In Charles Dickens’s short story, “The Boarding

House”, Mr Tibbs is said to be, vis à vis his wife, what the 0 is in 90. He was of some importance with her but was nothing without her. She seldom allowed him even to finish a sentence. He would begin “I recollect when I was in the volunteer corps in 1806 . .” but he never got beyond that kind of introductory remark. His plight comes to mind as this space begins a retrospect of the years in other centuries that shared with ours the final two digits: 06. This ‘intro’ will interest some. Others will ‘log off’ now.

I had a late colleague who spoke of a century ago as “19 and 6”. Occasionally it was “ought-six” but never “oh-six”. He recalled it as the year when hydro-electricity from Niagara began to be used by the Toronto street railway. Hydro presaged, people said, an industrial boom that would drive the city’s population beyond 200,000.

This annual review, by an arbitrary decision, usually begins in the 6th Century A.D., then jumps to the 11th. In the year 506 the major power in the West was the Ostrogothic Emperor Theodoric who made Ravenna his capital. In Rome Pope Symmachus kept what order he could while in Constantinople Emperor Anastasius faced the threat of pre-Muslim Persia (Iran).

Far away China was in a confusion of dynasties that followed the stable Han period. The world as we have known it for 1500 years was on the drawing board.

In 1006 Britain’s Ethelred the Unready (i.e. poorly advised) was collecting what money he could, called Danegeld, to buy off the annual and murderous invaders from Denmark They landed and plundered inland from coastal or riverbank camps they called ‘wycks’. Thus there are places named Sandwich, Harwich, Ipswich, Aldwych far up the Thames and so on. As for Far Eastern history, it is worth noting that Islamic conquerors arrived in North India as the 11th Century began.

1106 saw Henry I, grandson of William the Conqueror, on the throne of England, the political Motherland of both Canada and the U.S.A. It would be a good thing to better understand the common development of our institutions and to teach our children to appreciate it instead of romanticising our disputes and battles. Trial by jury and the rounds of circuit judges who laid the groundwork for Henry II’s Common Law were making their appearance. Arbitrary rule by rapacious regional barons was dying out. With less happy results the Bishops of Rome began to style themselves “Vicars of Christ” rather than being content with the older title, “Vicar of St. Peter”. Indeed, the first major Church schism (1054) between East and West was almost 50 years old.

By 1206 the legendary Mongolian prince, Genghis Khan (‘Perfect Warrior’), was riding off in all directions, invading both China and Europe. He was the Asiatic Alexander, one of the greatest conquerors in history. As with his ancient European counterpart, his degenerate successors squandered his positive achievements while disseminating Mongolian genes and tyranny far into what is now Russia. The year 1306 saw Robert Bruce crowned king of the Scots. England’s Edward I, “the Hammer of the Scots”, had died and been succeeded by the ‘gay’ Edward II. Soon, at Bannockburn in 1314, Bruce would rout the English. Scotland would be independent for another three centuries. There are those who liken Scotland’s relations with England to those between Canada and the United States. Does that suggest an eventual zollverein, even a marriage de convenace? Or shall we pass immediately to regional ‘devolution’ in a Parliament (or Congress) of North America in which both are represented? By 2106 we should know.

1406 seems to have been an uneventful year except, perhaps, for the fact that it fell in the time of the Great Schism in the Western Church, 13871417. With one pope already resident in Avignon, Gregory XII was elected in Rome in 1406. Little interested in spiritual matters, he eventually resigned and before long there were three popes issuing mutual anathemas. It is an interesting story for those who, as Abraham Lincoln said with reference to something else, are interested in that sort of thing. It explains much subsequent church history.

Forwarding to 1506, one finds a Dominican friar, Johann Tetzel, selling ‘indulgencies’, post-mortem pardons from penance left incomplete during a lifetime. Martin Luther would soon raise the protest, dubbed ‘protestantism’, the long-awaited culmination of synodical decrees and popular discontent that had been exercising the Western Church for four centuries. Sadly, reforms are accomplished at snail’s pace. In 1606 modern Europe was in process of formation. Its nation states were in gestation. England’s Elizabeth I was dead, France’s five-year old Louis XIII lived under the regency of his mother, Marie de Medici. One might say that America as we know it was being born as the groundwork for the first ‘world war’ that included Europe, the Americas and the Far East was being laid.

In 1706 Benjamin Franklin, son of an immigrant from Banbury, Oxfordshire, was born, 300 years ago on January 6 in Boston, Mass., the 15th of his father’s 17 children. Later that year John Evelyn, the diarist, died and the Sun fire brigade was formed in London. If a burning building did not bear the Sun symbol it kept on burning. Mercifully for those who travelled London streets, Henry Mill invented carriage springs that year, the first vehicular suspension system. A part of each of us is in his debt.

1806 saw the British occupation of the Cape of Good Hope. Before Suez it was the last port of call en route to India. That year, also, Napoleon closed all European ports to British shipping. The Royal Navy’s necessary interference with French and U.S. vessels in the Atlantic would exacerbate problems with both republics and lead to the War of 1812.

By 1906 hostilities with Germany were all but guaranteed and the pattern of the 20th Century was set. The first radio broadcast of words and music was made in “America” and Norway’s Roald Amundsen ‘discovered’ the magnetic North Pole.

Now comes 2006 and the asyet undiscovered.