Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - DOUBLE BILL: A Monkey For Mayor / A Screw Loose At 17,000 Feet

Episode Date: October 13, 2023

This week, we've twice the storytelling fun for you: two Cautionary Tales shorts, previously only available to Pushkin+ subscribers. A Monkey for Mayor: It was supposed to be a publicity stunt, but when the man who dressed as Hartlepool United’s monkey mascot stood in a mayoral election... he won. Actual politicians predicted disaster - since thousands of workers and millions of dollars were now in the hands of a complete novice. But H’Angus the Monkey proved to be a more effective leader than anyone had predicted, raising interesting questions about how we select the best people to be our managers and our mayors. And A Screw Loose At 17,000 Feet: Can you tell the difference between an A211-7D bolt and an A211-8C? Well, nor could the tired and stressed engineer fitting a cockpit windshield to Flight 5390. The difference is tiny, but the consequences of muddling them up - which played out at 17,000 ft - were dramatic. Such design flaws are common - and result in far more loose aircraft windows than you would imagine.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Amazing sports stories. How exactly do you survive a race that's deliberately designed to break you physically, mentally and emotionally? It's about the risk takers. I decided to climb the Himalayas all four-chimp peaks. And the game changers. I want to play like my brother. I want what he has.

Amazing sports stories from the BBC World Service. The rules were holding her back, so she would have to rewrite them. Search for amazing sports stories wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Pushkin. Hello, this week I'm sharing with you a double bill. Two shorter mini episodes of Corsionary Tales, twice the storytelling excitement. These Corsionary Tales shorts were previously only available to Pushkin Plus subscribers, but now everyone can hear them.

And a reminder that if you are a Pushkin plus subscriber, we've released our epic series on the V2 rocket looking at this fearsome Nazi weapon from three very different perspectives. For now and for everyone, I present a screw loose at 17,000 feet, and first, a monkey for mayor. a monkey for mayor. It's early in the 19th century, and England is at war with Napoleon's France. Far up the northeast coast of England, a long way from the action, there's been a shipwreck. So the story goes,

but something else that was on the ship has washed up too. Man, is. A man? Is it a man? It's like no man I've ever seen. The people of Hartlepool had never seen a monkey. And if something else they'd also never seen. A Frenchman. Could it be a Frenchman? Come just by on us.

You think? I suppose it could be. Seize him. If this was indeed a French spy, clearly they would have to hang him. The countries were at war. But first, he deserved a fair trial. fair trial. Are you a French spy? What's he saying? I don't know. I don't speak French. The people of Hartlipool hung the monkey. I'm Tim Haaford and you're listening to Portion Retails. Did this really happen? Did the people of Hartleypool really mistake a monkey for a French spy

during the Napoleonic Wars? Well, that would be telling, wouldn't it? And it doesn't actually matter for the purposes of our cautionary tale. What we do know from the historical record is that the legend soon came to be widely believed. People from nearby towns poked fun at heart-lapuddians with a song. In former times, Mr Miss Warren's strife, when French invasion threatened life, and always armored to the knife, the fisherman hung a monkey on.

Heartle-pudleon, by the way, is what people from Heartle-puller called. Sometimes, they're also still known today, as monkey hangers. Over the decades, Hartlepool grew from a tiny village into a town of 90,000 people. Not many are fishermen anymore, although the staple food is still fish and chips served with the traditional regional delicacy of mushy peas, a bright green lumpy gloop, unpromising to look at, delightful to taste. Hartlepool became an industrial port, built on steel and shipbuilding, then struggled

as those industries declined. And through it all, the gentle mockery from nearby towns continued. Hartlepuddlyans decided there was only one way to respond. By joining in and laughing at themselves, they embraced the monkey-hanging story as a source of civic identity, even civic pride. They weren't proud about their forebears not knowing the difference between a monkey and a Frenchman, of course, the pride is him the self-deprecating humour. Being a good sport, the ability to take a joke. When Hartlerpool's soccer club needed a mascot, the choice was obvious. They called him Hangus.

Hangus, the monkey. That's Angus with an H apostrophe at the front. Hangus. At Hartlepool United Games, Angus, played by a man in a full-body costume, performed the traditional role of the mascot, entertaining the crowd before kickoff and at half-time. Angus sometimes took things too far. At one game he got into a fight against the rival team's mascot, Desmond the Dragon.

He punched Desmond's head off. At another, Hangus was kicked out of an opponent stadium on suspicion of being drunk. At this point in the story, I need to take you on a brief diversion into politics. In 2002 the UK changed its system of local government. Until 2002 only big cities had directly elected their mayors. More modestly sized towns like Hardlepool elected a town council, and the councillors chose the mayor from among themselves. Now national reforms meant that more towns like Hartlepool would also be asked to elect a mayor directly.

In Hartlepool, there was little doubt about who would win the first mayor of election. It would be whoever the Labour Party picked as their candidate. Labour usually won elections in Hartlepool. The biggest group of town councillors was Labour. The member of Parliament was Labour. Hartlepool was a working town and Labour was the party of workers. It always had been, but its national leaders were trying to change its left-wing image. They no longer talked about socialism or taxing the wealthy. One party high-flyer had recently made waves by saying they were intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich. That high-flyer was called Peter Mandelson. He also happened to be the member of Parliament for Hartlepool,

the town's representative in the London legislature. But Mr Mandelson was not very representative of the town. Hartlepool is gritty and provincial. Mr Mandelson, who comes from London, was smooth and urban and cosmopolitan. It's said that when Mr. Mandelson first travelled to Hartlepool to campaign for election, his local handlers took into a fishing chip shop. He spotted the tub of gloopy green mushy peas, and asked for a portion of that excellent looking guacamole.

That story isn't true, but like the Monkey Story, it's stuck, because it seemed to capture something about how the Labour Party's leaders didn't understand their traditional northern voters. Still, they'd win the election for mayor, of course they would. Hartlepool was a labour town. At Hartlepool United Football Club, the man who wore the monkey costume, went to the club chairman with an idea.

What if, hang us the monkey ran for mayor? As a joke, it would raise the profile of the club, he suggested. Maybe raise some money. Go for it, said the club's chairman. So hangers began a campaign for mayor, with a flagship promise of free bananas for all the town's school children. Bookmakers gave odds of a hundred to one, and you can guess where I'm going with this story can't you? Here are the results of the election for mayor of Hartlepool, Leo Ginnon, the Labour Party candidate, 6,762 votes, hangers the monkey, 7,395 votes. Hartlepool had once supposedly hung a monkey. Now, they're the elected one.

Only technically speaking, it wasn't the monkey who'd been elected. It was the man who wore the costume. His name was Stuart Drummond. He was 28 years old. He worked in a call centre. He knew absolutely nothing about local government. And now he found himself unexpectedly put in charge of a municipal authority with an annual budget of over £100 million, that's almost $250 million in today's terms, and 3,000 staff looking

to him for leadership. There's a famous theory, partly a joke, and partly deadly serious, which is called the Peter Principle. The Peter Principle says that people who are good at their jobs will keep on being promoted until they end up in jobs that they don't have the skills to do well. They then stay in this job indefinitely too incompetent to be promoted further. The Peter principle says that promotion is a way of losing good workers without any guarantee of gaining good managers. In 2009, researchers from the University of Catania in Italy wondered if promoting people

at random might solve the PETA principle problem. That may sound crazy, but a few years earlier some other researchers in Texas had studied random promotion as a point of comparison for promoting by merit or length of time with the organisation. To their surprise they found that random choice was almost as likely to identify a junior worker who turned out to have the skills to succeed in a senior role. And promoting people at random rather than picking out those who were good at their job would also keep more people in lower level

jobs that they're good at. The academics from Katania modelled the effects and argued that organisations would, indeed, become more efficient overall if they handed out promotions randomly. efficient overall if they handed out promotions randomly. For their troubles, the Italian researchers received an IG Nobel Prize in Management Theory, a prize for research that makes you laugh, then makes you think. Inspired by this award, or at the very least undeterred by it, they went on to ask another provocative question. Why don't we do this for politicians too? Politics is broken, only partisan hacks get elected.

What if we appointed at least some parliamentarians by drawing lots? Might it improve the quality of governance? Stuart Drummond wasn't quite drawn by lot to be mayor of Hartlipul, but I can't imagine anything more similar to a random chance. He never intended to be mayor. He had none of the conventional qualifications. He had no interest whatsoever in politics.

He'd stood for election as hangas only as a joke. When the result was announced, the 28-year-old was dazed. Then, Stuart says, he saw the town's member of Parliament striding up to him. Peter Mendelsson looked furious. Peter Mandelson looked furious. You're a disgrace. You've set this town back 20 years. You think any business will want to invest here now? You've made us a laughing stock. Peter Mandelson started to quiz Mr. Drummond about his background.

What did he do other than wear a monkey costume on weekends? What did he study at university? Business and languages Mr. Drummond replied, yes, ironically, hang us the monkey, spoke French. Mr. Mandelson stalked off, leaving Mr. Drummond feeling even more bewildered. A few minutes later, Mr. Drummond caught sight of a television, on which Mr. Mandelson was being interviewed. No, not at all. Stuart's an intelligent guy.

He speaks three languages. He has a degree in business. He has the best interest of the town at heart. And that, said Stuart Drummond, with his introduction to how politics works. Mr. Drummond could have refused to take up the post of mayor, but he thought, why not give it a go? He figured out what it needed to learn and sent himself on training courses. It was like doing six masters degrees in six months, he later said.

But after a year or so, he began to feel like he was getting the hang of it. And he kept his big campaign promise about free bananas, or close enough. He found some funding from a health-eating programme and every day the schools of Hartlepool offered their children a free piece of fruit. At the end of his term as mayor, Stuart Drummond stood for re-election, not as hangas this time, but as himself. He won, with a bigger share of the vote. Four years later, at the end of his second term, he stood for a third and won again. He'd got the job by accident, but the people of Hartlepool clearly thought he'd done it well. So if you ever find yourself looking at the politicians who govern us and wondering if a random person picked off the street could

do better. I have one thing to say to you. I think that's French for you might be right. Can you tell the difference, dear listener, between an A2117D bolt and an A2118C? Well, nor could the tired and stressed engineer fitting a cockpit windshield to flight 5390. Our next cautionary tale short looks at what happened when those two very similar bolts were muddled up, and how the dramatic consequences played out at 17,000 feet. That's after the break. If you were to put the Millennium Falcon in space, would it actually work as a spaceship? Why has Gothic become the hot new literary genre? He is the role-playing game Warhammer, basically lawyers playing with action figures.

I'm Eric Molinsky, the host of Imaginary Worlds. Science fiction and fantasy stories may be set on other planets or parallel dimensions, but they're created by people in our world. Each episode, we examine these fantasy stories to learn what they can tell us about ourselves. I've talked with novelists like Andy Weir, who wrote the Martian, designers of games like Magic of the Gathering, writers of Hit TV shows like Star Trek Strange New Worlds, and the puppeteer who designed Miss Piggy. You can subscribe to Imaginary Worlds wherever you get your podcasts.

The maintenance hanger at Birmingham International Airport near an industrial city in the English Midlands is not a glamorous location in the dark hours before the dawn, but it is an important one. hours before the dawn, but it is an important one. The night shift maintenance manager is replacing an aging aeroplane windshield. Let's call him Guy. It isn't his real name. Standing on a raised maintenance platform beside the plane, Guy examines the 90 bolts he's just removed, along with the old windshield. Those bolts are a bit worn, he thinks. He's going to need to replace them too. But one bolt looks

pretty much the same as any other. Which ones should he use? I'm Tim Halford, and you're listening to caution retails. Instead of consulting the manual, Guy grabs one of the bolts he's removed, climbs down, and heads to the room where the spare parts are stored. He knows roughly what he's looking for and so quickly finds the box with the bolts that match the bolts he's brought with him. They're A21170s. Oh crap, says Guy to himself. They're less than half a dozen left. He needs 85 more. Guy drives across the airports to another spares storage facility. This one is

unstaffed and poorly lit. If you're standing in front of the parts drawers, you're also obstructing the light. It's night, it's raining, and Guy hasn't brought his reading glasses. has not brought his reading glasses. Even if he had, the drawers are not labeled properly. Crap, crap, crap. At least Guy has one of the right bolts with him. So he manually compares it until he finds a box with the right bolts in. Or at least, he thinks they are the right bolts. And then he remembers, one section of the windshield needs six slightly longer bolts. Which ones are they? He finds the longer bolts and drives back to the plane. The next step is to grab a special tool called a torque wrench, which, when the bolt is tight enough, stops tightening and instead gives a click. Except that the torque wrench is missing from the tool store.

Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap! I should confess that I'm someone who has trouble putting up a bookshelf so that it stays straight and level at a height of 4 feet. I have both sympathy and admiration for the maintenance crews who keep an entire aeroplane in tip-top condition, able to keep straight and level at 30,000 feet. But the thought that one of them might be as fallible as I am, it's unnerving. Matt Parker, whose book Humble Pie, contains the definitive account of this sorry tale, writes,

I can really empathise with a guy. It wasn't even his job to replace the windshield, but because they were short staff that night and he was the manager, he stepped in to avoid further delays. Great. So, guys trying to replace the windshield. He doesn't have the right parts, he doesn't have the right tools, and it's not even his regular job. And did I mention that it's 4 o'clock in the morning? Guy returns to the plane with his next best option, a torque limiting screw driver. The trouble is, it needs an adapter, which doesn't fit,

which means that the adapter keeps falling out, and Guy keeps having to climb down from the maintenance platform and climb back up again. It also means he's having to use both hands for the job, which is awkward. Finally, Guy reaches for those six longer bolts. They don't fit. They have to be kidding me. In the end, Guy decides that the old bolts he'd decided to replace are probably fine.

It's now 5 o'clock in the morning. It's been a long night shift, but at least guy can head home to bed in the knowledge of a job well done. A day later, the 10th of June 1990, British airways flight 530, climbed off the runway at Birmingham Airport and turned south towards Malaga in Spain. There were 81 passengers on board and most of them were looking forward to a vacation on the Costa del Sol. As a plane climbs higher, the air pressure outside gets lower. The air inside is kept at a constant pressure,

so it pushes more and more firmly against the inside of the aircraft. There's a huge amount of pressure pushing out against the windshield. As BA 539T rose past 17,000 feet, Captain Tim Lancaster was relaxing and shrugging off his shoulder harness. He had no warning at all. There was a sudden mix, close to bang, and the windshield disappeared. The cabin almost instantly depressurized. Captain Lancaster was sucked out of his seat and out towards the freezing air above did-cocked oxygen. He would have disappeared just as quickly as the windshield,

had his legs not become tangled in the aircraft controls. Flight Stuart Nigel Ogden was opening the door to the flight deck to offer the Cruea Cup a tee. The door was ripped off its hinges and flew out of the gap where the windshield had been. Ogden just had time to see that Captain Lancaster was heading the same way. Instinctively he leaped forward and grabbed Lancaster's waist. But he gashed his hand badly as he did. And without the protection of the windshield, Ogden was now being blasted with air at

zero degrees Fahrenheit as he desperately tried to keep hold of Captain Lancaster's legs. The upper half of Lancaster's body was outside the plane and now in danger of disappearing into the slipstream. Through the side windshield Nigel Ogden could see the captain being buffeted against the outside of the plane. Lancaster's face was blooded, his eyes wide and cyclist. Meanwhile, the co-pilot Alistair Atchison was fortunately still in his shoulder harness. But when Tim Lancaster's legs had snagged in the controls, they'd switched off the autopilot.

The plane was now plummeting downwards at hundreds of miles an hour. Co-pilot Atchison was fighting to get the aircraft back under control while The plane was now plummeting downwards at hundreds of miles an hour. Copilot Atchison was fighting to get the aircraft back under control while coping with the wind and the lack of oxygen and the coal. At that kind of altitude, you really want to be wearing a thick coat, a hat and gloves. Atchison was dressed in short sleeves. So was flight steward Nigel Ogden. He was bleeding, freezing, and starting to lose his grip on Captain Lancaster. Other crew members rushed to help. There was

a hurried exchanger to whether they would have to let go of the captain's body. Never yelled Ogden, how would they look his widow in the eyes? Copilot Atchison had a more practical concern. He shouted that the body might hit the plane's engine. He urged them to hang on. Eventually, Atchison managed to level the plane at a lower altitude. The air became warmer and more breathable.

But he still had to get the plane on the ground. He was yelling at air traffic control, trying to be heard over the rush of the wind. They directed him to Southampton Airport on the South Coast of England. Atchison pointed out that the plane was heavy with fuel, so he'd need a long runway to be able to stop safely. As long as we have two and a half thousand meters, I'm happy, he said, Air traffic control gave him the bad news. Southampton's runway was 700 meters short of that. But under the circumstances, Atcherson didn't want to make any more detours.

Talk me down, he told Southampton control, I need all the help I can get and make sure the emergency crews are ready. Against the odds, Atcherson's landing was perfect. Bleeding and frostbitten, Nigel Ogden staggered back to help evacuate the passengers. None of them were hurt. Most of them elected to fly on to Malaga that afternoon. Ogden returned to the flight deck to find Captain Tim Lancaster lying on a paramedic stretcher. He was blooded and most of his clothes had been ripped off. But he was awake and asking when he could eat. was awake and asking when he could eat. Ogden slumped into a seat and began to sob with shock and relief.

Why had the aeroplanes brand new windshield popped off? It isn't hard to guess. The day before the flight, maintenance guy had grabbed the wrong bolts, hadn't he? He didn't have the A2117D bolts, he got himself a fistful of A2118Cs. Matt Parker, the author of Humble Pie, ordered himself both types of bolt just to take a look. They're astonishingly similar. The A21170 bolts have a slightly different thread, a fractionally shorter, and are one quarter of one tenth of an inch thicker, even in daylight with perfect eyesight, the difference is hard to spot. Guy was doing it in the dark without his glasses, but while a difference is subtle, that one quarter

of one tenth of an inch means that the bolts are slim enough to be ripped out once the air pressure outside is low enough. That is exactly what happened. But as Matt Parker explains, there's more going on here. Guy only chose the wrong bolts because the original's store wasn't properly stocked, and the back-up store was a poorly lit, poorly labeled mess. He didn't notice that the bolt didn't fit properly because he was using the wrong tool, which obscured his view. His torque limiting screwdriver was supposed to click when it reached the right tension, instead the misfitted bolts would slip in a way that apparently felt quite similar.

And the shift manager didn't check Guy's work, because Guy was the shift manager. Safety experts have a cute analogy to describe what's going on here. First proposed by James Reason, a psychologist and the author of many books about human error. James Reason's analogy is to imagine different safety measures as slices of Swiss cheese with holes in them. Line up, slice after slice of Swiss cheese, and usually the holes won't overlap. There'll be no holes that go all the way through the stack of cheese slices. In this analogy, the holes represent something going wrong. But usually when something goes wrong, there's some sort of fallback. The hole in one slice is covered by cheese from another slice. Or maintenance guy grabs the wrong bolts,

but with the proper tool and a better view he notices that the bolts are slipping or a supervisor checks the work and spots the problem. Mistakes turn into accidents when all the problems line up like all the slices of Swiss cheese having a hole in the same place. That's really bad luck, a million to one piece of bad luck. But sometimes, really bad luck strikes. If you were to put the Millennium Falcon in space, would it actually work as a spaceship? Why has Gothic become the hot new literary genre?

Is the role-playing game Warhammer basically lawyers playing with action figures? I'm Eric Molinsky, the host of Imaginary Worlds. Science fiction and fantasy stories may be set on other planets or parallel dimensions, but they're created by people in our world. Each episode, we examine these fantasy stories to learn what they can tell us about ourselves. I've talked with novelists like Andy Weir, who wrote the Martian, designers of games like Magic of the Gathering, writers of Hit TV shows like Star Trek Strange New Worlds,

and the puppeteer who designed Miss Piggy. You can subscribe to Imaginary Worlds, wherever you get your podcasts. worlds wherever you get your podcasts. I interviewed James Wieson a few years ago and he told me he's been thinking about his Swiss cheese analogy a little differently. The mistakes don't all have to line up simultaneously. Instead some mistakes cause lasting problems that nobody notices. They lurk in weight, never fixed. It's like that particular slice of Swiss cheese was nibbled away months ago, and nobody is realised.

For example, the rule that if the shift manager does the work, nobody checks it, that's an accident waiting to happen. So is the badly organised, badly stocked, badly lit spare parts store. And perhaps most profoundly, so is the existence of several subtly different types of bolt. The bolts are in labelled boxes, but they themselves aren't labelled, and they're almost indistinguishable. Yet put the wrong one in, and you have a problem. This confusion could be avoided. The entire windshield could have been designed to be fitted from the inside, so that the internal air pressure pushed it tighter against the hull.

More awkward perhaps, but safer. Failing that, new windshields could at least come pre-packaged as a kit with a set of the correct bolts. At the very least, each bolt could be stamped with a label. When the windshield was found, intact, in a field near Oxford, along with some of the bolts, it didn't take accident investigators long to figure out what had gone wrong. Broadly speaking, they blamed Guy, and the managers who should have been paying more attention to the way Guy and his colleagues were doing their jobs – fair enough. But they also discovered something else. When British airways had acquired the aircraft, the windshield was already fitted with the

wrong bolts. Instead of being slightly too slim, they were slightly too short. It's all a question of whether you fit the A2117D's, the A2118C's or the correct bolts, the A2118D or the correct bolts, the A2118Ts. Confused? Well, maintenance guy was. Anyway, it turns out that you can get away with bolts that are slightly too short.

But as Captain Tim Lancaster discovered, you can't get away with bolts that are too slim. You should also be nervous. After the accident, airlines started double checking the wind shields on this sort of plane. It turns out that BA5390 wasn't the only plane flying with the wrong bolts. Not by a long shot. One airline found that half the planes of this type had windshields fastened with bolts that were too short.

Maintenance guy had caused a terrifying accident but perhaps more unnerving were all those planes flying around the world with the wrong bolts installed. Captain Tim Lancaster had suffered frostbite and a broken arm, along with many cuts and bruises, but within a few months he had recovered. He continued flying for another 15 years before retiring. Nigel Ogden wasn't so lucky. He suffered a dislocated shoulder and a frostbitten eye.

But the real injury was to his peace of mind. He could never forget the experience of clinging on to what he assumed was a corpse, or the sight of Tim Lancaster's face, smashing against the window, eyes psychlessly staring. He retired early on the grounds of ill health and went to work for a charity. Given what we now know about all those planes and all those wrong bolts, I don't blame him. If you like stories of things going wrong, you'll love Matt Parker's book Humble Pie. For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at timhalford.com. Corsinary Tales is written by me, Tim Halford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan Dilly with support from Courtney Garino and Emily Vaughn. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal

Wise, Julia Barton edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Guthritch, Stella Hartford and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Mia Le Abel, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, John Schnarrs, Carly Miliori, Eric Sandler, Royston Besserv, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Marano, Daniela LeCarn, and Maya Canig. Corsionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review. Amazing sports stories. How exactly do you survive a race that's deliberately designed to break you physically, mentally and emotionally?

It's about the risk takers. I decided to climb the Himalayas all 14 pigs. And the game changers. I want to play like my brother. I want what he has. Amazing sports stories from the BBC World Service. The rules were holding her back, so she would have to rewrite them. Search for amazing sports stories wherever you get your BBC podcasts.