YULETIDE THRILLS

Dominion, Volume 25, Issue 69, 15 December 1931, Page 5 (Supplement)

YULETIDE THRILLS

Some Eventful Christmases

By

Dudley M. Pilcher

Christmas has not always been a time of peace and goodwill on earth. There have been occasions when Christmas teas a time of thrills and excitement, as th% writer relates in this interesting summary of eventful Yuletides.

Christmas-time in England brings to mind one picture—a picturesque countryside covered in a white mantle of snow, family reunions in huge rooms warmed by smoking yule-log fires, and celebrations at the dinner-table with turkey and plum-pudding: in the time honoured fashion. In these changing times such may be somewhat from the truth, but it was at least typical of the days of our grandfathers. Yet to-dav in the Old Land there is still a wealth of tradition and ceremony inseparably associated with the ancient festival of Christmas. In the Southern Hemisphere, on account of the opposite season of the. year, Christmastide is celebrated in a somewhat different way Instead of gatherings indoors before cheery fires. New Zealand honours the day generally beneath sunny skies either in the green countryside or on the warm sandy beaches. It is truly a holiday season and a time to enjoy to the full the joy and freedom of the great outdoors. Although English and colonial people appear to do nothing of special importance round about Christmas-time, as it is generally made a time of rest and relaxation, nevertheless some very eventful Christmases have been spent by Englishmen in the past. say. one thousand years. In William the Conqueror’s Day. Going back fairly early in history, we find, for instance, that Duke William of Normandy ascended the throne of England as William the Conqueror on Christmas Day. 1060. It was the practice of kings in those days to choose some special festival as a suitable day for the crown to be placed upon their heads, and when William, along with his Norman nobles, came up to London, fresh from victory at Hastings, nothing was more natural for him to say than. “I will be crowned on Christmas Day.” He entered Westminster Abbey with a carefully-chosen escort, but left outside a much stronger body of men, instructing them that if they saw among the common people who had gathered around the Abbey the slightest indication of riot or rebellion, to fall upon them without mercy. Within the church itself were several Saxon grandees whose acceptance of William as their king was considered

necessary, and when the crown was placed upon the Duke’s head the Archbishop of York asked them in their own language if they were willing to acknowledge him. At the same time the same question was put in French by the Bishop of Coutances to the Norman barons, and the shout of their approval echoed again and again from the vaulted roof and down the long nave. It reached the ears of the soldiers outside and shook their nerves to such an extent that, with a' cry of “Treason; the Duke is attacked.” they turned upon the crowd. Bewildered and panic-stricken and trampled under the horses’ hoofs, the poor victims added to the uproar by their screams of terror, while some of the soldiers, bursting into the Abbey under the pretence of avenging their master, carried dismay even to the foot of the altar. So great was the confusion that before William could restore order many of those who were actually assisting at the ceremony had flown for their lives, and it was with trembling hands and quavering voice that the Archbishop of York completed the consecration. Thus was Duke William of Normandy rather unorthodoxly crowned King of England on Christmas Day, 1060. A Surprise Attack. An achievement by a nobler man took place on December 25, 1776. Throughout that gloomy year General George Washington had been fighting two wars —one against the British, sent to subdue the rebellion, and one (perhaps the harder) against a multitude of difficulties sent, it almost seemed, to test his sterling character. The winter was a severe one; his army, discouraged and discontented, was very small, and this was-at a moment when it was more necessary than ever to secure some triumph. -A short distance away, at the town of Trenton; in New Jersey, lay encamped a large body of Hessian troops whose services were paid for by the British, ami to rout these by a surprise attack was decided upon. Day was chosen as a time when the enemy would be most likely to be i--',,—of, <’onera! Washing-

ton embarked his men in boats on the Delaware River, and. battling against darkness and floating ice. thev eventually reached the opposite shore. The Hessians were completely taken by surprise and little or no resistance was made. A few escaped on horseback, but the main body of some thousand men surrendered, and thus in his darkest hour of dismay Washington won a triumph which made that Christmas the birthday of a new hope for him and his- country.

A Christinas Siege. ‘ Christmas also saw the greatest and longest siege that the garrison of Gibraltar was ever called upon to endure. The combined naval forces of Europe were directed against it, but . the result proved that Gibraltar was impregnable. Among the manj attacks fiercely made during that long siege, the one that took place on Christmas Day. 1783, is of most interest. The mortar boats had been hurling (heir projectiles at battery after battery for some time, when. Caprain John Drink water (the historian of the siege) tells us, a shell, falling above the camp guard, rolled along the road and entered his marquee, brushing the pillow of his bed and lodging closely under the corner of the bedstead. Though alight when it entered, thefuse luckily broke away as it came to a ’standstill, and the marquee and its contents were thus preserved from destruction. But for this the whole of the material carefully collected to form the famous history would have been blow# to the four winds of that Christmas morning. Christinas Island. In the year 1777 there was still another eventful Christmas spent on a lonely Pacific island. It was December 24. The tropical sun had scarcely shown itself above the ocean horizon, when the look-out man at the fore of the good ship Resolution announced that he had sighted land to the northeast. It proved to be one of the coral islands common to the Pacific, but for the first time in the history of navigation it was now visited bv explorers from the civilised world. The Resolution was a sailing-vessel under the command of the greatest of navigators, Captain James Cook. He was accompanied on this famous expedition by a second ship called the Discovery. All the next day was spent in searching for a landing-place, but the surf broke too fiercely on the coral shores, and it was at a late hour that an inlet was found of calm and shallow water, with a small island in the middle on which Captain Cook decided to land. Clearly enough the whole island was uninhabited, but a great event was about to take place which the explorer was anxious to witness from this particular spot. The event was, nothing less than an eclipse of the sun. Two days later Captain Cook observed the eclipse, but after a stay of three-quar-ters of an hour on land he was obliged to seek the shelter of the ship "on account of the great heat of the sun. increased by the reflection from the sand.” "As we kept our Christmas here,” he writes, “I called this discovery Christmas Island”—and such it -stands on our maps to-day, a part of the British Empire, the largest of this kind of coral island in the Pacific Ocean. Christinas in Antarctic. Quite another kind of Christmas was passed by another great explorer in 1911, when Captain Falcon Scott was on his last expedition to the South Pole. A strong wind that had blown all night increased the intensity of the cold, when, shortly after the breaking of the Christmas dawn, the party harnessed themselves to their sledges and proceeded to drag them up the gradually rising ground. All too soon they found themselves among the treacherous crevasses, when at any moment one of their number might- disappear with alarming suddenness, swallowed up by a cleft in the earth fifty or sixty feet deep and concealed by a thin bridge of snow. Indeed, after half an hour of toil Scott and his particular party paused to take breath, and, looking baek, saw that those with the second sledge had halted some distance in the rear. They were evidently in trouble, and the truth was soon apparent, for the sledge was stretched like a bridge across a gaping chasm. Into this a rope was lowered, and the best part of an hour had passed away before the watchers saw one of their companions hauled to the surface. In his fall he had nearly drawn the whole of the “crew” with him. However, all was well that ended well, and after a day of some progress the explorers encamped for their Christmas supper in latitude 85.50 south. Missing! Sandy entered the shop from which he had recently purchased a bicycle. “It’s about the bike, mon,” said the Scot. “Hasn’t it arrived yet, sir?” said the shopkeeper. .“Sure it has,” said Sandy, “but where’s the free wheel you spoke iboiit?”