Did It Actually Happen?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 422, 25 July 1947, Page 9

Did It Actually Happen?

T is a pity to seem always harping on one string, and I thought I had finished with This Actually Happened, but one of the latest episodes clamoured for comment, It explained, in brief, that the Boxer Rebellion was actually engendered by three American newspaper reporters! These young men, typical of the sort of reporter who tips his hat back at you from so many screens, seem to have gathered just before~ deadline in a saloon (bar to you) without the necessary story for the papers they, respectively, represented. They thereupon concocted a tale about some imaginary engineers of the white race who were intending to tear down the Great Wall of China, at the request of the Pekin Government, which intended the gesture to represent the lowering of barriers between China and the other nations. This story got into the Chinese papers, and the next thing we heard in the radio episode was a_ sing-song voice addressing the populace in pidgin English and exhorting them to up and slay the Foreign Devils who intended such sacrilege: Hence, and for no other reason (one gathered), the Boxer Rebellion. A very neat story, altogether; but there was no atom of proof in the radio version that it ever Actually Happened. Possibly it did (the hoax, I mean), but I imagine there were other contributory causes to the uprising. And a few more ‘names, dates, and crossreferences would certainly help the veracity of these programmes.