‍Martha with Hemingway in 1936. They divorced in 1945

‍

‍PLUCKY journalist Martha Gellhorn would do anything to go to war. Even when her husband, author Ernest Hemingway, grabbed her press pass for D-Day, to use himself, she would not be deterred … and became the only woman on what the Press headlined: ‘Bloody Omaha Beach’.

‍

‍Hemingway told his third wife: “Are you a war correspondent or a wife in my bed?” He hated her doing the job. Her place was as a wife looking after him and his sexual needs.

‍

‍His words didn’t stop her. Martha stowed away in a toilet on a ship packed with explosives to cross the Channel on June 6, 1944.

‍

‍When the ship was off Omaha Beach, she scrambled on to a landing craft serving as a water ambulance and waded ashore under fire to report on the conversations of wounded and dying soldiers as they waited to be taken back.

‍

‍Bombs and bullets were all around her as she worked with medics to get the wounded back to a hospital ship for treatment and wrote first-hand pieces on the human spirit in the face of war and devastation.

‍

‍“Everyone was violently busy on that crowded, dangerous shore,” she wrote. “The pebbles were the size of apples and feet deep, and we stumbled up a road that a huge motor shovel was scooping out.

‍

‍“We walked with the utmost care between the narrowly placed white tape lines that marked the mine-cleared path and headed for a tent marked with a red cross.

‍

‍“Everyone agreed that the beach was a stinker, and that it would be a great pleasure to get the hell out of here some time.”

‍

‍The previous year American-born Martha had gone to Cassino, Italy, where she covered stories of orphans and the French Army’s vain efforts against the Germans. Hemingway tried to stop her then too.

‍

‍The legendary author was resentful of his wife’s success and independence, which fuelled his competitiveness and insecurity, creating a toxic dynamic.

‍

‍They met in Sloppy Joe’s bar in Key West in 1936, when Martha noticed “a large, dirty man in untidy somewhat soiled white shorts and shirt,” sitting in a corner, drinking and reading his mail.

‍

‍Their relationship blossomed in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, inspiring Hemingway’s ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls.’ They married in November 1940 in Cheyenne, Wyoming, before moving to Cuba.

‍

‍Their marital rows climaxed in 1944 when Hemingway stole Martha’s Press credentials from Collier’s Magazine and travelled to England to cover the impending Allied invasion of Normandy, in her place.

‍

‍Collier’s was a highly influential weekly, American magazine, known for its dynamic investigative reports.

‍

‍After D-Day, Martha was arrested by British military police for stowing away, and her credentials were stripped. That didn’t stop her either. She eventually regained permission from the military to cover the war, but she was not happy with her marriage.

‍

‍The couple fought over everything, their house, writing, money, sex — and Hemingway went so far as to write to Martha’s mother saying that he felt she had become unbalanced during her time in Europe.

‍

‍“Nothing outside of herself interests her very much, she seems mentally unbalanced, maybe just borderline.” he said.

‍

‍Things came to a head one evening in London when Martha discovered Hemingway was having an affair. They had a heated argument in the Dorchester hotel where he was surrounded by admirers and drinking heavily.

‍

‍She walked out on him and never came back. She later said: “I had no intention of being a ‘footnote’ in someone else’s life!” Even though Martha was having affairs herself.

‍

‍She said later of Hemingway: “A man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome human being.”

‍

‍After that, she refused to talk about Hemingway ever again. They divorced in 1945. Martha went on to suffer from ovarian cancer and failing eyesight. She committed suicide at her home in London on February 15, 1998, at the age of 89.

‍

‍Her famous husband had four wives, three of them were journalists.

‍

‍

‍I SAY OLD BEAN, THAT’S NOT CRICKET WHEN some Essex lads challenged some Kent boys to a cricket match in 1776, everyone thought it would be a fun day.

‍

‍The venue was Tilbury Fort on the edge of the Thames in Thurrock and the Kent team rowed across the river for the match taking some beer with them.

‍

‍What happened then turned out to make history as the only deaths in battle the fortress ever saw. Cricket at this time was a bad-tempered affair with gambling, booze, the nobbling of players and general skulduggery. Not Lords at all.

‍

‍The fortress was guarded by some war veterans convalescing from their injuries. Their only job was to maintain the grounds and keep a small armoury of weapons and gunpowder for King George III.

‍

‍Newspapers of the time, including the Chelmsford Chronicle, the Essex Gazette and London Chronicle took up the story:

‍

‍“The Kentish team turned out to include a man who should not have been there because he was perhaps a ‘professional’. The Essex men refused to play, and a very bloody battle ensued.

‍

‍“Facing an obligation to forfeit the game, one of the Kentish team ran into the guard house, seized a gun from an ‘old invalid’, and shot dead an Essex man.

‍

‍“Everybody then rushed to grab guns, easily overpowering the four soldiers on duty, and ‘fell to it, doing a great deal of mischief’. This included running the invalid through with a bayonet and killing the sergeant of the guard as he attempted to restore order.

‍

‍“Eventually the Essex men fled over the drawbridge, while the Kentish team made off across the Thames in their boats. No one was caught.”

‍

‍TAPE WORM THAT GREW 30ft AND
ATE YOUR FAT TO MAKE YOU SLIM

‍Tape worms for sale in the Daily Mail circa 1900

‍

‍IN THE early 1900s a wonder diet started to be advertised in newspapers — The Tapeworm Remedy for readers who were fat. Dieters would swallow beef tapeworm cysts, usually in the form of a pill. The theory was that the tapeworms would reach maturity in the intestines and absorb food. This would cause weight loss (along with diarrhoea and vomiting).

‍

‍Once a person reached their desired weight, they then took an anti-parasitic pill which, they hoped, would kill off the tapeworms. The dieter would then have to excrete the tapeworm, which could cause abdominal and rectal complications. It was risky in many ways. Not only could a tapeworm grow up to 30 feet in length, but they could also cause many illnesses including headaches, eye problems, meningitis, epilepsy and dementia.

‍

‍Opera singer Maria Callas was reported to have taken them to lose her tubby tummy, but she told reporters she suffered a dramatic weight loss after she accidently ate raw steak while dieting.

‍

‍DAY THE AMERICANS PLANNED TO NUKE THE MOON TO WARN ENEMIES

‍THE US Air Force developed a top-secret plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the Moon, as big as the one used on Hiroshima, the Guardian revealed on May 4, 2000.

‍

‍The reason was a display of military might at the height of the Cold War in 1958. Chillingly the theory was that if the bomb exploded on the edge of the moon, the mushroom cloud would be illuminated by the sun.

‍

‍Scientists warned however that there would be a huge cost to science of destroying a pristine lunar environment, but the US Air Force were mainly concerned about how the nuclear explosion would play on Earth.

‍

‍At the very least the scientists said the crater from the blast would have

‍ruined the face of the ‘Man in the Moon’.

‍

‍At the time it was technically feasible as an intercontinental ballistic nuclear missile would have been capable of hitting a target on the moon with an accuracy of within two miles.

‍

‍American physicist, Dr Leonard Reiffel, 73, was approached by senior US Air Force officers who asked him to ‘fast-track’ a top secret the project called A119, ‘A Study of Lunar Research Flights’. “If it had been made public there would have been an outcry,” said Dr Reiffel.

‍

‍The project emerged after a biography of celebrated US scientist and astronomer Carl Sagan was published.

‍

‍Sagan, who died in 1996, was famous for writing about signs of aliens on Earth. He was hired by Dr Reiffel at the Armour Foundation in Chicago to undertake mathematical modelling on the expansion of an exploding dust cloud in the space around the moon.

‍

‍At the time scientists still believed there might be microbial life on the moon and Sagan had suggested a nuclear explosion might be used to detect organisms.

‍

‍Friends of Sagan believe he never would have wilfully revealed classified information, but Dr Reiffel came forward to put the historical record straight.

‍

‍“In my opinion Sagan breached security in March 1959,’ he said.

‍He did not know why the plans were scrapped and added: “Thankfully, the thinking changed. I am horrified that such a gesture to sway public opinion was ever considered.’

‍

‍Dr David Lowry, a British nuclear historian told the Guardian: “‘It is obscene. To think that the first contact human beings would have had with another world would have been to explode a nuclear bomb.

‍

‍“Had they gone ahead, we would never have had the romantic image of Neil Armstrong taking one giant step for mankind.

‍*****

‍TERRY MANNERS

‍26 January 2026

‍