This edited article about originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 704 published on 12 July 1975.

The murder of Thomas Becket by Peter Jackson

Canterbury Cathedral, that magnificent edifice of stone, founded by St. Augustine in 598, is rightly considered to be one of our great national heritages. Although by the twelfth century, its position as an ecclesiastical building was assured, its popularity as a place of pilgrimage did not really begin until after the year of 1170. Then a steady flow of pilgrims made their way lo Canterbury to stand before a shrine which had come to he considered as one of the most sacred spots in Christendom. Sacred that is, until it was destroyed by Thomas Cromwell, three centuries later, on the orders of King Henry VIII. who declared that the shrine did not belong to a saint but to a traitor. The shrine belonged to Archbishop Thomas Becket. whose story is the classic one of the king’s favourite who fell from grace and paid for it with his life.

Becket was the son of a London merchant, who had risen from his relatively humble beginnings to become chancellor, chief minister and the friend of King Henry II. Although Becket was some fifteen years older than his royal master, he had quickly endeared himself to the king because of his seemingly light-hearted attitude to life and his love of sport. As the years had gone by, the two of them had become inseparable. Unhappily for both of them, it was a friendship that was to turn to enmity.

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This edited article about King Faisal of Saudi Arabia originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 703 published on 5 July 1975.

King Faisal of Saudi Arabia

Dressed in a long white gown that effectively concealed the pistol he was holding. Prince Faisal bin Museid Ibn Abdel Aziz of Saudi Arabia began slowly to walk the length of a hall in the royal palace in Riyadh, the capital. At the far end of the hall sat his uncle, King Faisal, who was receiving the members of his family and court. It was March 25th, this year, the birthday of the prophet Mohammed, a holy day.

The courtiers had given the king the customary kiss on each cheek, and they drew to one side to allow the prince to do the same.

When he was only a few yards from the king, the prince stopped. While the attendants waited politely for him to advance, he drew his pistol. They saw the glint of metal, heard the sound of three shots fired at point blank range and saw the king collapse with blood staining his royal attire. The attendants rushed the king to hospital, but they were too late. Thirty minutes after the shots had been fired, he was dead.

The killer’s motives were not clear. Some said that his mind was deranged. Others declared that he had murdered out of revenge for his brother, who was killed at a political demonstration by Faisal’s security forces.

But whatever the motive was, the fact remains that with Faisal’s death there passed from the Middle Eastern scene a man with the power to control the flow of one of the world’s most vital commodities – oil!

King Faisal, a man of austere habits and untold wealth, was becoming the most important chieftain of all Arabia. This was because a measure of unity had been reached among the desert lands after the 1973 war with Israel. The fuel crisis in the West stemmed directly from his decision to stop exports of oil to countries which supported Israel. Even those like Britain, which tried to remain neutral, suffered from the oil restrictions.

The soaring price of oil brought vast riches to the already wealthy land of Saudi Arabia, where the king counted his fortune in millions of pounds. As the country with the largest oil fields in the world, Saudi Arabia earned £10,000 million last year – or roughly £300 a second. Her financial reserves grew almost too fast for accurate assessment.

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This edited article about the Kaiser originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 702 published on 28 June 1975.

The Kaiser took an obsessive interest in felling trees and was frequently photographed with axe in hand

The Dutch sentry on the Belgian frontier at Eysden swung round, his rifle at the ready.

Towards him, out of the November mist, came a group of people, some in the field-grey uniform of German officers. The sentry tensed as one figure, wearing a calf-length cape with fur collar, detached itself from the group.

As he strode up, the figure in the cape placed a hand inside its folds. The sentry expected to see a Luger pistol and prepared to fire. But the hand withdrew not a pistol, but a sword, and thrust it towards him, hilt first.

The astounded sentry lowered his rifle and as he took the proffered sword, he recognized its owner. It was the Kaiser – the King of Prussia, Emperor of Germany, the war-lord who had defied the power of 28 nations.

When the unknown Dutch soldier took the Kaiser’s sword it was a symbol of Germany’s total defeat.

Behind him the Kaiser had left a Germany being invaded from without and experiencing a revolution from within. His Germans, who four years ago had marched victoriously into Belgium at the beginning of the First World War, had mutinied against their own leaders. Germany was being devoured by her enemies – and was devouring herself.

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This edited article about the man in the iron mask originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 701 published on 21 June 1975.

An English rebel, a French royal prince or a minor Italian nobleman – who was the man in the iron mask? Picture by Neville Dear

One bleak November evening in 1703 a prisoner lay dying in the famous Bastille fortress in Paris. Breathing erratically, he struggled with the responses to the prayers of the chaplain, kneeling with the prison major and the doctor at his bedside. Suddenly he stopped breathing altogether.

The doctor rose quietly and folded the man’s arms across his breast. Then all three left the room. They had just witnessed the death of the most famous prisoner of all time, the Man in the Iron Mask.

The identity of the Man in the Iron Mask is one of the best kept secrets of history. His story has been the subject of books, plays and films, but this glamorizing of his curious life has served only to plunge his real identity deeper into obscurity.

Who was this man? Why did he spend most of his adult life in prison, and why did he wear an iron mask?

To begin with, the mask was not made of iron, but consisted of a whalebone cage covered with tough black velvet. This much we know from a diary kept by one of the lieutenants of the Bastille during the prisoner’s confinement, a soldier called De Jonca. This diary is an important source of evidence for dispelling some of the more fantastic suggestions as to who the prisoner was.

The best known but least credible theory is the one dramatized by Alexandre Dumas in his famous novel, The Man In The Iron Mask.

Louis the Thirteenth, King of France, having despaired of ever being presented with an heir to the throne by his queen, Anne, was discussing the succession problem with his ministers when a messenger hurried into the room and whispered a few words into his ear. The king set off at once to an adjoining room, and returned a little while later with a newly-born boy wrapped in a shawl. His queen had at last provided him with a son, and the Council rejoiced heartily.

A few hours later the king was again asked to come to the queen’s bedroom where, to his dismay, he found that she had just given birth to the second of twin children – another boy.

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This edited article about the Gunfight at the OK Corral originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 700 published on 14 June 1975.

Wyatt Earp at the so-called Battle at the OK Corral

It was unusually cold for October. Cold enough for the low range of mountains which overlooked the small Arizona mining town of Tombstone to be white with snow. Cold enough for the four tall men walking so determinedly down Fremont Street to be wearing thick overcoats over their dark, three-piece suits.

An onlooker would have found it difficult to distinguish between these four men in their heavy overcoats. They were all fair-haired, all wore moustaches and all wore flat, wide-brimmed hats.

But the observant would have noted that one man, a little less tall than the others and of slighter build, wore a grey coat while the others wore black – and that he was wearing it like a cloak.

The reason for this was known only to the four men. Underneath the grey overcoat, the man was holding a double-barrelled shotgun!

The four men, walking at a measured pace, passed the alleyway leading to the back entrance to the O.K. Corral, on past Bauer’s butcher shop, and then turned left into the vacant lot between Fly’s Photograph Gallery and the assay office. In the vacant lot were five men dressed in the I attire of working cowboys.

A few words were exchanged, then there was the sudden roar of six-shooters and the savage blast of a shotgun firing both barrels.

When the smoke cleared, less than thirty seconds later, three of the cowboys lay dead.

This was the grim encounter which has become celebrated as the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

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This edited article about William Brodie originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 697 published on 24 May 1975.

William Brodie, the real-life Jekyll and Hyde

The young ladies in the drawing-room could not stop talking about the handsome and prosperous bachelor who was coming to tea.

“What a wonderful husband he would make,” they said to each other. “He’s bound to marry soon. I wonder which one of us it will be?”

“Quiet!” said the girl keeping lookout at the window. “He’s knocking at the front door now. He’s dressed all in white – just like a saint.”

And saintly was just how William Brodie appeared to the wealthy merchants he mixed with in Edinburgh society. A bachelor of temperate habits, a city councillor, a skilful cabinet-maker and carpenter, he seemed faultless. The only thing held against him was his shyness and modesty that made him a difficult person to really know.

“He’s certainly polite and charming,” the girls of Edinburgh would say to their mothers. “But he seems a little too perfect. It is as if he is trying to hide something from us.”

They little guessed then that William Brodie was hiding plenty from them. Just what it was emerged in 1788 when Brodie – then forty-eight and still unmarried – was tried and executed at Tolbooth Prison as the leader of a gang of vicious underworld burglars who had long terrorized the city.

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This edited article about Lord Darnley originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 696 published on 17 May 1975.

Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley by Sir James Linton

On a cold February night in 1567, Mary Queen of Scots bade farewell to her husband, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, lying ill with smallpox in a little house on the outskirts of Edinburgh. As she prepared to mount her horse in the thick snow outside, a servant, nicknamed Paris, appeared at the front door, his face black with dirt.

“Jesu, Paris,” Mary exclaimed, “how begrimed you are!” Then without waiting for an answer, she turned to her attendants and gave the signal to set off down the street towards the other end of the city where they were to attend a wedding party.

Three hours later, the still of the night was shattered by a violent explosion. The little house, called Kirk O’Field, in which Mary had left her sick husband, had been blown to pieces by gunpowder. In the garden lay the bodies of Lord Darnley and his servant, Taylor.

Quickly a crowd gathered round the two bodies, and at once they noticed something curious about them. Neither showed the slightest trace of gunpowder or any injuries arising from its detonation. Both men had been suffocated.

In a muddy field nearby a slipper was found. It belonged to Archibald Douglas, Darnley’s cousin.

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This edited article about the Dreyfus Affair originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 695 published on 10 May 1975.

The humiliation of Captain Alfred Dreyfus

As he stepped into the courtyard, the drums began to roll.

The courtyard was packed with soldiers standing stiffly to attention, and as he walked past them between his escort, he wondered if they all really believed that he was guilty. If they did, he supposed it was not surprising. The press had reviled him throughout the trial, and the court martial had found him guilty. His own voice, protesting his innocence, had been ignored throughout the whole affair. Why should they not think anything but the worst?

The drums stopped rolling as he was led before General Darras. White faced, he listened to the sentence being read. Then the General was standing close to him, shouting in his face. “Alfred Dreyfus. You are unworthy to bear arms. In the name of the French people we degrade you!”

Alfred Dreyfus looked wildly around him. “Soldiers! An innocent man is dishonoured. . . . ” He was still protesting his innocence as the warrant officer stripped off his badges and buttons. Finally, the warrant officer removed the sword from its scabbard and broke it across his knees.

Outside the wall, the mob was howling for his blood.

This agonizing moment of shame was only the beginning.

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This edited article about Rene Belbenoit and Devil’s Island originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 693 published on 26 April 1975.

Dreyfus, the only man to be released from Devil’s Island, was branded a traitor and  publicly humiliated

The voyage across the Atlantic to French Guiana was the most terrible ordeal the 700 prisoners had ever experienced. Bound for the penal colony on notorious Devil’s Island, they were kept in cramped steel cages for the whole of the passage. By the time they reached the island, many of the men were near to death.

Although they had been sent to the world’s toughest gaol, not all of the offenders were hardened criminals. Some, like 21-year-old Rene Belbenoit, had committed minor crimes which did not warrant such cruel punishment.

Since the colony was opened in 1852, some 75,000 convicts had died there. A few had succeeded in escaping, but only one man, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, had been released, when the accusations against him proved to be false.

From the moment he landed on the island in 1920, Rene Belbenoit took courage from the example of Dreyfus, who was kept in captivity in the colony between 1894 and 1899 on a trumped-up charge of giving military secrets to the German Government. Rene believed that he, too, was suffering from an injustice; and he immediately began plotting his escape.

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This edited article about the Mutiny on the Bounty originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 690 published on 5 April 1975.

Mutineers from the Bounty land on Pitcairn Island by Severino Baraldi

Mutiny on the Bounty . . . most of us have seen the film, most of us know the story of the savage and hasty-tempered Captain Bligh, who ruled his officers and men with such brutal discipline that finally many of them revolted and put him over the side of the ship in a small boat with eighteen men who remained loyal to him.

We know how, with superlative seamanship, Bligh navigated his tiny boat over 3,600 odd miles of the Southern seas, until, finally, he and his small party came to the safety of the island of Timor, part of the collection of islands that was then called the East Indies, and is now Indonesia.

We know that Captain Bligh eventually returned to England, that some of the mutineers were captured and hanged, that others were drowned at sea, that one small party sailed on to found a community on Pitcairn Island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and that their descendants are there to this day.

The story of the mutiny on the Bounty must be one of the best-known in British naval history. Not so well known is that the whole tragic affair began in the peaceful setting of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, near London.

Two plant experts from Kew were on the ship. The object of the voyage was to collect breadfruit trees from Tahiti in the Southern Pacific and carry them across the seas to be replanted in the West Indies.

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