by Hap Rocketto
The world is full many unusual coincidences, perhaps chief among them is the occasional shot loosed from my rifle that strikes the X ring as it meanders into the bullet’s path. Another is the way that a series of seemingly unrelated historical occurrences seem to link up unusual and diverse events and individuals. This is sociologist Stanley Milgram’s yet unproved “small world phenomenon,” The idea, first proposed in 1967, postulates that every person in the United States is connected by a chain of no more than six people. It has morphed into a trivia game called ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.”
My six degrees began in 1853 when France demanded from the Turks, who ruled the Holy Land, the keys to Jerusalem’s Church of the Nativity which was supervised by the Russian Orthodox Church. Turkey who allowed the Russians to oversee the church was caught between two major powers. The French threatened military action if they did not turn over the keys and the Russians threatened military action if they did not.
In short order, as was the European custom right through 1939, nations took sides in order to beat up on each other and thus began the Crimean War. Quickly the Russians burned a squadron of Turkish ships at Sinope, the British Army waded ashore at Calamita Bay which led to the investment of Russina city of Sevastopol, whose captured cannons provide the bronze for The Victoria Cross to this day, the Light Brigade charged at Balaklava, the British Army was decimated by cholera, the war was ended by one of the many Treaties of Paris, and a Muslim doorkeeper ended up with the keys to prevent disputes between the Christian sects.
Meanwhile, in the squalid Dickensonian London district of Soho, the Eley brothers’ factory on Broad Street was turning out percussion caps by the cart load to support the war effort. A few doors down from the Eley factory was the Lion Brewery. In between was a municipal water pump.
While the pump got a lot of use during the hot summer of 1854 the laborers at the brewery ignored it for they received part of their wages in beer. The Eley Brothers, showing unusual compassion for Victorian employers, supplied tubs of water to refresh their employees. It was drawn from the Broad Street pump because it was both convenient and because it enjoyed a reputation as a source of clean and tasty water. It was not beer, but in Victorian England it was an unexpected kindness. So great was the pump’s reputation that locals, who lived closer to other public pumps, would often go out of their way to fetch water at Broad Street. Even the Eley Brothers were in the habit of sending bottles of it home to their mother, who favored it above all.
At 40 Broad Street, early on the morning of the 28th of August, the infant daughter of Sarah Lewis began running noxious fluid from both ends; the early stages of the dreaded cholera. Mrs. Lewis cleaned the doomed child as best she could and, as was the custom of the day, tossed the waste into a cesspit. Within ten days 500 residents of Soho died of the disease. The Herculean efforts of Doctor John Snow, the father of modern Epidemiology, determined that baby Lewis’ discharges had escaped the leaky cesspit and contaminated the Broad Street Pump. As Cholera can only be contracted by ingesting the bacterium the thirsty Soho residents lining up at the pump got far more than they expected.
The Eley labor force, drinking Broad Street Pump water, was seriously depleted by the disease, as was the Eley family. Mother Eley’s taste for Broad Street Pump water, fed by her doting sons’ attention, proved to be, quite literally, the death of her. Things were much better at the Lion Brewery where the beer hydrated brewers were about as healthy as a Victorian workman might hope to be. No pump water for them, just a bacterium free fermented fill up to keep the thirst down.
An unsuspecting family of six Prussian immigrants lived in a two room attic apartment on Dean Street, just a block or two from the Broad Street pump. The head of the household whiled away most of his time in the Reading Room of the British Museum, devising a system of economic and social theory to right the wrongs he perceived the working class suffered that would eventually develop into dialectical materialism . Called home from his intellectual ruminations the then obscure Karl Marx witnessed the horrors of cholera first hand as it took the life of his daughter.
A century and half later I wandered Camp Perry’s Commercial Row in search of the ever elusive “knot lot.” I found a case of Eley EPS Black that was manufactured in the same year, on the same machine, and with the same muzzle velocity as the stuff I had been shooting with great success that year. It was not the best way to test and select ammunition but I had two kids in college at the time and economics dictated my method, not madness.
Emerging from the store, bent under my load, I came upon my team mate and good friend Lenny Remaly and it was there that all the six degrees of history discussed so far converged: economic theory, the Eley Brothers, beer, Lenny, and me-everything but the cholera. Remaly is a serious beer maker and drinker who shoots Eley while I am a recreational beer drinker who shoots Eley. The major difference is that Len keeps healthy by drinking cases of beer annually while shooting a case of Eley ammunition while, on the other hand, I stay healthy by drinking a case of beer annually while shooting cases of Eley ammunition.
