On chance encounters and deadly coincidences

There is a stranger in navy swimming togs on my wall. I don’t know his name, or anything about him. I only know that he holidayed at a French campsite about 15 years ago.

I know this because he is in the background of a photograph I took. One of our children is busily piloting an inflatable shark around a swimming pool and the man is hoisting himself out of the pool.

I’m sure he would be surprised to learn that his photograph is on the wall of an Irish home. But perhaps many of us are on the walls of homes in far flung places? Maybe you were hungrily licking an ice-cream cone when you walked behind a bride and groom having their photograph taken in St Stephen’s Green.

Now you – and your protruding tongue – are immortalised on their sitting room wall. Or perhaps you are scratching your nose in the background of a couple’s romantic photo on the Cliffs of Moher?

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Look closely at the background of your photographs and you might find something surprising. That happened to Lu Yiqin from China, when she was preparing for her wedding to Zhang Hedong. They told the Hangzhou Daily newspaper that they were going through family photos when he found one of him, aged 14, on a visit to the Giant Buddha statue at Ling Shan mountain. Standing in the background of the photograph was his girlfriend’s mother. This was 15 years before the couple had met.

So, a programme about coincidences has its very own double coincidence. What are the odds?

If they were from Ireland, you would think nothing of it. In fact, if you went to Ling Shan mountain and didn’t hear an Irish accent you’d be wondering what was wrong. But it’s more impressive when you consider that there are approximately 1.4 billion people in China.

Some people just seem to attract coincidences. Look at Abraham Lincoln’s son Robert Todd Lincoln. In late 1864, he was on a crowded train platform in New Jersey when he fell on to the track. Someone reached out and hauled him back to safety. That stranger was Edwin Booth, brother of John Wilkes Booth who would assassinate Robert’s father a few months later.

Robert Todd Lincoln was not a man you’d like to see calling for tea, if you were a superstitious US president. The lawyer and businessman had a close connection with the assassination of no fewer than three presidents. Being at his father’s deathbed in 1865 was understandable. In fact, he had been invited to accompany his parents to Ford’s theatre on the night Lincoln was shot but decided to have an early night instead.

Robert Todd Lincoln went on to become secretary of war for president James Garfield in 1881. Despite Lincoln’s assassination, Garfield took a relaxed approach to his personal safety, saying “assassination can no more be guarded against than death by lightning”.

But, not long into his presidency, he was fatally wounded by Charles Guiteau at a railroad station in Washington. And who else was there? None other than Robert Todd Lincoln.

Twenty years later, the same Mr Lincoln was on his way to meet president William McKinley at the Pan-American exposition in Buffalo when he got word that the president had been shot by anarchist Leon Czolgosz.

If Robert Todd Lincoln had an unhappy association with presidential assassinations, then Violet Jessop was his maritime equivalent when it came to bad luck.

The Argentinian-born daughter of Irish immigrants worked for the White Star Line as a steward and nurse. She was on the RMS Olympic when it collided with a warship in 1911. The ship made it back to port, but it must have made her question her career choice. If it did, she ignored the little warning voice in her head and took a job with a swanky new unsinkable ship called the Titanic. She survived that sinking in 1912 by getting a place on lifeboat 16.

You would think that such trauma would have caused her to forsake the sea forever, but no. She took up a job on a sister ship, the HMHS Britannic. It won’t shock you to hear that it, too, sank in 1916. The redoubtable Violet received a serious head injury but survived to tell the tale. And she returned to the sea again, and again, until her retirement.

Former BBC journalist Rajesh Mirchandani loves a good coincidence story more than most. In 2018 he interviewed Prof David Spiegelhalter of Cambridge University for a Radio 4 programme on coincidences. The professor told the story of a holidaymaker in Italy who noticed a large group of middle-aged men having a party. He asked what they were celebrating and was told they all shared a birthday on January 27th, 1953. Guess what? The holidaymaker was also born on that date. Neat coincidence.

But no sooner had Prof Spiegelhalter told the story than the radio presenter heard a voice in his ear. His producer was telling him that her birthday was also on that day. Not only that, but the programme’s engineer also shared the same birthday.

So, a programme about coincidences has its very own double coincidence. What are the odds on that? One in 135,000, according to the good professor. Just don’t ask Violet Jessop or Robert Todd Lincoln to place your bet.