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.

Many of the animations were produced using Flash and will no longer work.

Well I Never!

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

Mystery solved

In 2000, my cousin, ( now deceased ), was returning from Vancouver to Glasgow to attend his father's funeral. When I met him at the funeral he was visibly shaken by an experience he had on the flight. He had to change planes at Toronto and on the journey to Glasgow he sat next to and elderly lady who was returning for a family reunion. She had emigrated to Canada in 1947. They talked about Glasgow in the old days and she mentioned that she had lived in Dumbarton road, Scotstoun during the war. As the conversation continued, he discovered that she had lived in the same block of flats as his Grandmother and had known her well. She had been present at the air raid which had destroyed the building and killed his aunt. The family had never known why the aunt had not stayed in the air raid shelter- everyone in there had survived. Seemingly she had gone back into the building to stay with a young mother who was too scared to move. When the bomb hit the building, all inside were killed. Nobody in the family could understand why my aunt had returned to the building from the relative safety of the shelter. Sixty years later we had the explanation by a series of coincidences

Mrs. April J.

Sitting in the Tube I noticed an advert for the new Kindle. I stood to see what book was displayed on the screen and it was David Copperfield ; the actual book that I am currently reading on MY Kindle.

Double coincidence

My name is Nigel C (an uncommon surname), I live in Cambridge, and in 1995 I was 49 years old. At that time (and ever since) I had never seen my family name on a gravestone. In that year I took my family to Finchingfield in Essex for a Sunday trip, merely because I had heard it was a pretty place to visit. In the churchyard by the green I came across the headstone of Kenneth and Eva C. To my considerable amazement the date of Eva's death was exactly the same as my own father's: 12 February 1986. Consequently my daughter took a photograph of me at the headstone and we put it in my family album. It struck me as astonishingly improbable that the very first C I ever found in a graveyard would have exactly the same day of death as a close member of my own family, but the story does not end there. Ten years later, in December 2005, I had a woodburning stove fitted in my front room. The man who installed it, Peter Wakeling, looked afterwards at my cheque, with the surname C on it, and said (I do not recollect anyone ever making a remark about my surname before): “C--that's not a common name, is it. My dad was friends at school with a Ken C.

Cricketing faux pas

In January 1986 I was traveling by train from London Waterloo to Somerset for a job interview. En route I happened to get chatting to a couple and their son returning from a trip to London. During the journey we discussed a range of topics and I happened to mentioned the subject of cricket. I began to bemoan the standard of behaviour of some cricketers off the pitch and as the gentleman was wearing a Somerset Cricket Tie I cited Ian Botham as an example of someone who I thought should set a better example (that year he had briefly been suspended for smoking cannabis). All three suddenly looked at me and then the man said; "We'll actually that is our son.". The following year Ian Botham left Somerset County Cricket Club and joined Worcestershire Country Cricket Club - the very county I hail from and support.

A long shot

25 years ago I was still living in Germany and placed a search for partner advert in a German weekly paper. One of the responses came from a German who lived and worked south of London. We met a couple of times, and kept in touch for a while after that, so I knew A had moved to London, but that was that. A year later I had my first ever trip to London, but decided not to contact A. I queued for tickets for CATS. I was 6th in the queue, 4 tickets were returned, but number 4 and 5 in the queue were two Swedish girls, who did not take up the ticket, and I got it. It was for a seat next to #3 in the queue, a guy from Australia. In the break we started to chat and it turned out he was in London for a congress on emergency medicine, and earlier the same day had been given a guided tour of A's department by A.

Pauntley Place - you've been here before.

In 1970 I visited a house (Pauntley Place) in Gloucestershire where a school friend lived. Three years later at University my girlfriend (later to become my wife) and I, became friends with a another student. When visiting him and his girlfriend in Gloucestershire we were surprised to find that her parents had bought my old schoolfriend's house Pauntley Place. In 1980 my wife and I attended our student friend and fiancees' wedding with a reception held in a marquee on the front lawn. We have calculated that my wife was just over one month pregnant with our first daughter. Last year, and four years after we bought Pauntley Place, my daughter was married in Pauntley and we had the reception in a marquee on the same front lawn that she had attended, (albeit in uteru), all those years ago. We surprised her with this story at the wedding. Richard Sullivan

Names

My daughter's name is Rebecca, her brother met and married a Rebecca, their middle name starts with the same initial, my generous daughter says you can have my brother and my name! My other daughter married a man with the same name as my son, it is quite tricky when we are all together, we have Becci and Becca, Richard and Rich.

Lightning does strike twice

I have a short video clip recived fomo a colleague in USA that was taken from a CCTV camera that shows a man being struck by lighting, not just once, but twice. He recovers from the first strike and walks on for a few a yards and is then hit again. He is lucky to be alive after being hit twice , but walks on after recovering for a few seconds. Can send this to you, I believe it to be authentic, please let me have an email address to send to as an attachment. I have a couple of personal coincidences that I will write up and submit. Nic H

Rescue at sea against all the odds

29 April 1941 - SS City of Nagpur torpedoed by U-415 - radio put out of action - two dead. All into lifeboats. Emergency radio? Batteries flat. We looked like joining earlier survivors who spent weeks drifting on the Atlantic before discovery - if we were lucky. But at dawn a Catalina flying boat hunting the Bismarck spotted us. Out of thousands of square miles of ocean it just happened to overfly our huddled little group of lifeboats. By nine that evening we were all aboard HMS Hurricane and on our way back to Glasgow, which we departed from just 4 days earlier. Fast forward to this new millenium when we read in the Falmouth Packet, our local paper, of a diamond wedding ... the bride having been nearly lost at sea when the SS Nagpur was torpedoed. We and they are now good friends.

Birthday Coincidence

When I worked in a school in the 1990s, three of us on the Senior Management team, only 7 people, had the same birthday, 16th February and two of us had been born in the same year!

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