31 March: Red Rum

On this date in 1978 the racehorse Red Rum retired from competition. 10 things you might not know about Red Rum.

1. His name comes from the names of his parents. His dam was Mared and his sire Quorum.

2. He was born on 3 May 1965 at Rossenarra Stud in Kells, County Kilkenny. His dam’s owner, Martyn McEnery, had taken her to Balreask Stud, near Dublin airport and paid £251.12s for the stud fee and Mared’s board for two weeks.

3. His first ever race was at Aintree, at the Grand National meeting, though not in the big race itself. The result was a dead heat with a filly also bred at Rossenarra Stud. It was on this day that he first came to the attention of Donald “Ginger” McCain, who would later become Red Rum’s owner and trainer, although the first time the horse came up for sale, he didn’t bid as Red Rum was at that time being touted as a sprinter and McCain’s speciality was steeplechasers.

4. McCain was a second hand car dealer who trained horses from stables behind his car showroom in Birkdale. He got engaged to his wife Beryl on Grand National day and married her on Grand National Day two years later. Hence they were always at the National, celebrating their anniversary. His lifelong dream was to train a National winner. He was, as he’d say, always on the lookout for “one good horse”. McCain eventually bought Red Rum in 1972 on behalf of a businessman called Noel Le Mare whose lifelong ambition was to own a Grand National Winner. Le Mare paid 6,000 guineas for the Horse.

5. There was a problem, however. When they got Red Rum home, it looked like, as a car dealer might say, they’d been sold a lemon; for Red Rum was lame. Le Mare had already commented that Red Rum backwards spelled “murder” and that had to be a bad sign. It turned out the horse had pedolostisis, a debilitating and thought to be incurable bone disease, the equine equivalent of arthritis and bone spurs. However, there was one cure and that was training on a beach and in the sea. McCain knew this, having seen working horses recover from it after working on the beach. He was also the only trainer in England who exercised his horses on a beach. As it happened, Red Rum loved the sea and would go in up to his chest any chance he got – and it did the trick. His lameness disappeared.

6. Comedian Lee Mack was a stable boy before he became famous, and the horse on which he took his first riding lesson was Red Rum.

7. Red Rum is the only horse to win both the Aintree Grand National and the Scottish Grand National in the same season in 1974. That said, Aintree seemed to be Red Rum’s favourite course where he gave his best performances, often doing less well at other venues.

8. Red Rum won the Grand National in 1973, 1974 and 1977, finishing second in 1975 and 1976. He was all set to give it another go in 1978, but the day before the race it was discovered he had a hairline fracture which could have led to collapse of the bone if he’d taken part in the race. So he was retired, although he would return to Aintree as a celebrity horse and lead the opening parade after that. In retirement, he earned more from merchandise, opening supermarkets, a roller coaster and switching on the Blackpool Illuminations, than he’d ever won in prize money. Since he was a gelding, his owners missed out on another potential goldmine they could have earned from stud fees.

9. Red Rum lived to the grand old age (for a horse) of 30. The McCains kept him at their country home in Cheshire until he died on 18 October 1995. He was buried beside the winning post at Aintree, where his epitaph reads “Respect this place, This hallowed ground; A legend here, His rest has found; His feet would fly, Our spirits soar; He earned our love, For evermore.” There is also a statue of him at Aintree.

10. A Merseyrail train and a fire engine in Southport were named after him.

I also write novels and short stories. If you like superheroes, psychic detectives and general weirdness you might enjoy them. 

Check out my works of fiction at https://juliehowlinauthor.wordpress.com/my-books/

30 March: 89

Today is the 89^th day of the year. Here are 10 fun facts about the number 89.

1. If all the elements in the Periodic Table were placed in alphabetical order, at the top of the list would be Actinium (Ac) which has the atomic number 89.

2. Hellin's law is an empirical observation (before fertility treatments were commonplace) that Twins occur once in 89 births, triplets once per 89 twin births, and quadruplets once per 89 triplet births, and so on.

3. The height of the pedestal under the Statue of Liberty is 89'.

4. The longest verse in the KJV Bible is Esther 8:9 with 89 plus one words.

5. The Michaelmas daisy usually has 89 petals. It is the largest naturally occurring Fibonacci number in flowers.

6. In Rugby, an "89" or eight-nine move follows a scrum, in which the number 8 catches the ball and transfers it to number 9 (scrum half).

7. The pattern on the underside of the wing of the butterfly Diaethria neglecta resembles the number 89.

8. 89 Julia is a large asteroid discovered by French astronomer Édouard Stephan in 1866. It is believed to be named after Saint Julia of Corsica.

9. London bus route 89 runs from Lewisham Station to Forest Road / Slade Green Station.

10. In numerology, 89 energy resonates with building things, generally with a humanitarian objective, such as large structures that benefit society and last a long time. People under the influence of the number are efficient and skilled managers.

I also write novels and short stories. If you like superheroes, psychic detectives and general weirdness you might enjoy them. 

Check out my works of fiction at https://juliehowlinauthor.wordpress.com/my-books/

29 March: John Tyler

This date in 1790 was the birthdate of the 10th president of the United States, John Tyler. Ten facts about him:

1. He was the first vice president to become president without an election, on the death of his predecessor William H Harrison in 1841. The US Constitution wasn’t clear about what should happen if a president died in office. Some, like John Quincy Adams believed the vice president should be an acting president, but Tyler declared that he was president and nobody was able to challenge it successfully. His opponents referred to him as “His accidency”.

2. Tyler fathered more children than any other American president. He married his first wife, Letitia Christian, on his 23rd birthday in 1813 and they had eight. Letitia died of a stroke in September 1842 and in 1844 he married Julia Gardiner and had seven more with her. Julia was 30 years his junior and five years younger than his eldest daughter, who wasn’t well pleased about the marriage. There’s speculation that he could have fathered even more with his slaves and then sold the babies. Hence there are a number of African American families today who claim to be his descendants although none of them have been able to prove it.

3. He claimed to be against slavery, but he’d grown up on a plantation and kept slaves himself, never freeing any of them. He believed it was up to individual states to decide whether slavery should be legal, not the federal government. We don’t know how well he treated his slaves, but historians surmise he treated them well and wasn’t violent towards them.

4. Tyler studied law with his father, gaining admission to the bar in 1809. He was only 19 at the time, and therefore too young to be eligible, but the admitting judge didn’t ask his age.

5. His presidency was somewhat turbulent. He’d defected from the Democrats to run with Harrison as a Whig, but when he became president, the Whigs decided they didn’t trust him and threw him out. For the remainder of his presidency, Tyler was, as he himself said, a man “without a party.” He was the only American president whose party expelled him while he was president.

6. He was also the only president to have had virtually all of his cabinet resign in protest over his veto of a tariff bill; all but his Secretary of State, Daniel Webster, resigned in protest.

7. He was influential in Texas’s journey to statehood. Though the Senate refused to ratify a treaty which would have made Texas statehood possible, Tyler did manage to get them to agree to an annexation bill which he signed three days before he left office.

8. In 1844 he entered the election, but since the Whigs had thrown him out and the Democrats didn’t support him either, he entered as a member of his own party, made up of people loyal to him. His candidacy attracted little support and in August 1844 he withdrew and the winner of that election was James K. Polk.

9. Tyler retired to a Virginia plantation which was called Walnut Grove, but Tyler renamed it Sherwood Forest because he saw himself as being outlawed by the Whig party and therefore identified with Robin Hood.

10. He died of a stroke in 1862 at the age of 71. Tyler's death was the only one in presidential history not to be officially recognised in Washington, because of his allegiance to the Confederate States. Confederate President Jefferson Davis organised a grand funeral even though Tyler had asked for a simple one. His coffin was draped with a Confederate flag, making him the only U.S. president ever buried under a flag not of the United States.

I also write novels and short stories. If you like superheroes, psychic detectives and general weirdness you might enjoy them. 

Check out my works of fiction at https://juliehowlinauthor.wordpress.com/my-books/

28 March: Radio Caroline

Radio Caroline Began broadcasting on this date in 1964. 10 things you might not know about Radio Caroline.

1. The station was born at a time when pop music got very little air time on BBC Radio. Young people wanting to listen to pop Music on the radio could only do so for about an hour a week, as The BBC catered mainly to older audiences.

2. It was founded by a musician and manager from Ireland, called Ronan O'Rahilly, who had applied to the BBC to get them to play a record by one of his contracted artists, one Georgie Fame, and been turned down.

3. O'Rahilly obtained a former Danish passenger ferry called Fredericia which he took to the Irish port of Greenore to be fitted out as a radio ship. She was then renamed MV Caroline and her port of registry changed to Panama. She was the first of a number of ships used to broadcast the station. Others were used as a result of mergers with other offshore stations or replacements for ships that were wrecked or seized. Other vessels included Mi Amigo and Ross Revenge. The latter was a former fishing trawler which had (91 m) high mast, the tallest on any ship in the world.

4. Why Caroline? We don’t know for sure, but there are three different theories. One was that O'Rahilly was inspired by a picture he’d seen of Caroline Kennedy, playing with her brother, John F. Kennedy Jr., in the Oval Office. Another theory is that it was named after someone O'Rahilly knew, probably Caroline Maudling, daughter of the British government minister Reginald Maudling. The third theory is that it wasn’t named for a real person at all, but a concept of a target audience. For a time, Radio Caroline shared an office with a music magazine, Queen, whose target audience according to its editor was "a twenty something, non intellectual who had left school at 16, and was a ‘good time’ girl called Caroline." Which, it was decided, was also the target audience for the radio station.

5. Some big names in the broadcasting world started their careers on Radio Caroline. They include Tony Blackburn, Simon Dee, Tony Prince, Spangles Muldoon, Johnnie Walker, Dave Lee Travis, Tommy Vance and Emperor Rosko. For one weekend in 1965 the regular DJs were joined by a singer called Sylvan Whittingham, who visited to promote her new single and then couldn’t leave due to a storm. She spent the time mucking in and helping to present programmes and create jingles.

6. In 1967, the UK Government enacted the Marine, &c., Broadcasting (Offences) Act 1967 which essentially meant companies weren’t allowed to advertise on it, which caused serious financial problems and several offshore stations, for want of a better word, went under. Caroline, however, simply moved to Dutch waters, out of the law’s jurisdiction. They stayed there until 1974, when the Netherlands enacted a similar law, at which point they moved to Spain.

7. The first programme was pre recorded and presented by Chris Moore. The opening show on the Ross Revenge was presented by Tom Anderson, who had been the one to broadcast the final goodbye from the sinking Mi Amigo in 1980.

8. There was once a murder associated with the station. In 1965, Caroline was in negotiations to take over another station, Radio City, which broadcast from a Second World War marine fort called Shivering Sands Army Fort, off the Kent coast. One Major Oliver Smedley entered into a partnership with Radio City's owner, Reginald Calvert, and had a more powerful transmitter installed on the fort. This transmitter didn’t work. Calvert didn’t pay for it and Smedley withdrew from the deal. Smedley later took a bunch of workmen to the fort to repossess the transmitter as it would still have useful parts. Calvert wasn’t happy about that and showed up at Smedley’s house asking for the transmitter back. There was a fight which ended with Calvert being shot dead. Smedley was charged with Calvert's murder, later reduced to a charge of manslaughter. The jury acquitted him.

9. As well as pop music, Radio Caroline used to broadcast shows by American Evangelists, who would pay handsomely for late night slots, perhaps hoping to reach young pop fans. This helped make ends meet during the time when advertising was outlawed.

10. Radio Caroline still exists today, but it’s not broadcast from a ship these days. The station now broadcasts on 648 AM across much of England and DAB radio in certain areas, and you can also listen to it 24 hours a day on The Internet.

I also write novels and short stories. If you like superheroes, psychic detectives and general weirdness you might enjoy them. 

Check out my works of fiction at https://juliehowlinauthor.wordpress.com/my-books/

27 March: Raymond Name Day

Today is the name day for people called Raymond. Raymond is a male given name of Germanic origin, meaning counsel and protection. It is frequently shortened to Ray. 10 famous Raymonds:

1. Ray Bolger: actor who played the Scarecrow in Wizard of Oz.

2. Saint Raymond of Penyafort patron of canon lawyers and of all lawyers in Spain.

3. Ray Bradbury: American science fiction and fantasy author best known for his novel Fahrenheit 451.

4. Raymond Reddington: main character in the TV series The Blacklist.

5. Raymond Burr: Canadian actor who portrayed the title roles in the television dramas Perry Mason and Ironside.

6. Ray Charles (pictured): American singer, songwriter and pianist.

7. Ray Park: British actor, martial artist and stuntman best known for as Darth Maul in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace and Solo: A Star Wars Story.

8. Raymond Briggs: English illustrator, cartoonist, graphic novelist, and author best known for The Snowman and Fungus the Bogeyman.

9. Ray Romano: actor who played Ray Barone in Everybody loves Raymond.

10. Raymond E. Feist: American fantasy writer.

I also write novels and short stories. If you like superheroes, psychic detectives and general weirdness you might enjoy them. 

Check out my works of fiction at https://juliehowlinauthor.wordpress.com/my-books/

26 March: Robert Frost

Robert Frost, the American poet, was born on this date in 1874. Here are 10 facts about him.

1. He was born in San Francisco; both his parents were teachers. He was named after Confederate General Robert E Lee, a hero of his father’s.

2. Frost’s father died of tuberculosis when he was 11 years old, leaving them with just eight dollars. Hence the family moved to Massachusetts to live with his grandparents.

3. Frost had two unsuccessful attempts at getting a college degree. He went to Dartmouth College but only lasted two months before dropping out, saying, "I wasn't suited for that place." He tried again at Harvard, but by this time he had a wife and child and dropped out to support them. Harvard bestowed an honorary degree on him in 1937.

4. His wife’s name was Elinor Miriam White and they were childhood sweethearts, having met at school. In fact, they shared the title of class valedictorian when they graduated in 1892. He proposed to her after he sold his first poem (My Butterfly, to the New York Independent newspaper in 1894, for which he got paid $15 which at the time was a substantial sum, about twice the weekly salary he earned as a teacher) but she insisted on waiting until she finished college. His poem, The Subverted Flower, was inspired by her.

5. His most famous poem, The Road Not Taken, was actually written as a bit of a joke. Frost used to go hiking with a friend, Edward Thomas. Thomas was often indecisive about which way to go, would spend a lot of time deliberating and then regretting that he’d not chosen the other route.

6. Another of his poems is called Fire and Ice, and this one was an inspiration to JRR Martin who admits the poem was an influence and that he lifted the title for his book A Song of Ice and Fire. Martin said, "Fire is love, fire is passion, fire is sexual ardour and all of these things. Ice is betrayal, ice is revenge, ice is … you know, that kind of cold inhumanity and all that stuff is being played out in the books.” Indeed.

7. John F Kennedy was also a fan, which led to Frost becoming the first poet to read at a presidential inauguration. The poem he used at the event was not the one he’d intended to read. He’d written one called Dedication and had it typed out, but the sun was so bright he couldn’t read the words because of the glare, so ended up reciting The Gift Outright because he knew it by heart.

8. He is the only poet to win the Pulitzer Prize four times. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature 31 times.

9. As well as poetry, he wrote a few plays including A Way Out, and The Cow's in the Corn: A One Act Irish Play in Rhyme.

10. He died in 1963 at the age of 88. The inscription on his tombstone is “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world,” which is the last line of his poem The Lesson for Today.

I also write novels and short stories. If you like superheroes, psychic detectives and general weirdness you might enjoy them. 

Check out my works of fiction at https://juliehowlinauthor.wordpress.com/my-books/

25 March: Béla Bartók

This date in 1881 was the birthdate of Béla Bartók, a Hungarian composer known for composing Hungarian dances. 10 facts about him.

1. Béla Bartók was born in Nagyszentmiklós, which was in Hungary at the time but is now part of Romania. His father was descended from a noble family and worked as Director of an Agricultural School. His mother was from Slovakia. He had a sister whose name was Erzsébet.

2. His parents were both amateur musicians and Bartók’s mother began teaching him to play the Piano when he was five. At nine, he started composing.

3. His first public performance was when he was 11. One of the pieces he played at it was his one of his own compositions called The Course of the Danube. His performance attracted the attention of László Erkel, who took him on as a student.

4. He earned a place at the prestigious Vienna Conservatoire when he was 17, but being a Hungarian nationalist he chose to study piano and composition at the Budapest Academy of Music instead. He graduated in 1903, and began teaching piano there himself.

5. He was married twice. His first wife was Márta Ziegler with whom he had a son, Béla Bartók III. They divorced in 1923 and the following year Bartók he married Ditta Pásztory, a piano student, and had another son, Péter.

6. While he is famous for folk music inspired compositions, he also wrote one opera, Bluebeard's Castle in 1911.

7. He was strongly against the Nazis and Hungary's alliance with Germany. He refused to perform in Germany after 1933, and eventually left Europe altogether to escape the Nazis. He went to America, settled in New York and taught at Columbia University.

8. His passion was ethnomusicological research. He collected folk tunes from Hungary, Romania, Croatia, Yugoslavia, Turkey and North Africa. When he retired from teaching he devoted much of his time to this pursuit.

9. Bartók died in New York in 1945, at the age of 64, from complications of leukaemia. Only ten people attended his funeral, including his wife and two sons. He was buried in New York although in 1988 his sons had his remains moved and reburied in Hungary in 1988.

10. At the time of his death, Bartók left some unfinished works which were completed by one of his students, Tibor Serly.

I also write novels and short stories. If you like superheroes, psychic detectives and general weirdness you might enjoy them. 

Check out my works of fiction at https://juliehowlinauthor.wordpress.com/my-books/