Alice Pemberton: In twenty thirteen, Paul Reichmann, the developer who turned London’s derelict docks into Canary Wharf, dies. Alice Pemberton: Eighteen-oh-nine: Britain celebrates the Golden Jubilee of King George the Third, thrown when he has merely begun the fiftieth year of his reign. Alice Pemberton: Nineteen ninety: the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic declares its sovereignty from the Soviet Union. Alice Pemberton: This is The Long Echo for the twenty-fifth of October. I'm Alice Pemberton. History doesn't repeat itself — but it echoes. Alice Pemberton: In this edition: Edmund Cavendish on the vote that swapped one China for another; Arthur Nightingale on Geoffrey Chaucer's last lease; Doc Sullivan on a pewter plate left on an Australian island; Judge Marion Calloway on a letter nobody can produce; and at the table, a concerto damned as unplayable. Let's begin. Alice Pemberton: In nineteen seventy-one, one vote in New York evicted the Republic of China from the United Nations and seated the People's Republic, though both called themselves China. For the front page, our professor of history, Edmund Cavendish. Edmund? Professor Edmund Cavendish: Both called themselves China, and both meant it. The Communist Party had held the mainland as the People's Republic since nineteen forty-nine, while the Republic of China retreated to Taiwan. Yet Taiwan's delegates kept China's chair for over two decades, permanent seat on the Security Council and all. Alice Pemberton: So what finally moved it? Professor Edmund Cavendish: A draft from Albania, Algeria and their co-sponsors: Resolution twenty-seven fifty-eight. Seventy-six nations voted in favour. Foreign Minister Chow Shu-kai had already led his delegation out, leaving behind a text that ends: 'to expel forthwith the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek from the place which they unlawfully occupy at the United Nations and in all the organizations related to it.' Alice Pemberton: And Beijing? Professor Edmund Cavendish: Its delegates were seated within the month. But listen to that text again. It names a man, Chiang Kai-shek. It never once says Taiwan. Both governments still claim to be the lawful China. Resolution twenty-seven fifty-eight settled a chair. It never settled the island. Alice Pemberton: Geoffrey Chaucer's last known act of optimism was a fifty-three-year lease, signed with less than a year to live. For the biographical sketch, our storyteller, Arthur Nightingale. Arthur? Arthur Nightingale: A fifty-three-year lease, on a house in the garden of the Lady Chapel at Westminster Abbey. It survives in the Abbey's archives. He signed it in December thirteen ninety-nine, a poet who would not see another winter. Alice Pemberton: Where did Chaucer begin? Arthur Nightingale: In wine. His great-grandfather kept a tavern, and his father, John, rose to be a London vintner with a royal appointment. As a boy, John had once been kidnapped by an aunt who wanted him married to her daughter. Geoffrey went as a page to the Countess of Ulster, and the court kept him for life: courtier, diplomat, Member of Parliament for Kent. Alice Pemberton: A courtier, at a court that spoke French. Arthur Nightingale: French and Latin were for serious writing. Geoffrey Chaucer chose English, and in The Canterbury Tales he made it carry everything. Almost two thousand English words are first recorded in his manuscripts. His contemporary Thomas Hoccleve called him 'the firste fyndere of our fair langage.' Alice Pemberton: And his death? Arthur Nightingale: Nobody knows how it came. The last record of Chaucer alive is a debt repaid to him that June. Even the date we keep was carved a century and a half later by an admirer, Nicholas Brigham, beneath the words 'Death is the repose of cares.' But Chaucer was buried in the Abbey as a tenant of the close, the first writer in what became Poets' Corner. Every great name laid there since has followed a man who was renting. Alice Pemberton: In sixteen-sixteen, the Dutch captain Dirk Hartog scratched his ship's name into a plate of pewter on the western edge of Australia. For the Laboratory, our man for science and medicine, Doc Sullivan. Doc? Doc Sullivan: Pewter, because a plate outlasts a page. Dirk Hartog was master of the Dutch East India Company ship Eendracht, bound for Java. Separated from his fleet in a storm, he crossed the Indian Ocean on the Roaring Forties, the strong westerlies the navigator Hendrik Brouwer had flagged as a faster road to Java. Alice Pemberton: A fast road, with a continent at the end of it. Doc Sullivan: That's the navigation trap: run east too long before turning north and you hit land nobody has charted. Hartog hit it at Shark Bay, on the island that now carries his name, and spent three days ashore. Before leaving, he fixed the plate to a post: 'arrived here the ship Eendracht of Amsterdam', then the merchant, the captain, the steersman, and 'the twenty-seventh ditto set sail for Bantam.' Alice Pemberton: Did he think much of the place? Doc Sullivan: He charted the coast northward, reached Batavia safely, and found nothing of interest. And the oldest surviving artefact of European exploration in Australia, the Hartog Plate, sits in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The first thing a European left in Australia went home. Alice Pemberton: Just before Britain's general election of nineteen twenty-four, the Daily Mail printed the Zinoviev letter, orders from Moscow that nobody has ever been able to produce. For the Chamber, our jurist, Judge Marion Calloway. Marion? Judge Marion Calloway: Never produced. In my courtroom, that's the first thing anyone would ask for. The Zinoviev letter claimed to come from Grigory Zinoviev, head of the Communist International, instructing British communists to step up 'agitation-propaganda work in the armed forces.' Alice Pemberton: So where did the Mail get it? Judge Marion Calloway: Follow the chain of custody. It reached London as a 'very secret' telegram from British intelligence officers in Riga, landing on the very day Parliament was dissolved. No original has ever been located in any archive. It is a copy with no source anyone could examine. Alice Pemberton: And the paper ran it anyway. Judge Marion Calloway: It ran under the headline 'Civil War Plot by Socialists' Masters', to a circulation of nearly two million, and the editor handed copies round Fleet Street. Four days later, the country voted. No court would have let the Zinoviev letter near a jury. It went to an entire electorate instead. Alice Pemberton: At the table: Gwen Harmon, our markets correspondent; Old Jim Calhoun, our human-interest man; and Walter Davies, our music narrator. Gwen, you've brought a stock exchange that died young. Gwen Harmon: Died young, and came back. On this day in eighteen sixty-one, brokers met at Toronto's Masonic Hall and founded the Toronto Stock Exchange. There were twenty-four of them. When the banks of Upper Canada failed, trading simply stopped, until a bull market brought a third of the originals back to start again. Old Jim Calhoun: That's not a market, Gwen. That's a reunion. Gwen Harmon: A reunion that's now one of the ten largest exchanges on earth. Walter Davies: Better start than Tchaikovsky got. He played his First Piano Concerto to Nikolai Rubinstein and remembered the verdict: 'It appeared that my Concerto was utterly worthless, absolutely unplayable; the piece as a whole was bad, trivial, vulgar.' So he gave it to Hans von Bülow, who premiered it on this day in eighteen seventy-five, in Boston. Gwen Harmon: Moscow passes, Boston buys. I've seen that trade before. Old Jim Calhoun: Mine's a hunger strike. Terence MacSwiney, playwright and Sinn Féin Lord Mayor of Cork, told a court-martial in nineteen twenty: 'I shall be free, alive or dead, within a month.' He died in Brixton Prison on this day, after seventy-four days. Walter Davies: And that death carried Ireland's cause round the world. Gwen Harmon: Then a warning nobody heeded. In nineteen twenty-seven the Italian liner Principessa Mafalda kept breaking down on the way to South America, so Captain Simone Gulì asked for a replacement ship. The company's answer: 'Continue to Rio and await instructions.' Off Brazil a propeller shaft broke and tore the hull. Panic killed three hundred and fourteen people, with rescue ships in sight. Old Jim Calhoun: The Italian Titanic. Mine's smaller. Sadako Sasaki was two when the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima, and seemed unhurt. Leukaemia came a decade later. Told the legend that a thousand paper cranes grant a wish, she folded them from medicine wrappers and scraps from other patients' gifts. She died on this day in nineteen fifty-five. She was twelve. Walter Davies: And the cranes are how the world remembers her. Alice Pemberton: Brokers who came back, a concerto that wouldn't be shelved, a mayor who wouldn't eat, a ship told to keep going, and a girl who kept folding. Thank you, all three. Alice Pemberton: Well, that was the day that was — the twenty-fifth of October — where in nineteen forty Benjamin O. Davis Senior was named the first African American general in the United States Army; where in eleven forty-seven Afonso the First of Portugal took Lisbon from the Moors, one of the few Christian victories of the Second Crusade; and where in eighteen fifty-four the ill-fated Charge of the Light Brigade was decisively repelled by Russian forces at Balaclava. The echo never stops. Neither do we. See you tomorrow. Humphrey Thwaite: They skipped Philippe Pinel, who died on this day in eighteen twenty-six. He was the physician who fought to strike the chains off psychiatric patients and insisted they could be understood and cured. Mortimer Finch: Pinel? The same man a prize jury once marked down for 'painful' mediocrity? Humphrey Thwaite: Failed twice, then ran the Salpêtrière for three decades and became the father of modern psychiatry. There's hope for you yet, Mortimer. Mortimer Finch: I'll take that as a diagnosis.