Cambridge Coincidences Collection

As of the 23rd May 2022 this website is archived and will receive no further updates.

understandinguncertainty.org was produced by the Winton programme for the public understanding of risk based in the Statistical Laboratory in the University of Cambridge. The aim was to help improve the way that uncertainty and risk are discussed in society, and show how probability and statistics can be both useful and entertaining.

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Well I Never!

Professor David Spiegelhalter of Cambridge University wants to know about your coincidences!

Staying in the room where I was born

I was born in a public house/hotel, at the time kept by my mother's parents in a village in Wales. My mother still lives in the village. The hotel has 6 bedrooms that are let to visitors. Three years ago my partner and I booked a room at the hotel when we were attending a family party to celebrate my mother's birthday. When we arrived at the hotel the bedroom that had been allocated to us was the one in which I had been born. We had not specified that we wanted any particular room. On being shown into our bedroom we saw that the duvet cover on the bed was exactly the same - brand, design and colour - as the one that was on my bed at my own home on that day. On being shown the en suite bathroom we saw that there were two water colour paintings of Venice on the walls. My partner and I had been in Venice a week earlier, the one and only time we have been there.

Moira Hepburn

My husband taught at a school in Zimbabwe in 1970. My son currently teaches at a school in London. At one of his parent's evenings of the children in his class, a mother said to him ....'I was taught by a Mr Hepburn at a school in Zimbabwe when I was the same age as my son?" ...on asking the name of the school, my son was able to reply "That Mr Hepburn is my father!" My husband and I were students together at the Teachers' College in Zimbabwe. We subsequently came to teach in England at a school in Sussex. We were out visiting one day, and on the way home stopped at a supermarket we hadn't been to before. We got in to the car to leave having done the shopping, and I suddenly remembered I had forgotten to get cheese, I dashed back in the store. The cheese counter was at the back of the store and I happened to bump into a girl who we had been at college with, and hadn't seen seen since graduation day 8 years ago...she was living in Zambia and was in England on a 48 hour stop over to visit an aunt in the village and was on her way to Canada!

A Pakistan coincidence

I am afraid this may be a little longwinded but the coincident I feel is quite remarkable. I am seventy yeras of age and my father back in the years around the 1950's was serving in the Gateshead police force as a constable. He was of the no nonsense category and he had a colleague by the name of Corrigan who had similar attitudes to miscreants. So to get to the coincidence. I am in Islamabad around 1984 and was my habit on a Friday I hailed a taxi from the front of the Holiday Inn to take me for the ride up to the foothhills of the Himalayas to Murray and beyond. Once seated comfortably in the taxi the taxi driver asks me where I am from. England I reply ! Then you will know my friend. Yes I reply, with a population of nearly 60 million of course I said in jest. The taxi driver had been seconded to look after an Englishmanin in Islamabad for a number of weeks and had become familiar with the background of his client. His client was the son of constable Corrigan who lives not more than one mile from where I live in Whickham Newcastle upon Tyne. I am the son of his colleague.

Consecutive phone and car numbers and journeys

I've two unconnected friends with consecutive land line phone numbers. On Tuesday the 10th January 2012 my Husband and I were coming off the M42, and found ourselves following a car to the same car park, from where (we discovered) the owner walked to collect her children from the same school from where we also collected our grandchildren. Her reg was FLO2 DFK, ours is FLO3 DFK. She lives in Nottingham, us in Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands & we connected in Ashby de la Zouch! Another one is a friend and I had lost touch and arranged to meet in Beatties in Sutton Coldfield, she was then living in Tamworth, Staffordshire. When putting my hand to push the shop door open another hand went up at the same time. It was my friend.

Good Morning coincidence.

My coincidence happened almost seventy years ago but I still find it hard to believe. It was War time,1942, and after a few months working in the Mancheser offices of the Daily Mirror I was promoted to the dizzy height of a junior reporter in Newcastle. It was a great adventure for a sixteen year old, for I had never been away from home before but was working with a very experienced newspaper man. The only problem was loneliness, but fortunately and quite soon my week-ends were filled travelling by bus and train throughout the whole of Northumberland and Durham. The Mirror had come up with the great Idea of publishing a newspaper called Good Morning written especially for members of the British Submarine Service and my task was to visit the families of submariners and bring them 'News from Home.' Things were different in those days : travel was no way as easy as it is today and I suppose I was homesick and missed my family. I came from an ordinary working-class family in Manchester and I can't remember any one of us travelling further from home than Blackpool. Newcastle a million miles away.

Thinking of you

My husband phoned his sister during the recent holiday. The phone line produced a series of unusual clicks as he rang. His sister was ringing him and connected at exactly the same time.

Family names in a USA book

Killing time I browsed the History shelves in a small county library in Maryland USA. Looking for anything about Quakers my eye was caught by a book on settlers in Maryland in the 17th century. I looked for my surname PYE and found three names ..........Nicholas Pye......Timothy Pye.....and Walter Pye. Here is the mind stopping coincidence......... MY ONLY GRANDSON IS NICHOLAS PYE. MY ONLY SON IS TIMOTHY PYE AND MY FATHER IS WALTER PYE ! Chances of my looking at that particular book ? Chances of those three names coming up in that order !!! If you will give me your email address I will scan and send you extracts from the book as kindly copied for me by the librarian.

Copacabana Coincidence

In 2002, my wife and I took a year off work to go travelling around the world. We had no real set agenda of where we were heading, preferring instead to listen to the experiences of fellow backpackers wherever possible to make the most of our travels. We were on an excursion to the silver mines in Potosi in Bolivia, when we met an older American traveller who was on her own. After striking up a conversation, we got on the to the inevitable discussion about places we had visited thus far. Our new found companion was clearly very well travelled and we decided to invite her out that evening for a bite to eat and a few drinks so we could tap into her wealth of knowledge of South America in particular. We told her that we were keen to get off the so called 'Gringo Trail' if possible and she then told us about an excursion into the Peruvian Amazon basin she had recently made that sounded right up our street. The trip would need to be set up by someone she had met while travelling who lived in Maine U.S.A.

The date of auntie's death.

Recently a local historian telephoned to ask us the date our aunt had died, who had been a much loved local teacher. Out of the blue we could not remember. So next day I went into our office and contemplated the piles of old diaries I had kept on the bookshelves since the 1970's, facing the gargantuan task of finding the appropriate entry. I pulled out one at random, and opened it in the middle - and there was the information! Memorial Serice for Auntie Mabel, 1st July 1996 at 2.30 p.m. The task which could have taken me perhaps an hour, had taken me just a few minutes! Ridiculous, of course, but I had the distinct feeling that the dear old lady had helped me.

It's a small world

Last summer, a close friend of mine came to stay with us in our French home. While there, we took her to a bar run by two friends of ours, one of them English. My friend is a classically trained musician with an interest in music therapy. She lives in Suffolk. The Englishman who runs the bar discovereed that his best friends live in the same tiny village in Suffolk as my friend. In subsequent conversation it emerged that another very good friend, who is Bristol based, of the barkeeper, is one of my Suffolk friend's key contacts in her music therapy work.

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