Example sentences of "he have [been] the first " in BNC.

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1 He had been the first to reach Maggie , though her screams had brought people running from all the neighbouring tenements .
2 Sheppard , already famous as ‘ the radio parson ’ — he had been the first person to broadcast a church service — was Canon of St Pauls .
3 Sir John Fastolf , involved in a long drawn-out lawsuit in Paris between 1432 and 1435 , could remind the court that he had been the first to jump into the sea when Henry V had come ashore in France in 1415 , and that the king had rewarded him with the grant of the first house which he had seen in France .
4 Once he had been The First Hand Supreme in all Chung Kuo , Master of Masters and eight times winner of the great annual championship held in Suchow .
5 He had been the first to hear the sound of the car approaching , and the quickest to identify it , for he was the only one who looked completely unsurprised as it rolled gently alongside the Aston Martin , while all the rest had checked momentarily and turned to gaze .
6 Matthei had been in post since 1978 , but in the late 1980s he had been the first among the military leadership to recognize the strength of the democratic opposition and the inevitability of political change and , as a result , began to distance himself from the military hardliners .
7 He had been the first serf-owner to take advantage of the reformist Law on Obligated Peasants .
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