-author of his academic papers, though her name was invariably removed by editors. When a publication once cropped her out of an author photo, Knorozov reportedly became furious. Legacy Yuri Knorozov died in 1999, largely unknown in his home country but revered in Latin America. His work not only solved a centuries-old puzzle but also transformed our understanding of a civilisation once thought to be mute. By reading their own words, modern scholars could now glimpse the beliefs, rituals and histories of the Maya as they were written — not by European chroniclers, but by the Maya themselves. In a life marked by war, suspicion, poverty and eccentric brilliance, Knorozov never gave up on his belief in the power of the human mind to decode the past. It took decades before he could stand in the shadow of a Maya pyramid and read its meaning aloud. But when he did, the world — finally — listened.

When the world slid towards chaos in the late 1930s, there were individuals who, faced with impossible choices, quietly chose to do the right thing. One such person was Paul Grüninger, a Swiss police commander who risked everything — his career, his reputation, his livelihood — to save thousands of Jewish refugees. His is not a story of dramatic battles or political speeches, but one of steadfast humanity in the face of rising bureaucracy and cold-hearted rules. Who Was Paul Grüninger? Born on 27 October 1891 in St. Gallen, Switzerland, Paul Grüninger lived through the First World War and the interwar years, experiencing firsthand a Europe increasingly marked by economic hardship and political extremism. Before joining the police force, he served briefly as a schoolteacher and later enlisted in the Swiss army during the First World War, although Switzerland remained neutral. By 1925, Grüninger had risen to the position of Commander of the St. Gallen Cantonal Police, responsible for overseeing the eastern border with Austria — a position that would thrust him into the moral crisis that would define his life. St. Gallen’s border with Austria was historically busy, but after the Anschluss of March 1938, when Nazi Germany absorbed Austria, the flow of people changed dramatically. Jewish families, once living stable lives, now fled with little more than the clothes on their backs, seeking a slim chance of survival across the Swiss border. Paul Grüninger (left) Switzerland’s Harsh Refugee Policy Switzerland had long prided itself on neutrality, but by the late 1930s, that neutrality had hardened into something less benevolent. In an effort to maintain good relations with Nazi Germany and avoid being overwhelmed by refugees, the Swiss Federal Government implemented strict immigration controls. In October 1938, negotiations between Switzerland and Germany resulted in the notorious “J-stamp” agreement — all Jewish Germans and Austrians now had a large “J” stamped into their passports, making it almost impossible for them to enter Switzerland legally. It was an early, chilling example of administrative measures reinforcing racial persecution. Official Swiss policy dictated that refugees without proper entry visas were to be turned back at the border — effectively returning them to countries where antisemitic violence was official state policy. For border officials like Paul Grüninger, the situation presented a brutal choice: obey orders and send desperate people back into the arms of their persecutors, or defy orders and risk everything. Grüninger in later years Grüninger’s Quiet Rebellion Paul Grüninger decided he could not, in good conscience, enforce a policy that condemned people to death. He began allowing refugees to cross the border illegally, often turning a blind eye to those arriving without papers, and actively helping them regularise their status once inside Switzerland. He did more than simply look the other way. Grüninger falsified official documents, altering the dates of entry so that refugees appeared to have arrived before the March 1938 cut-off. This clever manipulation meant that the authorities had to treat them as legal entrants. Without this administrative sleight of hand, many of the refugees would have been sent back across the border to almost certain death. Thanks to his efforts, thousands found temporary shelter in camps like Diepoldsau, supported by Jewish aid organisations, while they awaited permission to stay or opportunities to emigrate further afield. Grüninger’s work required constant vigilance. He filed false reports to the Swiss Federal Police, understated the numbers of new arrivals, and impeded efforts to trace those who had slipped across the border without authorisation. He even paid out of his own pocket for winter clothing and basic supplies for those who had fled Austria with nothing. His methods were simple but dangerous: he instructed his subordinates to turn a blind eye, he cooperated with Jewish organisations in Switzerland and abroad, and he never asked too many questions. His focus remained solely on saving lives. The Broader Human Context: The Story of Joseph Spring While Paul Grüninger risked everything to protect refugees, many others fell victim to Switzerland’s harsh border policies. One tragic example is that of Joseph Spring, a 16-year-old boy from Berlin. In November 1943, Joseph and his two cousins, Henri (14) and Sylver Henenberg (21), fled mass arrests in Belgium and attempted to cross into Switzerland near La Cure, in the canton of Vaud. Although they carried forged French papers identifying them as “Aryans,” they immediately revealed their Jewish identity to the Swiss authorities, hoping for asylum. Joseph Spring and his cousin Sylver Henenberg in the winter of 1943. Shortly afterward this photo was taken they were handed over to the Gestapo by Swiss officials. Instead, Swiss border guards turned them back. Undeterred, they tried again the following night — only to be arrested. Swiss officials handed them over directly to the Gestapo, specifically informing the Germans that the boys were Jewish and handing over their hidden papers. Henri and Sylver were murdered upon arrival at Auschwitz. Joseph Spring survived, but only by the narrowest of margins, protected by an older inmate and enduring forced labour, death marches, and further internment in Germany until his liberation by American forces in 1945. By November 1943, Swiss officials already had detailed knowledge of the extermination happening in camps like Auschwitz, including crematoria capacity. They could not claim ignorance. Cases like Spring’s reveal the deadly consequences of the border policies that Grüninger courageously defied. The Exposure and the Aftermath Unfortunately, such quiet acts of defiance could not remain secret indefinitely. German authorities grew suspicious as more and more Jewish refugees slipped into Switzerland. They eventually informed the Swiss government of Grüninger’s activities. In March 1939, Paul Grüninger was dismissed from his post without pension. Soon after, he faced criminal charges for breach of duty, falsifying documents, and aiding illegal immigration. His trial, which began in January 1939, dragged on for over two years. In March 1941, the court found him guilty. While the judges recognised that his motivations had been humanitarian, they insisted that, as a government official, his primary duty was to obey orders, not to question them. Grüninger was fined heavily, made to pay the costs of his own trial, and was left without the financial security he had earned over a lifetime of public service. From that point onward, he lived in relative poverty, taking on odd jobs to survive. He was ostracised by former colleagues, many of whom viewed him as a traitor to the Swiss system rather than a saviour of the persecuted. Grüninger’s Unwavering Belief in His Actions Despite the hardship, Paul Grüninger never expressed regret for his actions. In 1954, he explained his reasoning in simple, profound terms: “It was basically a question of saving human lives threatened with death. How could I then seriously consider bureaucratic schemes and calculations?” Grüninger’s quiet dignity in the face of adversity was perhaps his most remarkable quality. He continued to live modestly, never seeking fame or fortune, never demanding recognition for what he had done. In the year of his death in 1972, Grüninger was recognised as a "Righteous Among the Nations" by the State of Israel. A Long Overdue Recognition Public awareness of Grüninger’s actions remained limited for decades. It was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s, as Europe began to reckon more honestly with the legacy of the Holocaust, that journalists and historians began to draw attention to his heroism. Following a media campaign and growing public outcry, the Swiss government in December 1970 issued a somewhat reserved letter of apology. Yet even then, they refused to reopen his case or reinstate his pension. Paul Grüninger died in 1972, never having seen his name fully cleared. It took until 1995 for the Swiss Federal Government to formally annul his conviction, acknowledging that he had acted with moral integrity at a time when many had chosen complicity. His legacy was finally rehabilitated, and he was recognised as one of the Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. Today, his name appears on schools, memorial plaques, and public buildings across Switzerland, a belated tribute to a man who chose to do good when it mattered most.

It was a Thursday evening in November 1975, and anyone who wandered into the Common Room at Saint Martins School of Art on London's Charing Cross Road that night had no real reason to expect anything out of the ordinary. They'd paid about 50 pence to see a pub rock band called Bazooka Joe. What they got instead was the opening salvo of the British punk revolution, delivered by four scruffy young men who'd shown up without any equipment, borrowed everything they needed, and then smashed some of it up. The Sex Pistols played their first ever gig on 6 November 1975. The world hadn't heard of them. Most of the people in that room hadn't heard of them. And by the time they finished, roughly half the audience wished they still hadn't. How It Came Together The band that became the Sex Pistols had been kicking around under various names and configurations for a while before that night. It had started life as The Strand, a group loosely assembled around guitarist Steve Jones and drummer Paul Cook, two working class lads from West London who'd been in each other's orbit since their school days. Jones had a well-documented habit of stealing equipment, which partly explained the band's gear situation in those early years. Their guiding hand was Malcolm McLaren, a restless cultural provocateur who'd been running a boutique on the King's Road called Sex, which sold fetish-influenced clothing and had become a gathering point for London's more outrageously dressed youth. Glen Matlock, an art student who occasionally worked shifts at Sex, had joined as bassist. By the summer of 1975, a previous frontman named Wally Nightingale had been pushed out by McLaren, and the band was still missing a singer. The story of how they found one has become legend. A mutual acquaintance named Bernie Rhodes, who'd go on to manage the Clash, spotted a teenage John Lydon loitering near the shop wearing a Pink Floyd T-shirt with the words "I Hate" scrawled above the band's name in marker pen, his hair dyed green. Lydon was brought in, asked to mime along to a jukebox as an impromptu audition, and walked out the other end with a new name: Johnny Rotten, courtesy of Jones commenting on the state of his teeth. The band name itself was still in flux right up to the weeks before the Saint Martins gig. They'd considered Le Bomb, Teenage Novel, Kid Gladlove, and, remarkably, The Damned, before settling on Sex Pistols. McLaren later said the name was meant to evoke "a pistol, a pin-up, a young thing, a better-looking assassin." He'd launched, in his own telling, "the idea in the form of a band of kids who could be perceived as being bad." It was Matlock who sorted out the actual gig. Still officially enrolled at Saint Martins, he talked the college social secretary into letting them play as support to Bazooka Joe on 6 November. McLaren was sceptical about whether they were ready, and his promotional push amounted to telling a couple of people who worked at Sex. His rehearsal support had been slightly more substantial: he'd rented the band a space behind Zeno's bookshop to practise in, having spotted an ad in Melody Maker. The Bazooka Joe poster for the gig. The Pistols listed only as 'support band' No Equipment, One Mandrax, and a Borrowed Backline The band arrived for soundcheck with instruments and very little else. No amps, no PA, no drums. Bazooka Joe guitarist Robin Chapekar recalled the appeal with some sympathy: "They pleaded with us. All they had was their guitars, and they wanted to use our amps and drums. We felt sorry for them, we related to them, it had happened to us before." What witnesses at soundcheck remember most vividly, alongside the borrowed equipment, was McLaren. He'd turned up in peg-leg trousers and spent the afternoon running back and forth across the room in a state of barely contained excitement, directing the band on where to stand and trying to whip up trouble where none was yet needed. Gene Krell, one of the Sex shop staff McLaren had tipped off about the gig, stood next to his boss when the band finally started playing. He remembered McLaren looking "perplexed and then curious" as the volume hit. Jones, for his part, had taken a Mandrax tranquilliser to deal with his nerves. The sedative was kicking in as they started playing, which may explain what happened next. He cranked his borrowed amp up to full volume in a room with no stage and a ceiling low enough to feel every frequency in your chest. "It was a 100-watt amp in a little room with no stage," Jones recalled, "and it was great. Everyone was looking at us. It seemed like millions of people at the time." It wasn't millions. Most estimates put the crowd at somewhere between 20 and 40 people. Just before they went on, McLaren had produced a bottle of the band's favourite alcohol by way of encouragement. The booze, the Mandrax, and the adrenaline made for an interesting combination. The Set, the Chaos, and the Punch-Up The set was short, loud, and built almost entirely from covers. The Pistols hammered through the Who's "Substitute", the Small Faces' "Whatcha Gonna Do About It", and "(I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone", which most people knew from the Monkees. They weren't playing these songs out of reverence. They knew how they went, more or less, and that was sufficient. One eyewitness, Sebastian Conran, who was a Saint Martins student at the time, later recalled Johnny Rotten spending much of the performance blowing his nose into the microphone with a handkerchief. It bore very little resemblance to what Pete Townshend got up to on stage, but it had a similar level of controlled destruction. Cook's summary was blunt: "Total chaos. None of us knew what we were doing." The trouble started when the Pistols began taking out their energy on the equipment they'd borrowed. Danny Kleinman, another Bazooka Joe guitarist, was watching from the side of the room when Rotten started kicking the speaker cabinet. Bazooka Joe were still paying it off. Kleinman ran in and manhandled Rotten to make him stop, which was the spark that lit whatever altercation followed. The scale of what happened has been disputed ever since. Kleinman insists it was a minor scuffle, nothing more than a school playground moment. Others remember it differently. Photographer Paul Madden, who was there, noted that the tension had been building all afternoon, partly because the Pistols' attitude was so thoroughly hostile that Bazooka Joe had already told them to get their own amplifiers. The plug was eventually pulled after about 20 minutes. Rotten himself would later admit there "was not a single handclap" when they finished. The Man Who Quit the Next Morning Not everyone in that room was appalled. One person, standing in the audience watching the support act tear apart his band's equipment, felt something shift in him permanently. Stuart Goddard was Bazooka Joe's bassist. He'd later become considerably better known under a different name. Stuart Goddard "I'll never forget it," he told journalist Jon Savage for Savage's definitive punk history England's Dreaming. "They came in as a gang; they looked like they couldn't give a fuck about anybody. The impression they left on me was total. They had a certain attitude I'd never seen: they had balls and they had very expensive equipment and it didn't look like it belonged to them. They had the look in their eyes that said, 'We're going to be massive.'" Goddard quit Bazooka Joe the following morning. He went home, thought about who he wanted to be, and eventually settled on a name. He chose Adam because Adam was the first man. He chose Ant because, in a nuclear explosion, ants survive. He became Adam Ant, one of the biggest pop stars in Britain by the early 1980s. He's said that the Sex Pistols' first gig was the direct cause of his entire career taking the direction it did. The idea that a single chaotic support slot could redirect someone's entire creative life recalls similar sliding-door moments in rock history, like the night Lennon met McCartney at a Woolton fete in 1957, or the moment the Isley Brothers gave Jimi Hendrix his first real gig and changed what popular music thought a guitar could do. What Came Next The Common Room where it all happened is now a luxury apartment block. The 50 pence entry fee and the borrowed amp and the nose-blowing into the microphone belong to a world that's thoroughly gone. But the ripples from those 20 minutes of chaos spread in ways that nobody in that room could have mapped. The Saint Martins gig was followed by a string of college performances around London as the Pistols sharpened their set and their attitude. The early followers who latched on to them in those months before they became notorious included Siouxsie Sioux, Steven Severin, and a young Billy Idol. Their look, much of it pulled from McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's Sex boutique, ignited what became punk's visual language. By December 1976, they'd dropped the f-bomb live on television during an interview with Bill Grundy, triggering a tabloid panic that made them nationally infamous overnight. The Daily Mirror ran the headline "The Filth and the Fury." The Clash, the Damned, and the Buzzcocks all formed in their wake. The Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall performances in 1976 became almost as mythologised as the Saint Martins gig. Punk spread to American shores too, and the 1977 debut of the Ramones at CBGB showed how the same energy had been fermenting on both sides of the Atlantic. Back in Britain, the people who'd been at those early Pistols shows, or claimed they had been, went on to form Joy Division, the Smiths, and the Fall. Jones wrote in his autobiography that standing on that makeshift stage at Saint Martins and watching the room react felt like opening Pandora's box. He wasn't wrong. Though he was on a Mandrax at the time, so perhaps his judgment was somewhat impaired. Either way, the box was open, and there was no putting anything back in it. The Sex Pistols played together for just two and a half years. They recorded one studio album. They barely toured outside the UK. They broke up messily in January 1978 after a disastrous American tour, with Rotten announcing from the stage of the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco that he felt cheated. And yet the argument that punk changed British culture, and that British punk started in a small college common room on a Thursday evening when a band showed up without any equipment and borrowed someone else's, is one that's very hard to make a case against. Sources 1. The Birth of The Sex Pistols at Central Saint Martins, Artefact Magazine 2. The Birth of Punk, The Independent 3. Sex Pistols First Gig, GQ 4. Sex Pistols, Wikipedia 5. Why Sex Pistols' First Show Ended in a Fistfight, Ultimate Classic Rock 6. Forty Years of Art-School Rock, Artefact Magazine 7. No Future: Malcolm McLaren Art School Tour, Paul Gorman 8. Five Ways Sex Pistols First Gig Changed Music, Far Out Magazine 9. Anarchy Year Zero (extract), Route Online

Despite unwaveringly declaring her innocence along with the support of several priests, Mary Surratt was sentenced to death. On 7 July 1865, four people were hanged at the Washington Arsenal for their roles in the conspiracy to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln. Three of them were men. One was a woman. Her name was Mary Surratt, and she went to the scaffold maintaining she was innocent. The hangman who dropped the trap agreed with her. Five of the nine military commissioners who had convicted her had already petitioned the president for clemency. Her own daughter had tried to storm the White House that morning to beg for her mother's life and been turned away. Andrew Johnson later claimed he never saw the petition. The man who signed the death warrant had a different story. Nobody was ever able to prove whose version was true. Early Life and the Boarding House Mary Elizabeth Jenkins was born around 1823 on a tobacco plantation in southern Maryland, near Waterloo. She was raised Catholic in a region where that still carried social weight, and at seventeen married John Harrison Surratt, a farmer and sometime postal contractor. They had three children: Isaac, Anna, and John Jr. John Sr. opened a tavern and post office in Surrattsville, Maryland, about twelve miles south of Washington, and the family prospered modestly. When John Sr. died in 1862, Mary was left with debts and three children. She moved the family to a boarding house she owned in Washington DC, at 541 H Street NW, and took in lodgers to make ends meet. The house was comfortable and respectable. Her son John Jr., now a young man with Confederate sympathies, was already working as a courier for the Confederate secret service. It was through him that the boarding house began attracting the company that would eventually destroy his mother. Surratt's boarding house, c. 1890, little changed from how it looked during her occupancy. It now houses a restaurant called Wok & Roll, is in the Chinatown neighbourhood of Washington, D.C. John Wilkes Booth and the Plot John Wilkes Booth was one of the most famous actors in America in 1864, a Marylander from a celebrated theatrical family who had decided that Abraham Lincoln needed to die. His original plan wasn't assassination but kidnapping: capture the president, hold him as a bargaining chip to force the release of Confederate prisoners of war. The plan required a network of accomplices across Maryland, men who could move quietly through the countryside, hide horses and supplies, and ask no questions. John Surratt Jr. was perfect for this. His mother's boarding house became one of the planning venues. Booth visited the H Street boarding house multiple times in the winter and spring of 1865. So did Lewis Powell, who would attack Secretary of State William Seward on the night of the assassination. So did David Herold and George Atzerodt. The evidence at trial would show that Mary Surratt knew these men, fed them, and received Booth in her parlour. What it couldn't conclusively show was whether she knew what they were planning, or had agreed to be part of it. The kidnapping plan collapsed when Lincoln's schedule changed at the last minute on 17 March 1865. Six weeks later, on 14 April 1865, Booth revised his ambitions. Instead of kidnapping, assassination. And not just Lincoln: Seward was to be killed the same night by Powell, and Vice President Andrew Johnson was to be killed by Atzerodt. Johnson lost his nerve and never made the attempt. Powell attacked Seward in his bedroom and severely injured him and several others but failed to kill him. Booth shot Lincoln in the head at Ford's Theatre at around 10.15 that night. Lincoln died the following morning. The Evidence Against Mary Surratt Mary Surratt was arrested on 17 April 1865, three days after the assassination. The case against her rested primarily on two witnesses: Louis Weichmann, a boarder at the H Street house who testified that he'd driven her to her tavern in Surrattsville on the afternoon of the assassination, where she'd allegedly told tenant John Lloyd to have firearms and whiskey ready for men who would come to collect them that night. Booth and Herold did collect them during their escape. John Lloyd, the tenant, corroborated this, testifying that Surratt had told him the "shooting irons" would be needed soon. A package containing binoculars, delivered to the tavern by Booth on the afternoon of 14 April and retrieved by Herold during the escape, was also cited. Surratt had reportedly delivered the package. She said she'd had no idea what was in it. The defence countered that both Weichmann and Lloyd were compromised witnesses. Weichmann had been arrested initially as a suspect and was testifying to save himself. Lloyd had been drinking heavily that day and was also under pressure. Mary's lawyers, led by the Maryland Senator and former Attorney General Reverdy Johnson, argued that even if every word of the testimony was accurate, it didn't prove she'd known about the assassination rather than some other plan. The tribunal admitted virtually all prosecution evidence and excluded substantial defence material. There was, as historian Roy Chamlee later put it, no presumption of innocence. The Military Tribunal and Its Controversies The decision to try the conspirators before a military commission rather than a civilian court was itself deeply controversial. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and Attorney General James Speed argued that the assassination was a wartime act of treason and therefore a military matter, even though the war was effectively over and civilian courts were functioning. Frances Clalin Clayton, who had disguised herself as a man to fight in the Civil War, represented a very different relationship between a woman and the military justice system than the one Mary Surratt now found herself in. Reverdy Johnson argued directly that a military commission had no jurisdiction over a civilian in peacetime. The head judge, Major General David Hunter, who had been a pallbearer at Lincoln's funeral, had no interest in hearing it. The four condemned conspirators: David Herold, Lewis Powell, Mary Surratt and George Atzerodt (from left to right). The trial ran from 9 May to 28 June 1865. More than 300 witnesses testified. Nearly 5,000 pages of transcripts were produced. Mary was so ill during the final four days that she was permitted to stay in her cell. The commission found all eight defendants guilty on 30 June. Four, including Mary, were sentenced to death. Four others received life imprisonment or shorter sentences. Then something unusual happened. Five of the nine commissioners, Generals Hunter, Kautz, Foster, Ekin, and Tompkins, felt uneasy about hanging a woman. Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt, the chief prosecutor, had already quietly suggested to commission members that if they voted for the death penalty they could simultaneously petition the president for clemency, and that the president would respond favourably. Taking Holt at his word, the five signed a petition asking Andrew Johnson to commute Mary's sentence to life imprisonment "in consideration of the sex and age of the said Mary E. Surratt." The petition was attached to the pile of papers containing the commission's findings and sent to the president. Johnson approved the death sentences on 5 July. He signed the execution order. He did not sign the clemency order. The executions were scheduled for 7 July. The Habeas Corpus Battle Mary's junior lawyers, Frederick Aiken and John Clampitt, had one more card to play. On 7 July, the morning of the execution, they petitioned Judge Andrew Wylie of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia for a writ of habeas corpus, arguing that the military commission had no jurisdiction over a civilian. Wylie agreed, and issued the writ, ordering General Winfield Hancock, who was responsible for the prisoners, to produce Mary before the civil court by 10am. Hancock consulted the president. Within hours, Johnson suspended the writ under the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act of 1863, a wartime measure. Judge Wylie had no power to countermand the president during a declared suspension. Mary Surratt's last legal lifeline was gone. Meanwhile, Anna Surratt had been trying to reach the president all morning. She went to the White House repeatedly and was turned away each time. A contemporary account described her collapsing on the steps, weeping, and still being refused entry. Stephen Douglas's widow, the wife of the late senator, also went to plead for Mary's life. Johnson would not see either of them. The Execution At around 1.30pm on 7 July 1865, Mary Surratt was led out into the courtyard of the Washington Arsenal alongside Lewis Powell, David Herold, and George Atzerodt. It was a brutally hot day. A crowd of about 1,000 people had gathered, including government officials, military officers, and journalists. Photographer Alexander Gardner, who'd famously photographed the dead at Antietam, was there with his camera. Gen. John F. Hartranft reading the death warrant to the four condemned Lincoln assassination conspirators on the scaffold at Fort McNair, Washington. July 7, 1865. Photograph by Alexander Gardner Mary Surratt wore a black dress and black bonnet. She was assisted up the steps of the scaffold. Powell, who was physically powerful and who had come closer to completing his assigned murder than any of the other conspirators, leaned over to General Hartranft, who was supervising the executions, and said quietly: "She is innocent. She doesn't deserve to die with the rest of us." The condemned were seated in chairs while their arms were bound and white hoods were placed over their heads. The ropes went around their necks. Mary's rope had five loops, making it a more powerful and quicker noose than the standard three-loop arrangement, apparently at the request of the supervising officer, who wanted to ensure a clean death. When the trap fell, Mary Surratt died relatively quickly. One of the soldiers watching was heard to say, "She makes a good bow." Gardner's photographs of the four bodies hanging from the gallows, shot moments after the drop, became some of the most widely reproduced images of the execution of justice in American history. She was initially buried in the grounds of the Arsenal. In 1869, she was reinterred at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Washington DC. Her grave is still there. Did Johnson See the Petition? At Andrew Johnson's impeachment trial in 1868, the clemency petition resurfaced. Johnson testified that he'd never seen it. Holt testified that he'd shown it to Johnson, who had read it and refused to act on it, saying that Mary Surratt "had kept the nest that hatched the egg." Multiple witnesses at the impeachment hearing confirmed they'd heard Johnson make similar statements before the execution. The two accounts cannot both be true, and it's never been settled which one is accurate. What historians have largely agreed on is that even if Johnson had seen the petition, it almost certainly wouldn't have changed the outcome. Johnson had said repeatedly before the execution that Mary's sex made her no less guilty, and that allowing sentiment to override justice in a case of presidential assassination would set a dangerous precedent. The five commissioners may have been correct in thinking the petition would succeed. Holt, who knew Johnson better, apparently knew otherwise. John Surratt Jr. and What Came After While his mother was being tried, convicted, and executed, John Surratt Jr. was in Canada. He'd fled Washington the night of the assassination and made his way to Montreal, where Catholic priests sheltered him. From there he travelled to England and then to Rome, where he enlisted in the Papal Zouaves under the false name John Watson. In April 1866, a fellow Zouave named Henri Ste-Marie, who'd known Surratt in Canada, recognised him and reported him to the American ambassador. Surratt fled to Alexandria, Egypt, where he was arrested and extradited back to the United States in 1867, two years after his mother's execution. He was tried before a civilian jury, which deadlocked and failed to convict him. The irony was stark: Mary Surratt, tried by a military commission without a presumption of innocence, had been hanged. Her son, tried by a civilian jury with full legal protections, walked free. He subsequently went on a lecture tour, giving talks in which he defended himself and, implicitly, undermined the case that had killed his mother. John Surratt Jr. lived until 1916, dying at the age of 72. He never fully addressed what he knew about the plot or what his mother had known. He married, had seven children, and worked as a shipping clerk in Baltimore. He is buried in New Cathedral Cemetery. Was She Guilty? The question historians have wrestled with since 1865 is whether Mary Surratt genuinely knew about the assassination plot or only about the earlier kidnapping scheme. If she knew only about the kidnapping, and the assassination was a last-minute change of plan that Booth didn't share with her, then she wasn't guilty of what she was convicted of. Her conviction rested on circumstantial evidence delivered by two compromised witnesses, through a tribunal that admitted prosecution evidence almost without restriction. The broad consensus among legal historians today is that if Mary Surratt were tried in a modern civilian court, with modern evidentiary standards, she'd almost certainly not be convicted. Whether she was morally innocent is a different question. She knew these men. She housed them. She made deliveries on Booth's behalf. What she knew about their ultimate intentions died with her. The boarding house at 541 H Street NW in Washington DC is still standing. For many years it operated as a Chinese restaurant called Wok and Roll, occupying the same rooms where John Wilkes Booth sat in the parlour with Mary Surratt and her son. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2009. The man who pulled the trigger and started all of this, Boston Corbett, the self-castrated hat maker who shot John Wilkes Booth in a Virginia barn twelve days after the assassination, ended his own story much more ambiguously than Mary Surratt ended hers. Corbett disappeared in 1888 after escaping a mental institution. Nobody knows what happened to him. Sources: 1. Washington Post: President Johnson claimed to not have seen a clemency petition for Mary Surratt. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/house-divided/wp/2015/07/07/president-johnson-claimed-to-not-have-seen-a-clemency-petition-for-mary-surratt/ 2. Columbia Law Review: The Law(?) of the Lincoln Assassination. https://www.columbialawreview.org/content/the-law-of-the-lincoln-assassination/ 3. Boundary Stones WETA: Mary E. Surratt: The Woman Who Helped Kill Lincoln... Or Did She? https://boundarystones.weta.org/2025/04/14/mary-e-surratt-woman-who-helped-kill-lincoln-or-did-she 4. Lincoln Conspirators: June 30, 1865 Clemency petition transcript. https://lincolnconspirators.com/the-trial/june-30-1865/ 5. Turner, Thomas R. Beware the People Weeping: Public Opinion and the Assassination of President Lincoln. Louisiana State University Press, 1982. 6. Kauffman, Michael W. American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies. Random House, 2004.

"I'd give everything I got in the world if I could get rid of them. I don't know what it would be like not to have them. I get so sore jerking all the time." Most people's hiccups are gone within a few minutes. Charles Osborne's lasted 68 years. From 13 June 1922 to June 1990, the Iowa farmer hiccuped continuously, racking up an estimated 430 million involuntary spasms before his body finally, inexplicably, stopped. No doctor ever cured him. No remedy ever worked for long. And yet Osborne married twice, raised eight children, held down a job, and by most accounts remained cheerful company right up until the end. His case holds the Guinness World Record for the longest continuous attack of hiccups ever documented, and it remains one of the strangest stories in medical history. A 350-Pound Hog and a Very Bad Day in Nebraska The hiccups started with a fall. On 13 June 1922, Osborne was working on a farm near Union, Nebraska, preparing to butcher a hog. He was 29 years old. In his own words, as he later told People magazine in 1982: "I was hanging a 350-pound hog for butchering. I picked it up and then I fell down. I felt nothing, but the doctor said later that I busted a blood vessel the size of a pin in my brain." The hiccups began almost immediately and didn't stop. Not that day, not that week, not that year. Not for nearly seven decades. Osborne lived in Anthon, Iowa, a small town in Woodbury County, where locals grew accustomed to his unusual presence. Those who knew him remember a jovial man who sat on a bench at a street corner, greeted acquaintances with "What the hell's going on?" and rarely brought up his condition unprompted. He sold farm machinery for a living and auctioned livestock. He wasn't a man who wallowed. What Was Actually Happening in His Brain In the 1980s, a physician named Dr Terence Anthoney examined Osborne and offered the most detailed explanation anyone had managed. His conclusion was that the fall had destroyed a tiny area in the brain stem responsible for suppressing the hiccup reflex. Without that inhibitory mechanism, Osborne's diaphragm was left in a permanent state of involuntary spasm, firing 20 to 40 times per minute with no off switch. More recent analysis from neurosurgeon Dr Ali Seifi (the creator of HiccAway) has suggested an alternative: that the fall may have caused a rib injury damaging the diaphragm directly, or that Osborne may have suffered a small stroke. As neurologist Dr Diana Greene-Chandos has noted, prolonged hiccups that come on suddenly can be a sign of stroke, particularly when paired with chest pain and dizziness. The two theories aren't mutually exclusive, and the exact cause was never definitively confirmed. For a deeper look at how brain injuries can produce extraordinary effects, the story of Dr Harvey Cushing, the neurosurgeon who transformed our understanding of the brain in the early 20th century, is worth a read. What's clear is that in the early years, Osborne was hiccuping around 40 times a minute. That rate eventually slowed to about 20 per minute in later life. At those frequencies, over 68 years, the 430 million total estimate isn't an exaggeration. It's arithmetic. To put the condition in some context: intractable hiccups, defined as bouts lasting more than a month, affect roughly 1 in 100,000 people. Around 5,000 people are hospitalised for persistent hiccups every year in the United States alone. Osborne's case dwarfs them all. In the 2000s, Chris Sands of Lincolnshire, England, made headlines after hiccupping for around three years before doctors discovered a brain tumour was the cause. Even that pales next to 68 years. Learning to Live With It Osborne adapted. He developed a breathing technique that allowed him to suppress the audible "hic" by inhaling between spasms, heaving his chest in a controlled rhythm that muffled the sound. People nearby often couldn't hear the hiccups at all. "He'd flex his chest three or four times every minute," recalled Kevern Koskovich, an Anthon resident who knew one of Osborne's sons. "You could tell he was hiccupping, but he wouldn't make any noise. He heaved, that's the best way to describe it." Food became a particular challenge. From the early 1970s, Osborne had to put all his meals through a blender. He told People magazine in 1982: "I've worn out two Osterizers." His typical lunch was blended chicken, dressing, broth and milk, followed by several beers. Despite the dietary restrictions, he managed to keep his weight stable throughout his life. One small mercy: the hiccups stopped when he slept. The moment he woke, they returned. But those hours of silence each night were apparently enough to keep him going. As one physician noted, the insomnia that comes with chronic hiccups can trigger depression and anxiety on top of everything else. That Osborne remained so consistently good-humoured is, in some ways, the most remarkable part of the whole story. He married twice and fathered eight children. He kept working. He maintained friendships. By almost any measure, he refused to let his condition define what his life amounted to. Everything They Tried Over the decades, Osborne consulted doctors across the country. None found a lasting cure. Remedies ranged from the sensible to the experimental to the outright desperate. One friend decided that a sudden shock might do the trick and fired a shotgun behind Osborne without warning. Osborne's verdict: "It scared me some, but it didn't scare the hiccups out of me." He tried experimental hormone therapy. He tried various breathing and relaxation techniques. He drew the line at a surgical procedure that doctors warned might permanently impair his breathing, deciding that trading one problem for another wasn't much of a deal. The closest anyone came to a cure was at the Mayo Clinic, where a doctor placed him on a controlled combination of carbon monoxide and oxygen. The hiccups stopped. The treatment was immediately abandoned: Osborne could not survive breathing poisonous gas as a long-term solution. It remains one of the more grimly comedic moments in the whole story. By 1978, after 56 years of it, Osborne told the Associated Press: "I'd give everything I got in the world if I could get rid of them. I don't know what it would be like not to have them. I get so sore jerking all the time." Fame, Johnny Carson, and the Guinness Book It was around the time of that 1978 interview that national media attention began to build in earnest. He was listed in Guinness World Records. In 1980, he appeared on the TV show That's Incredible!. In 1983, he sat across from Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, hiccuping through the interview with the same quiet good humour he brought to everything else. It was actually his second brush with national fame: back in 1936, fourteen years into his streak, he had appeared on Robert Ripley's Believe It or Not radio show in New York. The Guinness listing and TV appearances brought an influx of letters from viewers offering home remedies. None worked. But Osborne seemed to take it all in his stride, never playing the martyr, never inviting pity. Columnist Bob Davis wrote in the Sioux City Journal in 1984: "Charles Osborne has not only survived; he has thrived." His story fits a particular kind of history that tends to stick: the person who faces something absurd with dignity and keeps going anyway. For other examples of lives lived at the extreme end of the ordinary, the history of Britain's greatest eccentrics covers characters who might give Osborne a run for his money. The Day They Stopped In June 1990, with no warning and no explanation, the hiccups stopped. Osborne was 96 years old. He'd been hiccuping for 68 years. And then he wasn't. No doctor could explain why they ended any more than they'd been able to explain why they started. Osborne himself apparently greeted the silence with characteristic understatement. He lived for another year without them, long enough to know what it felt like not to hiccup, something most people take entirely for granted. Charles Osborne died in May 1991, aged 97, from complications related to ulcers. The Guinness record stands. Nobody has come close. It's a story that sits in roughly the same category as King Adolf Frederick of Sweden, who reportedly ate himself to death, or Al Capone, whose syphilis-ravaged brain left him with the mental capacity of a 12-year-old by the end of his life: the human body doing something so extreme and so strange that it almost seems made up. Except it isn't. Sources 1. Smithsonian Magazine. "The Curious Case of Charles Osborne, Who Hiccupped for 68 Years Straight." https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-curious-case-of-charles-osborne-who-hiccuped-for-68-years-straight-180980232/ 2. People magazine. "A Cure for Hiccups? Retired Farmer Charles Osborne Isn't Holding His Breath." 1982. 3. Guinness World Records. "Longest attack of hiccups." https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/67619-longest-attack-of-hiccoughs 4. Little Village Magazine. "Lifting a heavy hog led to 68 years of hiccups for one long-suffering Iowan." https://littlevillagemag.com/peak-iowa-longest-hiccups/ 5. Associated Press interview with Charles Osborne, 1978, via Newspapers.com. 6. Sioux City Journal. Bob Davis column, 1984, via Newspapers.com.

On a Berlin stage sometime in the early 1920s a young woman stood almost naked beneath harsh lights, her lips painted a solid black and her eyes ringed dark enough to look hollow. She moved slowly, deliberately, as if each gesture were being tested against the audience’s tolerance. This was Anita Berber, and by the time the music ended she had already become something more than a performer. She was a provocation a mirror and for many a warning about where modern life seemed to be heading. Berber’s reputation has long rested on excess drugs sex scandal and early death. Yet when her life is examined closely she emerges as a far more revealing figure. Her story traces the pressures and freedoms of Weimar Germany with unusual clarity, from experimental dance and cabaret through early cinema queer subcultures, censorship moral panic and the physical cost of living at the edge of artistic possibility. Childhood and artistic inheritance Anita Berber was born in 1899 in Leipzig into a household already shaped by music and performance. Her father Felix Berber was a violinist and concertmaster of the Gewandhaus Orchestra, a position that placed him within Germany’s respected musical establishment. Her mother Anna Lucie Thiem was a cabaret singer and dancer whose ambitions pulled her toward the stage, rather than domestic life. The marriage did not last. When Anita was four her parents separated and she was sent to live primarily with her grandmother in Dresden. This early displacement mattered. Dresden at the turn of the century was both conservative and culturally rich and Berber grew up absorbing music theatre and visual art while lacking the emotional stability of a settled family. From an early age she was drawn to movement. Dance for Berber was not simply decorative but expressive and physical in a way that aligned with emerging modernist ideas. In 1913 she enrolled at the school of Émile Jaques Dalcroze in Hellerau near Dresden. Dalcroze’s approach combined rhythmic gymnastics music harmony and bodily awareness. Students learned to feel music rather than merely follow it. This training would shape Berber’s later performances where movement often appeared instinctive even raw. A year later she left Hellerau for Berlin to study ballet with Rita Sacchetto. Berlin in 1914 was already a magnet for artists, but the outbreak of war soon transformed the city. As traditional structures faltered new artistic languages emerged and young performers like Berber found opportunities that would not have existed before. Berlin after the war and the rise of cabaret Germany’s defeat in 1918 ushered in political instability economic hardship and social upheaval. At the same time censorship laws loosened and Berlin became one of Europe’s most permissive cities. Cabaret flourished. Small smoky venues offered satire sexual frankness political critique and experimental performance to audiences hungry for distraction and meaning. By the age of sixteen Berber was already appearing as a cabaret dancer. In 1917 she also worked as a fashion model for the magazine Die Dame, projecting a modern image that blurred gender lines. Her look was striking even by Berlin standards. She wore her hair in a short bob often dyed a vivid red. Heavy makeup exaggerated her features so that in black and white photography her lipstick appeared jet black and her eyes almost mask like. This cultivated androgyny was deliberate. Berber understood the power of appearance and used it to unsettle expectations. She did not present herself as a decorative dancer but as an unsettling presence. Critics and audiences struggled to categorise her and that ambiguity became central to her appeal. Marlene Dietrich from the 1930 film Morocco directed by Josef von Sternberg. Anita Berber in a tuxedo for the 1921 film Bitte Zhalen. Film work and early notoriety Between 1918 and 1925 Berber appeared in around twenty five films an extraordinary output for such a short period. She worked frequently with the director Richard Oswald who was known for socially engaged cinema. One of her most significant roles was in Different from the Others, a groundbreaking film that portrayed homosexuality sympathetically at a time when it was criminalised under German law. The film was both praised and condemned. For Berber it reinforced her association with sexual nonconformity. Later the Nazi regime would ban and largely destroy the film, but during the Weimar years it placed her at the centre of debates about morality art and freedom. In 1920 she also appeared in the political cabaret Schall und Rauch alongside Dadaists and other avant garde performers. These venues blurred the line between performance and provocation. Berber thrived in this environment. She was not interested in pleasing audiences so much as confronting them. Dances of transgression Berber’s dances often carried titles such as Cocaine and Morphium. They were not metaphorical. They attempted to embody altered states despair euphoria and decay. Total nudity was not uncommon and for Berber it was not an erotic gesture but a statement of exposure and vulnerability. The dance historian Karl Toepfer later wrote that no performer of the era was more closely associated with nude dancing than Berber. Yet contemporary accounts suggest audiences rarely understood what she was attempting. The choreographer Joe Jencik observed that the public fixated on her transgressions rather than her artistic intent, noting that she appeared to sacrifice herself in full view of the audience. Offstage her behaviour further blurred boundaries. Berber was openly bisexual at a time when such openness was rare. Her drug use was equally visible. In addition to cocaine opium and morphine she reportedly inhaled chloroform and ether from a bowl stirring the mixture with a white rose and eating its petals afterwards. Whether this ritual was embellished by gossip it became part of her legend. In 1922 Berber married the dancer and poet Sebastian Droste. Their relationship was both creative and destructive. Together they produced the book Dances of Vice Horror and Ecstasy, a combination of poetry and stark photography that captured their aesthetic of beauty and ruin. Only around one thousand copies were printed, yet the book circulated widely within avant garde circles. Even the artist Hannah Höch owned a copy. The pair also performed these dances in nightclubs, enacting the texts in front of live audiences. One poem associated with their cocaine themed work read: “Cocaine Outcry Animals Blood Alcohol Pains Many pains And the eyes.” It was less a celebration than a warning. Both Berber and Droste were deep in addiction and their performances increasingly resembled public confessions. The marriage collapsed within a year. Droste would later be imprisoned for fraud accused of stealing Berber’s furs and jewellery before dying in poverty. Marriage convenience and queer Berlin Berber’s personal relationships reflected the fluidity of Berlin’s queer scene. In 1919 she entered into a marriage of convenience with Eberhard Phillipp Engelhard von Nathusins, a screenwriter of means. The arrangement offered financial security but little emotional connection. She soon left him to pursue a relationship with Susi Wanowski, a woman who ran a lesbian establishment, and became both Berber’s partner and manager. Berlin in the early 1920s supported a visible lesbian and gay subculture with clubs publications and networks of support. Berber moved easily within this world. Gossip linked her romantically with Marlene Dietrich, whose later androgynous screen persona has often been compared to Berber’s earlier performances. Whether or not the relationship was real the comparison speaks to Berber’s influence on visual culture. Otto Dix, The Dancer Anita Berber, c.1925, Arrest scandal and exile In 1925 Berber married an American dancer Henri Chatin Hofmann. They embarked on an extended tour across Europe that ended dramatically in Zagreb, in the Kingdom of Serbs Croats and Slovenes. During a performance Berber’s nude dance offended Alexander I of Yugoslavia. She was arrested and imprisoned for several weeks. The incident had lasting consequences. After her release the couple continued travelling through the Mediterranean and the Middle East, but Berber found herself effectively barred from many European stages. The very notoriety that had sustained her career now worked against her. Otto Dix and the mask of performance In 1925 Berber sat for the painter Otto Dix. The resulting portrait is one of the defining images of Weimar art. Unlike earlier representations that focused on her nudity Dix depicted her clothed in a tight red dress her body angular her stance assertive. The makeup is heavy almost theatrical. Her face appears less human than constructed. Dix had seen Berber perform and understood her life as a continuous act. The painting captures that sense of performance as survival. It does not glamourise her but neither does it condemn. Instead it records the cost of turning one’s body into a site of constant expression. Dora Kallmus, ‘Dancers Anita Berber and Sebastian Droste in “Martyrs,”’ 1922 Decline illness and death By the late 1920s Berber’s health was failing. Years of addiction had taken their toll. In 1928 she abruptly gave up alcohol at the age of twenty nine but the damage was already severe. While performing abroad she collapsed in Damascus and was diagnosed with advanced tuberculosis. She returned to Germany and was admitted to a hospital in Kreuzberg where she died in November, 1928. She was twenty nine years old. Rumours circulated that she died surrounded by empty morphine syringes but medical accounts point to tuberculosis as the primary cause. Berber was buried in a pauper’s grave at St Thomas Cemetery in Neukölln. For a woman who had once been one of Berlin’s most talked about figures, her end was quiet and largely unattended. Reassessment and legacy For decades Berber was remembered as a cautionary tale, a symbol of Weimar decadence invoked by critics of modernity. Yet recent scholarship particularly within feminist and LGBTQ studies has reframed her life. Rather than a figure of excess alone, she is now understood as an early performance artist who used her body to question norms around gender sexuality and spectatorship. Her work anticipated later developments in performance art where endurance exposure and self harm were used to communicate political and personal truths. In this light Berber appears less an anomaly and more a precursor. Comparisons to artists and performers such as Madonna or Lady Gaga are not entirely misplaced. Each uses persona and provocation to navigate fame power and identity. Anita Berber lived fast and died young but her life offers more than scandal. It reveals the possibilities and dangers of artistic freedom in a society undergoing rapid change. In Weimar Berlin she found a stage large enough to contain her ambition but not a structure capable of protecting her from its consequences. Sources https://www.whitlams-berlin-tours.com/tips-for-your-trip/anita-berber https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/anita-berber/ https://www.stagingdecadence.com/blog/anita-berber https://travsd.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/anita-berber/

PICTURED -Top row, left to right, Alice Diamond, "Queen of Thieves"; Maggie Hughes, deputy; Laura Partrdige; bottom row, left to right, Bertha Tappenden; Madeline Partridge, Gertrude Scully. For roughly seventy years, an all-female gang ran a sophisticated shoplifting operation out of South London, stripping out the contents of Selfridges and other department stores in under an hour using coats with secret pockets sewn into the lining and fake pregnant bellies stuffed with stolen fur. Their leader wore diamond rings as makeshift knuckledusters and was known to police as Diamond Annie. When one of her members broke the gang's rules in 1925, she led an army of women armed with bricks and broken bottles into the street and started a riot. This is the story of the Forty Elephants, one of British crime history's strangest and least-known success stories. When we conjure up images of crime gangs, our minds often drift to Italian mobsters or Japanese Yakuza members, maybe Mexican or Colombian Cartels. However, there have been numerous gangs throughout history that haven't received the same level of recognition. Consider, for instance, the Forty Elephants. Named after their territory in Southwark, the Elephant and Castle area in London. The Elephant and Castle area of London, early 1900s. From the Forty Thieves to the Forty Elephants The gang's roots go back further than the famous 1920s heyday most people associate with it. Records trace an organised female shoplifting network in the area as far back as the 1870s, originally known as the Forty Thieves under a leader named Mary Carr. Carr was an expert "hoister", the period slang for a shoplifter, and she laid the groundwork that later generations would build on, training her thieves not only to steal but to seduce and blackmail wealthy men and worm their way into respectable household jobs to loot from the inside. The gang took its better-known name from the Elephant and Castle district of Southwark where most of its members lived and operated, and it maintained a close, semi-formal alliance with the all-male Elephant and Castle Mob, who handled the rougher end of the business while the women specialised in theft, fraud, and blackmail. Operating from at least the 1880s and possibly as far back as the 18th century, the Forty Elephants gang thrived in London until the 1950s. During the 1920s and 1930s, the gang enjoyed a robust partnership with the Elephant and Castle Mob, marking the peak of both groups. However, unlike the mob, the Forty Elephants gang consisted entirely of women. The members would often dress as housemaids in order to gain entry to wealthy homes, relieving the inhabitants of their jewels and other valuable objects. However, the gang's specialty was covertly stealing from department stores with extreme efficiency. Legend had it that a mere hour was all it took for a group of Forty Elephants members to clear out a store, skilfully concealing valuables in their numerous pockets. However, the gang had a particular fondness for fur coats, which became their signature style. Interestingly, rather than donning their stolen loot, the women opted for high fashion purchased outright with the proceeds from their illicit activities. Wearing the stolen goods was actually against the rules, known as the "Hoister's Code" which also prohibited going out drinking the night before a big job or working with the police, among other things. During that era, women in department stores were granted a degree of privacy, recognising that shopping for clothing or other items could potentially compromise a woman's modesty if certain protocols weren't upheld. However, this autonomy also provided an opportunity for the gang members to pilfer vast quantities of merchandise without detection. Photographs from an 1916 article in Popular Mechanics showing the garments shoplifters wear to make their work easier. Diamond Annie's Rise Alice Diamond, the woman who would lead the gang through its most famous and successful era, was born illegitimately in Lambeth workhouse in 1896, the eldest of seven children. Her father Thomas was a violent career criminal, once notorious for shoving the Lord Mayor's son's head through a plate-glass window during a riot. Growing up in poverty in Walworth, Alice was raised in an environment where crime was simply how families got by. She was first cautioned for theft at sixteen, and within a few years had become one of the most prolific shoplifters in South London. She was also unusually tall for the period, standing around 5'9" at a time when the average man stood barely an inch taller. Combined with her physical presence and a reputation for genuine toughness, she was marked out for leadership by the male Elephant and Castle gang, who recognised her as the perfect candidate to run their female counterpart. In 1915 or 1916, depending on the source, Alice Diamond became Queen of the Forty Elephants. She was twenty years old. The most infamous figure at the helm of the Forty Elephants was Alice Diamond, better known as Diamond Annie due to her dazzling rings that lent her punches considerable force. Taking charge in 1916, Diamond Annie steered the gang to unprecedented success, consistently outmaneuvering law enforcement with remarkable efficiency. Despite numerous members being apprehended and prosecuted for minor thefts, often without any direct association with larger gang operations, many of the girls resumed their affiliation with the gang upon completing their sentences. Alice Diamond, also known as “Diamond Annie,” began leading the Forty Elephants Gang in 1916. Other members included Lillian Rose Kendall, also known as the “Bobbed-Haired Bandit,” left, and Florrie Holmes. The Forty Elephants employed blackmail as a lucrative tactic, enticing affluent men only to later extort them for financial gain. This method was occasionally leveraged to call in favors and evade legal repercussions. Renowned for their resilience, many of these women were as formidable as any man when faced with threats. Conversely, the gang was also famed for throwing extravagant parties, indulging in the opulent nightlife of the 1920s and embracing the glamorous sophistication and champagne-soaked revelry depicted in 1930s cinema. The alternative for nearly all of the members of the Forty Thieves would have been extreme poverty and/or a life of prostitution. This would have been particularly true for the 19th century members of the gang as class divisions in London during the 1800s meant there was almost no chance of rising from poverty without considerable help. In the period between the World Wars, Diamond Annie served as the Queen of the Forty Elephants. In the 1920s, the gang reached the pinnacle of their success and notoriety. Diamond instituted numerous clever tricks into the gang's arsenal, ensuring that all thieves were equipped with secret pockets and flaps in their gowns to facilitate shoplifting. They were also early adopters of automobiles, making their getaways in the most glamorous models. They confounded police by handing off stolen goods to an unseen accomplice on foot before dashing off in a high-speed car chase; police were left befuddled when they caught up with the car and found it devoid of any stolen goods. Cars also allowed the members to expand their operation outside of London to nearby towns, all the better once Diamond's and other faces became too well-known to local law enforcement to go incognito. Notoriety on Both Sides of the Atlantic By the mid-1920s, the gang had become genuinely famous, not just in Britain. Their exploits were covered extensively by American newspapers including the San Jose Evening News and the Lancashire Evening Post, which ran breathless headlines describing the gang as "two of the most expert shoplifters in the world" and dwelling, with no small amount of sensationalism, on the gang's reputed use of razor blades hidden in their corsages to threaten witnesses into silence. The coverage, accurate or not, only added to the gang's mythology. The Lambeth Riot Ultimately, Diamond was undone by her increasing fixation on controlling the gang. The Hoister's Code forbade members from doing anything against Diamond's wishes, including marrying men she did not approve of. In late 1925, a member of the gang named Marie Britten broke that rule, marrying a man Alice hadn't sanctioned after falling pregnant by him. On the night of 20 December 1925, Alice and her deputy Maggie Hill, sister of the notorious gangster Billy Hill, gathered at the Canterbury Social Club near Lambeth's New Cut market and drank themselves into a fury. Armed with bottles, stones, and lumps of concrete, the gang marched to Britten's lodgings, smashed their way inside, held Marie at gunpoint, and beat her husband senseless in front of her. Police arrived and a brawl broke out in the street, which became known as the Lambeth Riot. When a member defied her in 1925, Diamond led the gang in a brutal attack against the newlyweds so disruptive that it became known as the Lambeth Riot. For her role as instigator, Diamond was sentenced to 18 months in prison. Maggie Hill received 21 months. Nine other members of the gang received prison sentences too. By the time she was freed, a new queen had taken over. Diamond's Decline and Shirley Pitts Diamond turned to a career managing a brothel, while still offering tutelage to aspiring young thieves. She refused to leave London during the Blitz evacuations of the Second World War and continued to mentor younger thieves from her Lambeth brothel until her death from complications of multiple sclerosis in 1952, aged 55. One of her protégées, Shirley Pitts, was the acknowledged queen of the gang in the 1960s. According to Pitts's biographer Lorraine Gamman, Alice Diamond first took a twelve-year-old Shirley shoplifting in 1947, after Shirley's father came home from prison and bought her clothes she hated. Inside a shop, Alice asked Shirley whether a particular top would fit her brother. When Shirley said yes, Alice stuffed the item down the front of Shirley's own clothes. By the end of that single outing, Alice had clothed the entire Pitts family for free, and Shirley was hooked for life. Pitts went on to lead the Forty Elephants into the 1960s, though her operation was smaller and the gang's methods were increasingly defeated by modern store security and changing fashion that made it harder to conceal stolen goods in clothing. When Shirley Pitts died in 1992, she was buried, fittingly, in a stolen Gucci dress. Following her departure, the leadership of the gang fell into the hands of Lillian Rose Kendall, a true embodiment of the flapper era, nicknamed the "Bobbed-Haired Bandit" for her short, fashionable haircut and her specialism in smash-and-grab raids, sometimes using her car to physically smash through jewellers' shop windows. However, by the 1950s, increased store security and the advent of sleeker clothing made shoplifting considerably more challenging, marking the eventual decline of the Forty Elephants' activities. The gang faded out sometime in the 1950s, never formally dismantled by police, simply outpaced by changing technology and changing fashion. They were not the only women-led criminal network of their kind. Across the Atlantic, Fredericka "Marm" Mandelbaum ran a comparable network of female thieves and fences out of Gilded Age New York. But few matched the Forty Elephants for sheer longevity. Across roughly eight decades and at least three generations of leadership, from Mary Carr to Diamond Annie to Shirley Pitts, they ran one of the longest-surviving organised crime operations in British history, and they did it by being underestimated. Store detectives were watching for men. Police were looking for men. For seventy years, nobody thought to look twice at well-dressed women trying on coats. Sources: 1. Southwark News: Alice Diamond and the Forty Elephants. https://www.southwarknews.co.uk/history/alice-diamond-and-the-forty-elephants-the-all-female-criminal-gang-which-caused-waves-on-both-sides-of-the-atlantic/ 2. Historic Mysteries: London's Notorious Female Gangsters, the 40 Elephants. https://www.historicmysteries.com/history/40-elephants/28301/ 3. Biographics: The Forty Elephants — The All-Women Gang That Robbed London Blind. https://biographics.org/the-forty-elephants-the-all-women-gang-that-robbed-london-blind/ 4. Crime+Investigation UK: The Key Figures. https://www.crimeandinvestigation.co.uk/crime-files/london-gangs/key-figures 5. Herstorical Tours: Alice Diamond and the Forty Elephants. https://www.herstoricaltours.co.uk/post/herstory-of-the-month-alice-diamond-and-the-forty-elephants 6. Taylor & Francis: 'Alice Diamond, giant—queen of the terrors': female gangsterism in the London underworld. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09612025.2025.2462879

In August 1990, Playgirl Magazine advertised the chance to “Sleep with Donald Trump” on its cover to its predominantly female audience. The move followed Trump’s messy and public divorce with his first wife, Ivana, who alleged that the entrepreneur had sexually assaulted her and pulled out her hair. Ivana Trump reportedly walked out of the marriage with a settlement of between US$14 million and US$25 million. As his divorce pended , the magazine quickly ran a contest with the offer to “sleep with” the businessman. “He’s rich, almost single and yours for the asking,” a blurb on its table of contents read. “Here’s how you can get the Donald out of your dreams and into your bed!” Obviously, readers weren’t actually invited to get frisky with Trump. According to fact-checking site Snopes , the contest was simply a PR stunt approved and paid for by Trump and/or a book publisher which explained, in the small print, that winners would receive a pillowcase silk-screened with an image of his face. The description also touted Trump as a fitting bedfellow by stating, “He’s tall, good-looking, about to be divorced, and rich beyond your wildest imagination. His every move makes headlines—even his bedroom moves. One woman reportedly called him ‘the best sex I’ve ever had.’” As well as a pillowcase made for audiences to “lie there whispering sweet nothings to his ear all night,” winners would each be handed a copy of Joel Reed’s Donald Trump: The Man, The Myth, The Scandal . “Don’t wait,” Playgirl magazine prompted. “A catch like Donald Trump won’t stay out of someone’s bed for long!”

Ernest Hemingway had survived a great deal by the time the end came. He'd been wounded by mortar fire in World War One, suffered severe injuries in two separate plane crashes in Africa within two days of each other in 1954, had hepatitis, skin cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, and had watched his father shoot himself. He was not a man who buckled easily. What finally wore him down wasn't anything as dramatic as a battlefield. It was a combination of a degenerative physical condition, a medical treatment that destroyed his ability to write, and a conviction that the FBI was watching his every move, which everyone around him dismissed as paranoia, and which turned out to be entirely true. A Body Breaking Down By the late 1950s Hemingway's health had been deteriorating for years. He was drinking heavily, his blood pressure was dangerously high, and he'd been suffering from hemochromatosis, a hereditary condition in which the body absorbs and stores too much iron. The excess iron accumulates in organs, damaging the liver, pancreas, heart, and brain. It's manageable if caught early. In Hemingway's case it wasn't caught early, and by the time it was properly understood, it had already been doing damage for years. The condition affects mood, memory, and cognitive function, and was almost certainly a significant factor in the depression and confusion of his final years, though it went largely undiagnosed during his lifetime. He was also struggling creatively in a way that terrified him. He'd spent years working on what would become A Moveable Feast, his memoir of Paris in the 1920s, and on a long piece about bullfighting that would be published posthumously as The Dangerous Summer. Neither felt right to him. The sentence-level precision that had defined his work seemed to be slipping. Writing, the thing that had been the organising principle of his entire adult life, was becoming harder to access. The Crook Factory and the FBI File During World War Two, while living at his estate Finca Vigia outside Havana, Hemingway had set up a private counterintelligence operation with the blessing of the US ambassador to Cuba, Spruille Braden. He called it the Crook Factory. The operation, staffed mainly by Hemingway's Cuban contacts and drinking companions, was tasked with monitoring Spanish nationals in Cuba who were suspected of working for Franco's government and passing information to the Axis powers. The FBI, which was simultaneously trying to run its own Cuban operation, was not pleased. J. Edgar Hoover took a personal interest in Hemingway, and the bureau began keeping a file on him that would run for 124 pages and continue until 1974, thirteen years after his death. It was similar, in a way, to the bureau's treatment of other cultural figures Hoover viewed with suspicion, including Robert Hanssen, whose career at the bureau later illustrated how institutionally paranoid the FBI had become about perceived threats, internal and external alike. By 1960, Hemingway was convinced the FBI was still watching him. He told friends that agents were following his car in Ketchum, Idaho, that his phone was tapped, that men in the street were watching him. His friend and biographer A.E. Hotchner recalled driving with Hemingway and the writer's hunting companion Forrest MacMullen in November 1960, with Hemingway insisting they were being tailed. "Was he making it up?" Hotchner later wrote. "Why would the FBI be following Ernest Hemingway?" The answer, which nobody knew at the time, was that they were. A Freedom of Information request filed by biographer Jeffrey Meyers in 1983 confirmed that the FBI had been monitoring Hemingway continuously since 1942, had tapped his phones, tracked him to the Mayo Clinic, and kept watching him right up to his suicide. The file noted, with evident satisfaction, that Hemingway's Crook Factory intelligence was "almost without fail valueless," but the surveillance continued regardless. Cuba, Castro, and the Lost Manuscripts Hemingway had lived at Finca Vigia for over twenty years. He'd written For Whom the Bell Tolls there, and The Old Man and the Sea, and kept thousands of pages of manuscripts, letters, and notes in filing cabinets at the house and in a bank vault in Havana. When the US embassy advised him to leave Cuba in July 1960 as relations with Castro's government deteriorated, Hemingway went. He didn't know it was permanent. The house was left exactly as it was, as though he'd gone for a walk and was coming back. He never did. After his death, with Americans banned from travelling to Cuba and diplomatic relations severed, Mary Hemingway obtained special permission through contacts in the Kennedy administration to return to Havana and negotiate with Castro's government directly. Castro allowed her to remove the manuscripts from the bank vault and some paintings from the house, in exchange for the Finca being turned into a national museum. Mary had the manuscripts, which included the original typescript of The Old Man and the Sea and the unpublished Islands in the Stream, loaded onto a shrimp trawler, the last American vessel to leave Havana, and sailed to Florida. She later arranged for the papers to go to the Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, where they remain. The Mayo Clinic and ECT In late 1960, Hemingway's mental and physical state had become critical enough that he was admitted to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. His admission was kept quiet; to avoid press attention, he was checked in under the name George Saviers, his Ketchum doctor's name. He was 61 years old, his blood pressure was severely elevated, his liver was damaged, and he was deeply depressed. The treating physicians decided to administer electroconvulsive therapy. ECT was, by 1960, an established treatment for severe depression, but it carries significant risks to memory and cognitive function, particularly with the higher-voltage protocols used at the time. Hemingway received around 15 rounds of ECT during two separate stays at the Mayo Clinic. Each course left him more confused and less able to write. His friends reported that he struggled to complete sentences. He couldn't read back his own work. He told Hotchner: "Well, what is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient." He was discharged in late January 1961 and returned to Ketchum. Mary found him in the kitchen one morning with a loaded shotgun. The guns in the house were quietly moved to a storage room and the keys given to the doctor. Hemingway found them within days. He was readmitted to the Mayo Clinic in April 1961 for a second course of ECT, and discharged again on 26 June 1961. The Morning of 2 July 1961 He'd been home in Ketchum for five days. On the morning of 2 July 1961, Mary heard a sound at around 7.30am. She came downstairs and found Hemingway in the entrance hall. He was 61 years old, three weeks shy of his 62nd birthday. The official statement initially described the death as accidental. Mary later confirmed it was a suicide. He'd used one of his own shotguns, retrieved from the locked storage room. The key had been left on the kitchen windowsill. His death became part of a devastating pattern in his family. His father Clarence had shot himself in 1928. His brother Leicester did the same in 1982. His sister Ursula in 1966. And in 1996, his granddaughter Margaux Hemingway died of a drug overdose the night before the anniversary of Ernest's death, the fifth member of the family to die by suicide. The pattern that had started with Clarence was still running three generations later. What the ECT Destroyed The debate about Hemingway's final years has often focused on whether the ECT was appropriate or whether it accelerated his decline. His biographers are divided. Some argue the ECT was the only option left given the severity of his depression. Others, including Hotchner, concluded that it destroyed the one thing that had kept him going. Hemingway himself was clear about what he thought. He'd spent his whole life arguing that a writer's memory was everything, that prose came from lived experience precisely recalled and precisely rendered. The treatment had taken that from him. Whether he could have recovered it, or whether the hemochromatosis and the years of heavy drinking had already made that impossible, is something that can't now be answered. A Moveable Feast was published posthumously in 1964, edited by Mary from the manuscripts he'd left. The Garden of Eden came in 1986. Islands in the Stream in 1970. The work he couldn't finish in the last years of his life, the work he'd convinced himself had gone beyond his reach, turned out to still be there. He just couldn't see it anymore. Sources: 1. Jeffrey Meyers, Hemingway: A Biography. Harper & Row, 1985. 2. A.E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway. Random House, 1966. 3. FBI Vault: Ernest Hemingway File. https://vault.fbi.gov/ernest-miller-hemingway 4. JFK Presidential Library: New Hemingway Materials from Cuba. https://www.jfklibrary.org/about-us/news-and-press/press-releases/new-hemingway-materials-from-cuba-made-available-for-first-time-at-jfk-library 5. Strand Magazine: The Adventure of the Hemingway Manuscripts. https://strandmag.com/the-adventure-of-the-hemingway-manuscripts/ 6. New York Review of Books: Wanted by the FBI (Jeffrey Meyers). https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1983/03/31/wanted-by-the-fbi/ 7. The Vintage News: The Declassified FBI Files on Ernest Hemingway. https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/08/01/hemingway-fbi/

On 6 July 1957, a 16-year-old John Lennon was playing at a church fete in Woolton, Liverpool, with his skiffle group the Quarrymen. A 15-year-old Paul McCartney was in the crowd. By the end of the afternoon, they'd been introduced in a Scout hut by a mutual friend, McCartney had shown Lennon how to tune a guitar and knocked out three songs from memory, and Lennon had started turning over in his head whether inviting this kid to join the band was a good idea. Within seven years they'd written "She Loves You," "A Hard Day's Night," "Help!," and "Yesterday." The Beatles as we know them started in a churchyard in Woolton. The Man Who Made It Happen The person responsible for the introduction was Ivan Vaughan, and his role in pop history has been consistently underplayed. Ivan was born on 18 June 1942 in Liverpool, which happens to be the exact same birthday as Paul McCartney. The two met when they both enrolled at the Liverpool Institute in September 1953. Ivan had known John Lennon since they were small children. They'd grown up near each other in Woolton, and Ivan played tea-chest bass in the Quarrymen from time to time. Ivan Vaughn with Paul and George The reason Ivan was at Liverpool Institute rather than Quarry Bank with John comes down to parental interference. The Vaughans were worried about their son spending too much time around Lennon, who already had a reputation for trouble, and steered him toward Liverpool Institute instead. This put Ivan in the same school as McCartney. Without that parental intervention, the person connecting Lennon to McCartney might never have existed in the right place. Ivan had been telling Paul about the Quarrymen and suggested he come to the fete. Paul was noncommittal at first. Ivan's winning argument, according to accounts from people who were there, was that it was a good place to meet girls. Paul decided to come. The Fete at St Peter's Church The Woolton village fete at St Peter's Church was a quintessentially English summer afternoon event: cake stalls, games, a Rose Queen procession, Morris dancers, Boy Scouts, Brownies, Cubs, and a display by the City of Liverpool Police Dogs. The Quarrymen played three times that day. First they rode through the village on the back of a flatbed lorry, part of a procession led by the Band of the Cheshire Yeomanry. At 4:15 in the afternoon, they played a set on a permanent stage in the field behind the church. The evening ended with a Grand Dance in the church hall. John Lennon sang lead, as always. He played guitar and fronted the band with the kind of performance described by everyone who saw the early Quarrymen as confident, physical, and slightly reckless. Julia Baird, Lennon's half-sister, was there that afternoon. She described the scene in her memoir Imagine This: "The entertainment began at 2pm with the opening procession, which entailed one or two wonderfully festooned lorries crawling at a snail's pace through the village on their ceremonious way to the Church field." Paul arrived during the 4:15 set. The song the Quarrymen were playing as he walked in was "Come Go with Me" by the Del-Vikings, a recent American chart hit. Lennon liked the song and had been playing it, but he didn't know the lyrics. He was improvising them, making them up as he went, keeping the rhythm and melody but filling in the words with whatever sounded right. Paul later recalled hearing Lennon singing it through the tannoy as he approached: the confidence of it, the way Lennon performed as if he knew exactly what he was doing even when he was winging it. The Scout Hut Introduction Between the afternoon set and the evening dance, Lennon had a few minutes while the band set up equipment in the church hall. It was in this window, in the Scout hut near the church, that Ivan Vaughan brought Paul over and introduced them. Paul McCartney was, by most accounts, immediately impressive. He was younger than Lennon, slightly rounder, not yet the lean teenager he'd become, but he was confident and he clearly knew his music. He showed Lennon how to tune a guitar by ear, something Lennon had been doing by feel and approximation. Then he played. He played Eddie Cochran's "Twenty Flight Rock," a fast American rock and roll number with complex chord changes. He knew every word. He played Gene Vincent's "Be-Bop-A-Lula." He did a Little Richard medley. He played it all with an authority that impressed every Quarrymen member present. The thing that mattered most to Lennon, according to Pete Shotton's later account, was that Paul knew the lyrics. Real lyrics. Not improvised fillers, not made-up words, but the actual songs as recorded. That was practically unusual for a working-class teenager in Liverpool in 1957. Pete Shotton, Lennon's closest friend and the Quarrymen's washboard player, later recalled what Lennon said to him on the walk home. He was thinking about whether to invite McCartney to join. The tension wasn't whether Paul was good enough. He clearly was. The tension was whether letting in someone that good was worth it, because someone that good might end up taking over. Lennon was the leader of the Quarrymen, and he'd built it to his own specifications. A 15-year-old who could play better than him and knew all the words was both an asset and a threat. Lennon's conclusion, by the time he got home, was that the asset outweighed the threat. Paul McCartney remembers the day he met John Lennon The Invitation and What FollowedThe Bob Molyneux Tape The afternoon at Woolton on 6 July 1957 was captured, partially, on an audio recording. Bob Molyneux, a local amateur recording enthusiast, brought a reel-to-reel tape recorder to the fete and recorded parts of the Quarrymen's performance. The tape was forgotten for decades. Molyneux held onto it without realising what he had, and it only came to public attention in 1994 when it was included in the Beatles Anthology documentary project. It was the oldest known recording of John Lennon performing. In 1994, Molyneux sold the tape at Sotheby's for approximately £78,500. It's an extraordinary document: a crackly, imperfect recording of teenagers playing skiffle at a village fete, with no idea that any of it mattered. You can hear Lennon leading the Quarrymen through their set, confident and slightly chaotic, on the same afternoon that McCartney walked through the gate and changed everything. A photo from Oct. 14, 1957 shows Paul McCartney’s first performance with the Quarry Men (from left): drummer Colin Hanton, McCartney, bassist Len Garry, John Lennon and guitarist Eric Griffiths. Why It Mattered There are arguments about whether the Lennon/McCartney partnership was the most significant creative collaboration in 20th-century popular music, but there aren't many serious ones. Between 1963 and 1970, working together and increasingly in competition with each other, they produced twelve studio albums and dozens of songs that reshaped what pop music was for and what it could sound like. The partnership started, improbably, because a teenager was told a church fete was a good place to meet girls. The relationship between Lennon and McCartney lasted, in various forms, until Lennon's death in 1980. It wasn't always warm. The split of the Beatles in 1970 produced years of public bitterness, including a venomous letter Lennon wrote to Paul and Linda McCartney in 1971, which reads like a document from a completely different relationship to the one that started in a Scout hut in Woolton. What happened in that Scout hut in 1957 created, eventually, both the greatest songwriting partnership of its era and the most public and acrimonious rupture of it. St Peter's Church in Woolton is now a tourist destination for Beatles pilgrims. The churchyard where Lennon and McCartney first crossed paths, where Lennon used to sit on the graves as a teenager, is marked and visited. Every year on 6 July, a small ceremony marks the anniversary. The fete still happens. Occasionally, the surviving original Quarrymen members play at it. Sources: 1. Wikipedia: The Quarrymen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quarrymen 2. Wikipedia: Ivan Vaughan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Vaughan 3. The Beatles Bible: John Lennon meets Paul McCartney: Saturday 6 July 1957. https://www.beatlesbible.com/1957/07/06/john-lennon-meets-paul-mccartney/ 4. Barry Miles, Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now. Secker & Warburg, 1997. 5. Pete Shotton and Nicholas Schaffner, John Lennon in My Life. Stein and Day, 1983. 6. Julia Baird, Imagine This: Growing Up with My Brother John Lennon. Hodder & Stoughton, 2007. 7. Hunter Davies, The Beatles: The Only Authorised Biography. McGraw-Hill, 1968.