title: Doro (musician)

text: Dorothee Pesch was born in Düsseldorf, West Germany on 3 June 1964, as the only child of Walter, a truck driver, and Barbara Pesch. Doro's first memory of rock music is the song "Lucille" by Little Richard, which she sang when she was three years old. She learned to play piano and started singing at the age of ten years, when she was exposed to the glam rock of bands like T. Rex, The Sweet and Slade. When she was sixteen and after a life-threatening form of tuberculosis, she decided to dedicate more of her time and energy to singing, without giving up her study of graphic design. In 1980, she was accepted in her first band called Snakebite, which was playing rock music in a Düsseldorf basement used as rehearsal space by many other underground groups. The first recording with Doro on vocals was a cheap 7-track demo released by Snakebite for promotion. When Snakebite disbanded in 1981, Doro went on to sing for the garage bands Beast and Attack, before forming Warlock with Peter Szigeti, Rudy Graf, Thomas Studier, and Michael Eurich in 1982.


title: Doro (musician)

text: Warlock signed their first recording contract with Mausoleum Records and released their debut album "Burning the Witches" in 1984. Doro attracted immediately the attention of fans and press, becoming the spokesperson and the main means of promotion for the band. The mix of traditional heavy metal and power ballads, together with her voice and stage presence led Warlock to success, an exception in the 80s' metal scene dominated by male-fronted metal bands. Warlock signed a new contract with the major label Phonogram and released the albums "Hellbound" in 1985 and "True as Steel" in 1986, sharing the stage of European rock festivals with some of the best hard rock and heavy metal bands of the period. On 16 August 1986, Doro was the first woman to front a metal band at the Monsters of Rock festival in Castle Donington, England, the most important European rock meeting of the 80s. Warlock's long tours in Europe, supporting W.A.S.P. and Judas Priest, pushed Doro to give up her day job as a graphic designer to devote her life to music. In this period she also received vocal coaching.


title: Doro (musician)

text: After the completion of the tour in support of "True as Steel", Doro took charge of business and went to live in New York City, where Warlock recorded their fourth and last studio album "Triumph and Agony". The album was their most successful, going Gold in Germany and reaching No. 80 in the "Billboard" 200 US album chart. It includes the songs "All We Are" and "Für immer" (Forever), Warlock's best known tracks, also because of the intense rotation of their videos on MTV. Warlock opened for Dio in Europe and embarked on their only US tour, supporting Megadeth. At the end of the US tour, Doro remained the sole German in the band after all the other original members had quit, replaced by American musicians. In 1989, while writing material for the follow-up to "Triumph and Agony", she lost a legal cause with the band's former manager for the rights to the name and merchandise of Warlock. Her record label forced her to accept the publication of new albums under the name Doro, in order to continue her career. Doro persevered in the legal battle for the Warlock name and eventually regained the rights in 2011.


title: Doro (musician)

text: What was initially intended as the fifth Warlock album resulted in "Force Majeure", the first Doro album, released in February 1989. It was recorded in the US by Joey Balin, and is the natural successor of "Triumph and Agony", continuing the band's drift towards radio-friendly glam metal in contrast with the European power metal of Warlock's earlier works. The album sold quite well in Europe, but it had limited success in the US, lurking at the bottom of the Billboard 200 chart.


title: Doro (musician)

text: Following the tour to promote "Force Majeure", the final Warlock line-up disbanded and Doro concentrated on her solo career. She decided to keep her Swiss manager Alex Grob, but renounced to be part of a band with whom to share songwriting duties and career decisions. She contacted KISS bassist and childhood idol Gene Simmons, who was taking a second career as talent scout and record producer. Simmons was willing to start a collaboration and produced the album "Doro", with the help of Black 'n Blue guitarist Tommy Thayer and Pat Regan. "Doro" was recorded in California with large use of writers and session musicians from the KISS entourage. Doro recently declared that Simmons "was the best producer we ever had!"


title: Doro (musician)

text: A band formed by the American musicians Thomas Jude on guitars, Paul Morris on keyboards, Nick Douglas on bass and Tom Coombs on drums was assembled for the supporting tour. "Doro" was a more commercial offering than the previous album, but resulted in a flop in the US. On the contrary, it sold well in Europe, accelerating PolyGram's decision to interrupt the publication of Doro's albums in America, where the commercial appeal of glam metal and classic rock acts was rapidly declining in favor of grunge and alternative rock. Doro concluded 1990 playing some dates in Germany, opening for Scorpions.


title: Doro (musician)

text: The German singer experimented a new direction for her music in 1991, when she recorded the album "True at Heart" in country music haven Nashville, Tennessee, with local musicians and mainstream producer Barry Beckett. Dann Huff of the melodic hard rock band Giant contributed his lead guitar work to the album. New band members Michael Tyrrell on guitar, Jeff Bruno on guitar and keyboards, and Tony Mac on drums were recruited for the following European tour.


title: Doro (musician)

text: Despite living in the US and losing visibility in the English-spoken media, Doro remained very popular in Germany, where her albums always charted and where in 1991 she sang on a charity song by the "German Rock Project" called "Let Love Conquer the World".


title: Doro (musician)

text: Returning in the US after the European tour, Doro was put in contact with Jack Ponti, a mainstream songwriter and producer from New Jersey, to work on her next two albums. Ponti at the time was the producer of some minor glam metal acts and the A&R manager of Skid Row and Nelson. The album "Angels Never Die", released in 1993, was produced and largely written and performed by Ponti himself and Vic Pepe with the help of various session musicians. It contains a mix of melodic hard rock songs and power ballads, typical of the commercial pop metal albums of the period. The album had limited success in Europe, but the video for the song "Bad Blood" was voted Best Anti-Racism Video during the first MTV Europe Music Awards ceremony in 1994. The tour in support of "Angels Never Die" introduced in the line-up of Doro's band the American musicians Joe Taylor (ex-Lita Ford Band) on lead guitar, Jimmy DiLella (ex-Waysted, Mariah and Tyketto) on guitar and keyboards, and Chris Branco on drums; Branco was soon replaced by Johnny Dee (ex-Waysted and Britny Fox) and this line-up recorded in 1993 the live album "Doro Live", released also in VHS. Doro headlined her first Wacken Open Air festival on 20 August 1993.


title: Doro (musician)

text: "Machine II Machine", the second album produced by Jack Ponti, was created through the collaborative efforts of musicians with very different musical backgrounds. The result is an album that explores new grounds for Doro, bringing her sound closer to mainstream rock music. "Machine II Machine" was mixed by Kevin Shirley and released in 1995. It was her last studio album published by PolyGram/Vertigo, finally fulfilling the ten-year contract with the label that Warlock had signed in 1985. PolyGram did not renovate her contract and Doro entered in negotiations with other record labels. Russ Irwin and Frank Ferrer replaced respectively DiLella and Dee for the following tour. In a pause of her touring schedule in October 1995, Doro made her acting debut as a guest star on the German television soap opera "Verbotene Liebe" (Forbidden Love). In various interviews Doro remembered how "it was pretty difficult to carry on" as a heavy metal musician in those years and how she was sometimes reduced to odd jobs like singing at weddings and private parties.


title: Doro (musician)

text: Doro signed a worldwide contract with the major record label WEA (now Warner Music Group) at the end of 1995 and started writing new material with Jürgen Engler and Chris Lietz of the German industrial metal and EBM band Die Krupps, who she had met while working on remixes of songs from "Machine II Machine". Doro also worked on other songs with Jimmy Harry and Fred Maher in the US. The resulting album, titled "Love Me in Black", took three years to be completed and features a massive use of electronics and drum machines, along with a heavier sound than its predecessors. WEA judged the album unsuitable for the US market and published it only in Germany. American guitarist Mario Parrillo (ex-Detente and Fear of God) joined Taylor, Douglas and the returning Johnny Dee in Doro's band for the following tour, which included another participation at the Wacken Open Air festival.


title: Doro (musician)

text: After the "Love Me in Black" tour in 1998, Doro parted ways with WEA, unsatisfied of the scarce promotion that the album had received, and signed with the German label SPV/Steamhammer. Through the decisive action of her American fan club, she also received and accepted a proposal from Koch Records for a US deal.


title: Doro (musician)

text: In 2000, the album "Calling the Wild" was published in two different versions in Europe and in the US, with the latter containing also re-recorded and remixed versions of songs from "Love Me in Black". The tracks of "Calling the Wild" are played by a large number of session musicians and feature contributions from Bob Kulick, Slash, Al Pitrelli and Eric Singer. The album includes the songs "Love Me Forever" and "Alone Again", recorded in California with the leader of the English band Motörhead Ian 'Lemmy' Kilminster, starting a tradition of singing duets that Doro maintained for all the 2000s and beyond. The music of "Calling the Wild" is straight hard rock and heavy metal, in Doro's words going "from super heavy to super sensitive with good messages", and leaves behind the experimental twists of her works of the 1990s. The song "Burn It Up" was written to be the anthem of the Düsseldorf–based NFL Europe American football team Rhein Fire.


title: Doro (musician)

text: At the beginning of the century heavy metal was regaining the favors of the public worldwide and Doro made her comeback in the US with a date at New Jersey Metal Meltdown II festival in March. She then started her first US tour in ten years supporting Dio and Yngwie Malmsteen, and received a very warm welcome from the audience. Doro's band toured also in Europe, visiting Russia for the first time, and Pesch made a guest appearance at Wacken Open Air 2001 for a duet with Sabina Classen of the German thrash metal band Holy Moses on the song "Too Drunk to Fuck".


title: Doro (musician)

text: While touring with Dio in the US in late 2000, Mario Parrillo fell ill and died a short time later from an undiagnosed form of cancer. Oliver Palotai, a young German-Hungarian classically trained musician, took his place on guitar and keyboards in Doro's band after the end of the tour.


title: Doro (musician)

text: Doro was again in a recording studio to produce her eighth studio album, titled "Fight", in 2002. Before the album release, she played, among others, at the two largest German metal festivals, Wacken Open Air and Bang Your Head. The new album was the first to feature the creative contribution of all the members of her touring band, who played in all the tracks. Guest musicians on the album were Jean Beauvoir, Chris Caffery, Russ Ballard and Type O Negative singer Peter Steele, who sang in a duet with Doro on "Descent". The song "Always Live to Win" replaced "Burn It Up" as Rhein Fire's anthem, while the song "Fight" was the first of four anthems composed by Doro and used to introduce the fights of her friend and German female boxing champion Regina Halmich (the others are "She's Like Thunder", "The Queen" and a new version of "All We Are"). Because of her friendship with Halmich, Doro was involved in an exhibition match on German RTL Television, which opposed her to Michaela Schaffrath.


title: Doro (musician)

text: By 2003, both fans, press and internet community had often referred to Doro with the moniker Metal Queen, to show their respect and deference for the uninterrupted career of the German singer on the heavy metal scene. During her European tour with Saxon, Bonfire and Circle II Circle, Doro organized a special concert at Phillips Halle in Düsseldorf to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the release of her first album, "Burning the Witches", and invited many musicians that she had befriended and collaborated with in her career. On 13 December 2003, she performed in front of more than 6,000 people with guests Blaze Bayley, Udo Dirkschneider, Lemmy, Mikkey Dee, Jean Beauvoir, Claus Lessmann and members of Saxon and Circle II Circle. During the show, Doro played three songs with her former bandmates of Warlock, in their line-up of 1986. The concert was released on a double DVD in 2006 with the title "20 Years – A Warrior Soul".


title: Doro (musician)

text: The long world tour to promote "Fight" brought Doro for the first time in some countries of Eastern Europe, in Australia and Thailand. Live footage from that tour was published in the double DVD "Für Immer" of 2003, which went Gold in Germany. She also held two concerts in Germany with a full symphonic orchestra, where she converted her rock songs to new acoustic and classical versions. These new live experiences pushed her to experiment the recording of a full acoustic and symphonic album, containing both new and re-arranged songs. The production of "Classic Diamonds" took eight months, requiring a thirty-elements symphonic orchestra and the arranging abilities of Oliver Palotai and producer Torsten Sickert to be completed. The album was released by AFM Records in September 2004, and Doro went on tour in Europe with her usual touring band and elements of the orchestra to offer semi-acoustic shows. The tour had started with a live performance of Doro and the Classic Night Orchestra at Wacken Open Air 2004, the first time ever of a full symphonic orchestra at the renowned German metal festival. Her acoustic performance included also a duet with Blaze Bayley on the Iron Maiden song "Fear of the Dark". In the same night, Doro was reunited again with her bandmates of Warlock to perform their old songs.


title: Doro (musician)

text: The EP "Let Love Rain on Me", containing single versions of songs from "Classic Diamonds", was an unexpected hit in Spain, where it reached No. 7 in the Singles chart.


title: Doro (musician)

text: In 2004, Doro recorded with actor Dirk Bach a metal version of the song "Gimme Gimme Gimme" and performed it live on stage on the ABBA Mania Show of German RTL Television.


title: Doro (musician)

text: Doro Pesch was cast as the warrior Meha in the prehistoric action movie "Anuk-Der Weg des Kriegers" (Anuk-The Way of the Warrior), written, directed and interpreted by Luke Gasser and shot in Switzerland in 2005. The film was released in 2006 and features also Marc Storace, lead singer of the Swiss hard rock band Krokus. During the period of shooting, she wrote and recorded new songs in Switzerland with local session musicians and the production of Gasser, who used three of those songs for the soundtrack of the movie. More songs were recorded in Germany in the spare time between tours with her band and usual collaborators, and released in 2006 in the album "Warrior Soul". The screenplay for a second movie with the same cast was written in the following years and Gasser finally found the funding to start production in 2012.


title: Doro (musician)

text: In the same year, Doro Pesch contributed to the benefit CD for the museum association of Borussia Dortmund the song entitled "Tief in meinem Herzen" (Deep in My Heart), a modified version of her classic "Für Immer" re-written for this purpose. She also did a live performance at the Westfalen Stadium before a game of Borussia Dortmund and was one of the first visitors in Borusseum, when it opened. Her father was a fan of Borussia, she said in an interview with the spokesperson of the BVB.


title: Doro (musician)

text: In the following tour Doro was present at various festivals around the world. Among them, the band headlined the very first female-fronted metal US festival Flight of the Valkyries on 27 June 2007 in Saint Paul, Minnesota. They were also at the Summer Breeze Open Air festival in Dinkelsbühl, Bavaria in August 2007, at the fifth edition of the Metal Female Voices Fest in Wieze, Belgium on 19 October 2007, where she dueted with Sabina Classen on "All We Are", and at the Heavy Christmas Meeting on 15 December 2007 in Düsseldorf. In July 2008, they were at the Magic Circle Festival in Bad Arolsen, Germany and at Hard Rock Hell in Prestatyn, Wales on 5 December 2008. Doro's band visited for the first time China in November 2008. Chris Caffery replaced Joe Taylor on lead guitar for some US dates in 2007, and also Oliver Palotai had to be replaced in various tour dates by Italian guitarist Luca Princiotta, because of his multiple commitments with Blaze, Kamelot and Sons of Seasons.


title: Doro (musician)

text: Both Taylor and Palotai were in the band on 13 December 2008 at the more than three-hour special concert that Doro held at ISS Dome in Düsseldorf to celebrate her 25th anniversary of activity in front of 9,000 spectators. The show was introduced by performances of the bands Holy Moses, Leaves' Eyes and Arch Enemy. The main part began with songs from Doro's career, including duets with Bobby Ellsworth (Overkill), Jean Beauvoir, Chris Boltendahl (Grave Digger), Axel Rudi Pell, Klaus Meine and Rudolf Schenker (Scorpions), Tarja Turunen (ex-Nightwish), Warrel Dane (Nevermore), Liv Kristine, Floor Jansen, Ji-In Cho, Girlschool and other female singers who had sung in the single "Celebrate", issued a few months before the show. The show included another reunion of the 1986 formation of Warlock and culminated with all the guests, other musicians (like Alexander Krull, Tom Angelripper, members of Saltatio Mortis) and friends of the German singer on stage to sing "All We Are". The event was recorded and released in 2010 in the double DVD "25 Years in Rock... and Still Going Strong" by Nuclear Blast, Doro's new record label.


title: Doro (musician)

text: A few days after the show and despite a precarious health state due to strong eye inflammation, Doro was in Tilburg, the Netherlands, to participate at the first edition of Christmas Metal Symphony, where she sang accompanied by a band of Dutch metal musicians and by a symphonic orchestra.


title: Doro (musician)

text: Doro's album "Fear No Evil" was released in January 2009 and entered in many charts all over Europe. It was her last collaboration with guitarist Joe Taylor, who left to join Cycle of Pain. His place in the band was taken by the Dutch guitarist Bas Maas (ex-After Forever). The line-up of Pesch, Maas, Princiotta, Douglas and Dee went on a world tour for most of 2009 and 2010, reaching North and South America, Russia, China and, for the first time, Japan. Doro supported Saxon in their 2009 UK tour and Motörhead in Germany in 2010. During this prolonged time on the road, guitarist Princiotta was sometimes substituted by Robert Katrikh or by Harrison Young. Doro's band appeared at festivals all over the world, including Wacken Open Air and Metal Female Voices Fest 7 (where she dueted again with Tarja Turunen) in 2009, Hellfest in France, Bang Your Head!!! in Germany and Bloodstock Open Air in Great Britain in 2010.


title: Doro (musician)

text: In 2009, she wrote the Wacken anthem "We Are the Metalheads" for the 20th anniversary of Wacken Open Air festival. The song was released as single on 30 July 2009 and was performed by Doro Pesch and Wacken-organizer Thomas Jensen's ex-band Skyline.


title: Doro (musician)

text: On 13 March 2010, Doro celebrated her 2500th live show with a special concert in Düsseldorf with guests Krypteria, Luke Gasser, Marc Storace, Schmier (from the band Destruction), Sabina and Andy Classen. Always in 2010, Doro, Schmier, Mille Petrozza (Kreator) and Alf Ator (Knorkator) lent their voices to the German version of "Metalocalypse", the US animated show about Dethklok, the world's most popular death metal band.


title: Doro (musician)

text: Doro was again on tour in 2011 and participated at Metal Female Voices Fest 9. She also toured Spain and Italy as guest vocalist for the tribute band Dio Disciples, formed by musicians of the band Dio which performed songs taken from the long career of the late Ronnie James Dio. In 2010, she had already participated in Germany to a tribute benefit concert for the Stand Up and Shout Cancer foundation for cancer research, which celebrated the life and work of Dio.


title: Doro (musician)

text: In 2012 she recorded in the US, Germany and Scandinavia songs for a new album titled "Raise Your Fist", released in October. The first single "Raise Your Fist in the Air" was released in August 2012.


title: Doro (musician)

text: To celebrate her 30th stage anniversary, Doro held a two-day concert at CCD Stadthalle in her hometown of Düsseldorf on 2 and 3 May 2014. She was accompanied by the Classic Night Orchestra for the first show. Guest singers included Biff Byford, Chris Caffery, Udo Dirkshneider, Blaze Bayley, Marc Storace, Tom Angelripper, Mr Lordi and Hansi Kürsch. Also the Lordi-guitarist Amen was featured on the show on 2 May.


title: Doro (musician)

text: Doro continued touring and had more celebratory shows in the following years, although with less tight schedules than in the past. She released her first album in six years, "Forever Warriors - Forever United", on 17 August 2018, entering in many charts worldwide.


title: Doro (musician)

text: By November 2019, Doro had begun writing new material for her fourteenth album. Her new single "Brickwall" was released digitally on 26 June 2020, with a vinyl version to be released on 31 July. The song is expected appear on her new album, which was due for release in 2021, though it was later pushed back to 2022.


title: Doro (musician)

text: On 13 June 2020, Doro performed at the CARantena-Arena in Worms, Germany, becoming the first heavy metal artist to hold a drive-in concert during the COVID-19 pandemic. She remarked, "Over the last few weeks I've really missed my fans and also my band. The drive-in show has been a real unique experience and career highlight for me. It feels great to rock out together again. Hopefully, we can soon enjoy normal shows again as well."


title: Doro (musician)

text: Doro Pesch is well known in the metal scene for her many duets with both expert singers and new artists. The duets started to indulge the wish of the German singer to work with artists that she admired and that had influenced her. She found the amicable availability of many musicians she had met in her career to contribute to her albums and live performances and, as an exchange of favors between singers, she appeared both in live shows and in studio albums of those same artists. This happened, for example, with Udo Dirkschneider in the rock ballad "Dancing with an Angel" and with Twisted Sister on the song "White Christmas" on their album "A Twisted Christmas" of 2004.


title: Doro (musician)

text: Also new bands and artists requested Doro's vocals to enhance their productions, usually with the same mechanism of reciprocity, like After Forever on the song "Who I Am" and Tarja Turunen on the song "The Seer". Both After Forever's singer Floor Jansen and Turunen appeared also as guest singers in Doro's albums and live shows. The band Krypteria, which had opened for Doro in the tours of 2009 and 2010, obtained a duet with Ji-In Cho on their song "Victoria" in a similar way.


title: Doro (musician)

text: Frequent occasions for live duets happen during tours, such as the 2010 European tour with Motörhead, when Doro and Lemmy used to perform the band's famous tunes like for instance "Killed by Death" and "Born to Raise Hell", or with Saxon in 2011 when performing Saxon's song "Denim & Leather".


title: Doro (musician)

text: More recently, Doro has contributed to the song "A Dream That Cannot Be" by Swedish melodic death metal band Amon Amarth, on their album "Jomsviking", released in 2016.


title: Doro (musician)

text: In the 1980s the presence of women in rock, and in particular in heavy metal bands, was usually considered by press and fans more for glamour and sexual exploitation than for the musicianship showed. Doro Pesch was one of the few exceptions; her qualities as vocalist and songwriter in Warlock, her commitment in promoting their music and her avoidance of posturing as a sex symbol won the respect of a solid fan base in the expanding European metal scene of that period, ensuring a long string of favorable articles and covers on the principal European metal magazines. In an interview in 2006 Doro remembered how "we lived in paradise and had not noticed it, (...) we thought at the time, that now it goes on and on and the success would continue automatically, (...) then came the great awakening".


title: Doro (musician)

text: Warlock were starting to make a solid reputation in the US, when the taste of the audience for classic metal acts shifted in favor of grunge, leaving the singer's mission to conquer the American market incomplete. On the contrary, in her home country fans and press remained always loyal and favorable to Doro, who received in her career five nominations for the German Echo music award, which she won in 1994 as Best National Female Artist.


title: Doro (musician)

text: Her frequent European tours in the 1990s maintained her visibility in the eyes of the fans and granted her enough income to survive the bleak period. She became so popular in Spain that she was voted for 13 times Best International Singer by the readers of the music magazine "Heavy Rock" in their annual polls. She often declared to live and tour for the fans and said that she "would never cancel a tour and everybody knows that about me". Lemmy, in a 2003 interview, testified how professional Doro is.


title: Doro (musician)

text: With the return of heavy metal in the charts worldwide and the diffusion on the internet of hundreds of webzines and fanzines dedicated to hard rock, Doro became again a star of the metal scene, highly requested all over the world and treated by the media as a revered veteran and inspiration for new female singers. Her career and commitment are held in high esteem by the new generation of female heavy metal singers. As Floor Jansen of After Forever stated in a 2007 interview, to duet with Doro "was a huge honor and we chose her because she was a pioneer of the female fronted scene". Doro herself was apparently aware early in her career to have the role "to give other women self-confidence" in the metal world, acting as a pioneer for female fans and musicians.


title: Doro (musician)

text: As further evidence of her influence on the heavy metal scene, in December 2008 Pure Steel Records released "Tribute to Steel: A Tribute to Warlock", the first official tribute album to Warlock and Doro; the album includes contributions from bands like Custard, Crystal Viper, Sabaton and Lonewolf, paying homage to the songs of Doro's first four albums with the participation of Warlock's original members.


title: Doro (musician)

text: Doro Pesch has always been very reserved and careful in protecting her privacy off-stage. She consciously chose to not get married or have children in order to dedicate all of her time to her musical career and her fans. The lyrics of the song "You Are My Family", which opens the album "Warrior Soul", exemplify this decision. After the death of her father in 2000, her mother Barbara manages the Doro fan club.


title: Doro (musician)

text: She has homes in Düsseldorf, Germany and on Long Island, New York, where she usually resided when not on tour, until her house was destroyed by Hurricane Irene in August 2011. She received her green card to live and work in the US in 1991. Doro owns, together with former Die Krupps members Chris Lietz and Jürgen Engler, Atom H recording studios in Düsseldorf, where she has recorded some of her albums.


title: Doro (musician)

text: Doro is a vegan. Her stage clothes are handmade, following models she designs and using synthetic materials which imitate leather, in line with her relationship with PETA. She also supports the non-profit organization Terre des Femmes, which helps women and girls in need all over the world. Doro has been a trained Thai boxer, a sport that she started practicing in 1995. She enjoys graphic arts and painting.


title: Undeclared

text: Undeclared is an American sitcom created by Judd Apatow, which aired on Fox during the 2001–02 season. The show has developed a cult following, and in 2012, "Entertainment Weekly" listed it at #16 in the "25 Best Cult TV Shows from the Past 25 Years".


title: Undeclared

text: The half-hour comedy was Judd Apatow's follow-up to an earlier television series he worked on, "Freaks and Geeks", which also lasted for one season. "Undeclared" centers on a group of college freshmen at the fictional University of Northeastern California. Unlike "Freaks and Geeks", it is set contemporaneously (early 2000s) rather than the early 1980s.


title: Undeclared

text: Numerous actors from "Freaks and Geeks" appeared on "Undeclared" portraying new characters, including Rogen, Segel, Levine, Starr, Phillips, and Melnick, among several others.


title: Undeclared

text: When first shown on network television, many episodes were aired out of order, much to Apatow's dismay. When originally released on DVD, the episodes were presented in their production order, which was a mistake according to Apatow. However, newer versions of the DVD present the episodes in the correct chronological order, restoring all storylines and character developments. In addition, an alternate version of the second episode, titled "Full Bluntal Nugety" is included on the DVD release of the series.


title: Undeclared

text: The DVD contains the script to an unproduced episode, "Lloyd's Rampage" (written by Lewis Morton), which was written for the show's second season. It revolves around Lloyd getting into a fight with Kieran, the star student of his acting class, and deciding that he wants to experience real life. So, Steven and Lloyd go to a bar and end up in a fight with some working-class men, which impresses Kieran when Lloyd tells him about it. A subplot revolves around Marshall getting extremely drunk and throwing up in a bar. When he is throwing up, Perry takes a picture and video, and makes T-shirts and posters and puts them around campus. Marshall is embarrassed at first, but he is glad when he finds out about all of the attention that he gets as "Puke Dude". Unfortunately for him, this doesn't last long when everyone forgets about him after another student defecates in his pants in the library. Perry's last name is revealed to be Madison in this episode. The role of Kieran was written for "That '70s Show" star Topher Grace, but he never appeared in the episode because of a dispute between Apatow and "That '70s Show" co-creator Mark Brazill.


title: Undeclared

text: During a question-and-answer session, Judd Apatow stated that if the series had been picked up for a second season, there would have been an episode titled "Eric's Birthday" in which Lizzie and Steven would go to the birthday party mentioned in episode "Eric's POV". Linda Cardellini of "Freaks and Geeks" would have played his new girlfriend. In the episode, Eric would have had a cake with a picture of him and his new girlfriend printed on it. Lizzie would have been given the piece with Eric's new girlfriend's face. At the time, Segel and Cardellini were dating.


title: Undeclared

text: In June 2010, it was announced that the Independent Film Channel had acquired the rights to air both "Undeclared" and "Freaks and Geeks". "Undeclared" premiered on IFC on November 5, 2010. Both "Undeclared" and "Freaks and Geeks" began rerunning on the TeenNick network on June 13, 2011. Netflix also had "Undeclared" (in the past) and had the episodes in their original chronological order.


title: Undeclared

text: On August 16, 2005, Shout! Factory and DreamWorks Home Entertainment released the complete series of "Undeclared" on DVD in Region 1. The four-disc boxed set contains all 17 episodes, including an unaired episode and a bonus director's cut.


title: Undeclared

text: According to Apatow, the producers were unable to get clearance for all the music in the series (not being able to use about 10 songs). Since the uncleared songs were considered to not play a significant role in the series, they were switched with a suitable substitute.


title: Undeclared

text: "Undeclared" received critical acclaim from television critics. On Metacritic, the series earned a score of 85 out of 100, based on 24 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". On Rotten Tomatoes, it has an approval rating of 93% with an average score of 8.18/10 based on reviews from 30 critics. The website's critical consensus reads, ""Undeclared" lives in the shadow of its Apatow-produced predecessor but still delivers an insightful and sweet year of self-discovery on campus."


title: Undeclared

text: In 2020, Briana Kranich of "Screen Rant" named "Undeclared" as one of the "10 Most Underrated Shows Of the Noughties".


title: Richard Garriott

text: Richard Allen Garriott de Cayeux ("né" Garriott; born July 4, 1961) is an American video game developer, entrepreneur and private astronaut. Although both his parents were American, he maintains dual British and American citizenship by birth.


title: Richard Garriott

text: Garriott, who is the son of NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, was originally a game designer and programmer, and is now involved in a number of aspects of computer-game development. On October 12, 2008, Garriott flew aboard the Soyuz TMA-13 mission to the International Space Station as a space tourist, returning 12 days later aboard Soyuz TMA-12. He became the second space traveler, and first from the United States, to have a parent who was also a space traveler. During his ISS flight, he filmed a science fiction movie "Apogee of Fear".


title: Richard Garriott

text: The creator of the "Ultima" game series, Garriott was involved in all games in the series, and directly supervised all eleven main installments, starting with 1979's "" and concluding with 1999's ""; the series is considered influential, notably helping with establishing the computer role-playing game genre. He founded the video game development company Portalarium in 2009. He was CEO of Portalarium and creative director of "" until 2018 when he shed the title, later relinquishing all "Shroud of the Avatar" assets to Catnip Games in 2019.


title: Richard Garriott

text: Richard Allen Garriott was born in Cambridge, England on 4 July 1961, to Helen Mary () Garriott (1930–2017) and Owen Garriott, one of NASA's first scientist-astronauts (selected in NASA Astronaut Group 4), who flew on Skylab 3 and Space Shuttle mission STS-9. His parents had been high school sweethearts growing up in Enid, Oklahoma. Although both his parents were Americans, Garriott claims dual citizenship for both the United States and the United Kingdom by birth.


title: Richard Garriott

text: Garriott was raised in Nassau Bay, Texas from the age of about two months. Since his childhood, he had dreamed of becoming a NASA astronaut like his father. Eyesight problems discovered at the age of 13 blocked his ambition, however, so he instead came to focus on computer game development.


title: Richard Garriott

text: Garriott's "first real exposure to computers" occurred in 1975, during his freshman year at Clear Creek High School. In search of more experience than the single one-semester BASIC class the school offered, and as a fan of "The Lord of the Rings" and "Dungeons & Dragons", Garriott convinced the school to let him create a self-directed course in programming. He used the course to create fantasy computer games on the school's teletype machine. Garriott later estimated that he wrote 28 computer fantasy games during high school.


title: Richard Garriott

text: One of Garriott's game pseudonyms is "British", a name he still uses for various gaming characters, including Ultima character Lord British and "Tabula Rasa" character General British. The name was given to him by his first Dungeons and Dragons friends because he was born in the UK.


title: Richard Garriott

text: Garriott began writing computer games in 1974. His first games were created on teletype terminals. The code was stored on paper tape spools, and the game was displayed as an ongoing print-out. In summer 1979, Garriott worked at a ComputerLand store where he first encountered Apple computers. Inspired by their video monitors with color graphics, he began to add perspective view to his own games. After he created "Akalabeth" for fun, the owner of the store convinced Garriott it might sell. Garriott spent $200 printing copies of a manual and cover sheet that his mother had drawn, then put copies of the game in Ziploc bags, a common way to sell software at the time. Although Garriott sold fewer than a dozen copies at the store, one copy made it to California Pacific Computer Company, which signed a deal with him. The game sold over 30,000 copies, and Garriott received five dollars for each copy sold. The $150,000 he earned was three times his father's astronaut salary. "Akalabeth" is considered the first published computer role playing game.


title: Richard Garriott

text: Later that year, Garriott entered the University of Texas at Austin (UT). He joined the school's fencing team, and later, the Society for Creative Anachronism. He lived at home with his parents while attending university, and from there created "Ultima I" with his friend Ken Arnold. Its cover, and those of several subsequently Garriott games, were painted by Denis Loubet, whose art Garriott discovered during a visit to Steve Jackson Games.


title: Richard Garriott

text: Garriott continued to develop the "Ultima" series of computer games in the early 1980s, eventually leaving UT to work on them full time. Originally programmed for the Apple II, the "Ultima" series later became available on several platforms. "Ultima II" was published by Sierra On-Line, as they were the only company that would agree to publish it in a box together with a printed cloth map. By the time he developed "Ultima III", Garriott, together with his brother Robert, their father Owen and Chuck Bueche established their own video game publisher, Origin Systems, to handle publishing and distribution, in part due to controversy with Sierra over royalties for the PC port of "Ultima II".


title: Richard Garriott

text: Garriott sold Origin Systems to Electronic Arts (EA) in September 1992 for $30 million. In 1997, he coined the term massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), giving a new identity to the nascent genre previously known as graphical MUDs. In 1999 and 2000, EA canceled all of Origin's new development projects, including "Privateer Online", and "Harry Potter Online". Garriott resigned from the company and formed Destination Games in April 2000 with his brother and Starr Long (the producer of "Ultima Online"). Once Garriott's non-compete agreement with EA expired a year later, Destination partnered with NCsoft where Garriott acted as a producer and designer of MMORPGs. After that, he became the CEO of NCsoft Austin, also known as NC Interactive.


title: Richard Garriott

text: "Tabula Rasa" failed to generate much money during its initial release, despite its seven-year development period. On November 11, 2008, in an open letter on the "Tabula Rasa" website, Garriott announced his plans to leave NCsoft to pursue new interests sparked by his spaceflight experiences. Later, however, Garriott claimed that the letter was forged as a means of forcing him out of his position and that he had had no intention of leaving. Garriott reviewed and signed this announcement, but did not sign a resignation letter that had been drafted for him by NCSoft. On November 24, 2008, NCsoft announced that it planned to end the live service of "Tabula Rasa". The servers shut down on February 28, 2009, after a period of free play from January 10 onward for existing account holders.


title: Richard Garriott

text: In July 2010, an Austin District Court awarded Garriott US$28 million in his lawsuit against NCsoft, finding that the company did not appropriately handle his departure in 2008. In October 2011, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed the judgment.


title: Richard Garriott

text: Garriott founded the company Portalarium in 2009, which developed "", a spiritual successor to the "Ultima" series. Garriott remarked that had they been able to secure the intellectual property rights to "Ultima" from EA, the game could have become "Ultima Online 2". On March 8, 2013, Portalarium launched a Kickstarter campaign for "Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues". An early access version of the game was released on Steam in 2014, and the game was fully released in March 2018.


title: Richard Garriott

text: In April 2022 he announced he had begun working on a new fantasy MMO that uses NFT technology with long time contributor Todd Porter. In August 2022, the game was announced as "Iron and Magic".


title: Richard Garriott

text: In 1983, "Softline" reported that "Garriott wants to go into space but doesn't see it happening in the predictable future ... He has frequently joked with his father about stowing away on a spaceship, and recently his speculations have been sounding uncomfortably realistic". The income from the success of Garriott's video game career allowed him to pursue his interest in spaceflight. After the sale of Origin Systems, he invested in Space Adventures and purchased a ticket to become the first private citizen to fly into space. Due to financial setbacks in 2001 after the dot-com bubble burst, however, he was forced to sell his seat to Dennis Tito.


title: Richard Garriott

text: Garriott then returned to creating games; once he had accumulated sufficient funds, he put down another non-refundable deposit. During his mandatory medical examination a hemangioma was discovered on his liver, which could cause potentially fatal internal bleeding in the event of a rapid spacecraft depressurization. Given the choice of forfeiting his deposit or undergoing surgical removal of the angioma, he decided to have the surgery.


title: Richard Garriott

text: On September 28, 2007, Space Adventures announced that Garriott would fly to the International Space Station in October 2008 as a self-funded space tourist at a reported cost of $30 million. On October 12, 2008, after a year of training in Russia, Garriott became the second second-generation space traveler (after Sergei Volkov), the first offspring of an American astronaut to go into space, and the second person to wear the British Union flag in space. His father, Owen Garriott, was at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for the launch, and was in attendance when he landed safely, along with Russian cosmonauts Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko, twelve days later.


title: Richard Garriott

text: During his spaceflight, Garriott took part in several education outreach efforts. The free Metro newspaper in London provided him with a special edition containing details of British primary school students' space experiment concepts that Garriott took to the ISS. The Metro has claimed, as a result, that it was the first newspaper in space. He communicated with students and other Amateur Radio operators and transmitted photographs using the Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) slow-scan television system, and placed a geocache while aboard the ISS.


title: Richard Garriott

text: Garriott worked with the Windows on Earth project, which provides an interactive, virtual view of Earth as seen from the ISS. Garriott used Windows on Earth software to assist in the selection of locations on Earth to photograph, and the public were able to use the same online tool to track the ISS and see the view Garriott was experiencing. Garriott's photographs, along with images taken by his astronaut father Owen Garriott in 1973, will be available to the public through Windows on Earth, adding a personal element to studies of Earth and how Earth has changed over time.


title: Richard Garriott

text: Garriott covertly smuggled a portion of the ashes of Star Trek actor James Doohan on a laminated card, which he placed under the floor cladding of the ISS's Columbus module. This action was kept secret until Christmas Day 2020 when Doohan's son made the fact public on his Twitter account. At the time of the reveal, Doohan's ashes had orbited the Earth more than 70,000 times and traveled more than 1.7 billion miles.


title: Richard Garriott

text: Garriott's film "Apogee of Fear" was the first ever fictional (short) film fully filmed in space (whereas "Return from Orbit" was only partially filmed in space). Tracy Hickman wrote the screenplay.


title: Richard Garriott

text: In 2010 he was featured in a documentary, "Man on a Mission: Richard Garriott's Road to the Stars", which covered his spaceflight training and mission into orbit.


title: Richard Garriott

text: In February 2021, Garriott traveled to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest oceanic trench on the planet. While there, as well as performing scientific duties, he placed a geocache, and recorded another short sci-fi film. This made him the holder of both altitude and depth records for these activities.


title: Richard Garriott

text: In 1986, Garriott helped start the Challenger Center for Space Science Education with his high school science teacher, June Scobee Rodgers, widow of Challenger Shuttle Commander Dick Scobee, who piloted the ill-fated STS-51-L mission. Scobee Rodgers drew on Garriott's early leadership in gaming to help design what have become approximately 50 global interactive networked facilities, where students perform simulated space missions.


title: Richard Garriott

text: Garriott bought the Luna 21 lander and the Lunokhod 2 rover (both currently on the lunar surface) from the Lavochkin Association for $68,500 in December 1993 at a Sotheby's auction in New York. (The catalog incorrectly lists lot 68A as Luna 17/Lunokhod 1.) Garriott notes that while UN treaties ban governmental ownership of property on other celestial bodies, corporations and private citizens retain such rights. Lunokhod 2 is still in use, with mirrors aligned to reflect lasers such that precise Earth-Moon distances can be measured. With his vehicle still in use, Garriott claims property rights to the territory surveyed by Lunokhod 2. This may be the first valid claim for private ownership of extraterrestrial territory. Lunokhod 2 held the record for distance traveled on the surface of another planetary body until it was surpassed by NASA's Opportunity Rover in 2014.


title: Richard Garriott

text: From 1988 through 1994 Garriott built a haunted house/museum each year at Britannia Manor, his residence in Austin, Texas. Garriott's haunted houses cost tens of thousands of dollars to create each year and took many months and a sizable team to construct, yet were free to the public.


title: Richard Garriott

text: Garriott promotes private space flight and served as vice-chairman of the board of directors for Space Adventures. He is also a trustee of the X PRIZE Foundation.


title: Richard Garriott

text: Garriott is a member of The James Caird Society "that exists to preserve the memory, honour the remarkable feats of discovery in the Antarctic and commend the outstanding qualities of leadership associated with the name of Sir Ernest Shackleton, KCVO (1874-1922), especially during the ill-fated but glorious Endurance Expedition."


title: Richard Garriott

text: Garriott participated in the first zero gravity wedding on June 20, 2009, with his wife Laetitia Garriott de Cayeux. The wedding took place in a specially modified Boeing 727-200 aircraft, G-Force One, operated by a company Garriott co-founded, Zero Gravity Corporation.


title: Richard Garriott

text: Garriott wrote a memoir (with David Fisher) covering his accomplishments in games publishing and spaceflight, entitled "Explore/Create: My Life in Pursuit of New Frontiers, Hidden Worlds, and the Creative Spark". It was published on January 10, 2017.


title: Carlton Leach

text: Leach was born in Canning Town. A fan of West Ham United F.C., he became involved in the Inter City Firm, a gang of hooligans who followed the East London club. Leach was the original model for the cover of the "Strength Thru Oi!" album.


title: Carlton Leach

text: Leach started work as a bouncer in East London, where he became involved with Tony Tucker, then Pat Tate, both of whom worked as large scale dealers in ecstasy during the rave era in the late 1980s. Tate, Tucker and Craig Rolfe were shot dead in December 1995 in a Range Rover on a farm track in Rettendon, in the Rettendon murders.


title: Carlton Leach

text: In 2003 Carlton Leach wrote a memoir about his criminal exploits, entitled "Muscle". In 2007 a film based on the book was released, entitled "Rise of the Footsoldier" and starring Ricci Harnett as Leach. In 2015, Leach worked with Harnett to organise another film about his life, "Reign of the General", but after losing a legal battle over copyright, the film was taken over by the owners of "Rise of the Footsoldier" and released. The same people went on to make a third film in the franchise in 2017. Leach claimed to have no part in the film, and commented on Twitter that it was fictional and no longer his story. In 2021, Carlton decided to release what he called his last (autobiographical) book. Co authored with Jason Allday, the book Titled,"The Final Say" went to number 1 on Amazon's best seller list within 24 hours of release. It has been said that the book is, "more than Essex and the same old..." as it covers Carlton's life from childhood until now; including references and contributions from his family and friends.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: The May 1998 riots of Indonesia (), also known as the 1998 tragedy ("Tragedi 1998") or simply the 1998 event ("Peristiwa 1998"), were incidents of mass violence, demonstrations, and civil unrest that occurred throughout Indonesia, mainly in Medan in the province of North Sumatra (4–8 May), the capital city of Jakarta (12–15 May), and Surakarta (also called Solo) in the province of Central Java (13–15 May). The violent riots were triggered by corruption, economic problems, including food shortages and mass unemployment. It eventually led to the resignation of President Suharto and the fall of the New Order government, which had been in power for 32 years. The main targets of the violence were ethnic Chinese Indonesians, but most of the casualties were caused by a massive fire and occurred among looters.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: It was estimated that more than a thousand people died in the riots. At least 168 cases of rape were reported, and material damage was valued at more than Rp3.1 trillion (US$260 million). As of 2010, legal proceedings regarding the riots were stalled and not completed.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: On 27 July 1996, soldiers, police, and civilians attacked the headquarters of the Indonesian Democratic Party (', PDI) in Central Jakarta, which was occupied by supporters of party leader Megawati Sukarnoputri, daughter of former President Sukarno. Megawati had been selected as party leader in general congress in December 1993. Her selection, however, was seen as a threat by the New Order government, which suppressed free speech during its 30 years in power. Popular support of Megawati and the PDI was growing leading up to the 1997 legislative election and threatened the dominance of the ruling Golkar party. The government declared Megawati's appointment invalid and organised a new congress in June 1996, during which a new party leader was selected. The attackers said they were acting on behalf of the rightful party leadership. The incident evolved into two days of rioting in Jakarta that the government blamed on the illegal People's Democratic Party (', PRD). Violence continued up to the election on 29 May 1997, which was won by Golkar with 74% of the votes. The divided PDI received only 3% of the votes, while the mostly Muslim United Development Party (", PPP) received 22%.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: The election was marred by widespread cases of vote-rigging, causing public outcry especially among supporters of the PPP, which had called on the government to follow a democratic process lest the results be rejected by the public. At this time, Indonesia was experiencing an economic boom with its gross domestic product growing at a rate of 8% in 1996, led by the manufacturing sector. Five months after the election, however, it was caught in the Asian Financial Crisis which began when the Thai baht collapsed in July. The rupiah dropped from Rp2,450 to Rp4,000 to the US dollar between July and October, and economic growth slowed to 1.4% in the fourth quarter. Unable to stabilise the economy, the government sought assistance from the International Monetary Fund. The rupiah declined further to one-sixth of its original value by January 1998. With rising unemployment and inflated food prices, the public lost confidence in the government's ability to turn the economy around. Violence spread throughout the island of Java, but the government exercised its power in February and imposed a 25-day ban on street protests. Law enforcement officials were given the authority to imprison anyone found participating in political activities in violation of the ban.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: Suharto was elected by the People's Consultative Assembly (", MPR) to a seventh consecutive five-year term as president in March. Despite calls for economic and political reforms, his controversial Seventh Development Cabinet included his family members and cronies, including protégé B. J. Habibie as vice-president. Student demonstrations in campuses grew in intensity following these events.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: By the beginning of May, students had been demonstrating in campuses throughout Medan for nearly two months. The growing number of demonstrators was coupled with increasing calls from the public for overall reforms. On 27 April, the death of a student in a vehicle accident was blamed on security officials who had fired tear gas onto the campus. Over the next few days, the clashes between students and security forces grew. On 2 May, a showroom of the "national car" Timor, whose controversial development was spearheaded by the President's son Tommy Suharto, was attacked.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: When the government announced on 4 May that it would increase the price of gasoline by 70% and triple the price of electricity, campus groups reacted. More than 500 students gathered at the State Institute of Teacher Training and Education (", IKIP Negeri). Security forces barricaded the campus to prevent students from leaving and allegedly threw Molotov bombs at demonstrators through the day. Although the students had dispersed by late afternoon, replacement forces were brought in to keep them on campus through the night. When they were allowed to return home hours later, police reportedly stopped a group of students and assaulted them. Word of this attack spread through several witnesses, and a large group later attacked and destroyed a traffic police post. As the outnumbered police fled, protesters began attacking shopping malls and another police post. Thousands poured into the streets and burned cars and shops through the late night.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: On the morning of 5 May, a crowd gathered at a police station where it was reported that more than 50 people suspected of involvement in the previous night's attack were detained. When more officers arrived to confront the group, the station was attacked. The crowd moved toward the nearby market of Tembung as they burned cars and attacked houses. Shops owned by Chinese Indonesians were looted, while they reportedly left those marked with the words """ (owned by the indigenous "pribumi") in graffiti alone. When the Mobile Brigade arrived in the afternoon, the crowd was dispersed with tear gas. As businesses in Medan closed on the following day, thousands of people attacked markets throughout the city and its surrounding districts. Police and anti-riot soldiers fired rubber bullets at the crowd to disperse them but were unsuccessful. When the violence ended two days later, six people had died (two by gunshot) and one hundred were injured (nine with gunshot wounds). Police detained 51 people for questioning, and the damage was estimated in the hundreds of billions of rupiah. Many looted shophouses were mainly in nearby indigenous and outskirt areas like Jalan Aksara, Tembung, Pasar Baru, Brayan and Pancing. Meanwhile, in Chinese-majority areas such as Medan Kota and Maimun districts (Jalan Asia, Kesawan, Pandu, Cirebon, Wahidin, Sutrisno, Sumatra), Cemara, Sunggal, Setiabudi and several roads nearby were mostly safe from the mobs due to strict guarding by local residents.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: On 9 May, one day after the violence in Medan ended, President Suharto left the country for a Group of 15 summit in Cairo, Egypt. Prior to his departure, he called on the public to end the protests. To the "Suara Pembaruan" daily newspaper, he said, "I judge that if we continue like this there will be no progress." He later returned to Indonesia earlier than scheduled on 14 May, when the worst violence occurred in Jakarta. The campus of Trisakti University in Grogol, West Jakarta, became the site of a gathering of 10,000 students on 12 May. They had planned on marching south toward the Parliament building, but security forces refused to allow them to leave the campus. The university students conducted a sit-in outside the campus gates, which the police fired shots at and demonstrators responded by throwing rocks at police. In the ensuing chaos, four students were killed.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: Catalysed by the student deaths, mass violence occurred throughout Jakarta the following day. The Matahari department store in the eastern district of Jatinegara and Yogya Plaza in Klender were barricaded and deliberately torched. It was estimated that at least a thousand people died inside the buildings during the fires. Mobs also attacked Glodok in the northwestern part of the city, where the commercial area of Jakarta's Chinatown was severely damaged. Some store owners reportedly paid local thugs to protect them from the violence because security forces were mostly absent. Riots also occurred near the port of Tanjung Priok in the north, the city of Tangerang to the west, and Kebayoran Baru in the south. Properties owned by Chinese Indonesians were the most common targets.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: Student protests in Surakarta (also called Solo) began as early as March at the Muhammadiyah University of Surakarta (', UMS) and the Sebelas Maret (11 March) University (', UNS) and grew over the next two months, prompting the police to station officers outside both campuses to prevent them from entering the streets. On 8 May, later known as "Bloody Friday", a clash between UNS students and police forces resulted in hundreds of wounded students. There was also evidence of gunfire as police launched tear gas canisters and fired rubber bullets.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: UMS students clashed with security forces on 14 May during a protest of the Trisakti shootings in Jakarta. A report of the incident claimed that the violence was provoked by students throwing objects at police from campus grounds. Security forces were unable to disperse the group, and the angered mob of 1,000 moved eastward into the city. A showroom of Timor cars was attacked, much like the violence in Medan earlier in the month. Kostrad (Army Strategic Reserve) forces arrived as the crowd attacked banks and public buildings in the city centre and prevented them from reaching the city hall. From there, they broke up into smaller groups and attacked the surrounding districts of Surakarta. More people poured into the streets when tires were lit on fire at intersections. Because 11 companies of the Brimob, crowd control forces, and Kostrad soldiers had remained on the UMS campus, downtown Surakarta was left unprotected. Additionally, members of the Kopassus (special forces) had left the city earlier in the day. A group of 15 "provocateurs" was said to have directed crowds using walkie-talkies and incited some of the violence using crowbars to open buildings and throwing Molotov bombs into them.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: Because electricity was cut throughout the city that evening, residents were not able to receive television and radio coverage of the events. Instead, they relied on the local newspaper "Solopos" for accounts of the previous day on 15 May. As the attacks continued to a second day, 10,000 student protesters organised a separate peaceful protest and marched from the UNS campus to the city hall, explaining that they were not connected to the mob violence.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: On 14 May 1998, in Sidotopo, Surabaya, rioters targeted Chinese-owned stores and homes, burning their properties. After the riots, ten thousand Madurese patrolled the streets from further attempted riots, armed with "celurit". The Joint Fact Finding Team (", TGPF) found two cases of rape and four cases of sexual assault.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: On 14 May 1998, at least ten offices, banks, and showrooms in Padang, West Sumatra, had rocks thrown at them by student rioters on the way to the Provincial People's Representative Council (DPRD) office of West Sumatra.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: On the same day, in Palembang, South Sumatra, ten shops were burned, more than a dozen cars were burned by rioters, and dozens of people were injured by rocks thrown by students marching to the DPRD office of South Sumatra. Thousands of police and soldiers were put on guard at various points in the city. The non-governmental Volunteer Team for Humanity (, or TRUK) reported that cases of sexual assault also took place.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: On 15 May 1998, at roughly 14:20 WIB, thousands of rioters from Surakarta arrived in Boyolali, burning factories, cars and homes, as well as looting stores near the Boyolali market. Banks were closed due to threats to burn Bank Central Asia branch in Salatiga, rioters blocked the road from Semarang to Surakarta.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: Most of the deaths suffered when Chinese-owned supermarkets in Jakarta were targeted for looting were not ethnic Chinese, but looters themselves. Many of them were burnt to death in malls. Yogya Klender Mall in East Jakarta saw 400 looters burnt to death. The total death toll was around 1,188 according to one report, and at least 85 women were reported raped.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: The majority of anti-Chinese violence in previous riots also involved only by looting Chinese shops and property without killing the owners themselves. Most Indonesians did not want to drive out the Chinese or murder them, but some of them falsely believed that the Chinese have an infinite supply of products and thought that the shops would open again in the future despite the looting.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: Indonesian Muslims who physically looked Chinese were attacked by rioters, despite not identifying as Chinese at all and only having one distant Chinese great grandfather. An Indonesian Muslim woman who had 5 sons, Ruminah, mentioned she had just one Chinese grandfather who married a local Muslim woman and she did not identify as Chinese at all or speak Chinese but she and her family were constantly harassed and hated by their neighbours just for their Chinese physical looks and her hair salon was ransacked and one of her sons died in a fire at the mall during the riots.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: On 19 August, a group called the Reformasi Presidium Council of Youth and Students of Surabaya issued a statement claiming that the rape photographs were 'bohong belaka' (flat out lies) and part of a 'rekayasa' (political engineering) with the goal of inciting hatred against Indonesia. The following day, this story was picked up by Asia Wall Street Journal, and the story broke internationally. The story claims that the sources of some of these photographs were from a gory photo exhibit and a pornographic website, including one named "Sexy Asian Schoolgirls". This story made its way into an Indonesian national newspaper, Republika, a few days later and began to be widely disseminated in other local newspapers as well.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: Scholars have since commented on the impact of these allegations. Following sharing of these photographs online, an intense debate broke out in online Chinese communities. Australian researcher Elaine Tay believes such discussions "do not give the sense that these participants are conscious of the issue of authenticity". As such, she argues that these commentators or "diasporic activists", have "unwittingly complicated the investigation into this issue".


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: American author Karen Strassler is concerned with the effect of these allegations on the Indonesian public discourse. She argues that although many Indonesians did not see the photos, the "discussion of them in the press served those who would deny the rapes particularly well." The campaign to question the veracity and authenticity of the photographs creates "extraordinary power to discredit the effort to gain recognition for the rape victims."


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: Violence in Medan drew the attention of national security officers. General Wiranto, Commander of the Armed Forces (', Pangab, or Panglima ABRI), toured the affected areas on 6 May and committed his forces to help restore calm to the city. Two days later, Lieutenant General Prabowo Subianto of the Kostrad (Army Strategic Reserve) deployed one of his units "to support local troops and assured the public that others were ready to go into troubled areas should the need arise". Neither effort, however, was able to contain the violence as the riots continued in Medan for another three days following Wiranto's visit, leading the public to believe that few orders were carried out by the deployed units. Order was finally restored when regional military commander Yuzaini requested the help of community leaders and youth organisations to arrange for local patrols (') with security forces. Security inaction continued as violence escalated in Jakarta, and the military leadership in charge of security in the capital city—Wiranto, Prabowo, and General Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono—were absent. Military and police response in the capital was inconsistent. Soldiers in the northern area of Mangga Besar allegedly stood by and allowed looters to walk away with stolen goods. In Slipi to the west, soldiers reportedly risked their lives to protect civilians.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: In Surakarta, Armed Forces representative Colonel Sriyanto denied allegations of neglect by the military. He claimed that ground forces were limited because some units were en route to Jakarta while the few left behind were assisting police in controlling protesters at the Muhammadiyah University. For the most part, the military portrayed the violence "in terms of mobs gone mad, acting in an uncontrollable and spontaneous manner, outnumbering security forces". Susuhunan Pakubuwono XII, the traditional monarch of Surakarta, condemned the violence as behaviour "not in line with the cultural values held by " (Solonese)". He also made a rare appearance on 19 May to demonstrate solidarity by the elites with victims of the violence. In a meeting with 5,000 students at his palace complex, he pledged a symbolic amount of Rp1,111,111 to support the students' calls for reform.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: As it was evident that Suharto had lost control of his senior military leaders, he resigned one week after the violence on 21 May. Two months later, on 23 July, his successor B. J. Habibie appointed the TGPF to conduct an official investigation of the May riots. During the investigation, the team had difficulty finding witnesses who were willing to testify about the violence, and the team was only given three months to investigate riots in six cities. Data collected by the team mainly came from non-governmental organisations and the state-sponsored Communication Forum for National Unity (", Bakom PKB), which had compiled numerous police reports on the incidents. The full report totalling hundreds of pages was never distributed to the public and was only available to members of the team, relevant government ministers, and a few researchers. The media received a 20-page summary in both Indonesian and English, which was then distributed widely on the Internet.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: To this day, government officials deny the occurrence of sexual violence, citing a lack of police reports despite overwhelming evidence from local human rights groups.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: Chinese Indonesians in Medan became victims of the local " (gangsters) who threatened the community with violence. Prior to the rioting, the Chinese commonly used extra-legal methods to ensure their protection and security. Consequently, groups who extorted money from the Chinese—sometimes agents of government—saw them as nothing but "cash cows". During the violence, however, intimidation was often followed by the looting of Chinese-owned stores and businesses. Chinese Indonesians were angered and felt betrayed by this action, and many fled the area for Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, Netherlands, Australia, United States, or other locations in Indonesia. Those who remained checked into indigenous-owned hotels or armed themselves to form a community defence group. However, local community members distinguished this incident from previous anti-Chinese violence because threats against the Chinese were "a part of the socioeconomic and political structure of the city". They believed that the riots were incited by either student demonstrations or thugs who sought to discredit the reform movement.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: Stories of sexual violence with perpetrators shouting anti-Chinese slogans and other verbal abuses during the Jakarta riots shocked Indonesians. As the incidents were represented as state-sponsored violence, national and international groups became more vocal in calling for reform and the government to step down. Muhammadiyah leader Amien Rais denounced the violence in Surakarta, which he saw as more destructive than the riots on Jakarta. The Islamic organisation manages the UMS campus, where student clashes with police on 14 May prompted the ensuing violence. His statement that the Surakarta incident was orchestrated by a " (puppeteer) rather than unorganised masses became a national headline. Unlike in Jakarta, local citizens in Surakarta did not view the violence in their city as anti-Chinese. This image was further cultivated by the insistence of influential Chinese Indonesians that the causes were "multifaceted". Most Chinese who fled during the violence returned after it had subsided, unlike those in Medan and Jakarta.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: When the Jakarta riots began, the United States government ordered the evacuation of "dependents and non-essential personnel" of the consulate. The Department of State also recommended US citizens to leave the country using commercial flights or evacuation flights organised by US forces. The and its "Flying Tigers" Marine Helicopter Squadron were stationed in the region as part of a contingency evacuation plan for US citizens and embassy personnel, known as Operation Bevel Incline. In the Department of State's "Indonesia Country Report on Human Rights Practices for 1998", the US accused Suharto's government of committing "serious human rights abuses". Between the 1997 election and the riots, students and human rights activists were kidnapped and tortured while in the custody of security forces. The report also mentioned that police stoned and fired at foreign journalists covering a clash between students and security forces on 6 May.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: As news of attacks on Chinese Indonesians during the violence reached the international ethnic Chinese community, the riots were labelled as "anti-Chinese" in nature. In a letter to President Habibie, leader of the Hong Kong Democratic Party Martin Lee wrote, "The severity of these two days of mayhem evoked comparisons to the Nazi regime's attacks against Jews." Ethnic Chinese organised protests through the website Global Huaren, founded by Malaysian Chinese emigrant Joe Tan in New Zealand. Tan founded the website in response to "seeming indifference" around the world and spread news of the violence to professionals and colleagues. Members then coordinated rallies at Indonesian embassies and consulates in major Pacific Rim cities. Solidarity from the international community brought about a renewed awareness of ethnic and national identity—Indonesian and Chinese—among Chinese Indonesians "because for so long the one had been sacrificed for the other".


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: China's cautious response to the issue caused an uproar among human rights groups. Following protests at the Indonesian embassy in Beijing in August, Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan made a direct appeal to the Indonesian government to ensure the protection of Chinese Indonesian communities. During a visit to Jakarta in November, Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin said that "Chinese Indonesians will not only serve ... the long term stability of Indonesia, but also ... the smooth development of the relationship of friendly cooperation with neighboring countries." China claims they have also urged airlines to operate three more flights out of Indonesia, which transported some 200 Chinese people away from Jakarta. The riots became known in China as "Black May" (), named after a VCD documentary of the events released by the China Radio and Television Publishing House in October. Compared to China's approach, Taiwan took on a more active role in demanding the trial of those involved in the violence and protection for victims. It threatened to withdraw investments from the country, estimated at US$13 billion in 1998, and block the entry of Indonesian workers, whose population in Taiwan had reached 15,000. Taiwan justified the threats "based on the principles of protecting overseas Chinese and protecting human rights". On 9 August, Minister of Investment Hamzah Haz flew to Taiwan and apologised for the violence while promoting Indonesia as an investment destination. At the same time, a Taiwanese delegation met with Wiranto, who was then the Defence Minister under Habibie, as well as several other government ministers.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: For more than a week after the riots in Jakarta, locals feared for their safety and stayed home. Most banks, businesses, and public buildings remained closed in major cities throughout the country. Some government offices reopened for the commemoration of National Awakening Day on 20 May. Despite fears that the riots could worsen, only three minor incidents occurred in smaller cities. Data compiled by the fact-finding team on the human toll of the violence in the capital was conflicting. TRUK reported 1,109 deaths from fire, 27 gunshot deaths, 91 wounded, and an additional 31 missing. Police reports counted 463 dead and 69 wounded, while the city government only reported 288 dead and 101 wounded. Property damage was estimated at Rp2.5 trillion (US$238 million), with the city government reporting 5,723 buildings and 1,948 vehicles destroyed, while police reports counted 3,862 buildings and 2,693 vehicles. Damage in Surakarta was estimated at Rp457 billion (US$46 million), with Chinese Indonesians suffering most of the material losses.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: Members of TGPF appointed by Habibie believed their mandate for seeking the truth behind the violence included drawing conclusions and making recommendations. Although they were given access to members of the military elite, their findings came into conflict with the military and the government. Unwilling to let go of "the power to be gained by having a monopoly over ... 'representations' of the violence", government officials and the military elite inside and outside Soeharto's circle rejected or ignored the team's findings. Sections of the report were also challenged by the national media. The People's Representative Council (", DPR) eventually declared the riots "ordinary crimes" during the Megawati administration (2001–2004). The collapse of Soeharto's government also led to the intensification of separatist movements in the outlying provinces of Aceh, Papua, and East Timor. Ethnic and religious conflicts also flared in Maluku and Central Sulawesi as law and order deteriorated. In a January 1999 poll by the daily newspaper "The Jakarta Post", 77% of respondents rated public safety levels as bad or very bad. Economic conditions continued to fluctuate in the first few months of Habibie's presidency, and the National Police reported that crime increased by 10% during 1998.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: Based on reports of military inaction during the riots, the TGPF made an unprecedented allegation against the military elite. The team concluded that "the Armed Forces had failed to anticipate the riot, that there was a lack of adequate communications between those in command and those on the ground, and that, as a consequence, the forces had responded tardily in most cases and sometimes not at all". Soldiers allegedly allowed rioting to continue in some areas, while others were hesitant to fire at civilians under the Armed Forces doctrine. Evidence of decision making at the "highest levels" of government led the team to conclude the violence was "an effort to create a critical situation that required a form of extra-constitutional government to control the situation". However, its members admitted that the story lacked a crucial link between the military and rioters.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: Investigations revealed that violence in Jakarta was the result of an internal struggle within the military elite to become Suharto's successor, with evidence that some of the damaged areas were near military installations with reports that riot organisers had military-like characteristics. Many believed Kostrad commander Prabowo Subianto sought to become his father-in-law's successor and coveted the Commander of the Armed Forces position held by General Wiranto, who was favoured to succeed Suharto. He was also suspected of organising the kidnappings of students and activists prior to the 1997 election. Together with Operations Commander for Greater Jakarta ("", Pangkoops Jaya) Major General Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin, Prabowo aimed to terrorise opponents of the government and to show that Wiranto was "an incompetent commander who could not control disorder". During August and September, the fact-finding team interviewed Prabowo, Sjafrie, and other military commanders regarding their movements during the Jakarta riots. Prabowo asserted that he was unsure of the precise movements of military forces in the capital and deferred to Sjafrie. In the meantime, the Operations Commander was vague in his testimony and stated that security forces were protecting "priority locations".


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: In its final report, the fact-finding team suspected that, on the night of 14 May, Prabowo met with several Armed Forces and prominent civilian figures at the Kostrad headquarters to discuss the organisation of the violence. However, this was later refuted by several people who attended the meeting, including prominent human rights lawyer Adnan Buyung Nasution and TGPF member Bambang Widjojanto. Further testimonies by Prabowo in the years following the investigation contradicted the team's report and led to scepticism of the team's allegations. When Suharto resigned his mandate on 21 May, both Prabowo and Wiranto were bypassed in favour of a constitutional power transfer to Vice-President Habibie. Prabowo was transferred to a non-active position on the following day before being discharged from service in August. He and Wiranto denied that the discharge was a result of disciplinary action.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: While the riot was triggered by an economic recession, its prime target was the ethnic Chinese community. The Chinese-Indonesian community was believed to have loyalties to both China and Indonesia, a sign that they had no national patriotism and were labeled as "traitors". During Suharto's New Order rule, multiple laws were passed against the ethnic Chinese community in Indonesia. These laws included prohibiting speaking any Chinese dialect publicly as well as the public display of Chinese characters, changing Chinese names to become Indonesian-sounding, and the restriction on celebrating the Lunar New Year. However, President Suharto kept a few Chinese-Indonesians by his side, primarily for business reasons. These individuals include ""konglomerat"" or business magnates such as Sofyan Wanandi, Sudono Salim, and Mochtar Riady. The image of the average Chinese-Indonesian became one of an affluent individual, sometimes seen by the public to be stealing wealth from Indonesians, although most were middle-class retailers. During this period, Chinese-Indonesians were increasingly contributing to the local retail industry. The resulting growth in income within the community led to the rise in prices of basic goods such as rice and oil to be associated with the Chinese, fuelling the existing anti-Chinese sentiment even more.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: Provocateurs, suspected to be military, goaded rioters, screaming ethnic insults like "Cina babi!" () and "Ganyang Cina!" (). The provocateurs also shouted commands, directing the riots towards Chinese-owned businesses and away from Native Indonesian-owned ones.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: In this climate of fear, between 10,000 and 100,000 ethnic Chinese, who made up about 3–5% of Indonesia's Chinese population, fled the country. Thousands of foreign nationals and expatriates left Indonesia, some evacuated by their embassies.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: In the days during riots, many women suffered from sexual violence with most of the incidents taking place in Jakarta. The attacks appeared to be an organised campaign of assaults against ethnic Chinese women by the same groups that organised the riots. Accounts compiled by aid workers depicted a wide range of attacks from humiliation, child rape, and gang-rape followed by murder.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: More than a hundred women were reported to have been assaulted or killed. The Volunteer Team for Humanity recorded 168 cases of sexual assault, with 152 in Jakarta and the remaining 16 in Surakarta, Medan, Palembang, and Surabaya; of these victims, twenty had died by 14 July 1998.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: The Indonesian government has responded with conflicting messages. President Habibie issued a statement acknowledging the violence and regretted it as "not in accordance with the cultural values of the Indonesian people" and condemned it in the name of the government and all Indonesians. However other authorities denied that any rape had taken place. The intelligence chief stated that the incident "was spread for political purposes to defame Indonesia" and the police commander threatened to prosecute any organisation publicising the rape issue on charges of spreading false rumours.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: In the aftermath of the violence, JFF was tasked to document the rapes. After JFF reported that the violence had been organised, General Wiranto publicly apologised for the army's failure to prevent the violence and acknowledged that elements in the military were involved. In addition to government-mandated JFF, a special rapporteur was established by the United Nations to validate JFF findings and interview some of the victims. Both have officially reported that the sexual abuse in May 1998 did occur. The rapporteur noted that the difficulty of interviewing rape victims and lack of testimonials had been used to discredit the fact-finding effort and in one instance to twist it to portray that the incident was fabricated to raise resentment against Indonesian Muslims. In 2008, National Women Commission working together with the UN rapporteur issued recommendations to the government to adopt violence elimination, victim protection and recovery, gender awareness measures. These measures have been accepted and implemented into policies. However, the general public still refuses to acknowledge the rapes and legal proceeding against the perpetrators has stalled.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: To many Chinese-Indonesians, the event served as a reinforcement of the idea that they do not belong in Indonesia despite most of them having lived in the country all their lives. It is also believed that the event inspired change in the country's authoritarian policies that perpetuate the discrimination. The "Reformasi" period, when Suharto resigned and B.J. Habibie became president, saw a lot of changes in the country’s values, including that of racial affairs. These changes include the abolishment of several legislations that came into being during the New Order that specifically targeted the Chinese community, declaring Chinese New Year as a national holiday. Some believe that Indonesia is able to see an improvement in the implementation of its national motto "Bhinneka Tunggal Ika" which translates to "Unity In Diversity" and a greater acceptance of the Chinese-Indonesian community as a whole.  This can be seen as greater forms of representation of the community in media, popular culture, and even politics that have been embraced by both the local community and the government. The rise of the Ex-Governor of Jakarta, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, widely known as "Ahok", is an example of this. According to Leo Suryadinata, a professor focusing on Chinese Indonesian issues at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, "The lot of ethnic Chinese here has greatly improved since Suharto, but that doesn't mean the riots' underlying problems have been resolved." Others do still believe that the century-old tension between the native Indonesian community and the ethnic Chinese still persists within the Indonesian society while it does not affect one's day to day life.


title: May 1998 riots of Indonesia

text: Dramas and other works of fiction have been written in response to the 1998 riots, especially regarding the racial aspects and rapes of Chinese Indonesian women. These include "Putri Cina" (), by Indonesian Catholic priest and author Sindhunata, which deals with the loss of identity experienced by Chinese Indonesians after the riots and is written in part from the point of view of a rape victim. A more general view of the 1998 events is given in the film "Di Balik Pintu Istana" (Behind 98).


title: The Thirty-Nine Steps

text: The Thirty-Nine Steps is an adventure novel by Scottish author John Buchan. It was serialized in "All-Story Weekly" (5 – 12 June 1915) and "Blackwood's Magazine" (credited to "H de V.", July – September 1915) before being published in book form in October 1915 by William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh. It is the first of the five novels featuring Richard Hannay, an all-action hero with a stiff upper lip and a miraculous knack for getting himself out of tricky situations.


title: The Thirty-Nine Steps

text: The novel has been adapted many times, including several films and a long-running stage play. In 2003, the book was listed on the BBC's The Big Read poll of the UK's "best-loved novels."


title: The Thirty-Nine Steps

text: John Buchan wrote "The Thirty-Nine Steps" while he was ill in bed with a duodenal ulcer, an illness which remained with him all his life. Buchan's son William later wrote that the name of the book originated when the author's daughter was counting the stairs at St Cuby, a private nursing home on Cliff Promenade in Broadstairs, where Buchan was convalescing. "There was a wooden staircase leading down to the beach. My sister, who was about six, and who had just learnt to count properly, went down them and gleefully announced: there are 39 steps." There were actually 78, but he halved the number to make a better title. When the original steps were later replaced, one of them, complete with a brass plaque, was sent to Buchan. They were replaced by concrete, and this set, now numbering 108, still runs from the garden to the beach.


title: The Thirty-Nine Steps

text: The novel was his first "shocker", as he called it—a story combining personal and political dramas. It marked a turning point in Buchan's literary career and introduced his adventuring hero Richard Hannay. He described a "shocker" as an adventure where the events in the story are unlikely and the reader is only just able to believe that they really happened.


title: The Thirty-Nine Steps

text: In late May 1914, when World War I is imminent in Europe, Richard Hannay returns home to London after having lived and worked in Rhodesia as a mining engineer. One night, his neighbour, an American who claims to be in fear for his life, asks if Hannay can let him in. The man appears to know of an anarchist plot to destabilise Europe, beginning with a plan to assassinate the Greek Premier, Constantine Karolides, during his forthcoming visit to London on the forthcoming 15 June.


title: The Thirty-Nine Steps

text: The man, named Franklin P. Scudder, is a freelance spy, and reveals that he has faked his own death with a corpse in his flat. Scudder claims to be following a ring of German spies called the Black Stone who are trying to steal Britain's naval defense plans for the outbreak of war and are also after him. Hannay, convinced of his honesty, lets Scudder hide in his flat. Police discover the fake suicide, but suspect nothing. Nonetheless, Hannay finds Scudder murdered in his flat a few days later. Feeling now bestowed with the responsibility to foil the plot, as well as in mortal danger himself, Hannay takes up Scudder's encoded little notebook and escapes his apartment under watch by the plotters by disguising himself as the milkman the next early morning.


title: The Thirty-Nine Steps

text: Arriving just in time at St. Pancras Station, Hannay takes a train to Galloway, in south-west Scotland, believing it sufficiently remote to hide in until just before the fateful date in June. Hannay lodges in a shepherd's cottage overnight and reads in a newspaper that the police are looking for him in Scotland, suspecting him of Scudder's murder. Hannay boards a local train heading east, but jumps off between stations to confuse his trail. He eventually finds an inn where he stays the night. He tells the innkeeper a modified version of his story, and persuades the man to shelter him. While staying at the inn, Hannay cracks the cipher used in Scudder's codebook. The next day, two men arrive at the inn looking for Hannay, but the innkeeper sends them away. When they return later, Hannay recognizes them as his watchers in London, stealthily leaves the inn, steals their car and drives off.


title: The Thirty-Nine Steps

text: But soon, Hannay sees that he is being pursued by an aeroplane. Later, a policeman in a remote village tries to stop him as he drives through, making him realize that a search warrant for him has been issued. He decides to stay off the main roads, driving very fast he nearly gets into a crash with another motorcar. Swerving to avoid it, his car falls off a cliff, Hannay narrowly escaping death. The other driver, Harry Bullivant, a local landowner and prospective politician, feels dreadfully responsible for this and offers to take him home to clean up. When he learns that Hannay possesses deep knowledge of Australia, he excitedly invites him to address an election meeting that afternoon where is due to speak about the Colonies, but is ridden with stage fright. Hannay manages well, better than Harry. Both return to Harry's place and Hannay feels able to entrust him with his story. To thank him for his speech and help him with the plot, Harry writes an introductory letter about Hannay to his godfather who holds a senior position at the Foreign Office.


title: The Thirty-Nine Steps

text: Hannay leaves Harry by foot and tries to hide in the countryside, but is spotted again by the aeroplane. He then notices a group of men on the ground searching for him. Miraculously, he meets a road mender out on the moor, who is suffering from a severe hangover and is afraid that the new road surveyor due this very day sees him in such a state. Hannay offers to swap places with him, sending the grateful workman home for the day. His disguise eventually fools a party of pursuers by car, whom Hannay recognises as those looking for him at the inn. As dawn nears, an acquaintance from London, Marmaduke Jopley, whom Hannay hates drives by. Hannay calls him by his name, forces him to lend him his driver's outfit and takes the wheel for several miles until they have passed the roadblocks that had been set up. He then lets his hostage free, who drives off.


title: The Thirty-Nine Steps

text: Now back on foot, after an uncomfortable night on the hills, Hannay wakes up in shock when he sees that the search posse is closing in on him again, and he runs off. He finds a cottage and enters, desperate for cover, and the occupant calmly welcomes him. Unfortunately, the man turns out to be Hannay's very enemy, the spy ring's chief. After a brief interrogation where Hannay plays fool, he locks him into a storage room, not sure who the scruffy man in front of him really is, preferring to wait for his accomplices to return, who had seen Hannay the day before. The room in which Hannay is locked appears to contain bomb-making materials, which he uses to break out of the cottage. Badly shaken by the explosion and intoxicated by the fumes, he crawls to the top of a building nearby where he waits until dawn while everyone has gone to look for him, then runs off at night, narrowly escaping a few traps around the property.


title: The Thirty-Nine Steps

text: Hannay returns to the helpful road mender's place to retrieve his possessions, but is so badly hurt after his escape that he has to stay in bed for a few days to recover from his escape. He then joins a shepherd to walk to the nearest station, where he catches a train to go meet Harry's Foreign Office relative, Sir Walter Bullivant, who is taking a few days' vacation at his summer retreat in the Kent countryside. After exchanging coded signals, Hannay is invited to join Sir Walter at the house, is given a new attire, bathes luxuriously and is served a beautiful dinner. Sir Walter, who had received Harry's letter, then summons Hannay to spew out his story. They discuss Scudder's notes, Sir Walter believes in it except the Greek Premier's murder plot. He suddenly receives a phone call from London telling him that Karolides has indeed just been assassinated. Sir Walter and Hannay return to London the next morning, where they clear his name at Scotland Yard who release him, free of involvement in Scudder's murder. Sir Walter lets Hannay off for the evening as he has arranged an emergency top-secret meeting at his London home to discuss the situation and Britain's naval defense plan with government members and a French army representative. However, Hannay feels agitated and unfulfilled; after an unpleasant dinner, he goes for a walk and runs into a party with Marmaduke Jopley, who tries to arrest him as Scudder's murderer. Hannay gets into a fight, flees followed by the police and everyone. Sprinting fast he manages to reach Sir Walter's home, where he finds shelter in his hallway while the butler closes the door on his pursuers. While Hannay waits for the meeting to end, the First Sea Lord leaves. Yet, they briefly make eye contact and Hannay is certain that the man is one of his pursuers in disguise. He breaks in into the meeting room, rudely interrupting the proceedings, forcing Sir Walter into calling the First Sea Lord's home, where a servant informs them his Lordship is asleep in bed and never went to Sir Walter's meeting.


title: The Thirty-Nine Steps

text: Desperate to stop the imposter from escaping with the secret information that was discussed, Hannay and the officials comb Scudder's notebook. They reason that the phrase "the thirty-nine steps," along with the date and tidal information (high tide at 10:17 PM) must indicate the location of the escape point for the conspirators. They all go to the Admiralty for help, and in the dead of night, manage to summon the help of a coast guardsman, who knows this part of the coast well and identifies a particular, quiet middle-class location on the South-East coast of England that matches Scudder's description. Hannay immediately sets off by car with a police officer to