Churchill was in South Africa working as a special correspondent for the Morning Post, and in this role had been accompanying an armed train to Ladysmith when it was ambushed by Boer guerrillas. Churchill was taken prisoner but managed to escape by climbing out of a latrine window and walking straight out of the prison gate.
He jumped a coal train, hiding among the sacks of coal, but when he realized it wasn’t going in the direction he wanted he jumped off again. He wandered about aimlessly for a long time undetected, but became increasingly hungry. Eventually he decided he had no alternative but to knock on a door and seek help. He was in Witbank, a Boer town seventy-five miles from Pretoria and still three hundred miles from the British border. His famous good luck held up. Churchill chose to knock on the front door of the only Englishman in the district, John Howard, a coalmine manager, who concealed him and arranged for him to be smuggled out of the country.
FLIGHT OF ANGELS
A heart attack during a remote transatlantic flight might be considered extreme bad luck. It happened to sixty-seven-year-old Dorothy Fletcher on a trip to Florida, but on this occasion good luck swiftly came to the rescue. When the anxious flight attendant called for a doctor, fifteen cardiologists stepped up. They were all on their way to a cardiology conference in Canada.
Dorothy was in the best of hands and the attack was controlled with the help of an onboard medical kit. The plane was diverted to North Carolina, where Mrs. Fletcher recovered in the intensive care unit of a hospital. “The doctors were wonderful,” she said later. “They saved my life. I wish I could thank them but I have no idea who they were.”
GODS OF CHANCE
Gabriel García Márquez reveals in the first volume of his autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale, how, as a young adolescent, he embarked on an arduous journey across Columbia to Bogota in the hope of being allowed to take an examination for a school scholarship. He didn’t rate his chances very highly. En route he happened upon another traveler who gave him the gift of a book in return for teaching him how to sing a romantic bolero.
Upon arriving in Bogota he was dismayed to find hundreds of students in line in the rain at the ministry of education. Joining the end of the line his spirits were very low.
Feeling a tap on his shoulder, he turned to face the man he had met on his journey, who asked him what he was doing there. When he explained, the man laughed and revealed that he was Dr. Adolfo Gomez Tamara, national director of scholarships for the Ministry of Education.
Marquez says, “It was the least plausible coincidence, and one of the most fortunate of my life.” Marquez was promptly registered for the scholarship examination with no further formalities. He adds, “They told me first that they were not showing contempt for application forms but paying tribute to the unfathomable gods of chance.”
OUR REGULAR ROBBER
The secret of success in life, more often than not, is to find a winning formula and stick to it. In the case of bank robbery however, it is prudent to vary your strategy in order to avoid being caught. Unless that is, you have coincidence on your side.
One who certainly had more than his fair share of luck took a liking to a bank in Detroit. Entering the bank, he walked up to the teller at the first window and passed a note under the window that read: “I have a gun. Give me all your 100s, 50s, and 20s. Don’t give me the bait money or the dye pack or you’ll be sorry.” The teller placed the money in a big brown envelope and gave it to the robber. He picked it up, walked right out past the guard onto the main thoroughfare, and disappeared into the crowd.
As soon as he had left the teller pushed the alarm button. The closed-circuit cameras TV had been running but no images were captured because the recorder had run out of tape two days earlier and no one had replaced it with a new one.
A few weeks later, the same robber entered the same bank and approached the same teller and passed the same note. Once again the teller filled a brown envelope with money and the robber took it and left the bank. There was no guard on the door this time. He and the manager were in the back office reviewing films of the past three weeks in the hope of getting a glimpse of the robber casing the bank on a day when the cameras were recording. Because they were using the equipment, there were again no closed-circuit TV pictures of the robbery.
ELECTRIC PERFORMANCE
During the making of Mel Gibson’s biblical epic, The Passion of Christ, Jim Caviezel, the actor playing Jesus, was struck by lightning as he hung from the cross. The devout Gibson rejected coincidence as an explanation, preferring, as Caviezel was unharmed, to see the incident as a sign of heavenly endorsement. It seems a funny way to say good job, though it’s certainly true that the fundamentalist God Gibson recognizes would have fried the actor had He been displeased. A skeptic would point out that it can be dangerous hanging from crosses on hilltops in inclement weather.
13
DATES, NUMBERS, AND WRONG NUMBERS
Our lives are full of numbers—from addresses to telephone numbers and bank account numbers to house alarm codes. We have the ability to remember a vast amount of digits and the capacity to spot when the numbers emerge in some surprising and coincidental ways.
For example, the address of Howard Trent of Fresno, California, ends with the digits 742, as do his telephone number and bank account number. The number of a compensation check he received after an injury was 99742, which matched the last five digits of his telephone number. The serial numbers of a set of new tires he bought ended in 742 and the number of his car license plate is FDC742.
Some numbers are loaded with cultural significance. Our birth date is particularly special to many of us, tied as it is to beliefs that our entire fate is determined by it. Other numbers are thought to relate to bad luck or danger. The number 666, for example, is considered the “mark of the beast” and for millions of people the number 13 is a certain harbinger of ill-fortune.
Engineers working on India’s Hassan-Mangalore railway line back in the late 1970s may well have suffered from triskaidekaphobia—fear of the number 13. They reported major problems with the construction of tunnel number 13. A series of five major rockfalls held up work for months. According to the Rail Gazette International of April 1979, “The tunnel was renamed No. 12-A and suddenly all was well.”
Astronauts are no greater fans of the number 13, since the explosion of an oxygen tank prevented the ill-fated Apollo 13 from reaching the moon, and almost cost the lives of its crew.
Nature is full of numerical coincidences. Mathematician Ian Stewart points out that many flowers have five or eight petals, but very few have six or seven. As seemingly random a thing as a snowflake always has “six-fold symmetry.” Our entire universe is full of mathematical coincidences—most of them not yet fully understood.
HOW TO LOSE SEVEN SHILLINGS
The following memoir, sent to Arthur Koestler after the publication of his book The Roots of Coincidence in 1973, ought perhaps to be in the apocrypha section of this book.
The author of the letter, Anthony S. Clancy of Dublin, Ireland, writes, “I was born on the seventh day of the week, seventh day of the month, seventh month of the year, seventh year of the century. I was the seventh child of a seventh child, and I have seven brothers; that makes seven sevens. On my twenty-seventh birthday, at a horserace, when I looked at the racecard to pick a winner in the seventh race, the horse numbered seven was called Seventh Heaven, with a handicap of seven stone (ninety-eight pounds). The odds were seven to one. I put seven shillings on this horse. It finished seventh.”
STOCK MARKET SCAM
The rise and fall of stock market prices is notoriously difficult to predict. Playing the market can be a fast road to penury, so when one particular stockbroker started to demonstrate an almost superhuman capacity to detect market trends, he found his prediction services in great demand. Was it down to pure chance, coincidence—or something else?
In fact, in his particular case, it was something beyond coincidence … though nothin
g of a paranormal or supernatural order. This publisher of a stock newsletter would send out sixty-four thousand letters extolling his state-of-the-art database, his inside contacts, and his sophisticated econometric models. In thirty-two thousand of these letters he would predict a rise in some stock index for the following week—and in the other thirty-two thousand he’d predict a decline.
Whatever happened to the stock market that week, he’d send a follow-up letter—but only to those thirty-two thousand people to whom he’d made a correct “prediction.” To sixteen thousand of these he’d predict a rise for the next week and to sixteen thousand a decline. Whatever happened he would have sent two consecutive correct predictions to sixteen thousand people. And so on. In this way he built the illusion that he knew what he was talking about.
His purpose was to boil the database down to the 1,000 people who had received six straight correct predictions (by coincidence) in a row. These would think they had a good reason to cough up the $1,000 the newsletter publisher requested for further “oracular” tip-offs.
DOPPLEBANGER
When Ernest Halton parked his car outside his church he noticed that the car next to his was the same make and color. That was unusual but not extraordinary. However the next thing he noticed was incredible: the car had the same license plate number. Halton asked among the church congregation for the owner, who turned out to be Tony Gowers, a man he knew, who was as surprised as he had been. Gowers had bought the car second-hand four weeks before. Gowers’s car’s license number was actually one numeral different to Halton’s, but Gower had reconditioned the car when he bought it, and as part of the process had ordered fresh plates. A slipup at the plate makers resulted in one of the numerals being printed wrongly.
WRONG NUMBER, RIGHT CHOICE
Like many teenagers who’ve fought with their parents, Julia Tant walked out of her parents’ house in a fury, vowing never to return, with her suitcase in her hand. She went first to her local youth club to cool off and there a good friend persuaded her to phone her mother, if only to let her know where she was going.
In her agitation, without realizing it, she dialed the wrong number. A woman who sounded like her mother answered. “It’s me,” Julia said.
“Where are you?” said the woman.
Julia told her she was at the youth club and that she was going to her grandmother’s. At this point the woman started swearing at her and shouting, “Julia, get home here!”
Despite the fact that she had used her name, Julia was beginning to realize that something wasn’t quite right. “Why are you swearing?” she said. “You never swear.”
By this time the woman too was realizing this Julia was not her daughter. She composed herself, explaining that her daughter Julia had walked out on her and disappeared.
Julia had stumbled on a situation more serious and extreme than her own, yet alarmingly similar in many respects. The telephone call sobered her and after it she returned home to be reunited with her parents. Now, years later, she says, “I felt it was a kind of omen so I went back home. If it wasn’t an omen it certainly seemed like one.”
LAST PUTT
In December 1991 golfer Tony Wright died on the fourteenth green of his local golf course, fourteen months after his father Les collapsed and died at the same spot. Both men had been lining up for putts when they suffered heart attacks.
LAST SYMPHONY
Beethoven, Schubert, Dvořák, and Vaughan Williams (among others) all died after composing a ninth symphony. Mahler, superstitious about his ninth, urgently commenced his tenth as soon as he’d finished his ninth, but not quickly enough to avert his death. Bruckner went to elaborate lengths to delay the syndrome, numbering his first two symphonies 00 and 0. To no avail: he died while composing his ninth. Sibelius stopped after his eighth and lived another thirty-three years.
THE BIRTHDAY CARD THAT NEVER GAVE UP
When Mrs. J. Robinson’s mother died in 1989, she found among her possessions a birthday card she had sent to her niece in 1929. The card had been returned by the post office because her mother had got the address wrong. Though they were not in regular contact, Mrs. Robinson thought her cousin might still like to see the card, so she posted it to her again. She had no idea that it would arrive on her birthday, exactly sixty years late.
UNDER COVER
A picture Mrs. G. L. Kilsby inherited from her mother had started to get on her nerves, so on March 1, 1981, she decided to open it up. Inside was the cover of a magazine whose date—March 1, 1881—showed it to be exactly one hundred years old to the day. Mrs. Kilsby was so pleased with the coincidence that she threw away the picture and framed the magazine cover.
FATE OF BIRTH
Baby Emily Beard came into the world on the twelfth day of the twelfth month at twelve minutes past twelve. Her dad David was born on the fourth of the fourth at forty minutes past four. Mother Helen was born on the tenth of the tenth. Brother Harry, three, was born on the sixth of the sixth. Grandmother Sylvia Carpenter was born on the eleventh of the eleventh.
Emily nearly ruined the pattern. She was due two hours earlier but complications put the birth back. David, from Gosport, Hampshire, said. “It’s quite spooky; like ‘You’ve entered the twilight zone.’ It was only when I rang my mom to tell her about Emily that she told me I’d been born at 4:40. That’s when we realized just how weird it all was.”
LUCKY FOR SOME
The novelist David Ambrose has been dancing a tango with the number thirteen.
His uncanny association with the number considered by many to be unlucky began when he was writing a novel called Superstition. Working at a computer, he would check every day or so how many words he had written. The word-checker facility would also tell him how many lines and paragraphs he had written and the average number of words per sentence.
“I found that I was consistently writing an average of thirteen words per sentence,” says David. “I thought maybe I always wrote thirteen words per sentence; I found it hard to believe I was doing it only now, unconsciously, because I was writing a novel called Superstition. But when I checked the manuscripts of other novels and stories of mine, I found my average was fourteen to sixteen words per sentence, never thirteen.”
Much earlier, before he had begun properly writing the novel, he had sold the film rights on the strength of a thirteen-page outline. “I do not recall consciously registering the moment at which the deal was struck,” he says. “However, I saw in my diary shortly afterward that it had happened on the afternoon of Tuesday the thirteenth of February, 1996. The producers of the film asked me to meet them at the Cannes Festival in 1997. The only day we could all manage turned out to be Tuesday the thirteenth of May. In June they flew me out to L.A. for further meetings. Still nobody was actively thinking ‘thirteen.’ I arrived on the eighth, planning to fly on to New York to see the American publishers of Superstition the following Friday—which turned out to be the thirteenth of June. While in L.A. I picked up from my agent a copy of the fully executed contract. The covering letter from the agency’s legal department was dated the thirteenth of May—coincidentally the same day on which I had lunched with the producers in Cannes.”
Despite every effort to finish earlier, he eventually completed the screenplay version of Superstition on October 13. “In February 1998 I had to have a meeting with my London publishers to discuss the paperback edition of the book. The only date on which it turned out that everyone could be there was Friday the thirteenth of February.”
David stresses that he had been totally unaware of all these coincidences at the time. “If we had been making this happen even half consciously, we would surely have published the book on the thirteenth,” he says. “As it was, it came out on the tenth of July. However, my editor and I weren’t able to have our planned celebratory lunch on that day, so it had to be moved to the following Monday. Which was the thirteenth.”
The final coincidence related to the number of radio and TV shows at which David
was interviewed about the book. “Nobody gave any thought to the actual number of shows,” he says. “It was, as always, just a question of getting on as many as possible. At the end of the week, when I glanced through my schedule and counted up the number of broadcasts I’d done, I saw it was thirteen.”
TWIN NUMBERS
The winning number in the evening drawing of the New York Lottery three-digit “numbers” game on September 11, 2002 was 911.
CAPTAIN CLARK’S BAD DAY
The novelist William Burroughs had a thing about the number twenty-three. It kept on cropping up in the coincidences he noticed. He met a Captain Clark, when living in Tangier, in 1958, who boasted he had been sailing twenty-three years without an accident. That day Captain Clark took his boat out and had an accident. Later Burroughs heard a news report on the radio about an airline crash. The flight number was twenty-three; the pilot’s name was Captain Clark.
BIBLE NUMBERS
Keen-eyed numerologists have spotted some interesting coincidences in the Bible.
They point out that Psalm 118 is the middle chapter of the entire Bible; that, just before it, Psalm 117 is the shortest chapter in the Bible and Psalm 119 is the longest chapter.
The Bible has 594 chapters before Psalm 118 and 594 chapters after Psalm 118. If you add up all the chapters except Psalm 118 you get 1,188 chapters. If you take the number 1,188 and interpret it as chapter 118 of Psalms, verse 8, you will find the middle verse of the entire Bible—“It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man.”
Some would say that this is the central message of the Bible—numerically speaking at least.
PASTOR BLASTER
Alicia Keys couldn’t have been more inviting on her hit single, “Diary.” “Ooooh baby,” the singer crooned, “if there’s anything that you fear … call 489-4608, and I’ll be here.” The trouble was, she wasn’t there. Fans in Georgia who dialed the number got an increasingly exasperated retired pastor instead.
Beyond Coincidence Page 21