Flavour of the month: August – rich dogs, secret marriages and the shortest war in history

Our monthly trivia round-up started with July, named after Julius Caesar – now we reach the segment of the year named after the emperor Augustus. It’s the month with the shortest war in history, the theft of the Mona Lisa, and the execution of William Wallace. You won’t believe what happened to his left leg…

• 2 August 1932 – Birth of Peter O’Toole. The actor often wore two watches. Asked why, he replied that ‘life is too short to risk wasting precious seconds glancing at the wrong wrist’.
• 3 August 1919 – Birth of Helen Viola Jackson. She would live until December 2020, making her the last surviving widow of an American Civil War veteran. As a teenager in Missouri, she had helped the elderly James Bolin with household chores, and as a way of saying thank you he offered to marry her so that she would receive a widow’s pension on his death. (This practice was not unknown.) They married in 1936 when she was 17 and he was 93. After the wedding, which the couple kept secret, Jackson continued to live with her parents. Bolin died three years later, but his daughters threatened to ruin Jackson’s reputation, so she decided against claiming the pension. She never married again, and only revealed the story when planning her own funeral in 2017.
• 8 August 1963 – The Great Train Robbery takes place, on Ronnie Biggs’s 34th birthday. One of the jurors at the robbers’ trial was called Mr. Greedy.
• 9 August 2016 – death of Gerald Grosvenor, the 6th Duke of Westminster. He was once asked by the Financial Times if he had any advice for young entrepreneurs wanting to become rich. ‘Make sure,’ he replied, ‘they have an ancestor who was a very close friend of William the Conqueror.’
• 12 August 2014 – Death of Lauren Bacall. Before her husband Humphrey Bogart was buried, she placed a whistle in his coffin. It was a reference to her line from To Have and Have Not, the first film the couple made together. ‘You know how to whistle, don’t you?’ asks Bacall. ‘You just put your lips together and blow.’
• 15 August 1939 – Premiere of The Wizard of Oz. The dog who played Toto (a Cairn terrier named Terry) was paid $125 per week. The actors who played the Munchkins were paid $50 a week.
• 21 August 1911 – The Mona Lisa is stolen from the Louvre in Paris. After the crime, people queued up simply to see the empty space on the wall where the painting had once hung.
• 23 August 1305 – Sir William Wallace is executed for high treason at Smithfield. His head was dipped in tar and impaled on a spike on London Bridge, while his limbs were sent to different towns and cities as a warning to anyone thinking of copying his rebellion. His left leg went Stirling, from where it eventually ended up in Aberdeen. It was buried in the wall of St Machar’s Cathedral, where it remains to this day.
• 24 August 1957 – Birth of Stephen Fry. One of the questions on the BBC show Shooting Stars (asked by Bob Mortimer) was: ‘True or false? When Stephen Fry gets an erection, it is known as a fry-up.’
• 27 August 1896 – The Anglo-Zanzibar war takes place. It is commonly cited as the shortest war in history, lasting a mere 38 minutes. The British had demanded the removal of the new Sultan of Zanzibar, Khalid bin Barghash. He refused, so at 9.02 a.m. Royal Navy ships positioned in the harbour opposite his palace opened fire. There was some attempt at retaliation, but in a little over half an hour it was all over.
• 28 August 1937 – The Toyota Motor Corporation is incorporated. The founder’s surname was actually Toyoda, but the family made the change because ‘Toyota’ written in Japanese takes eight brush strokes, and eight is considered a lucky number.
• 30 August 1917 – Birth of Denis Healey. His middle name was Winston, a tribute by his parents to Churchill (then minister of munitions). John Lennon had the same middle name for the same reason, while Gary Lineker has the middle name Winston because he shares Churchill’s birthday.