Miscellany

Concerned about pigeons carrying military communications, German troops in occupied Belgium during World War I would shoot at overhead flocks. Such fears had not abated by World War II, when the British government ordered a systematic slaughter of pigeons throughout the UK, and inmates at British and Australian interment camps were banned from approaching birds on compound grounds. 

Miscellany

New York Giants pitcher Christy Mathewson wrote in 1912 that he had heard the Philadelphia Athletics “had a spy” who stole signs and “tipped the batters by raising and lowering an awning a trifle.” In Philadelphia for the World Series the year before, Mathewson had looked for the culprit. “In the enemy’s camp, I kept watching the windows of the houses just outside the park for suspicious movements,” he wrote. “But I never discovered anything wrong.”

Miscellany

“Secretary Morrice did this day in the House, when they talked of intelligence, say that he was allowed but £700 a year,” wrote Samuel Pepys in his diary in 1668, “whereas, in Cromwell’s time, he did allow £70,000 a year for it; and was confirmed therein by Colonel Birch, who said that thereby Cromwell carried the secrets of all the princes of Europe at his girdle.”

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