History's greatest crossovers: Part Three

Romans and helicopters, pharaohs and woolly mammoths

Last week, German woman Charlotte Kretschmann died in the city of Kirchheim unter Teck in Baden-Württemberg, the sadness of her passing eased by the fact that she had had a good innings. Indeed, at 114 years of age, Kretschmann was the oldest ever resident of Germany, so elderly that the town in which she lived until middle age is now in Poland.

Born in Breslau in the Second Reich, she had fled west from the advancing Red Army along with her daughter towards the end of the rather more controversial Third Reich, spending the rest of her life in the Federal Republic - and outliving East Germany by 34 years.

Yet Germany’s oldest lady was a mere child compared to Jeanne Calment, France’s famous supercentenarian, who died at the age of 122 in 1997. As Martin Gayford wrote in The Yellow House, in 1889 the 13-year-old Calment had been introduced to ‘an uncharming Dutch painter’ by a cousin in her home town of Arles.

And that Dutch painter’s name? You’ll never guess. 

This meeting occurred during Vincent Van Gogh’s most productive and dazzling period, when he spent several miserable months in the Provençal town where he was largely shunned by the locals, his artistic brilliance matched by his complete inability to get along with people.

‘She thought him very ugly, ungracious, impolite, crazy and bad-smelling,’ Gayford wrote: ‘which was characteristic of the impression poor Vincent made on people, especially the opposite sex.’

That year, 1889, was notable for the construction of the Eiffel Tower, Preston North End becoming the first champions of the new Football League, the Meiji constitution being inaugurated in Japan, the admission of the Dakotas into the United States, the unfortunate death of Austria’s Crown Prince Rudolf, the even more unfortunate birth of another Austrian, Adolf Hitler, the deadly Russian Flu pandemic, the abolition of the Ottoman Slave trade (under British pressure) and, more curiously, the creation of Nintendo. 

There were still several veterans of the Napoleonic War wandering the earth, and, perhaps, a veteran of the Revolutionary Wars (although there are doubts). Certainly Joseph Sutherland, the last survivor of Trafalgar, was still alive at this point.

Calment died not long after the publication of the first Harry Potter book, and just weeks before the tragic death of Princess Diana. She had been born three months after Winston Churchill.

Kretschmann and Calment are examples of those rare individuals who come to live such lengths of time that they span historical eras, a subject I wrote about after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, following up with a second post looking at such unlikely occurrences as Alexander Kerensky’s friendship with Ted Danson. I kept some material over from those two posts and, partly inspired by this tweet, here is part three.

As examples of strange historical crossovers, the earliest Egyptian pyramids were already centuries old when the last woolly mammoths died.

The fax machine, the Samurai and Abraham Lincoln were all around at the same time.

Some Romans would have heard of America, including Anna Notaras, who spent her childhood in the court of a Roman Emperor and was still alive when Christopher Columbus sailed west.

Indeed, there were still self-identified Romans in 1912, five years after the invention of the helicopter.

According to Greek-born American academic Peter Charanis, when Greek soldiers arrived on his home island of Lemnos that year, some local children approached to see what they looked like.

‘What are you looking at?’ one of the soldiers asked. 

‘At Hellenes,’ the children replied. 

‘Are you not Hellenes yourselves?’ the soldier retorted. 

‘No, we are Romans.’

While the eastern Roman Empire survived until 1453, and far longer in the memory of former inhabitants, the western fan fiction version, the Holy Roman Empire, lasted long enough for the United States to have a trade consulate with it (although there were no diplomatic relations).

American history throws up far more of these confusing historical crossovers, both because of the relatively short time span of its history, the relatively long span of its political system, and because of the speed of historical change in the republic. As the recent Rest is History series on Custer showed, it was not long after the defeat of the native tribes that the taming of the West was being retold as entertainment, often featuring those who had taken part. Many lived well into the age of television, too.

Among those were Apache warrior Jason Betzinez, who was born in 1860 and spent time fighting with his cousin Geronimo against the Mexicans and Americans. Aged 99, he flew for the first time, to meet the publisher of his memoir I Fought With Geronimo. A year earlier, he appeared on the game show ‘I’ve got a Secret’ where his fighting days from another age were the big reveal. Bizarrely, for someone who grew up riding horses on the plains and who lived to fly, his cause of death at 100 was – a car crash. 

As with the conflicts against pre-agricultural tribes, American slavery seems like something from another world, but the last documented former slave in the United States, Peter Mills, died in 1972, having outlived five wives. Like Betzinez, he was killed by a car.

Harriet Tubman, the famous abolitionist, was born in 1822, when second and third presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were alive (indeed they died on the same day, July 4, 1826), and passed away on March 13, 1913, by which time 40^th president Ronald Reagan was already two. 

Meanwhile, civil rights campaigner Rosa Parks didn’t quite live long enough to see a black president – she died in 2005 – but she did live long enough to sue OutKast for using her name without permission.

US politics also throws up more crossovers because so many of its leading political figures live to such extreme lengths, and this isn’t even a recent thing. Civil War veteran Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of America’s most important jurists, was still active during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Joe Biden was born during the Siege of Stalingrad, and has been in politics so long that Richard Nixon sent him a condolence letter after his wife and daughter were killed in a car crash.

He’s not the only one. Nancy Pelosi attended John F. Kennedy’s inauguration and was Speaker of the US House of Representatives until last year. Kamala Harris is from a younger generation but even she has her place in the great chain of being, born on the day that Herbert Hoover died, October 20, 1964 - and Custer hadn’t made his famous last stand when Hoover was born.

Likewise James Stewart and Tom Cruise, the biggest movie star of 1939 and the biggest movie star of today, both appear in a famous Paramount studios photograph from 1987. Also pictured is Olivia de Havilland, who died in 2020, having played alongside James Cagney in The Irish in Us in 1935.

America’s history also sees such overlaps because of the extent to which its technology speeds up. Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, heroes of the Apollo 11 mission, were all in their late teens by the time that Orville Wright died, and there were still a handful of former American slaves alive at the time of the Moon landing.

There is even a picture of claimed Civil War veteran William Lundy posing with a fighter jet at Eglin Air Force Base. The former Confederate soldier apparently enjoyed it as a 107^th birthday treat, although his age and service record have been questioned, and most believe he was too young to have fought.

In fact many claims involving very old people down the ages are questionable. One of the most famous historical examples was the Countess of Desmond, a very old woman during the reign of James I who claimed to have danced with Richard III as a young girl, something not really believed by any historians, as it would have made her over 120 (she said he was a very good dancer).

Many things we assume to be ancient practices went on for much longer than we think, including the castrati, the eunuch singers of Rome, the last of whom can be heard on gramophone. 

Eunuchs had been admitted to sing in the papal choir from 1562, and the Church offered any boy who had suffered an ‘unfortunate accident’ a guaranteed minimum standard of living including food, lodging and musical training. Unfortunately this incentivised very poor families to operate on their sons, and the Church issued a bull against castration in 1586 - but this was reversed 20 years later and by the late 17th century 200 churches in Italy had castrati in their choir. 

Napoleon outlawed castration when he conquered Italy, proposing the death penalty for anyone who authorised or carried out the operation, but it was not finally eradicated until 1870. The last castrato Alessandro Moreschi, born in Lazio and castrated in 1865, lived until 1922 and recordings of his voice can be found on YouTube – and they are indeed beautiful.

Meanwhile Sun Yaoting, the last imperial Chinese court eunuch, lived until 1996.

Some things we think of as ancient lasted into the modern era - in the year the Beatles released A Hard Day’s Night, Britain was still freeing slaves - and some things we think of as recent are a lot more ancient. The internet is so old that the USSR was assigned a domain, ‘.su’ (which inevitably turned into a haven for hackers).

Some of the most extraordinary crossovers involve survivors from wars and tragedy, of which statistically there will always be a few. There were still Titanic passengers alive on 9/11, including Lillian Asplund, the last with memories of the disaster, who died in 2006, and Millvina Dean, the very last survivor, who passed away in 2009.

Lemuel Cook, the last veteran of the American War of Independence, lived long enough to see the US Civil War. He had been present at Cornwallis’s surrender, given an honourable discharge by George Washington, and outlived Abraham Lincoln. Harry Patch, who had fought at Passchendaele, lived until 2009, the last soldier of the First World War.

Most remarkably, the last survivor from the Crimean War only died in 2004, the secret of Timothy’s longevity being that he was in fact a tortoise. But then there are Greenland sharks inhabiting the North Atlantic who might well have seen the Mayflower passing by. For these ultimate survivors, the rise and fall of human nations is merely the blink of an eye.