Cream Teas, Traffic Jams and Sunburn by Brian Viner

Author:Brian Viner [Viner, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847377333
Publisher: Simon and Schuster

And to think that the whole adventure, and the hundreds and hundreds of pounds it cost, could have been avoided by Catherine checking more carefully that she had all six passports in her bag. But then there for the grace of God – or a man in a uniform who thinks he’s God – go all of us.

Still, 3500 years of human experience should have taught us to approach borders with everything we need to cross them. The concept of a document entitling people to move between countries, or city states, dates back to at least 1500 BC and indeed back to Egypt; drawings found in a tomb in Thebes show a line of ancient Egyptians in what appears to be the world’s first known queue at a passport office. What a shame Jonny didn’t see that image on his whirlwind tour by camel; he would have appreciated the irony.

As for the actual word ‘passport’, it started cropping up in England around the middle of the sixteenth century, and clearly derived from the French word ‘passer’, although nobody seems quite sure whether the ‘port’ bit originally related to actual ports, or was taken from the French word porte, meaning gate, because the early passports were required to travel within countries as well as outside them. At night there were usually soldiers stationed at the gate in a town or city wall, demanding identification. And of course, for about as long as humans have held legitimate passports, other humans have held forged passports. The diarist John Evelyn recorded a journey to Paris in 1650 on which he used counterfeit papers.

Evelyn lived to tell the tale, but a false passport ended up being the death of William Joyce, the wartime traitor better known as Lord Haw-Haw. It’s hardly a holiday yarn, but it’s nevertheless a story worth relating. On 28 May 1945, two weeks after the unconditional surrender of German forces, two British army officers, Captain Alex Lickorish and Lieutenant Geoffrey Perry, were collecting firewood near their base on the German-Danish border. They were watched by a thin, unkempt man, whom they took to be a local peasant, but suddenly he called out in English, telling them where they could find more wood. It was an unwise move. Lickorish and Perry were both in the Intelligence Corps and they instantly recognized his voice as that of Joyce, whose lurid propaganda had been broadcast on the wireless regularly since 1940. ‘You wouldn’t happen to be William Joyce, would you?’ asked Perry, with admirable politeness, whereupon Joyce reached into his pocket and Perry, less politely this time, shot him in the buttocks. For a man who had been such a pain in the arse for five years, it was poetically fitting treatment, although it turned out that he was unarmed, and actually reaching for a German passport declaring him to be one Fritz Hansen. When they searched him, however, they also found a German military passport in the name of William Joyce. The contemptible

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.