Example sentences of "happened to [be] " in BNC.

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31 I happened to be the last person of my family there .
32 But tonight , although she had left it open on many other nights , it happened to be locked .
33 The CO 's office where he was learning the job of Assistant Adjutant happened to be on the first floor of an empty house in Cadogan Gardens .
34 Her heart was beating wildly as it had for days whenever the telephone bell rang anywhere she happened to be .
35 Why should the fact that D was engaged on causing damage to property at the time ( even damage to D's own property ) make his conduct into an offence punishable with life imprisonment when , if D were engaged on some other activity , it would not be punishable as such and would only amount to manslaughter if a death happened to be caused ?
36 Sir Neill Cooper-Key , Lord Rothermere 's son-in-law , procured the safe Conservative seat of Hastings because , as a young army officer in 1945 he happened to be drinking in the bar of the Berkeley Hotel .
37 On his deathbed at Pentecost 337 he was baptized by a bishop whose sympathies happened to be Arian ; much later legend made Pope Silvester bestow the lifegiving baptismal water .
38 The press had been given nothing but ‘ blurry , distorted photographs culled from television shots of occasions in the past at which North happened to be present ’ ; at best , ABC News had shown ‘ pictures of the back of a man 's head that may or may not have been North 's as the man got into an Embassy car in Cyprus on the occasion of the homeward flight of one of the hostages ’ .
39 No , it was a piece I am very fond of and it happened to be in quite a few programmes at that time .
40 The marble happened to be perfect .
41 It was a subjective , not an objective view ; but it happened to be the attitude of a man living in the kingdom which harboured Mary Queen of Scots .
42 ‘ Pray , sir , may I ask you , do you think that if St. Paul happened to be travelling with us and had passed the place where he was born , that he would have pointed out the fact to us ? ’
43 It proved a disastrous union — ‘ Salo ’ , the inferior player , became brutally jealous of his wife 's game , and accused her of flirting with whomever she happened to be playing .
44 But it happened to be true . ’
45 It also transpired that parts of England ( east and south-east ) were put on full invasion alert at the time , but it seems that ‘ Cromwell ’ had been ignored in some places where the junior officers who happened to be on duty had not been let into the secret of what it meant .
46 The French relieve you of £1.05 in tax , 63 per cent of the £1.66 pump price you would be charged if diesel happened to be sold by the gallon in Calais .
47 Crofting made its impact when we moved house from one of the quiet streets , in the middle of the town , to the road which was planned by a wealthy proprietor as an elegant tree-lined approach to Lews Castle , but which also happened to be the shortest route between a dozen crofting villages , lying to the east of the town , and their 19,000 acres of general common pasture which lay to the west .
48 So a Primary school headmaster , for instance , could find his school offering movement experience to children who had female teachers to the neglect of those children who were unfortunate enough to have a man as their teacher , and similarly , Movement and Drama appeared as a subject on the time-table in our Secondary schools where there happened to be a woman in the P.E .
49 One quite serious limitation in the original selection of these authorities lay in the criterion for selection which seemed to rest in the main on those authorities whose drama advisers happened to be currently in favour with H.M.I .
50 No-one was certain if any hanging had really taken place but on cold , windy nights the tree would creak and moan , startling those who happened to be passing by .
51 Martin Martin notes that on a small rocky island to the south of Skye there is ‘ a great quantity of scurvey-grass , of an extraordinary size , and very thick ; the natives eat it frequently , as well boiled as raw : two of them told me that they happened to be confined there for the space of thirty hours , by a contrary wind ; and being without victuals , fell to eating this scurvey-grass , and finding it of a sweet taste , far different from the land scurvey-grass , they ate a large basketful of it , which did abundantly satisfy their appetites until their return home ’ .
52 They had an interest in playing golf together so specifically formed a society giving it the name of the road they happened to be in at the time — Worple Way , Harrow .
53 The divisions were arbitrary , mainly depending upon who happened to be where when the fighting stopped .
54 The fact that they happened to be sites where nuclear waste was already produced , where there might be a flicker of acceptance from the local population , and appeared to have been chosen more from expediency than science , did n't seem to embarrass the already embattled industry .
55 The increased dose they would get from having Hinkley C on their doorstep , according to Jeremy Western ( a manager from the Board 's Health Physics department who confidently fronted the radiation case ) was less than if they had simply moved from one part of Britain to another — where the ‘ natural ’ background radiation happened to be higher .
56 Beatrice described his assaults in her fluent , showy style , the nights when Modigliani came home drunk : ‘ If I happened to be drunk too , there was a great scene !
57 George Taylor was collected and he and Mrs Oliver returned to the tobacconists ' to be joined shortly by PC Chandler , an off-duty policeman who happened to be in Higatt 's too .
58 Arrested with Mrs Dyer was her son-in-law , a Mr Arthur Palmer , who happened to be living with her at the time .
59 ‘ We happened to be at the mortuary … not that it will make any difference , but there is one thing we thought you would find interesting . ’
60 Chateaubriand , who happened to be visiting Arenenberg was asked by the young author for his opinion of the work , and the great writer graciously suggested that it would be improved if , where the word ‘ people ’ occurred , the Prince were to replace it with ‘ nation ’ .
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