John DeLorean and Gerald Durrell: born on the same day?

I noticed an interesting coincidence recently: two very different men with very different lives and outlooks share the same birthdate. 

The automobile engineer and executive John DeLorean was born on January 6th 1925 in Detroit; the author, naturalist, zoo keeper and wildlife conservationist Gerald Durrell was born in India on January 7th 1925. Allowing for time differences, they were born at much the same time – and under the sign of Capricorn.

One appears to be on the whole one of the good guys, the other was a fraudster. From his obituary in The Guardian:

“Almost everyone who had business dealings with car-maker John DeLorean … suffered either money losses in the millions, public vilification for the vanished cash, or both. Through all this turbulence, DeLorean remained unscathed: even if he did lose a fortune, he had not been entitled to it in the first place… DeLorean was a world-class conman, despite a brilliant early engineering career at General Motors. Among his victims of fraud, embezzlement, tax evasion or defaulted loans, were the governments of Britain, the US, and Switzerland…”

John DeLorean called the British government ‘suckers’ and his Irish workers ‘dummies’; Gerald Durrell built good relationships with various authorities and made friends with and allies of ordinary people wherever he went. 

John DeLorean ruined the livelihoods of many people; Durrell saved several species from extinction.

A coincidence involving Levelers and Huguenots

A good example of a ‘coincidence’ happened to me this week. 

It began when for no obvious reason I started to think about The Children of the New Forest, a children’s classic written by Captain Frederick Marryat in 1847; it was one of the first historical novels written for young people. 

Such books never gripped me the way that fantasy and science fiction did, but I learned a lot of history from reading them. I had not read, seen or even thought about this book since I was at school, but suddenly some fragments of dialogue popped up in my mind:

“Levelers, to horse!” and, “What’s a Leveler?” (Levelers or Levellers were radical supporters of the Parliamentarian cause at the time of the Civil War). I tried to remember what I had learned about them from this book at the time.

I had also decided recently to learn more about the Huguenots, persecuted French Protestants many of whom took refuge in England. 

I went out for the day to a town of great historic interest but decided to cut my losses and come back early as it was a bit of a disappointment. 

There were some people on the train on the way home whose conversation was very loud and very boring.