Some short news-items from the past seem to me to be charged with irony., such as this from the Western Times of 26th June 1913:
"Last evening, a little boy named Jack Hannaford, living in Frog Lane, was playing at the Basin in Exeter when he fell into the water. The mate of the ship "Rothersand", a German named M Coobs, who saw the accident, at once plunged in after the lad and quickly rescued him. Hannaford thus escaping with a ducking."
Well, I'm pretty sure the mate of the Rothersand was not called Coobs, Kurtz perhaps! His ship was a cargo-ship from Bremerhaven. He carried out his heroic rescue of the boy, Jack Hannaford, and sailed away. He almost certainly saved Jack from a watery grave.
The irony? Almost exactly twelve months later (28th June 1914) the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated at Sarajevo and the next month we were at war with Germany. After some forty-million deaths, casualties of the Great War, I dare say Jack Hannaford was still going strong. I wonder how his rescuer, "M Coobs," fared.
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