January 6th and a few associated birthdays

Some aspects of the lives of Stella Gibbons and Stella Benson were compared in the post that marked their birthdays.

There are a few more associated birthdays to mention.

Stella Benson shares the day of her birth, January 6th, with SF writer Eric Frank Russell and engineer/ businessman John DeLorean.

January 6th is also said to be Sherlock Holmes’s birthday.

Stella Benson shares the year of her birth, 1892, with J. R. R. Tolkien, who was born a few days earlier. 

Incidentally, Lucy M. Boston was also born in 1892, as was Basil Rathbone, the actor who played Holmes in major Hollywood films.

By coincidence, both Tolkien and Rathbone were born in South Africa. 

Sherlock Holmes is deduced to have been born on January 6th 1854:

Joyce Collin-Smith: imagination, alienation, and an imaginary friend

Novelist and journalist Joyce Collin-Smith’s autobiographical work Call No Man Master has inspired many articles to date, and there is still a little more miscellaneous material of particular interest to come. 

This article covers some of the attributes that Joyce Collin-Smith had in common with other writers mentioned on here.

The article about Stella Benson’s imagination and the one about her imaginary friends spell out what life is like for someone who is very good with words, has a very vivid imagination and feels alienated from the real world.

Joyce Collin-Smith is another example of such people.

Joyce Collin-Smith’s childhood
There are some very familiar elements here.

Joyce Collin-Smith tells us that she was a thin, ailing, solitary, excessively shy and nervous child. Fearing rebuffs or incomprehension if she voiced her thoughts, she busied herself with private activities, including writing or imagining stories.

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.