May 18, 2020 • 31 mins
Duquesne changed his life story to suit his needs, worked under an estimated 40 aliases, and lived a life that directly involves a LOT of significant historical events. One of the things Duquesne excelled at was escaping custody.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So back
when this pandemic began, we selected ten episodes to go
(00:21):
on our Offbeat History Playlist, which was a playlist that
we dropped of things that were a little more light
in tone so that there might be a nice distraction.
And one of the things that I had selected to
include was our two parter on the Great American Hippo
Ranch Plan. And so in re listening to those just
for a quality check, I realized that I mentioned during
(00:42):
them that it would be really, really fun to do
an entire episode on Fritz Duquine because his life was
I don't know a better word to describe it, bananas.
It's a it's a journey, a very a lot of journey.
I mean, I I envy both his bravado and his energy.
(01:03):
But so here I am. It's almost four years later,
finally doing that thing. Uh, and that two parter has
spawned another two parter because we are talking about a
man who changed his life story to suit his needs.
He worked under an estimated forty aliases, and he lived
a life that was very full, but it also directly
involves a lot of significant historical events. And one of
(01:25):
the things that Ducane excelled at was escaping custody. And
this first part is going to cover his early life
up to an escape that serves as a major shifting
point in his life. And then next time we will
cover a whole bunch of his time as a saboteur,
spy and journalist, among other things, right up to the
end of his life. And I want to give you
(01:47):
heads up that this episode does contain brief mentions of
sexual violence. Decane's parents, Abraham and Minna, lived in East
London in Cape Province, South Africa, and Abraham was a
hunter who just lowly built up a fortune by selling
hides as well as tusks and horns. The Duquesnes were bowers.
These were Dutch and Huguenot settlers and their descendants who
(02:10):
made their homes in Southern Africa starting in the seventeenth century.
Frist was born on December twenty one, eighteen seventy seven,
and his full name was Frederick Luguno Jubert Ducaine, and
at this point the spelling of that last name was
d u q u e n n e. His spelling
of it changed later on in his life. Yeah, if
(02:31):
you hear someone who is a French speaker pronounced it,
particularly the way his parents spelled it, it will be
more like Duquenne, where that a sound is a little softer.
And then as he lived his life, Duquesne in that
sort of harder a sound, americanized style became part of
it and he started spelling it differently. The blurred nature
of Fritz's life story begins right there at the beginning,
(02:53):
at least in terms of how he presented himself. This
will come up over and over that he kind of
crafted his persona h I don't even want to say carefully,
because he was sloppy in details at times, but to
suit his needs. And while he was born in the
Duquesne home, what he liked to tell people was that
he was born on the run as his parents traveled
with other white European descendant Afrikaners and were attacked by
(03:17):
a group of black Africans. He claimed that he came
into the world hearing gunfire. This was just one of
the many stories that Fritz would eventually tell as he
crafted this very complicated and completely unverifiable backstory, despite the
fact that he spent most of his time as a
teen being educated in England, he claimed that in those
(03:38):
same years he had been captured by a Bantoo speaking
tribe and had saved himself by making the daughter of
the tribal leader fall in love with him. A lot
of this is racially very problematic. Oh yeah, Like the
whole story of of of European colonialism in South Africa
is like, we're going to touch on it some, but
(03:58):
like there's a lot of pieces that are very racist
and problematic. Oh yeah, we will talk about Duquesne as
an adventurer, but we don't really delve into the the
really problematic and difficult thing that the attitude of virtually
all white European descendant men who categorized themselves as adventurers
(04:22):
had really really unfortunate and incorrect attitudes about the people
that were native to the places they like to explore.
It's coming up on the show many times. So I
felt like Duquesne's story is busy enough. We didn't need to, uh,
you know, kind of venture over that territory again. Um,
But the Ducheans did certainly find themselves in the conflict
(04:43):
between the black and white inhabitants of South Africa. Fritz
is actually alleged to have killed a Zulu man who
was attacking his mother when he was still just a boy,
and then to have been involved in a much larger
battle between the Dutch descendant Africanners and a group of
Bantu men when he was just well. And while these
stories do seem to have at least been grounded in
(05:05):
some actual events of conflict, we should note that this
information comes from sources that are all written from the
Boer point of view. In eighteen o six, the Cape Colony,
which had been controlled by the Dutch until this point,
fell under British control during the Napoleonic Wars. This led
to a lot of friction between the Boers and Britain
over a number of issues. The biggest one was Britain's
(05:27):
antislavery stance. Many Boers decided to move to more rural areas.
They eventually founded Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Written
recognized those independent republics. Although it's violence between the Boors
and the native Bantu people's escalated. Britain moved in its
troops into these republics under the pretext of keeping the peace.
(05:50):
There's really a motivation in this whole mix that was
outside of diplomacy and politics for Britain. That was the
discovery of gold and diamonds in the area, and the
ports around the Cape that were active trade routes also
added value to trans of all that Britain was really
eager to control. Yeah, it was initially like, oh, sure,
you have your own countries. That's fine. Wait, your countries
(06:11):
have stuff. Uh, we have that stuff. We have to
help you. We're helping, We're helping. Uh. This is of
course the very broad strokes version of all of this,
but ultimately a struggle for control of the region escalated,
unsurprisingly into military conflict. The first of these, which was
called the First boo Or War or sometimes the First
Anglo Boer War or the Transvaal Rebellion, and you will
(06:35):
even find other names, started in December eighteen eighteen, and
it resulted in a British defeat. Fritz was just three
years old when this played out, but the ongoing hostility
toward Great Britain in the area was part of a
culture that he just grew up in, and in an
odd twist. Despite this anti Anglo sentiment, Fritz was, as
we mentioned just a moment ago, sent to England for
(06:57):
school as a teenager allow Julie, at the behest of
an uncle on his mother's side, who recognized that there
was just no comparable education in southern Africa. The story
goes that after attending private school and graduating, Fritz moved
on first to Oxford for a year and then to
the Belgian at Cole Militaire in Brussels. When he was
(07:18):
there he learned about artillery and engineering as well as explosives.
He also became proficient in fencing and swordsmanship, and according
to the kind of legendary Duquesne accounts, this resulted in
the deaths of three different challengers in duels the rose
over the affections of young ladies. These assertions, though, are
(07:39):
not really backed up with any kind of attendance records
at Oxford or at Cold Militaire, and there is also
an alternative account of these years, also told at various
points by Duquesne, in which he claimed that he had
been en route to Europe from Africa a board a
steamer after a break between his English schooling and his
advanced studies so Be where he went to university, when
(08:01):
suddenly his plans shifted. According to this story, he said
that he met a man on that journey while he
was on the ship, who convinced him that he would
learn more if he took his school money and used
it to travel around the world, And so the two
men set off together, and allegedly this journey ended when
Ducaine's father caught up to the pair in Singapore partying
(08:23):
like crazy and then sent Fritz back to school. But
as Fritz was either on a globe trotting, drinking binge
with his new much older friend, or learning about explosives
in military school, the issues between the Boors and the
British back home were escalating. This would become the Second
Boer War. There were a lot of circumstances in the
mix leading to the cause of this. The ideologies of
(08:46):
Britain versus the Orange Free State and the Republic of
Transvaal also known as the Republic of South Africa were
still at odds. Annexation of parts of Transvall by Britain
were once again the focus, as was this battle over
the control of valuable resources like gold. In things boiled
over and twenty two year old Fritz was ready to fight.
(09:08):
Fritz claimed that he had been summoned to return home
from Europe to join the fight in a letter from
his father, but it seems as though Abraham Ducane was
actually already dead. By an ultimatum, though was issued jointly
by Transvaal and the Orange Free State, that British troops
had to be out of Boer territory by October. Even
(09:30):
that did not happen, and so on October twelfth war
was declared by the Boers and Britain began closing all
of the ports along the coast. Duquesne arrived home, whether
at the behest of his father or someone else, as
all of this was happening sometime in December. We'll get
into Fritz's life in the military after we pause for
(09:51):
a quick sponsor break. Fritz was commissioned as a lieutenant
and was assigned under the command of Piat Jubet, the
Commandant General of the Republic. Now. Fritz claimed throughout his
life that Jubert was his uncle. His mother's maiden name
(10:12):
was Hubert, and he said that Piet had been the
one to send him to school in England, but that
family tie has never actually been confirmed. Initially, the Boers
fared quite well in the war against the British. Although
the Transvaal and Orange Free State military was made up
of farmers and hunters, many of them led pretty nomadic lives.
(10:33):
Those were men who could shoot and track as a
matter of course, from the time they were kids, and
they were comfortable out in the beld, that's the undeveloped
grasslands of southern Africa. This entire conflict was harder for
the British soldiers than anticipated. Britain had become kind of
accustomed to just swooping into areas of conflict with nations
(10:53):
that had less fortified militaries and then wrangling just efficient
and decisive victories. That's not what happened here. There was
a lot of back and forth in the fight with
the Boers, and Fritz thrived in the conflict. He became
so well known for his stealth that people started calling
him the Black Panther of the Veld. Although that may
have been the nickname that he gave himself, he definitely
(11:17):
told people about it for the rest of his life. Though. Yeah,
anytime you look up any sort of article about him,
anytime he appears people will use that moniker, and I
still wonder if he just decided, like I'm a black panther,
I'm a black panther of the veld Um. In early
spring of nineteen hundred, Fritz Dukane was actually injured in
(11:37):
the war. He was shot in his right shoulder and
he continued fighting, though, even as the Boers found themselves
with fewer and fewer successes. To be clear, this was
a lot of incredibly bloody fighting. There were a lot
of men lost for both the Boers and Britain uh
and in some cases the far militia of the Boers, though,
were able to take advantage of their knowledge of the
(11:59):
term rain and make themselves almost undetectable to British troops,
and that offered them a chance to open fire without
the enemy ever anticipating it. This is kind of one
of those conflicts where you see some shifting away from
traditional military engagement into more guerrilla warfare. As the tide
had turned, there were concerns that the finances of chanz
(12:20):
walls Burg government could fall into the hands of the British,
and a plan was made to move the country's gold
stores to Europe in secret so millions of pounds of
gold the exact value ranges from a million dollars to
five million dollars was loaded with other valuable state papers
onto a series of wagons to be taken quietly to
(12:43):
the coast and then sent on from there. And allegedly
none other than Fritz Ducane got involved in this whole story.
So Fritz, according to the tale, intercepted the wagons with
fake credentials that he was carrying that claimed to be
from Transwall's president Paul Krueger. Ducuese had several other men
with him, white accomplices, as well as several black servants,
(13:06):
and they took those wagons that they had common to
here deeper into the wilds. It is possible that once
the gold was stashed in a series of caves, Ducane
actually conspired with the head of a nearby tribe to
have all of his men killed in exchange for the
oxen that had been pulling the wagons, leading him to
be the only one left alive who knew the gold's whereabouts.
(13:29):
We do not know if this story is true. I
feel like we say that after everything uh conveniently, all
of the players in this story, other than Duquesne were
killed or would be impossible to track down per his story,
but he used this tale once again as a yarn
that would bolster his reputation throughout his life. In June
of nineteen hundred, he was injured, he had a lance
(13:52):
go through his foot, and Ducane went on the run,
but was soon captured by the British. It was only
the first of seven real captures. He escaped when the
town that the British troops took him to for imprisonment
turned out to have burned down, and in the confusion
upun Having discovered that their destination was burned down, Fritz
(14:13):
made a run for it, and then, after finding another
group of Boer fighters andy real military structure was gone
at this point, he joined up with them. They were
defeated in their next fight, though, and he was taken
prisoner again. This time, he started up a friendly conversation
with one of the soldiers to get that soldier relaxed,
and then as they crossed a bridge, Fritz hit the
(14:34):
soldier hard over the head, knocking him out, and then
jumped into the river. He managed to hide in the
bush by the bank until the British troops gave up
looking for him and moved on. Duquesne planned to then
travel on foot until he could get to a port,
with the hope being that he could get on a
boat and be taken to where he could rejoin the
(14:54):
main thrust of the Boer forces. But after a few
days of walking, he was captured by colonists from Portugal
and he was turned over to British authorities. From there,
he was transported to the port city of Lorenzo Marquez
now known as Maputo in Mozambique, and he was put
in an actual prison. It was actually like a cell
in a castle style prison. Uh That made his plans
(15:15):
for escape a little bit limited, but of course that
was always his plan. Literally every time he got in
hot water, his next thought was how can I get
out of here? He managed to slip through a ventilation
shaft into another room at one point, but that was
not a cell. But then he was seen right away
and was immediately taken back into custody and put back
into his cell. From there he was shipped to Lisbon,
(15:38):
where he was jailed, but found it much more comfortable
than his previous captivity had been. He claimed to have
befriended the jailer and also had a romance with that
man's daughter, but whether or not it was comfortable to
Caine still wanted out. He eventually managed to escape again,
although the details are not clear. This time he made
(15:58):
his way to Brussels after in Kiddies and Paris, and
he made contact with Transvaal's representative there that was William
Johannes Lads. It was there and through this discussion with
Lads that Decane's life as a spy began. Uh. Yeah,
we'll do a brief aside and say that there you
could have some pedantic discussions over whether he was more
(16:19):
of a saboteur or a spy. At various points in
his nefarious dealings career, um he got labeled a spy generally,
So even though this particular part to me seems more
like a saboteur, we'll go with it. Uh. Lades suggested
that Fritz pose as a board defector and joined the
British military. This was something that happened a number of
(16:40):
times as some of the Boers got tired of the fighting,
and Fritz's background and his military expertise ensured that he
would be sent right back to the Anglo Boer War there,
the plan was that he would desert and join up
with the Boers again. But this plan was really really risky.
As we said, defectors not that uncommon, but they were
known as judas Boers and they were viewed with utter
(17:02):
contempt by their countrymen, and it was entirely possible that
Fritz would be shot on site by his fellows before
he could reveal his ruse. When Decaine got back to
South Africa in March of nineteen o one, he was horrified.
Most of the Boer farms had been burned. There was
a huge homeless population of Boer women and children who
(17:23):
had lost their husbands and fathers to the fighting. They
were put into camps that were poorly managed and resulted
in really high mortality rates and sheer misery for those
who managed to survive. But the real horror for Fritz
Ducane was learning what happened to his family. He thought,
because they were so rural and it would just be
his mom and his sister who was a little bit younger,
(17:45):
and his uncle who was blind, that people would just
leave them alone. But their farm had been burned, like
so many others. The one surviving servant had told him
that his uncle had been hanged and then mutilated, his
mother and sister had both been raped by British soldiers.
His sister had been shot, and his mother was then
taken to camp as a prisoner disguised in his British uniform.
(18:08):
Fritz was able to find his mother at a nearby camp,
and she was very, very sick, dying according to Fritz's
later account, of syphilis, and she had a seven month
old baby. Decane knew that he couldn't save his mother,
so he made her a promise quote, as long as
I live, I will never draw one breath but to
pay back the English for what they have done. I
(18:31):
pledge my soul that for every drop of rotten, poisoned
blood in your body, I will kill a hundred Englishmen.
So for Fritz this completely changed his drive to fight
the British on behalf of his people. It's just a
personal vendetta. He spoke for the rest of his life
about how deeply he hated all Englishmen for what had
(18:51):
happened to his family, and he held a special level
of hatred for Field Marshal Horatio Kitchener, who headed up
the British military effort during the time and had directed
this scorched Earth campaign and bore territory, and Duquesne immediately
set to work on his first act of vengeance. His
plan was to turn Cape Town, which was a place
(19:12):
that had become sort of the English headquarters in South Africa,
into a place with as much pain and suffering for
Great Britain as the misery that they had caused the Boers.
With about twenty conspirators, he planned a massive bomb attack
for the night of October eleventh, nineteen o one. Explosives
were to be placed throughout the city, at the docks,
(19:32):
at the utilities, around municipal buildings, basically everywhere, and as
part of this plot for It's actually attended a social
event that night in his full British uniform. He was
quite respected within the British Army. But then as he
tried to leave the event, Duchese was arrested on charges
of conspiracy against the British government and espionage. And it
(19:53):
turned out that one of the twenty men that Fritz
had trusted had become worried that his own property in
Cape Town would be destroyed by all this, so he
blabbed the entire scheme to British authorities. So hang on
to that betrayal. We are about to get into its repercussions,
but first we're going to take a quick break to
hear from the sponsors. Fritz Duchane, still technically a British
(20:23):
Army officer, was court martial and when he was questioned
along with the nineteen other men, Fritz confessed to his
own involvement in the plot, but claimed the other men
were strangers to him. The only one that he could
not deny knowledge of was the man who turned him in.
When Fritz was called a trader, he denied it, saying, quote,
I am a Boer, not a Britisher. Duchese continued. He
(20:45):
explained to the court his political point of view that
Britain had invaded where the Boers were simply trying to
live their lives as they wished, and he also revealed
what had happened to his family at the hands of
British soldiers. Fritz and his accomplice Is were declared guilty
and sentenced to be shot at sunrise the following day,
but Fritz Decane did not die. With the dawn in
(21:08):
the night, a British general made him an offer that
if he gave the British Army the communication codes that
the Boers were using, he could live to fight for
his country. He would not be freed, but he also
would not be executed. He grudgingly agreed with this. He
watched the firing squad carry out the sentence on his
co conspirators before he was taken to a cell where
(21:31):
he was asked to translate a number of Boer communications.
Ducaine always claimed that he didn't translate the codes and
betray his country, but instead created new codes to confuse
the British. He also wrote a number of letters to
his captors complaining about the food and the treatment that
he was receiving, including a list of expletives that he
(21:52):
had been called and saying, quote, this is not likely
to do any good and hurts the feelings of the
prisoner that just tickled me. In the midst of all
of this, He's like, my feelings are hurt when you
call me these bad names. And of course he tried
to escape. That was his jam. So this is pretty ingenious.
We mentioned it briefly in the Hippo episode, but we
(22:14):
can go into a little more detail here. He used
a spoon like the classic old school movie Troupe to
scrape away the mortar that was holding the stones of
the exterior wall of his cell, and he did this
slowly over time until he felt like he had gotten
enough stones loose that he could get out. But when
the night came that he thought that he was ready,
(22:34):
there was enough loose mortar for him to escape. As
he was pushing them out, a stone from above those stones,
which had lost its support as he had been scooting
those stones below out, fell on top of him and
it pinned him to the ground. So from that point
on he was kept in irons. He was also shipped
away to Bermuda on a ship that sailed from Cape
(22:55):
Town on November seven one, which carried three forty prisoners
of war. As part of this change in circumstance, he
was told that he was exiled from South Africa forever.
He took this news very badly, but he was oddly
okay with a transfer to a penal colony in Bermuda
I s meant that he might have another chance at escape.
(23:18):
He tried to put together an escape plan during the voyage,
which involved taking the captain of the ship prisoner that
was foiled by the men being a little cavalier with
their discussions and being found out. As a consequence, all
of the conspirators and that attempt were placed in cells
with worse conditions than the already rough situation that they
had been in prior to this plan. Yeah, they they
(23:42):
had apparently had you know, not great provisions, cleanliness, etcetera.
Before this, But then they were just put in like
the grossest part of the ship. Uh. Fritz maybe learning
that you can't trust groups, tried to escape on his
own leader when his shackles had been removed so that
he could get some exercise on deck. He actually killed
a guard in the process and threw him overboard, and
(24:04):
then he hid in a hawse hole, hoping to jump
into the water when night fell, but he was recaptured
before that could happen. But because there was no body,
he was not officially found guilty of murder. Throughout this journey,
he wrote a number of letters to various authorities about
his poor treatment in the awful provisions. This is something
that became sort of a hobby throughout all of his
(24:26):
various imprisonments in life, of which there were a lot
more to like. I was like, well, I tried to escape,
I might have murdered someone. I definitely conspired with the
other prisoners, but they're treating me so bad. I would
really like better food. So once the ship got to Bermuda,
conditions improved considerably for the Boer POWs, although they were
(24:50):
still captive. Then Fritz, as ever, was plotting with escape possibilities.
They were on small islands apart from the main island,
so the prisoners had more freedo of movement within these
military camp zones. There were some escape attempts by other prisoners,
particularly because there were a number of Boer sympathizers on
the main island who would harbor them, but most of
(25:11):
them were recaptured. Yeah. Once once British authorities realized like, oh,
they're making a run for the island because these people
will let them stay in their houses, they started watching
those houses and the islands a little more tightly, even
in shackles. Though, Fritz, who had always been a ladies
man since he was a teenager, managed to woo a
young woman while in Bermuda. Alice Wortley was the daughter
(25:34):
of the u S director of Bermuda's agriculture and she
found Fritz Duchane fascinating, even though she literally met him
when he was in shackles sitting with other prisoners. Uh
he was well educated and he could speak multiple languages,
and the two of them were really strongly drawn to
one another. As the word reached Duquesne about the Anglo
Boer War coming to a close and peace terms being
(25:57):
reached in May of nineteen two shifted his plans a
little bit. He still wanted to escape, but there was
no home that he could go back to, and there
was no fight that he could take up there on
the part of his people. So Fritz, like all the
other Boer POWs, was offered release if he signed an
oath of allegiance to the British Crown. A lot of
(26:18):
the other Boer prisoners readily did so, but Fritz and
a number of the other men were just not willing to,
even though refusing meant that they would stay in prison.
Fritz was making other plans, so one night, during a rainstorm,
Duquese made his move. He slipped out of his tent
through a barbed wire fence and, in what he described
as the thrill of his life, swam through water filled
(26:41):
with sharks to the main island, where he sought help
from one of those known Boer sympathizers. She actually knew
that it was a little dicey to take anybody in
at this point because of the heightened awareness, and so
she handed him off to another sympathizer, and that person
helped him make his way to the capital city of Hamilton's.
Duquesne knew that he could not just board a ship.
(27:03):
He was a wanted man. All of the docks and
the ships in ports were being watched, so he set
up a life for himself in Hamilton's. First, he disguised
himself by shearing off all of his hair. Then he
made the acquaintance of a sex worker named Vera and
became her manager. But this was of course, not something
he intended to be his new life. It was a
(27:25):
means to an end. Meeting men to arrange rendezvous with
Vera meant that he heard all the latest information about
what was happening at the docks from the sailors who
made up a significant portion of that business. Moreover, it
gave him a chance to steal clothing from one of
Vera's customers one night and then pretend to be that
(27:46):
drunken sailor when returning to his ship, which was the Margaret.
By the time Duquesne was discovered as a stowaway, the
Margaret was well on its way to Baltimore. Fritz has
spent more than a day at that point in the
brig because when he had boarded, apparently stumbling drunk, which
was fake, the first mate had thrown him in there
to sober up, not realizing it was not their regular
(28:09):
crew member but an interloper. The once Boer spy had
found himself aboard a very nice yacht belonging to Isaac
Edward Emerson. This was the inventor of the ant acid
Bromo Seltzer. Emerson questioned the stowaway and got Ducane's entire story,
at least as Fritz chose to tell it, of the war,
his imprisonment, his unwillingness to swear an oath to Britain,
(28:31):
and his escape from prison. When Emerson asked Ducane if
he had ever been at sea, Fritz said no, but
that he thought he would make a good steward, and
Emerson agreed that he would and allegedly replied, I think
everything will turn out fine for you in America. So
while the yacht's owner seemed to like Fritz, the captain
did not. Nuchane was convinced he would be turned in
(28:54):
if he arrived in Baltimore with the ship, so he
plotted an opportunity to jump and swim to sure After
studying maps of their planned course as the Margaret slid
past Great Fox Island in Chesapeake Bay, he made his
move and he arrived after a swim in Maryland. He
next made his way to Pennsylvania and then to Paterson,
(29:15):
New Jersey, where he had a contact and a place
to stay. Incidentally, ten years later, when Duquane applied for
naturalization to become a citizen of the US, he said
that he had arrived in Baltimore on September twelve night,
you know, to aboard the Margaret as a crew member
and an immigrant from Bermuda. So this is where we
(29:36):
are going to take a pause in Fritz's story because
I mean, next time it's gonna get really weird. Yeah,
Oh Fritz. Um, I have a grudging sort of love
for him because he's very fun. For listener mail, I
am gonna read one from our listener Ashley, which is
(29:57):
about our emergency medicine episodes, and Ashley writes, Hi, Tracy
and Holly, my partner and I listened to your emergency
medicine episodes together and love them. My partner is an
e R resident in a major city, and I'm a
historian and an archaeologist. Your episodes have been getting me
through my days working remotely and kept my spirits up.
Thank you for all you do, um, Ashley, thanks to
both you and your partner for having jobs that are important. UM.
(30:22):
Keeping history alive is always very dear to our hearts,
and of course anyone working in emergency medicine right now
needs to have all of the accolades thrust upon them.
She also writes some great topics you may be interested in. Uh, sure,
it's a few that are pretty cool, and she said,
if you read all of this, thank you for taking
the time, and thank you for making an awesome podcast. UM.
(30:45):
We almost never read our suggestions in listener mail out
loud because we might use them. UM, but I wanted
to make sure to thank Ashley, especially because her partner
is an e R residence super important, and that also
means that Ashley is living in a heightened state of
probably stressed as well. So thank you both, because uh,
(31:06):
we would be lost without you. Um. If you would
like to write to us, you can do so at
the History podcast at i heart radio dot com. You
can also find us everywhere on social media as Missed
in History, and if you would like to subscribe, you
can do that on the I heart Radio app, at
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(31:27):
Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio.
For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So back
when this pandemic began, we selected ten episodes to go
(00:21):
on our Offbeat History Playlist, which was a playlist that
we dropped of things that were a little more light
in tone so that there might be a nice distraction.
And one of the things that I had selected to
include was our two parter on the Great American Hippo
Ranch Plan. And so in re listening to those just
for a quality check, I realized that I mentioned during
(00:42):
them that it would be really, really fun to do
an entire episode on Fritz Duquine because his life was
I don't know a better word to describe it, bananas.
It's a it's a journey, a very a lot of journey.
I mean, I I envy both his bravado and his energy.
(01:03):
But so here I am. It's almost four years later,
finally doing that thing. Uh, and that two parter has
spawned another two parter because we are talking about a
man who changed his life story to suit his needs.
He worked under an estimated forty aliases, and he lived
a life that was very full, but it also directly
involves a lot of significant historical events. And one of
(01:25):
the things that Ducane excelled at was escaping custody. And
this first part is going to cover his early life
up to an escape that serves as a major shifting
point in his life. And then next time we will
cover a whole bunch of his time as a saboteur,
spy and journalist, among other things, right up to the
end of his life. And I want to give you
(01:47):
heads up that this episode does contain brief mentions of
sexual violence. Decane's parents, Abraham and Minna, lived in East
London in Cape Province, South Africa, and Abraham was a
hunter who just lowly built up a fortune by selling
hides as well as tusks and horns. The Duquesnes were bowers.
These were Dutch and Huguenot settlers and their descendants who
(02:10):
made their homes in Southern Africa starting in the seventeenth century.
Frist was born on December twenty one, eighteen seventy seven,
and his full name was Frederick Luguno Jubert Ducaine, and
at this point the spelling of that last name was
d u q u e n n e. His spelling
of it changed later on in his life. Yeah, if
(02:31):
you hear someone who is a French speaker pronounced it,
particularly the way his parents spelled it, it will be
more like Duquenne, where that a sound is a little softer.
And then as he lived his life, Duquesne in that
sort of harder a sound, americanized style became part of
it and he started spelling it differently. The blurred nature
of Fritz's life story begins right there at the beginning,
(02:53):
at least in terms of how he presented himself. This
will come up over and over that he kind of
crafted his persona h I don't even want to say carefully,
because he was sloppy in details at times, but to
suit his needs. And while he was born in the
Duquesne home, what he liked to tell people was that
he was born on the run as his parents traveled
with other white European descendant Afrikaners and were attacked by
(03:17):
a group of black Africans. He claimed that he came
into the world hearing gunfire. This was just one of
the many stories that Fritz would eventually tell as he
crafted this very complicated and completely unverifiable backstory, despite the
fact that he spent most of his time as a
teen being educated in England, he claimed that in those
(03:38):
same years he had been captured by a Bantoo speaking
tribe and had saved himself by making the daughter of
the tribal leader fall in love with him. A lot
of this is racially very problematic. Oh yeah, Like the
whole story of of of European colonialism in South Africa
is like, we're going to touch on it some, but
(03:58):
like there's a lot of pieces that are very racist
and problematic. Oh yeah, we will talk about Duquesne as
an adventurer, but we don't really delve into the the
really problematic and difficult thing that the attitude of virtually
all white European descendant men who categorized themselves as adventurers
(04:22):
had really really unfortunate and incorrect attitudes about the people
that were native to the places they like to explore.
It's coming up on the show many times. So I
felt like Duquesne's story is busy enough. We didn't need to, uh,
you know, kind of venture over that territory again. Um,
But the Ducheans did certainly find themselves in the conflict
(04:43):
between the black and white inhabitants of South Africa. Fritz
is actually alleged to have killed a Zulu man who
was attacking his mother when he was still just a boy,
and then to have been involved in a much larger
battle between the Dutch descendant Africanners and a group of
Bantu men when he was just well. And while these
stories do seem to have at least been grounded in
(05:05):
some actual events of conflict, we should note that this
information comes from sources that are all written from the
Boer point of view. In eighteen o six, the Cape Colony,
which had been controlled by the Dutch until this point,
fell under British control during the Napoleonic Wars. This led
to a lot of friction between the Boers and Britain
over a number of issues. The biggest one was Britain's
(05:27):
antislavery stance. Many Boers decided to move to more rural areas.
They eventually founded Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Written
recognized those independent republics. Although it's violence between the Boors
and the native Bantu people's escalated. Britain moved in its
troops into these republics under the pretext of keeping the peace.
(05:50):
There's really a motivation in this whole mix that was
outside of diplomacy and politics for Britain. That was the
discovery of gold and diamonds in the area, and the
ports around the Cape that were active trade routes also
added value to trans of all that Britain was really
eager to control. Yeah, it was initially like, oh, sure,
you have your own countries. That's fine. Wait, your countries
(06:11):
have stuff. Uh, we have that stuff. We have to
help you. We're helping, We're helping. Uh. This is of
course the very broad strokes version of all of this,
but ultimately a struggle for control of the region escalated,
unsurprisingly into military conflict. The first of these, which was
called the First boo Or War or sometimes the First
Anglo Boer War or the Transvaal Rebellion, and you will
(06:35):
even find other names, started in December eighteen eighteen, and
it resulted in a British defeat. Fritz was just three
years old when this played out, but the ongoing hostility
toward Great Britain in the area was part of a
culture that he just grew up in, and in an
odd twist. Despite this anti Anglo sentiment, Fritz was, as
we mentioned just a moment ago, sent to England for
(06:57):
school as a teenager allow Julie, at the behest of
an uncle on his mother's side, who recognized that there
was just no comparable education in southern Africa. The story
goes that after attending private school and graduating, Fritz moved
on first to Oxford for a year and then to
the Belgian at Cole Militaire in Brussels. When he was
(07:18):
there he learned about artillery and engineering as well as explosives.
He also became proficient in fencing and swordsmanship, and according
to the kind of legendary Duquesne accounts, this resulted in
the deaths of three different challengers in duels the rose
over the affections of young ladies. These assertions, though, are
(07:39):
not really backed up with any kind of attendance records
at Oxford or at Cold Militaire, and there is also
an alternative account of these years, also told at various
points by Duquesne, in which he claimed that he had
been en route to Europe from Africa a board a
steamer after a break between his English schooling and his
advanced studies so Be where he went to university, when
(08:01):
suddenly his plans shifted. According to this story, he said
that he met a man on that journey while he
was on the ship, who convinced him that he would
learn more if he took his school money and used
it to travel around the world, And so the two
men set off together, and allegedly this journey ended when
Ducaine's father caught up to the pair in Singapore partying
(08:23):
like crazy and then sent Fritz back to school. But
as Fritz was either on a globe trotting, drinking binge
with his new much older friend, or learning about explosives
in military school, the issues between the Boors and the
British back home were escalating. This would become the Second
Boer War. There were a lot of circumstances in the
mix leading to the cause of this. The ideologies of
(08:46):
Britain versus the Orange Free State and the Republic of
Transvaal also known as the Republic of South Africa were
still at odds. Annexation of parts of Transvall by Britain
were once again the focus, as was this battle over
the control of valuable resources like gold. In things boiled
over and twenty two year old Fritz was ready to fight.
(09:08):
Fritz claimed that he had been summoned to return home
from Europe to join the fight in a letter from
his father, but it seems as though Abraham Ducane was
actually already dead. By an ultimatum, though was issued jointly
by Transvaal and the Orange Free State, that British troops
had to be out of Boer territory by October. Even
(09:30):
that did not happen, and so on October twelfth war
was declared by the Boers and Britain began closing all
of the ports along the coast. Duquesne arrived home, whether
at the behest of his father or someone else, as
all of this was happening sometime in December. We'll get
into Fritz's life in the military after we pause for
(09:51):
a quick sponsor break. Fritz was commissioned as a lieutenant
and was assigned under the command of Piat Jubet, the
Commandant General of the Republic. Now. Fritz claimed throughout his
life that Jubert was his uncle. His mother's maiden name
(10:12):
was Hubert, and he said that Piet had been the
one to send him to school in England, but that
family tie has never actually been confirmed. Initially, the Boers
fared quite well in the war against the British. Although
the Transvaal and Orange Free State military was made up
of farmers and hunters, many of them led pretty nomadic lives.
(10:33):
Those were men who could shoot and track as a
matter of course, from the time they were kids, and
they were comfortable out in the beld, that's the undeveloped
grasslands of southern Africa. This entire conflict was harder for
the British soldiers than anticipated. Britain had become kind of
accustomed to just swooping into areas of conflict with nations
(10:53):
that had less fortified militaries and then wrangling just efficient
and decisive victories. That's not what happened here. There was
a lot of back and forth in the fight with
the Boers, and Fritz thrived in the conflict. He became
so well known for his stealth that people started calling
him the Black Panther of the Veld. Although that may
have been the nickname that he gave himself, he definitely
(11:17):
told people about it for the rest of his life. Though. Yeah,
anytime you look up any sort of article about him,
anytime he appears people will use that moniker, and I
still wonder if he just decided, like I'm a black panther,
I'm a black panther of the veld Um. In early
spring of nineteen hundred, Fritz Dukane was actually injured in
(11:37):
the war. He was shot in his right shoulder and
he continued fighting, though, even as the Boers found themselves
with fewer and fewer successes. To be clear, this was
a lot of incredibly bloody fighting. There were a lot
of men lost for both the Boers and Britain uh
and in some cases the far militia of the Boers, though,
were able to take advantage of their knowledge of the
(11:59):
term rain and make themselves almost undetectable to British troops,
and that offered them a chance to open fire without
the enemy ever anticipating it. This is kind of one
of those conflicts where you see some shifting away from
traditional military engagement into more guerrilla warfare. As the tide
had turned, there were concerns that the finances of chanz
(12:20):
walls Burg government could fall into the hands of the British,
and a plan was made to move the country's gold
stores to Europe in secret so millions of pounds of
gold the exact value ranges from a million dollars to
five million dollars was loaded with other valuable state papers
onto a series of wagons to be taken quietly to
(12:43):
the coast and then sent on from there. And allegedly
none other than Fritz Ducane got involved in this whole story.
So Fritz, according to the tale, intercepted the wagons with
fake credentials that he was carrying that claimed to be
from Transwall's president Paul Krueger. Ducuese had several other men
with him, white accomplices, as well as several black servants,
(13:06):
and they took those wagons that they had common to
here deeper into the wilds. It is possible that once
the gold was stashed in a series of caves, Ducane
actually conspired with the head of a nearby tribe to
have all of his men killed in exchange for the
oxen that had been pulling the wagons, leading him to
be the only one left alive who knew the gold's whereabouts.
(13:29):
We do not know if this story is true. I
feel like we say that after everything uh conveniently, all
of the players in this story, other than Duquesne were
killed or would be impossible to track down per his story,
but he used this tale once again as a yarn
that would bolster his reputation throughout his life. In June
of nineteen hundred, he was injured, he had a lance
(13:52):
go through his foot, and Ducane went on the run,
but was soon captured by the British. It was only
the first of seven real captures. He escaped when the
town that the British troops took him to for imprisonment
turned out to have burned down, and in the confusion
upun Having discovered that their destination was burned down, Fritz
(14:13):
made a run for it, and then, after finding another
group of Boer fighters andy real military structure was gone
at this point, he joined up with them. They were
defeated in their next fight, though, and he was taken
prisoner again. This time, he started up a friendly conversation
with one of the soldiers to get that soldier relaxed,
and then as they crossed a bridge, Fritz hit the
(14:34):
soldier hard over the head, knocking him out, and then
jumped into the river. He managed to hide in the
bush by the bank until the British troops gave up
looking for him and moved on. Duquesne planned to then
travel on foot until he could get to a port,
with the hope being that he could get on a
boat and be taken to where he could rejoin the
(14:54):
main thrust of the Boer forces. But after a few
days of walking, he was captured by colonists from Portugal
and he was turned over to British authorities. From there,
he was transported to the port city of Lorenzo Marquez
now known as Maputo in Mozambique, and he was put
in an actual prison. It was actually like a cell
in a castle style prison. Uh That made his plans
(15:15):
for escape a little bit limited, but of course that
was always his plan. Literally every time he got in
hot water, his next thought was how can I get
out of here? He managed to slip through a ventilation
shaft into another room at one point, but that was
not a cell. But then he was seen right away
and was immediately taken back into custody and put back
into his cell. From there he was shipped to Lisbon,
(15:38):
where he was jailed, but found it much more comfortable
than his previous captivity had been. He claimed to have
befriended the jailer and also had a romance with that
man's daughter, but whether or not it was comfortable to
Caine still wanted out. He eventually managed to escape again,
although the details are not clear. This time he made
(15:58):
his way to Brussels after in Kiddies and Paris, and
he made contact with Transvaal's representative there that was William
Johannes Lads. It was there and through this discussion with
Lads that Decane's life as a spy began. Uh. Yeah,
we'll do a brief aside and say that there you
could have some pedantic discussions over whether he was more
(16:19):
of a saboteur or a spy. At various points in
his nefarious dealings career, um he got labeled a spy generally,
So even though this particular part to me seems more
like a saboteur, we'll go with it. Uh. Lades suggested
that Fritz pose as a board defector and joined the
British military. This was something that happened a number of
(16:40):
times as some of the Boers got tired of the fighting,
and Fritz's background and his military expertise ensured that he
would be sent right back to the Anglo Boer War there,
the plan was that he would desert and join up
with the Boers again. But this plan was really really risky.
As we said, defectors not that uncommon, but they were
known as judas Boers and they were viewed with utter
(17:02):
contempt by their countrymen, and it was entirely possible that
Fritz would be shot on site by his fellows before
he could reveal his ruse. When Decaine got back to
South Africa in March of nineteen o one, he was horrified.
Most of the Boer farms had been burned. There was
a huge homeless population of Boer women and children who
(17:23):
had lost their husbands and fathers to the fighting. They
were put into camps that were poorly managed and resulted
in really high mortality rates and sheer misery for those
who managed to survive. But the real horror for Fritz
Ducane was learning what happened to his family. He thought,
because they were so rural and it would just be
his mom and his sister who was a little bit younger,
(17:45):
and his uncle who was blind, that people would just
leave them alone. But their farm had been burned, like
so many others. The one surviving servant had told him
that his uncle had been hanged and then mutilated, his
mother and sister had both been raped by British soldiers.
His sister had been shot, and his mother was then
taken to camp as a prisoner disguised in his British uniform.
(18:08):
Fritz was able to find his mother at a nearby camp,
and she was very, very sick, dying according to Fritz's
later account, of syphilis, and she had a seven month
old baby. Decane knew that he couldn't save his mother,
so he made her a promise quote, as long as
I live, I will never draw one breath but to
pay back the English for what they have done. I
(18:31):
pledge my soul that for every drop of rotten, poisoned
blood in your body, I will kill a hundred Englishmen.
So for Fritz this completely changed his drive to fight
the British on behalf of his people. It's just a
personal vendetta. He spoke for the rest of his life
about how deeply he hated all Englishmen for what had
(18:51):
happened to his family, and he held a special level
of hatred for Field Marshal Horatio Kitchener, who headed up
the British military effort during the time and had directed
this scorched Earth campaign and bore territory, and Duquesne immediately
set to work on his first act of vengeance. His
plan was to turn Cape Town, which was a place
(19:12):
that had become sort of the English headquarters in South Africa,
into a place with as much pain and suffering for
Great Britain as the misery that they had caused the Boers.
With about twenty conspirators, he planned a massive bomb attack
for the night of October eleventh, nineteen o one. Explosives
were to be placed throughout the city, at the docks,
(19:32):
at the utilities, around municipal buildings, basically everywhere, and as
part of this plot for It's actually attended a social
event that night in his full British uniform. He was
quite respected within the British Army. But then as he
tried to leave the event, Duchese was arrested on charges
of conspiracy against the British government and espionage. And it
(19:53):
turned out that one of the twenty men that Fritz
had trusted had become worried that his own property in
Cape Town would be destroyed by all this, so he
blabbed the entire scheme to British authorities. So hang on
to that betrayal. We are about to get into its repercussions,
but first we're going to take a quick break to
hear from the sponsors. Fritz Duchane, still technically a British
(20:23):
Army officer, was court martial and when he was questioned
along with the nineteen other men, Fritz confessed to his
own involvement in the plot, but claimed the other men
were strangers to him. The only one that he could
not deny knowledge of was the man who turned him in.
When Fritz was called a trader, he denied it, saying, quote,
I am a Boer, not a Britisher. Duchese continued. He
(20:45):
explained to the court his political point of view that
Britain had invaded where the Boers were simply trying to
live their lives as they wished, and he also revealed
what had happened to his family at the hands of
British soldiers. Fritz and his accomplice Is were declared guilty
and sentenced to be shot at sunrise the following day,
but Fritz Decane did not die. With the dawn in
(21:08):
the night, a British general made him an offer that
if he gave the British Army the communication codes that
the Boers were using, he could live to fight for
his country. He would not be freed, but he also
would not be executed. He grudgingly agreed with this. He
watched the firing squad carry out the sentence on his
co conspirators before he was taken to a cell where
(21:31):
he was asked to translate a number of Boer communications.
Ducaine always claimed that he didn't translate the codes and
betray his country, but instead created new codes to confuse
the British. He also wrote a number of letters to
his captors complaining about the food and the treatment that
he was receiving, including a list of expletives that he
(21:52):
had been called and saying, quote, this is not likely
to do any good and hurts the feelings of the
prisoner that just tickled me. In the midst of all
of this, He's like, my feelings are hurt when you
call me these bad names. And of course he tried
to escape. That was his jam. So this is pretty ingenious.
We mentioned it briefly in the Hippo episode, but we
(22:14):
can go into a little more detail here. He used
a spoon like the classic old school movie Troupe to
scrape away the mortar that was holding the stones of
the exterior wall of his cell, and he did this
slowly over time until he felt like he had gotten
enough stones loose that he could get out. But when
the night came that he thought that he was ready,
(22:34):
there was enough loose mortar for him to escape. As
he was pushing them out, a stone from above those stones,
which had lost its support as he had been scooting
those stones below out, fell on top of him and
it pinned him to the ground. So from that point
on he was kept in irons. He was also shipped
away to Bermuda on a ship that sailed from Cape
(22:55):
Town on November seven one, which carried three forty prisoners
of war. As part of this change in circumstance, he
was told that he was exiled from South Africa forever.
He took this news very badly, but he was oddly
okay with a transfer to a penal colony in Bermuda
I s meant that he might have another chance at escape.
(23:18):
He tried to put together an escape plan during the voyage,
which involved taking the captain of the ship prisoner that
was foiled by the men being a little cavalier with
their discussions and being found out. As a consequence, all
of the conspirators and that attempt were placed in cells
with worse conditions than the already rough situation that they
had been in prior to this plan. Yeah, they they
(23:42):
had apparently had you know, not great provisions, cleanliness, etcetera.
Before this, But then they were just put in like
the grossest part of the ship. Uh. Fritz maybe learning
that you can't trust groups, tried to escape on his
own leader when his shackles had been removed so that
he could get some exercise on deck. He actually killed
a guard in the process and threw him overboard, and
(24:04):
then he hid in a hawse hole, hoping to jump
into the water when night fell, but he was recaptured
before that could happen. But because there was no body,
he was not officially found guilty of murder. Throughout this journey,
he wrote a number of letters to various authorities about
his poor treatment in the awful provisions. This is something
that became sort of a hobby throughout all of his
(24:26):
various imprisonments in life, of which there were a lot
more to like. I was like, well, I tried to escape,
I might have murdered someone. I definitely conspired with the
other prisoners, but they're treating me so bad. I would
really like better food. So once the ship got to Bermuda,
conditions improved considerably for the Boer POWs, although they were
(24:50):
still captive. Then Fritz, as ever, was plotting with escape possibilities.
They were on small islands apart from the main island,
so the prisoners had more freedo of movement within these
military camp zones. There were some escape attempts by other prisoners,
particularly because there were a number of Boer sympathizers on
the main island who would harbor them, but most of
(25:11):
them were recaptured. Yeah. Once once British authorities realized like, oh,
they're making a run for the island because these people
will let them stay in their houses, they started watching
those houses and the islands a little more tightly, even
in shackles. Though, Fritz, who had always been a ladies
man since he was a teenager, managed to woo a
young woman while in Bermuda. Alice Wortley was the daughter
(25:34):
of the u S director of Bermuda's agriculture and she
found Fritz Duchane fascinating, even though she literally met him
when he was in shackles sitting with other prisoners. Uh
he was well educated and he could speak multiple languages,
and the two of them were really strongly drawn to
one another. As the word reached Duquesne about the Anglo
Boer War coming to a close and peace terms being
(25:57):
reached in May of nineteen two shifted his plans a
little bit. He still wanted to escape, but there was
no home that he could go back to, and there
was no fight that he could take up there on
the part of his people. So Fritz, like all the
other Boer POWs, was offered release if he signed an
oath of allegiance to the British Crown. A lot of
(26:18):
the other Boer prisoners readily did so, but Fritz and
a number of the other men were just not willing to,
even though refusing meant that they would stay in prison.
Fritz was making other plans, so one night, during a rainstorm,
Duquese made his move. He slipped out of his tent
through a barbed wire fence and, in what he described
as the thrill of his life, swam through water filled
(26:41):
with sharks to the main island, where he sought help
from one of those known Boer sympathizers. She actually knew
that it was a little dicey to take anybody in
at this point because of the heightened awareness, and so
she handed him off to another sympathizer, and that person
helped him make his way to the capital city of Hamilton's.
Duquesne knew that he could not just board a ship.
(27:03):
He was a wanted man. All of the docks and
the ships in ports were being watched, so he set
up a life for himself in Hamilton's. First, he disguised
himself by shearing off all of his hair. Then he
made the acquaintance of a sex worker named Vera and
became her manager. But this was of course, not something
he intended to be his new life. It was a
(27:25):
means to an end. Meeting men to arrange rendezvous with
Vera meant that he heard all the latest information about
what was happening at the docks from the sailors who
made up a significant portion of that business. Moreover, it
gave him a chance to steal clothing from one of
Vera's customers one night and then pretend to be that
(27:46):
drunken sailor when returning to his ship, which was the Margaret.
By the time Duquesne was discovered as a stowaway, the
Margaret was well on its way to Baltimore. Fritz has
spent more than a day at that point in the
brig because when he had boarded, apparently stumbling drunk, which
was fake, the first mate had thrown him in there
to sober up, not realizing it was not their regular
(28:09):
crew member but an interloper. The once Boer spy had
found himself aboard a very nice yacht belonging to Isaac
Edward Emerson. This was the inventor of the ant acid
Bromo Seltzer. Emerson questioned the stowaway and got Ducane's entire story,
at least as Fritz chose to tell it, of the war,
his imprisonment, his unwillingness to swear an oath to Britain,
(28:31):
and his escape from prison. When Emerson asked Ducane if
he had ever been at sea, Fritz said no, but
that he thought he would make a good steward, and
Emerson agreed that he would and allegedly replied, I think
everything will turn out fine for you in America. So
while the yacht's owner seemed to like Fritz, the captain
did not. Nuchane was convinced he would be turned in
(28:54):
if he arrived in Baltimore with the ship, so he
plotted an opportunity to jump and swim to sure After
studying maps of their planned course as the Margaret slid
past Great Fox Island in Chesapeake Bay, he made his
move and he arrived after a swim in Maryland. He
next made his way to Pennsylvania and then to Paterson,
(29:15):
New Jersey, where he had a contact and a place
to stay. Incidentally, ten years later, when Duquane applied for
naturalization to become a citizen of the US, he said
that he had arrived in Baltimore on September twelve night,
you know, to aboard the Margaret as a crew member
and an immigrant from Bermuda. So this is where we
(29:36):
are going to take a pause in Fritz's story because
I mean, next time it's gonna get really weird. Yeah,
Oh Fritz. Um, I have a grudging sort of love
for him because he's very fun. For listener mail, I
am gonna read one from our listener Ashley, which is
(29:57):
about our emergency medicine episodes, and Ashley writes, Hi, Tracy
and Holly, my partner and I listened to your emergency
medicine episodes together and love them. My partner is an
e R resident in a major city, and I'm a
historian and an archaeologist. Your episodes have been getting me
through my days working remotely and kept my spirits up.
Thank you for all you do, um, Ashley, thanks to
both you and your partner for having jobs that are important. UM.
(30:22):
Keeping history alive is always very dear to our hearts,
and of course anyone working in emergency medicine right now
needs to have all of the accolades thrust upon them.
She also writes some great topics you may be interested in. Uh, sure,
it's a few that are pretty cool, and she said,
if you read all of this, thank you for taking
the time, and thank you for making an awesome podcast. UM.
(30:45):
We almost never read our suggestions in listener mail out
loud because we might use them. UM, but I wanted
to make sure to thank Ashley, especially because her partner
is an e R residence super important, and that also
means that Ashley is living in a heightened state of
probably stressed as well. So thank you both, because uh,
(31:06):
we would be lost without you. Um. If you would
like to write to us, you can do so at
the History podcast at i heart radio dot com. You
can also find us everywhere on social media as Missed
in History, and if you would like to subscribe, you
can do that on the I heart Radio app, at
Apple Podcasts, or wherever it is you listen. Stuff you
(31:27):
Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio.
For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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