Some time ago I
published a regular monthly magazine column linking a set selection of dates in
history. The series was popular. I'm busy coordinating the articles into book
form. As today is 7 January, here are a number of linked events for that date plus
three other January dates. To avoid repetition, I've simply indicated the
relevant date in brackets. The three dates for this article are:
1, 7, 11 and 22
January
January’s the time when we put up our pristine calendars and
look forward to a new year full of promise – if you’re an optimist, of course.
At one time calendars could present a little problem or two. Take for example
the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in 1582 (named after Pope Gregory
XIII), which was to replace the Julian (named after Julius Caesar, which began
in 45 BC). It was bound to cause consternation. After all, ten days were
eliminated – 5 to 14 October. Only Spain, Portugal and parts of Italy started
to use the new calendar in 1582 – now, a calendar for that year would make a
priceless collectors’ item.
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Friar Roger Bacon – not to be confused with Sir Francis
Bacon (22), the philosopher who was born in 1561 – felt that this action was
necessary some three hundred years earlier, calculating that the Julian
calendar had been overestimating the solar year in excess of eleven minutes per
year. Bacon was ignored, his representations misplaced in time, but by the
1500s scientists were clamouring for a correction, even Copernicus joining the
fray. Those calculations were remarkable; the length of time the Gregorian
calendar is off from the true solar year is 25.96768 seconds per year.
Most Catholic countries accepted the Gregorian calendar
between 1582 and 1584; Scotland adopted it in 1600; Protestant Germany accepted
it partially in 1700 and fully in 1775.
Almost two hundred years after its creation, Great Britain
and the American colonies accepted the Gregorian calendar in 1752; Parliament
eliminated 3 to 13 September of that year and London bankers shouted ‘Give us
back our eleven days’, protesting against paying their taxes on 25 March,
eleven days early. Taxes were finally paid on 5 April, which remains tax day in
the UK today. It also plays havoc with time-travellers, as you can imagine!
China accepted the Gregorian calendar in 1949.
As you’d expect, the first day of a year is a significant
start-point for any number of changes. On this day in 1651 Charles II was crowned
King of Scotland. And 150 years later to the day the legislative union of the
Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland was completed to form the
United Kingdom.
Three years later, French rule was ended in Haiti and eight
years after that the importation of slaves into the United States was banned
(though it was another fifty-five years to the day before Abraham Lincoln gave
his Emancipation Declaration). Pioneers of a different stamp were accepted into
the United States when Ellis Island opened in 1892 for immigrants (1).
Just before the close of the nineteenth century, Spanish rule in Cuba ended in 1899 (Fidel Castro seizing power on the same day sixty years later). In 1901 the Commonwealth of Australia was established and eleven years later the Republic of China.
A regular staple on television screens, the Vienna New Year’s concerts actually began in 1939. Nothing to make a song and dance over, true – though possibly singers who died on this day might have given it a go, such as Hank Williams (died 1953), Maurice Chevalier (died 1972) and Ray Walston (died 2001) of South Pacific and My Favourite Martian fame. Fifteen years earlier Gershwin completed Rhapsody in Blue (7); and on the same day two other famous musicians were born – Francis Poulenc (1899) who actually wrote music especially for the man with the golden flute, Jean-Pierre Rampal (1922).
As a nation of shopkeepers, the UK ought to welcome the euro
and the simplification of the immense marketplace it offers; it would be
interesting to know what Harry Gordon Selfridge (11) would have thought – he
was born in 1858, the same day as the coal-miners’ once-powerful trade union
leader, Arthur Scargill, in 1938. Scargill was a member of the Young Communist
League from 1955 until 1962 when he joined the Labour Party. The so-called
Scargill miners’ strike brought down Edward Heath’s government in 1974, a year
after Heath took the UK into the European Community (1). Since those on
mainland Europe couldn’t successfully invade us or beat us, they decided to
join us.
Perhaps we’ve never recovered from losing England’s last
possession on the continent in 1558 – Calais, which France took back (7); well,
we did let them win occasionally. That Channel might divide us, but plenty of
people have attempted to bridge the gap, not least the Frenchman Jean-Pierre
Blanchard and American John Jeffries, who in 1785 were the first to travel by
air in a gas balloon from Dover to Calais (7). It was another hundred years
before the more famous Montgolfier brothers flew over the Channel (1);
incredibly, it was a mere fifty years later in 1935 that the first woman flew
from Hawaii to California – plucky Amelia Earhart (11).
When Earhart was twenty she visited her sister in Toronto
and saw first-hand the survivors from WWI. She received nurse’s aide training
and worked in the military hospital, handing out medicines. Here, she
contracted Spanish flu during the pandemic which lasted from March 1918 until
June 1920. Spanish flu claimed about fifty million lives. After about a year,
Earhart recovered but would suffer from chronic sinusitis thereafter, which
affected her flying. Because there was censorship during the World War, and
Spain was neutral without news blackouts, when the flu pandemic was reported in
Spain, it was wrongly assumed this was where the disease originated, when in
fact it was virulent in North America and all of Europe, not only Spain.
Spain ceded Port Egmont in the Falkland Islands to England in 1771 and, sixty-nine years later to the day, British colonists reached New Zealand (22). Many colonists might have thought life was a lottery – and could bear in mind that the first recorded lottery in England (11) was in 1569.
Still dwelling on the other side of the globe, it might have
had something to do with the growing threat of Japan, but in 1943 both the US
and Britain gave up all territorial rights to China (11).
Perhaps there were no new lands to discover once the Pacific
Ocean was navigated, but there were still places ‘out there’. In 1610 Galileo
Galilei observed the four largest moons of Jupiter for the first time (7): Callisto
was a beautiful maiden who enticed Jupiter, thereby invoking the wrath of Juno,
Jupiter's wife. She turned Callisto into a bear. After Io's romance with
Jupiter, she was turned into a heifer, pursued by Juno's gadfly. To elude the
ever-watchful Juno, Jupiter approached Europa as a bull; she climbed upon
his back, and the two flew off to Crete, where Europa became an object of
worship. Ganymede, a “handsome youth” attracted Jupiter's attention too,
who whisked the boy off to become a cup-bearer to the gods.
In 1787 William Herschel found Titania and Oberon, the two moons of Uranus (11); and a mere fourteen years later the first asteroid, 1 Ceres, was discovered.
On the same day Galileo made his discovery (7), but nine
years earlier, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, led a revolt in London against
Queen Elizabeth. Happily, the UK’s other long-lived monarch didn’t have to put
up with such things. Although Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India in
1887 in Delhi (1), her troops didn’t get it all their own way by a long
assegai.
Sixty-three years earlier – the young queen had been on the throne just five years - the Ashanti warriors crushed the British forces in the Gold Coast (22) and on the same day in 1879 Zulu troops massacred the British at Isandlwana, just a short time before the famous battle of Rorke’s Drift. While serving on HMS Zulu, we had a permanent copy of the famous film – and a regular ship’s newspaper, The Warrior. The Anglo-Zulu war started some eleven days earlier (11). Stories of all those flashing spears, knives and naked bloody heroism probably appealed to someone born in 1906, Robert E Howard (22) - the creator of the mythical Hyborean Age warrior Conan. And on the same day at the beginning of the twentieth century – 1901 – Queen Victoria died, to be succeeded by Edward VII.
On the same day in 1924 Ramsay MacDonald became the first Labour Prime Minister; in fact he was one of many distinguished people who visited author Thomas Hardy, who died four years later (11).
This writer thinks that’s about it for now...
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