Getting the record right on Hannibal

Two weeks ago, I wrote a column urging people over 50 not to be too disconsolate about the future and to remember that their best achievements could yet lie ahead of them. In the process, I let drop the fact that Hannibal was older than 50 when he crossed the Alps.

You could not imagine what response I have had to that statement. From all sides, I have been bombarded with demands that I set the record straight.

There were telephone calls throughout the weekend. I discovered e-mails, in similar tone, in number on my computer. One reader, B M of Walmer, quoted alleged extracts from the Encyclopaedia Britannica to support his contention that Hannibal was only 29 at the time. He referred to a Second Punic War and the struggle of Carthage in which, he claimed, Hannibal was somehow instrumental in securing a victory.

B M of Walmer also described Hannibal as one of the best military strategists of all time!

There must be some confusion here. These people cannot be referring to Fred  Hannibal, with whom I shared a bedsitter in London those many years ago. It seems a clear case of mistaken identity.

If Fred ever was a military strategist, even on a small scale in his native town of Port Morgan, Australia, I’m sure he would have told me. We kept few secrets between us. Indeed, it was something of a problem just getting to sleep at night, so forthright did Fred Hannibal become after a few games of darts in the White Swan (or Mucky Duck, as the locals called it). Friday nights were the worst. Mainly, his frankness concerned past encounters with women.

But Fred never said a word about Carthage or any Punic Wars.

On another point, B M of Walmer. Since receiving your e-mail, I have looked up Carthage in The Times Atlas of the World. There are eleven such places, all of them in the United States, apart from a small town in Tunisia. Now, to my certain knowledge, Fred Hannibal never visited the United States. He had a typical Australian attitude to all things American. He wouldn’t even eat Big Macs – unless I was buying and he didn’t wish to offend me.

As to Fred Hannibal’s age. I can state quite categorically that he was more than 50 when he crossed the Alps. I know because he showed me his passport before we went our separate ways to the Continent, with an arrangement to meet at a youth hostel in Florence.

Fred was old for a Youth Hosteller but his size, five foot two, allowed him to take advantage of YHA facilities. Also, he submitted an old photograph when he applied for a YHA card. Hostel wardens, seeing this cherubic picture over the injunction to “pick wild flowers sparingly, if at all”, concluded that Fred had merely had a rough day getting there, on his bicycle.

What the YHA wardens didn’t know (and could not be allowed to, since many of them barred Hostellers with motor vehicles) was that Fred Hannibal also possessed an old Fordson van, in which he stowed his bicycle for all but the last few hundred yards before the next youth hostel. So he would park the van around a corner and arrive, suitably puffed, on his bike.

Fred’s scheme eventually backfired. Halfway up the Alps, while he was overnighting in a hostel at the little mountaineering resort of Ober-Ingenflushenheimer, the van slipped its handbrake and was never seen again.

So Fred Hannibal was actually forced to cross the Alps by bicycle and by the time he got back to London he looked more over 50 than ever (29 indeed, B M of Walmer!).

Incidentally, we never did meet in Florence. Fred apparently couldn’t find it, although he told me later he had passed through a place called Firenze.

A final thing, B M of Walmer. You state in your e-mail that the Hannibal of your acquaintance crossed the Alps with elephants? Come, come, B M of Walmer! Pull the other leg!

John Ryan’s Time Wounds All Heels column