The film The Night My Number Came Up (1955) was based on a strange incident in Goddard's life. In January 1946, he arrived at a party in Shanghai to overhear an officer talking of a dream in which Air Marshal Goddard was killed in a plane crash. The aircraft in the officer's dream iced over and crashed on a pebbled beach near mountains with two men and a woman on board. Goddard himself was due to fly to Tokyo that night on a Dakota and by the end of the evening he was persuaded to take two men and a woman with him. The plane iced over and was forced to make a crash landing on the Japanese island of Sado; the crash scene, a pebbled beach near mountains, resembled that described in the precognitory dream. Unlike the dream, however, because of Goddard's precautions no one was injured. Michael Redgrave who played the Air Marshal, was depicted in the film as becoming excited as the plane made its crash landing; this seriously annoyed Goddard, who had been proud of what he had seen as his unemotional behaviour.
Read more about this topic: Victor Goddard
Famous quotes containing the words the night, night and/or number:
“I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is “Who in the world am I?” Ah, that’s the great puzzle!”
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)
“By night we lingered on the lawn,
For underfoot the herb was dry;
And genial warmth; and o’er the sky
The silvery haze of summer drawn;”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)
“The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)