Cross Your Fingers

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 947, 4 October 1957, Page 18

Cross Your Fingers

| AST month the 13th was a Friday; this month it falls on a Sunday. On October 13, ZB Sunday Showcase will look at some of our ideas on such dates, in Superstition with Rhyme and Reason.

Allan Sleeman, who produced the feature for the NZBS, did considerable research into the subject of superstitions, both ancient and modern, and attitudes to them. Belief in some, such as the evil eye, has now died out, but many people still refuse to walk under ladders. Bad luck has been associated with many actions, but perhaps its most persistent association has been with the number 13; As a date, the ill-luck is heightened in the eyes of the superstitious when it is associated with a Friday, thought to be unlucky itself as the day of the Crucifixion. Some people go out of their way to defy superstitions. In America and other parts of the world there are "13 Clubs," with 13 members who meet every Friday 13. Superstition with Rhyme and Reason makes no attempt to reveal the outcome of their defiance. But it does tell what happened when the British Admiralty set out, some years ago, to explode the time-honoured superstition of sailing men that Friday, 13th or not, was their particular jinx, The Admiralty, says Mr Sleeman, caused ‘the keel of a new ship to be laid on a Friday. They named the vessel Friday. She was launched on a Friday and set sail on a Friday from an English port. No one has heard of her since.