TASTIEST THE BEAT WAY TO DIABETES
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MOST parents would do everything within their power to help their children if they became ill.
But one mother has gone a step further by leaving her career behind to go back to university to study the rare genetic mutation carried by her young daughter.
Mia-Rose Henderson, six, has had the extremely rare KIF5B mutation diagnosed – and she is the only known person in the world to have it.
She has suffered from health problems since birth and has issues with her hearing, speech and eyesight.
Her mother, Chloe, 29, said Mia-Rose’s health is likely to deteriorate as she gets older and fears she will end up in a wheelchair.
She gave up her career as a restaurant manager in 2018 and went back to college to get the exam grades needed to study biology at St Andrews University.
Miss Henderson said there is no NHS funding for research into Mia-Rose’s condition and she hopes to research the mutation herself to find out the long-term implications for her daughter.
The mother of two, from St Andrews, said: ‘Mia-Rose has always been a poorly little girl.
‘It has all been a mystery since she was born and she was in the special care baby unit.
‘She didn’t thrive, she didn’t put on any weight and didn’t meet her milestones.
‘We were back and forth to the doctors with her all the time because we knew there must be something underlying.’
Mia-Rose had a chromosome test but nothing showed up on the results and in 2018 she was put forward by medics for the Scottish Genomes Programme.
But the 18-month research project failed to come up with any answers – prompting Miss Henderson to decide to study biology in the hope that she could help her child.
Two weeks ago, Mia-Rose finally had KIF5B diagnosed, but her mother said it is not known how the mutation will affect her.
She said: ‘Mia-Rose went for a check-up recently and they found she needed hearing aids.
‘They did some tests to work out if it was due to another health condition and that’s when we got the call to say the doctors discovered the KIF5B mutation.
‘It was a complete shock to get that call and we have spent a lot of time crying.
‘The NHS don’t have funding to research such a rare mutation and until research into it is done we won’t know what it will mean for her in the future.’
She added: ‘I gave up my career as a restaurant manager to go back to college because I knew I wanted to get into St Andrews University to study biology.
‘I just thought, “I am going to do this, I will try and find an answer if no one else can”.
‘If anyone is going to find answers it’s going to be me – a parent who has the drive to find out. Other people won’t have that drive. ‘I need some sort of hope.’ Miss Henderson has even been in touch with the man who discovered the faulty gene in 1984 – Ron Vale, 62, from Virginia – in a desperate bid to find answers.
She said: ‘I reached out to Ron in the hope he would get back to me and amazingly he got back to
‘Back and forth with doctors’
me and asked for more information to see if he can help.
‘He hasn’t been able to find anyone with the same mutation.’
In a bid to learn more about the mutation, Miss Henderson has booked an appointment with one of the UK’s leading geneticists in London this month.
To help raise the money necessary for the appointment, the mother has launched a crowdfunder campaign.
So far, more than £5,000 has been handed over by scores of generous well-wishers.
The money will be used to cover the family’s travel expenses, appointment costs and extensive lab analysis required.
He captivated readers around the world with captain corelli’s Mandolin, his tale of a doomed love affair set in wartime Greece.
But it seems that best-selling author Louis de Bernieres (pictured) no longer melts hearts north of the border.
For i can disclose that he has just been unceremoniously sacked as patron of the British Banjo Mandolin and Guitar Federation because of, he believes, his views about how to resolve the question of Scottish independence.
‘i have actually been “cancelled”,’ he says. ‘i had a letter published in the times about how the rest of the UK ought to have a say in whether we wanted independence from the Scots.
‘Some Scottish snowflakes protested to the BMG [the Federation] and i was fired.’
the Federation, whose aim is ‘to promote the performance and education of banjo, mandolin and guitar’, did not respond to requests for comment.
de Bernieres has since expounded on his ideas on independence and noted that ‘nobody with any sense wants to stay with somebody who doesn’t love them’.
de Bernieres plays both the mandolin and the guitar — as well as the flute, saxophone and clarinet. ‘i decided recently that should i get an invitation from a university to go and speak to them, i will enquire as to whether they practise cancel culture, and if they do, i won’t go,’ says the author de Bernieres. ‘i think that ever since Germaine Greer got cancelled, it has to be an honour, and i feel proud to be at her side, albeit in a very tiny and entertaining and insignificant way.’
the Federation seems reluctant to let de Bernieres go entirely: a photograph of him continues to adorn its website.
Nevertheless, it is clearly too late to win him back.
His reverence for those who oppose totalitarianism is evident in captain corelli’s Mandolin.
its dedication reads: ‘to my mother and father, who...fought against the Fascists and the Nazis . . . and were never thanked.’
Actress Alison steadman has turned to birdsong to help her through lockdown.
‘the beauty of birds and birdsong always puts a smile on my face,’ the Gavin & stacey star says.
‘the dawn chorus is glorious. If you can just stop and listen to a bird sing for ten minutes, it lifts your spirits.
‘Very often, if I’m on a walk and hear a blackbird or a robin, I get my phone out and record it.
then when I come home, I can play it a few times and it’s just lovely. these things remind you that, yes, you’re important, but all creatures on this planet are.’
And that’s not all. ‘I love looking for funghi. If I see funghi, I don’t recognise, I take a photograph and check it out.’
Makes a change from making banana bread at least.
THE man striding across the Old Course on a blowy day in St Andrews certainly caught the eye of his fellow golfers. Overweight and balding yet immaculately dressed, with a cigar sticking out the side of his mouth and a loud New York accent, he was not the usual sort of player to be found on the Scottish greens of the 1920s.
Then there was his caddy, a large, intimidating man who held on to his golf bag just a little too tightly. As he prepared to tee off, suspicious Scots wondered: who was the man with the cigar?
His business card declared he was a dealer in furniture. Only the initials on his golf clubs –
He was the world’s most notorious mobster... who couldn’t resist the lure of golf, whisky and a day out in St Andrews
‘A.G.C’ – gave a hint to his identity. Alphonse Gabriel Capone was the most famous – and dangerous – mob boss in the world.
But in Scotland, a place he adored, he travelled incognito, even if his appearance on some of the country’s top golf courses tended to provoke a certain amount of frightened curiosity. Even now, almost a century after his reign of terror in Chicago in the prohibition era of the 1920s, Capone’s story still fascinates.
In a new film, Capone, released last week on Netflix, the gangster’s final years in Florida following his release from prison on medical grounds are explored in grim detail, as the actor Tom Hardy portrays an ageing man whose brain has been ravaged by syphilis, haunted by the violent and bloody crimes he committed.
But back in the 1920s, when Capone ran Chicago with an iron fist and harboured many dark secrets, there was one he kept particularly close: his love for Scotland.
It was a place where he was able to indulge his twin passions of whisky and golf. He did murky business deals here, finding ways to flood prohibition America with Scotch.
HE was attracted to the nononsense Scottish sensibility, and hired Scots to work within his mob. He loved the place so much he apparently even contemplated buying a home here, and long after his arrest for tax evasion in 1931, his influence was still being felt on the streets of Glasgow, as Scottish members of his mob brought the ruthless tactics they had learned from their boss back to their home turf.
‘I remember seeing his golf bag leaning against a wall in the house in Miami, where he lived in his last years,’ said his great-niece, Deirdre Marie Capone, who in 2012 wrote a book, Uncle Al Capone: The Untold Story From Inside His Family.
‘He told me they’d been made for him in Fife. He was in love with the game – and with the country.’
Capone took golf seriously. During his trips to Scotland, having sailed here under a false name and accompanied by his personal caddy, an armed thug who doubled as a bodyguard, he teed off not just at the Old Course but at Turnberry in Ayrshire and Muirfield in East Lothian.
According to his great-niece, he enjoyed the game ‘for the challenge it gave him in strategy and critical thinking’, and was particularly excited to play the Old Course.
‘St Andrews and Scotland was the birthplace of golf,’ she said.
‘To visit and play there was more than a vacation.’
This was true in more ways than one. By the late 1920s Capone’s Chicago Outfit had taken control of the Windy City’s golf clubs.
In an attempt to make them more exclusive, Capone insisted on hiring Scottish caddies, brought from places such as the Old Course and recognised around the world as the best in the business.
Such were the stakes on the Chicago greens, however, often swarming with the biggest gangsters of the day, caddies were ordered to carry more than just clubs in their golf bags, with tommy guns and revolvers also concealed inside for protection.
In Scotland, meanwhile, Capone hired local professionals to give him lessons, paying large sums of money not only for their expertise, but for their discretion, even if they did recognise their famous, cigar-chomping pupil.
He is also said to have done a number of business deals in Scotland involving whisky, which helped build his $28million empire.
He wouldn’t have been the first US gangster to make the trip. According to whisky historian Jason Craig, Arnold Rothstein, a New York crime lord who also loved his golf, made regular trips across the Atlantic to buy whisky and play a few rounds.
‘It’s the dark secret of the whisky industry,’ he said. ‘There’s no doubt Rothstein and Lucky Luciano came to Scotland to see who they were dealing with and to oversee operations worth fortunes.’
Certainly, Capone knew the value of a Scotch whisky label. As well as purchasing the ‘good stuff’ while in Scotland he is also said to have made his own low-quality bootleg whisky, putting it in illicitly procured Campbeltown casks in an effort to try to pass it off as genuine Scotch.
Then there is his rumoured involvement with Scottish businessman William C Miller-Thomas who, it has been alleged, was known for shipping bootleg whisky to waters just outside of US territory.
It was even believed that MillerThomas bought the mobster’s car,
and that it ended up buried in the grounds of his estate, the Ley, in Innerleithen, in Peeblesshire.
MILLER-thOMaS’S daughter Patricia Bertram, however, told a rather different tale in a letter to a newspaper several years ago.
‘My father never met al Capone and certainly never bought a car from him, neither did he conduct any business with him or operate an illegal trade offshore in bootleg whisky during Prohibition,’ she wrote. ‘he did, in fact, buy an american Buick in 1938 and shipped it over in his baggage on the Queen Mary.
‘he sold it immediately after the war and it was last seen motoring down the drive.’
that no car has ever been found in the grounds does, perhaps, tell its own story.
One Scot Capone certainly did have dealings with, however, was a Glaswegian named Ronald Kerr, whom he encountered by chance during a trip to Canada.
Kerr, a sandy-haired former soldier who served with the Kings Own Scottish Borderers, impressed the mobster with what a newspaper at the time described as his ‘rugged honesty and natural shrewdness’.
So much so that he rose to the top of the heap after Capone’s most audacious and grisly act: the St Valentine’s Day Massacre, in which seven members of Capone’s rival Chicago North Side Gang were gunned down in a garage on the morning of February 14, 1929.
the audacious killings put a price on Capone’s head and he fled to Florida, where he holed up at his home in Miami’s Palm Beach, living in constant fear of reprisal.
It was here that Kerr, who had no criminal record and had once been employed as a clerk in the accounting department of the London, Midland and Scottish Railway Company, came into his own, commanding a group of ten gunmen assigned to protect Capone and becoming, so one account of the day said, ‘the only man whom Capone will trust’.
and yet Kerr was far from the only Scot involved in Chicago’s ganglands. according to historian andrew Davies, whose book City of Gangs: Glasgow and the Rise of the British Gangster, documents the connections between the two cities: ‘If all the stories are true, you would think the Chicago gang wars were orchestrated by Scots.
‘there was a fascination in Britain with the US underworld in the Prohibition era. another dimension is the young Scots who had emigrated to the US during the Depression. Many returned having gained first-hand experience of violent, organised crime.’
history does not record what happened to Kerr after Capone was imprisoned in 1931 for tax evasion. Did he melt back into the shadows of the Chicago underworld? Or did he return to his native Glasgow, and start employing some of his strong-arm mob tactics there?
One Scots mobster who did just that was James Gilzean, who had emigrated to Chicago in the 1920s and upon his return to Glasgow claimed to have worked for a number of Chicago gangsters.
‘having returned to Scotland, he was keen to trade on the global notoriety of the wild men of Chicago and he provided sketches of John torrio, al Capone and Dean O’Banion,’ said Davies.
Indeed, Gilzean even trotted out a series of newspaper articles about his experiences, entitled a Scot in Chicago’s Gangland.
he was one of a number of young Scottish men who emigrated to the US in the 1920s in search of a fresh start and a better life but, when the Great Depression hit, found themselves turning to crime in order to scrape a living.
When caught, they were swiftly deported back to Scotland.
Records show that in 1932 alone, the year after Capone’s arrest, more than 100 criminals were deported from the US and Canada to Scotland.
Once home, and with little in the way of fresh prospects, they turned to what they knew. Before long the police in Scotland, and in Glasgow in particular, found themselves besieged by crimes they had rarely witnessed before, such as armed robberies, smash and grab raids, and protection rackets involving shopkeepers and publicans.
It has even been suggested that a number of Scottish criminals once employed by Capone in the Windy City ended up as members of the Billy Boys, the notorious Glasgow razor gang which terrorised the city in the 1930s. they were recently immortalised in the tV series Peaky Blinders, bringing the brutal lessons they had learned under the mob boss to the streets of the East End of Glasgow.
AS for Capone, it is believed that even before his arrest in 1931 for tax evasion (the authorities were never able to pin him for any of his more gruesome crimes, and while he served much of his sentence in the grim surroundings of alcatraz prison, he was released in 1939 on medical grounds), he had regrets about his life.
‘al would tell my grandfather, “I’ve got to get out. I’ve been shot, almost poisoned and there’s an offer of $50,000 to any man who kills me”,’ said his great-niece.
While he would live out the rest of his life in Miami, the syphilis he had contracted as a teenager slowly rotting his brain, finally dying in 1947 after a stroke and a heart attack, Capone’s great-niece says that he never stopped dreaming of Scotland.
‘Maybe if he’d taken another trip to Scotland to relax, he’d have lived longer,’ she said.
‘I could see him buying a home in St andrews’.
Quite what the well-heeled residents of the town would have made of the world’s most famous mobster as a neighbour, we can only wonder.