Make a date - June 4, 12 & 22

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 22 June, here are a number of linked events for that date plus two other June dates. To avoid repetition, I've simply indicated the relevant date in brackets. Apologies for the length of this entry! The three dates for this article are:
 

4, 12 and 22 June

If memory serves me right, June in England seems to be a time for pleasant warm evenings watching cricket on the village green, though it’s also the month when fetes are invariably washed out. That’s only one reason why many Brits have become expats in Spain! In 1896 J T Hearne set a cricket record for taking 100 first-class wickets (12).

Then in 1931 forty-eight-year-old Charlie Parker (not the Jazz musician!) equalled Hearne’s record (12); a day later, Tich Freeman achieved the same record. William Attewell was another bowler who took 100 (not first-class!) wickets (in 1884). He played in ten Tests; he was born (12) in 1861 and actually died a day before his birthday in 1927.

Still on the subject of sport – the sport of kings. The Epsom Derby in 1913 was sadly marred by a suffragette, Emily Davison, running out in front of the king’s horse Anmer (4). She was trampled underfoot and died a few days later. In 1994 sports superstar O J Simpson was accused of killing his wife Nicole and Ronald Goldman (12); he was acquitted though held liable in a civil case.

Eight years earlier Argentine soccer maestro Diego Maradona scored (22) against England during the World Cup in Mexico City. You know, that game where the Hand of God scored the winning goal.

Hot air ballooning is regarded as a sport, too. And it all started in 1783 when the Montgolfier brothers demonstrated (4) their hot air balloon.

 

Montgolfier balloon - Wikipedia commons

 

Another pioneer in flight was the pilot of the Gossamer Albatross, which flew across the Channel in 1979. It was man-powered by Bryan Allen.

Irwin Allen produced many films, among them Five Weeks in a Balloon, The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. He was born (12) in 1916. He was responsible for many science fiction series on TV, including The Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Lost in Space in the days when fiction was becoming fact, when, for instance, Venera 4 was launched in 1967 to become the first space probe to enter another planet’s atmosphere and successfully return data (12).

In 1633 views on the universe were very different: the Holy Office in Rome forced Galileo to recant his view that the sun, not the earth, was the centre of the universe (22). It wasn’t until 1992 that the Vatican recanted and effectively apologised for the treatment of Galileo.

A transit of Venus in 1769 was followed five hours later by a total solar eclipse (4); interestingly, on the same day in 780 BC the first solar eclipse was recorded in China (4).
 
On the same day Austrian astronomer Franz Xaver, Baron Von Zach, was born (4) in 1754 and he set out to find a predicted missing planet between Mars and Jupiter. His team located Ceres 1, which is the biggest rock in the Asteroid Belt that passes between these two planets.
 
In 1978 Pluto’s satellite Charon was discovered (22), some forty-eight years after the planet itself was actually found. Pluto was the Greek god of the underworld and Charon ferried the dead across the Styx to Hades; in August last year Pluto was declassified, no longer being a planet but merely a dwarf or minor planet, seventy-six years after its discovery.
 
Of course, instead of searching the heavens, many people simply explored our planet. One such man was George Vancouver, who was born (22) in 1757. He claimed Puget Sound for Britain (4) in 1792 and of course Vancouver in Canada is named after him.
 
Canadian actress Norma Shearer died (12) in 1983; she had been offered the part of Scarlett O’Hara in David O Selznick’s Gone With the Wind but he was overruled. Selznick died (22) in 1965; both he and Shearer were born in 1902.

Gone with the Wind poster - Wikipedia commons

Two of Selznick’s most popular films were Duel in the Sun, a western starring Gregory Peck, who died (12) in 2003, and The Third Man, based on the novel by Graham Greene. The Canadian actor Graham Greene, who captivated global audiences in Dances with Wolves, was born (22) in 1952.

The fifth century Capitoline Wolf statue symbolises the she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus at the birth of Rome. It’s featured in the epic film Cleopatra, which premiered (12) in 1963.

 
Henry Rider Haggard, author of King Solomon’s Mines and She also wrote a novel called Cleopatra in 1889. He was born (22) in 1856; he stood unsuccessfully for Parliament for East Norfolk in 1895. His tales of Allan Quatermain inspired modern interpretations like Indiana Jones and Lara Croft.
 
Tomb Raider star Angelina Jolie was born (4) in 1975. Her film Tomb Raider also featured Daniel Craig, who is the current movie James Bond, as well as Richard Johnson, who was in the TV movie The Secret Life of Ian Fleming.

Angelina Jolie - Tomb Raider - Wikipedia commons

 
Ian Fleming was actually in Intelligence during the Second World War. In 1940 the end of the evacuation from Dunkirk (4) seemed to offer little hope for the European continent’s future, with Rommel accepting the surrender (12) of 13,000 British and French troops followed by France being forced (22) to sign an armistice with Nazi Germany.
 
Two years later, thirteen-year-old Anne Frank received a diary on her birthday (12) – she was born in 1929 and was murdered in 1945.
 

And of course the war ended in that year with an Allied victory, thanks to Churchill’s leadership, among other factors. Prime Minister Churchill was succeeded in 1955 by Anthony Eden, who was born (12) in 1897.

Churchill, 1940 - Wikipedia commons

 
Perhaps because he was headstrong and stubborn, Winston Churchill didn’t get on well with fellow students in his early school years. He even had to hide behind a tree when some boys threw cricket balls at him. After this experience, he vowed to be as tough as anybody else. So with that cricket anecdote we’ve come full circle for this look at linking dates, people and events.
 

Make a date - 1, 14 and 31 October

Some time ago I published a regular monthly 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 14 October, here are a number of linked events for that date plus two other October dates. To avoid repetition, I've simply indicated the relevant date in brackets. The three dates for this article are:

1, 14 and 31 October

October is supposed to be the scary month, a time of hobgoblins, ghosts and of course Halloween. They don’t get much scarier than those Nazi leaders who in 1946 were sentenced at the Nuremberg Trials (1). A couple of years earlier (14) Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, suspected of plotting Hitler’s assassination, was given the choice of a public treason trial and certain death by firing squad or suicide with honour. This much-revered soldier chose the latter.

A ruler who met a grisly end was Benito Mussolini; little did he know about his fate when in 1922 he became the youngest premier in the history of Italy (31). Familiar to all of us living in Spain, Francisco Franco, although a controversial leader, actually died in his bed: in 1936 he was named the head of the Nationalist government of Spain (1).

Benito Mussolini

 

Less fortunate was King Harold Godwinson, who in 1066 got one in the eye at the battle of Senlac Hill (14), seven miles from Hastings.

With one eye on history, Khruschev made several cataclysmic revelations about his predecessors in his 1956 speech, resulting in the body of Joseph Stalin being removed (31) from Lenin’s Tomb in 1961 because Stalin was suddenly a non-person.

A mere three years later, Leonid Brezhnev ousted Khrushchev (14), probably as a result of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis which began with a U2 flyover taking photos of Soviet nuclear weapons being installed in Cuba (14).

Indeed, October seems to be a month marked by achievements in transport.

To begin with, in 1811, the first steamboat set sail down the Mississippi, arriving in New Orleans (1) and the following year work on London's Regent’s Canal began (14).

In 1908 Ford introduced the Model T car (1) and a mere thirty-nine years later Chuck Yeager flew the X-1 plane faster than the speed of sound (14), heralding in the concept of the space-age. NASA was created (1) in 1958.

Chuck Yeager and the X-1

 

Eleven years later to the day, a passenger aircraft - the Concorde - broke the sound barrier for the very first time (1). Maybe it did become uneconomical, but what a beautiful plane!

Other technological things happened on our selected days in October too. The first electric lamp factory was opened (1) by Thomas Edison in 1880 and the first rectangular television tubes were manufactured on the same day sixty-nine years later.

Although refrigeration was in use at the turn of the century, it wasn't commonplace, but that was due to change when Acme Refrigeration (1) was incorporated in 1959.

Quite a bit of land changed hands this month, too. Alexander the Great increased his empire (1) by defeating Darius III of Persia (now Iran) in the battle of Arbela in 331BC and Spain ceded Louisiana to France via the Treaty of San Ildefonso on the same day in 1800.

Still on the same day, with the help of T E Lawrence, the Arab forces captured Damascus for the Allies in 1918, while thirty-one years later Mao Zedong declared the People’s Republic of China.

T.E. Lawrence

 

Eleven years after that (1), the British Empire was being given away - notably Nigeria and Cyprus gained their independence.

 
That favourite place for philatelists, the Gilbert Islands, lost the Ellice Islands when they took the name Tuvalu (1) in 1975. Independence occurred in 1978. Tuvalu means “group of eight” – there are eight inhabited islands in the group. In 2000 Tuvalu leased its internet domain name “.tv” for fifty million dollars (until 2012).

Four years later to the day – 1979 - America too gave back land, returning sovereignty of the Panama Canal to Panama. The canal was purchased by the US while Theodore Roosevelt was their charismatic president. In 1912, while campaigning in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Roosevelt was shot by a saloon-keeper (14) but even with the flesh wound and the bullet still in him, Teddy Roosevelt delivered his scheduled speech.

Of course teddy bears were named after Roosevelt.

Another kind of bear cropped up in 1926 when A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh (14) was first published.

 
An earlier landmark in the publishing of a continuing character was Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, published (31) in 1892.

A similar publishing phenomenon is Ian Fleming’s James Bond; Patrick Dalzel-Job, whose exploits were the inspiration for the famous spy, died (14) in 2003 while coincidentally on the same day in 1927 the movie Bond Roger Moore was born.

Further to the magic of movies, The Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson was born in 1961, perhaps appropriately on Halloween. Thirty-two years to the day later, Federico Fellini, the Italian director died. Magician Harry Houdini died the same day in 1926 after his appendix was ruptured. Houdini and Conan Doyle were acquainted; the former debunked spiritualists, while Conan Doyle believed in them.

 

The magic of Broadway was heightened by the great composer Leonard Bernstein, who died (14) in 1990 while two famous British singer/actors were born on the same day (1) - Julie Andrews in 1935 and Stanley Holloway in 1890.

So there’s probably something to celebrate among that little lot! You could even sing Celebrations! Cliff Richard was born (14) in 1940 but they don't know in which attic he keeps the painting. (Oscar Wilde was born in October too [1854] but two days later than Cliff).