Tiny Histories

by Dixe Wills

  As such, Sportsnight can perhaps make a greater claim to changing the political face of the nation than many a television programme dedicated to politics.

  But we should leave the last word to Harold Wilson and Steptoe and Son. In Wilson’s 1981 interview, he recalled his meeting with Sir Hugh Greene:

  I said I didn’t want a popular programme between 8 and 9 o’clock. It was the equivalent of bringing Morecambe and Wise back. Hugh didn’t think much of this argument. He said what would you prefer to put on between 8 o’clock and 9 o’clock? I said, “Greek drama, preferably in the original.”

  It would have been highly appropriate had the BBC filled the slot with such a play: a module on Greek drama is offered at Wilson’s Open University today.

  A former colonel rides his motorbike through a dip in the road

  Lawrence of Arabia. Utter the name and suddenly visions arise of Peter O’Toole in David Lean’s classic Oscar-winning film, ice-blue eyes heroically scanning the horizon as he rides a camel through the desert. A swashbuckling hero with a devil-may-care attitude, Lawrence had reserves of courage that would shame most other mortals. If even half the stories about him are true, he was a man who lived an extraordinary life, the effects of which are still felt today. That his death should also have made its mark should not, therefore, be a surprise. That it was an entirely unwitting legacy Lawrence was to pass on to future generations, and one that he would doubtless have poured scorn on himself, is one of those odd quirks of fate that make the world such an appealingly unpredictable place in which to live.

  He was born Thomas Edward Lawrence in Tremadog, Wales, on 16 August 1888. His mother was Sarah Junner, a Scottish governess, and his father was Sir Thomas Chapman, an Anglo-Irish nobleman who had abandoned his first family in Ireland to live with Junner. The surname Lawrence was entirely fictitious – the couple had assumed it to cover the fact that they were not married and then, quite naturally, had passed it on to their son in order to keep up the pretence. It was an unconventional start to an unconventional life.

  Lawrence gained a place at Oxford University to read history and headed off to the Middle East in 1910 as an archaeologist, digging mainly in areas that are today part of Syria. It was World War I that was to make his name as well as his nickname. Using his brilliant leadership and language skills and, just as importantly, his knowledge and respect for the Arab people and their culture, he led a guerrilla force composed of Arab fighters against the might of the Ottoman Empire, eventually helping to capture Damascus. He ended the war a colonel.

  A short while later he returned to Oxford to begin a fellowship at All Souls College and the writing of his best-selling war memoir, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. He also served as a diplomat but found the widespread acclaim for his rôle in the Great War difficult to live with; in 1922 he deliberately attempted to disappear from public view. He spent the remaining 13 years of his life striving – largely in vain – to achieve obscurity. He enlisted in the Royal Air Force as a lowly aircraftman under the name John Hume Ross and served a short time as a private in the army as T. E. Shaw before returning to the RAF.

  While he may have endeavoured to avoid the unwanted trappings of his fame, the daredevil streak in him did not go away. He was a collector of Brough motorcycles and a lover of the high speeds (in excess of 100mph) they could attain, writing once that, ‘A skittish motor-bike with a touch of blood in it is better than all the riding animals on earth.’

  It is not known whether Lawrence was travelling at any undue velocity on his Brough Superior 1100 on the morning of Monday 13 May 1935. What we do know is that it was raining very hard and that a dip in the road near his Dorset home restricted the view of what lay up ahead of him. It meant that he did not see two boys on bicycles until it was too late. He swerved to avoid them but lost control of his machine and was thrown over the handlebars. The damage he sustained to his head when it hit the road was severe, and despite the best efforts of hospital doctors, he died six days later. He was 46. Like most motorcyclists of his time, Lawrence was not wearing a crash helmet.

  One of the doctors who had fought to save his life was a man named Hugh Cairns. The young neurosurgeon – one of the first in Britain – was deeply affected by Lawrence’s death. He grew absorbed by the problem of head traumas suffered by the victims of motorbike accidents and wanted to find out to what extent crash helmets prevented them. It seems an all-too-obvious line of thought to pursue now, but back in the 1930s such notions were groundbreaking.

  He had his first report published in the British Medical Journal in 1941 while serving in the army. It contained the shocking statistic that in the 21 months leading up to the outbreak of World War II, 1,884 motorcyclists had perished on Britain’s roads, two-thirds of them as a result of head injuries. With the advent of blackouts during the war, the death toll rose even higher, to between three and four every day. While crash helmets could never bring this horrifying total down to zero, Cairns’ investigations convinced him that they would at least reduce the casualties.

  By November, Cairns’ work had persuaded the army top brass to issue an order that henceforth all despatch riders should wear a helmet. By the end of the war, death from accidents among army motorcyclists had fallen by around 75 per cent.

  Despite the overwhelming evidence that Cairns had compiled to show that the wearing of crash helmet made the motorcyclist much less likely to die in a crash that involved a blow to the head, it wasn’t until 1973 that legislation was introduced in Britain making their use compulsory. There had been a good deal of opposition from those who saw their imposition as an infringement of personal freedom, but the counter-argument won the day. The law paved the way for another major piece of road-safety legislation ten years later – the compulsory use of seat belts by those in the front of cars (back-seat passengers were also obliged to belt up by 1991).

  In his relative short span on Earth, Lawrence demonstrated both figuratively and literally that he did not have a ‘crash helmet’ approach to life. It’s an irony, therefore, that his death brought about legislation that forced his fellow motorcyclists to adopt a measure that would contribute considerably to their safety, but which one can hardly imagine Lawrence adopting himself.

  Motorcycle usage in Britain, in terms of miles ridden, is slightly higher nowadays than it was in 1973, when helmets became compulsory. Despite that, fatalities among motorcyclists have fallen from over 700 that year to 331 in 2013. The drop in serious injuries to bikers resulting in accidents on the road has been even more acute. Naturally, not all of this can be put down to the use of crash helmets, but the statistics tend to support the idea that their adoption has saved the lives of thousands of riders and kept many more from sustaining severe head injuries. And all because there was a dip in the road near Lawrence of Arabia’s Hampshire home.

  An elderly Burmese woman falls dangerously ill just before a national uprising

  It is 1988 and in the then Burmese capital of Rangoon, Khin Kyi’s health has deteriorated badly. The 76-year-old is the widow of General Aung San, a hero of the struggle for Burmese independence and a de facto prime minister of British Burma who had been assassinated in 1947. She is also the mother of four children, two of whom died very young. Her only daughter lives abroad, as she has done most of her life. After schooling in India, where Khin Kyi was Burmese Ambassador, her daughter had gone to Oxford University where she graduated in philosophy, politics and economics. After a spell in the United States working at the United Nations, she had married an Englishman and had eventually settled down in England, where she had given birth to two children of her own and written several books.

  When Aung San Suu Kyi received word of her mother’s illness, she had no designs on becoming an internationally recognised political figure, and certainly had no desire to become one of the world’s most famous prisoners. She rushed to her mother’s bedside. While she was caring for her, Burma’s military leader General Ne Win resigned after 26 years at the helm amidst a mas
s popular uprising in 1988. This was put down by the country’s widely despised junta, resulting in the deaths of thousands of protesters. Just a week later, Suu Kyi wrote an open letter to the government, calling upon it to hold free multi-party elections. Well known in Burma on account of her parents, she made her maiden public speech soon afterwards to an immense crowd outside the Shwedagon Pagoda. By September she had founded the National League for Democracy (NLD). Her mother died in December. The following year, the military government declared that Burma would be known as Myanmar (a name that many Burmese refuse to recognise).

  Suu Kyi’s demand for elections was eventually granted – the military junta had reckoned that the dizzying number of parties contesting votes would ensure that no clear result was possible and they would be able to use this as an excuse to remain in power. They also banned Suu Kyi from standing for election, though this did not deter her from campaigning on behalf of her party. Come July 1989, her popularity was so great that the military rulers had her placed under house arrest, though without bringing charges against her or sending her to trial. The following year, the delayed elections took place and the NLD won an astonishing 80 per cent of all the seats in parliament. Naturally enough, the junta refused to recognise the result.

  Over the 21 years from her first arrest, Suu Kyi was to be imprisoned for 15 years, almost all of that time under house arrest charged with spurious crimes or none at all. She also spent over three months in secret detention. She was released twice, only to be arrested again, before being freed for the final time in 2010, six days after an election in which the NLD had refused to run because of changes to the electoral laws specifically designed to damage the party. During her prolonged periods of confinement there were numerous calls from the United Nations for Suu Kyi’s release. These were simply ignored by the junta. She also won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 while under house arrest, and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2008, making her the first person ever to win the US government award while imprisoned.

  The most affecting detail of what must have seemed to Suu Kyi two interminably long decades was that her husband, Michael Aris, was almost never allowed to visit her from Britain. The last time the two saw each other was at Christmas 1995, during a period when Suu Kyi was not under house arrest. When Aris was diagnosed with prostate cancer, he asked the Burmese authorities if he could come to Burma one last time in order to say goodbye. The request was refused. Instead, Suu Kyi was encouraged by the junta to leave Burma in order to visit him. Believing that she would not be allowed to re-enter the country if she did so, she stayed put. Aris died in March 1999.

  Suu Kyi made a successful bid for election to parliament in 2012. Three years later, the electorate delivered a landslide victory to her NLD party, giving them 390 of the 498 seats that the military allowed to be contested. In 2016, the NLD chose Htin Kyaw as president of Burma. As leader of the NLD, Suu Kyi should have become president, but a cynical change to the constitution put in place by the junta in 2010 barred anyone who had ever been married to a foreign national from holding that office. However, a few months later, the party created the post of ‘state counsellor’ for her and Suu Kyi has since declared that she will rule ‘above the president’ until such a time as the constitution can be changed.

  Not everything has gone perfectly since the NLD took over the reins of government. In 2017, Suu Kyi had to answer questions about the alleged ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslim minority in Burma and accusations that the army was carrying out atrocities in operations against ethnic insurgent groups (under the current constitution, the army is not under the control of the government).

  However, had Khin Kyi not fallen ill just before the uprising, there’s every chance that her British-based daughter, bringing up British-born children, would not have become so enmeshed in her country’s fight for democracy, nor would she have become the figurehead for it. Without her and the perseverance of her party, the generals might still be ruling Burma today. Instead, Burma is a democracy once more and has a government concerned with rebuilding the country by investing in its infrastructure, creating jobs and improving health care. One can only imagine that both Suu Kyi’s parents would have been immensely proud of that.

  It’s also fitting that Britain, which ruled Burma from 1824–1948 (albeit with a major incursion by the Japanese during World War II), and whose colonisation of the country helped sow the seeds of the long military dictatorship that Burma suffered, should play a small part in the restoration of democracy there.

  A cyberspace prank is played on Prince Philip before the internet even exists

  ‘Ah yes, this is an idea whose time has come,’ we purr, as we gaze down at the self-propelling hummus dish. ‘If only every innovation arrived at precisely the hour it were required.’

  It’s indeed a sad fact that history is littered with ideas that are simply too far ahead of their time to succeed. In the 15th century, Leonardo da Vinci was drawing plans for helicopters, a form of transport that would only become reality in the 20th century. René Descartes’ 1636 dream of a contact lens only became reality in 1888. And then there is Prestel.

  Almost forgotten now, Prestel was Britain’s very own internet before the internet itself came on the scene. Launched by the Post Office in 1979, it was an information network that anyone could access from their home or business if they had a phone, a modem, a computer and a television (to use as a monitor). Invented by research engineer Sam Fedida, it was initially called Viewdata, marketed under the brand name Prestel, and used the phone network to link databanks brimming with useful information – a cool 100,000 pages at its launch, covering news, sport, transport timetables and a whole range of other areas.

  Unfortunately, very few Britons were impressed by this. As 1981 dawned, Prestel had a mere 6,000 customers. Undaunted, the Post Office expanded the system. Unlike Teletext, Prestel was interactive – it began to offer online banking services for Bank of Scotland and Nottingham Building Society customers, theatre-ticket booking, and online shopping. A service called Micronet 800 allowed Prestel users to participate in chat rooms and online games. Another Micronet innovation called Mailbox gave users the chance to send messages to one another.

  It was this last service that grabbed the attention of two British journalists – Robert Schifreen and Steve Gold. One day in October 1984, Schifreen was testing a modem when he found that some random numbers he had typed had gained him entry onto a page used by Prestel’s administrators (by that time British Telecom had taken over from the Post Office). This later gave him access to login information that allowed him to hack into the system.

  Disturbed by the slipshod nature of Prestel’s security, which had been called into question repeatedly by other users and computer experts, Schifreen decided to have a look into Prince Philip’s Mailbox account. He would then publicise what he had done, and in this way compel British Telecom to do something about its approach to security.

  In an interview with John Leyden for the online tech magazine The Register, Schifreen said that after he had had a browse around the royal inbox, ‘I phoned Steve [Gold] (who’d been pursuing Prestel in other ways). I then went and told Micronet what I’d done, and they told Prestel… who called in the Met [Metropolitan Police].’

  Schifreen is leaving out a couple of the rungs in the ladder there. As Prestel was being told of the breach, Gold and Schifreen broke the story in the press, which meant that it got picked up by the national television news networks. Margaret Thatcher, who was in the process of ensuring that as much of Britain’s infrastructure was owned by as few Britons as possible, was beside herself with fury at the story, fearing that it might damage British Telecom’s forthcoming sell-off.

  The prime minister, never one burdened with the need to fool people into thinking she didn’t know the price of everything and the value of nothing, pressurised Prestel into reporting the whistle-blowing pair to the police.

  Both Schifreen and Gold were arrested. Farcically, since no
legislation existed that specifically covered computer crime, they had to be charged under Section 1 of the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act 1981. The ‘forgery’ supposedly involved was somewhat tenuous. The prosecution applied it to the use of a password to enter the system and the damage caused afterwards (to prove he had gained access, Schifreen made a very minor change on the master page).

  The two men pleaded ‘not guilty’ at the Crown Court on the grounds that they had not broken any law. When they were found guilty, they took their case to the Court of Appeal and won. The Crown responded by appealing to the House of Lords, which likewise found in favour of the defendants, on the grounds that the ‘forgery’ had only existed for a minute fraction of a second.

  Although there had been previous computer-related cases that had been tried by contorting existing legislation, the Schifreen and Gold case exposed the glaring inadequacy of the law when it came to computer crime. The result was the Computer Misuse Act of 1990. Although it, too, was far from perfect, it was used by other countries as a template for their own laws that attempted to deal with computer-related offences. The British version has been updated several times since in a bid to keep up both with computer technology and evolutions in the development of the internet.

  Ultimately, Prestel proved too expensive for its users, who were unwilling to fork out the £20 per annum subscription on top of usage charges and any equipment they might need to buy to get themselves online. The service kept going until 1994, when it was sold off and petered out, cruelly brushed aside by the emerging internet and its sparkly new World Wide Web. However, at least its administrators can claim the dubious honour of practising security procedures so lax that they sparked off a whole new field of British law.