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Authors: Mike Holgate
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Island, finding them ‘All safe. All well!’
Feted for his heroics in South America, Shackleton travelled to San Francisco before sailing to New Zealand, where a ship was provided to relieve the party stranded in the Ross Sea. Led by the indefatigable Shackleton, the rescuers arrived in January 1917 and discovered that all but three of the twenty-three men had survived the year-long ordeal. In a subsequent book, South , about the doomed venture that took place in the midst of the First World War, Shackleton dedicated it: ‘To my comrades who fell in the white warfare of the south and on the red fields of France and Flanders’.
While embarking on his fourth polar expedition to explore ‘all the oceanic and sub-Antarctic islands’ in 1922, the intrepid Shackleton died from a heart attack on board his ship Quest at Grytviken, South Georgia Island, where he lies buried. The last words written in his diary shortly before his sudden death read: ‘In the darkening twilight, I saw a lone star hover gem-like above the bay’.
Agatha Christie wrote a short mystery story, ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’ (1960) and, if ever a true-life adventure involving this festive treat occurred, it was in 1902 when Scott and Shackleton were jointly making their first attempt to reach the South Pole (an expedition obliquely referred to in the short-story collection The Thirteen Problems (1932), when a polar explorer writes an important letter before perishing during the plot of ‘The Idol House of Astarte’). On Christmas Day, Shackleton conjured up a surprise to raise the morale of his fellow polar explorer, who recorded the joyous occasion:
I had observed Shackleton ferreting about in his bundle, out of which he presently produced a spare sock. Stored away in that sock was a small round object about the size of a cricket ball, which when brought to light, proved to be a notable plum pudding. Another dive into his lucky bag and out came a crumpled piece of artificial holly. Heated in the cocoa, our plum pudding was soon steaming hot, and stood on the cooker-lid crowned with its decoration. Our Christmas Day had proved a delightful break in an otherwise uninterrupted spell of semi-starvation. Some days elapsed before its pleasing effects wore off.
16
BILLIE CARLETON
The Affair at the Victory Ball
Billie Carleton had a certain frail beauty of that perishable, moth-like substance that does not last long in the wear and tear of this rough-and-ready world.
Evening News
A collection of Agatha Christie short stories, which originally appeared in magazines between 1923 to 1926, was published as The Underdog and Other Stories (1951) and included ‘The Affair at the Victory Ball’, in which Hercule Poirot and Captain Hastings investigate a well-publicised society mystery where a young woman has been found dead of a cocaine overdose. With the addition of another death on the same night, where the drug victim’s aristocratic fiancé is found stabbed to death, the mystery is based on the first great sex and drugs scandal of the twentieth century, in which the promising show-business career of actress, dancer and singer Billie Carleton came to a tragic end. A member of a fast-living set, the beautiful actress died from an overdose of cocaine. She was found dead in bed after an all-night party following the Victory Ball at the Royal Albert Hall to celebrate the end of the First World War in November 1918. Her Chinese drug suppliers became the target of hysterical press coverage about the growing threat of a ‘yellow peril’ in the Limehouse area of London. The case inspired several books, plays and films, notably Noël Coward’s The Vortex , D.W. Griffiths’s Broken Blossoms , based on a story by Thomas Burke, and Sax Rohmer’s incredibly successful novels, adapted into over thirty films, about an evil empire in Limehouse controlled by ‘Dr Fu Manchu – the yellow peril incarnate in one man’.
Billie Carleton (1886-1918)
Feted for his heroics in South America, Shackleton travelled to San Francisco before sailing to New Zealand, where a ship was provided to relieve the party stranded in the Ross Sea. Led by the indefatigable Shackleton, the rescuers arrived in January 1917 and discovered that all but three of the twenty-three men had survived the year-long ordeal. In a subsequent book, South , about the doomed venture that took place in the midst of the First World War, Shackleton dedicated it: ‘To my comrades who fell in the white warfare of the south and on the red fields of France and Flanders’.
While embarking on his fourth polar expedition to explore ‘all the oceanic and sub-Antarctic islands’ in 1922, the intrepid Shackleton died from a heart attack on board his ship Quest at Grytviken, South Georgia Island, where he lies buried. The last words written in his diary shortly before his sudden death read: ‘In the darkening twilight, I saw a lone star hover gem-like above the bay’.
Agatha Christie wrote a short mystery story, ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’ (1960) and, if ever a true-life adventure involving this festive treat occurred, it was in 1902 when Scott and Shackleton were jointly making their first attempt to reach the South Pole (an expedition obliquely referred to in the short-story collection The Thirteen Problems (1932), when a polar explorer writes an important letter before perishing during the plot of ‘The Idol House of Astarte’). On Christmas Day, Shackleton conjured up a surprise to raise the morale of his fellow polar explorer, who recorded the joyous occasion:
I had observed Shackleton ferreting about in his bundle, out of which he presently produced a spare sock. Stored away in that sock was a small round object about the size of a cricket ball, which when brought to light, proved to be a notable plum pudding. Another dive into his lucky bag and out came a crumpled piece of artificial holly. Heated in the cocoa, our plum pudding was soon steaming hot, and stood on the cooker-lid crowned with its decoration. Our Christmas Day had proved a delightful break in an otherwise uninterrupted spell of semi-starvation. Some days elapsed before its pleasing effects wore off.
16
BILLIE CARLETON
The Affair at the Victory Ball
Billie Carleton had a certain frail beauty of that perishable, moth-like substance that does not last long in the wear and tear of this rough-and-ready world.
Evening News
A collection of Agatha Christie short stories, which originally appeared in magazines between 1923 to 1926, was published as The Underdog and Other Stories (1951) and included ‘The Affair at the Victory Ball’, in which Hercule Poirot and Captain Hastings investigate a well-publicised society mystery where a young woman has been found dead of a cocaine overdose. With the addition of another death on the same night, where the drug victim’s aristocratic fiancé is found stabbed to death, the mystery is based on the first great sex and drugs scandal of the twentieth century, in which the promising show-business career of actress, dancer and singer Billie Carleton came to a tragic end. A member of a fast-living set, the beautiful actress died from an overdose of cocaine. She was found dead in bed after an all-night party following the Victory Ball at the Royal Albert Hall to celebrate the end of the First World War in November 1918. Her Chinese drug suppliers became the target of hysterical press coverage about the growing threat of a ‘yellow peril’ in the Limehouse area of London. The case inspired several books, plays and films, notably Noël Coward’s The Vortex , D.W. Griffiths’s Broken Blossoms , based on a story by Thomas Burke, and Sax Rohmer’s incredibly successful novels, adapted into over thirty films, about an evil empire in Limehouse controlled by ‘Dr Fu Manchu – the yellow peril incarnate in one man’.
Billie Carleton (1886-1918)
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