Why read a book (more than 500 pages) when you know how it ends? This occurred to me as I started Abyss, The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962 by (Sir) Max Hastings.
I did not expect to read it all but thought I might pick a few plums for the blog. In case you are not thinking of reading this post (fewer than 500 words, I hope) here they are. They are completely irrelevant to the over-arching narrative but caught my attention.
”He called McCloy’s secretary at home, to help track down the banker, who was then in Frankfurt, about to go partridge-shooting in Portugal. McCloy, finally contacted, proved willing to come home. The daily commercial flights to New York had already taken off, but a USAF plane was sent to take him back across the Atlantic.”
This is not the first time ‘phones, politics and partridges have coincided.
“The call came when Peter Carington was standing in a field in Buckinghamshire shooting partridges. ”It was late October 1951, the day after the general election,’’ he recalls with clarity. ”A man on a bicycle found me, and said he had Number 10 Downing Street on the telephone and Winston Churchill wanted to speak to me so could I come, please. I thought it was a joke.’’
“I thought I’d better go and answer that call, though, and it was Churchill, offering me the lowliest position in his government: parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of Agriculture and Food. He said: ‘I hear you’ve been shooting partridges. Would you like to join my shoot?’ “ (The Sir Winston Churchill Society of Edmonton)
And another aside about telephones. Max Hastings writes –
“ In that pre-cellphone era, a bizarre communications machinery was created, which remained in existence until 1970, whereby in the event of warning being received of an incoming strike while the prime minister was in his car, the Automobile Association’s radio rescue system for motorists would be co-opted to alert the PM’s driver, who would then stop at the nearest public telephone box, for Britain’s leader to telephone Downing Street. In a final touch of satire it was suggested that every Downing Street driver should be issued with the four pennies then necessary to operate a public call-box in this eventuality.”
(to be continued)