On This Day

[Altobelli]

21 OCTOBER

1772 The birth, at Ottery St. Mary (Devon) of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The years 1797 and 1798, during which he lived at Coleridge Cottage, in Nether Stowey, Somerset, were among the most fruitful of Coleridge's life and where he wrote his notable poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan.

1774 First display of the word "Liberty" on a flag, raised by colonists in Taunton, Massachusetts in defiance of British rule in Colonial America.

1805 At the Battle of Trafalgar, Nelson gave his famous signal, ‘England expects...’ which flew from the HMS Victory shortly after 11:00 a.m. The British won this important battle against Napoleon’s combined French and Spanish fleets off Cape Trafalgar, south-west of Spain and left Britain's navy unchallenged until the 20th century but Nelson was one of the day’s casualties. Nelson's flagship, Victory is now preserved at Portsmouth.

1824 Portland cement, the modern building material, was first patented by Joseph Aspdin of Wakefield in Yorkshire. Its name is derived from its similarity to Portland stone, a type of building stone that was quarried on the Isle of Portland in Dorset.

1854 Florence Nightingale with a staff of 38 nurses is sent to the Crimean War

1868 Sir Ernest Dunlop Swinton, the English inventor of the military tank, was born.

1879 Thomas Edison invents a workable electric light bulb at his laboratory in Menlo Park, N.J. which was tested the next day and lasted 13.5 hours

1921 George Melford's silent film, The Sheik, starring Rudolph Valentino, premiers.

1921 President Warren G. Harding delivers the first speech by a sitting U.S. President against lynching in the deep South.

1940 Geoff Boycott, Yorkshire and England batsman was born.

1940 The first edition of the Ernest Hemingway novel For Whom the Bell Tolls is published.


1944 World War II: US troops capture Aachen, 1st large German city to fall

1948 UN rejects Russian proposal to destroy atomic weapons

1950 Korean War: Heavy fighting began between forces from the 27th British Commonwealth Brigade and the North Korean 239th Regiment at the Battle of Yongju, also known as the Battle of the Apple Orchard.

1950 Chinese forces occupy Tibet

1956 Kenyan rebel leader Dedan Kimathi was captured by the British Army, signalling the ultimate defeat of the Mau Mau Uprising, and essentially ending the British military campaign in Kenya.

1958 The first women peers were introduced into the House of Lords.

1960 Britain launched its first nuclear submarine, HMS Dreadnought, at Barrow. The building, is Europe's largest ship building hall at almost 200 ft high and 900 ft long.

1966 144 people, 116 of them children, were killed in the small Welsh mining village of Aberfan when tons of slush, from a nearby coal slag tip weakened by rain, slid downhill and engulfed the village school, a farm and a row of terraced houses. The tragedy occurred at the beginning of the school day and on the day before the school closed for the half-term holiday. The children are buried in Aberfan's cemetery, on the hillside above the valley.

1973 Fred Dryer of the then Los Angeles Rams becomes the first player in NFL history to score two safeties in the same game.

1973 John Paul Getty III's ear is cut off by his kidnappers and sent to a newspaper in Rome; it doesn't arrive until November 8.


1975 Britain's unemployment figure reached 1,000,000 for the first time since World War II.

1982 Gerry Adams & Martin McGuinness made history by becoming the first members of Sinn Fein to be elected to the Ulster Assembly.

1985 In one of Britain's worst motorway crashes, 13 people were killed on the M6 motorway in Lancashire.

1988 A Greek cruise ship sank after a collision with a freighter. All 390 British schoolchildren and 81 teachers were rescued.

1993 Military coup by Burundi President Ndadaye; 525,000 Hutus flee

1994 North Korea and the United States sign an agreement that requires North Korea to stop its nuclear weapons program and agree to inspections.


1996 Frances Lawrence, widow of headmaster Phillip Lawrence who was stabbed to death by a group of teenagers outside his school gates, launched a 'better citizenship campaign' to promote good behaviour in schools.

1997 'Candle in the Wind' - the re-working of the hit single Elton John sang live at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, was declared the biggest selling single in music history.

2011 St Paul's Cathedral was closed to visitors for the first time since World War II because of anti-capitalist demonstrators (the 'Occupy London Stock Exchange' movement) 'camping on its doorstep'. The Right Reverend Graeme Knowles said that the decision had been taken with a heavy heart, for health and safety reasons.

2012 The death (aged 99) of William Walker, the oldest surviving pilot from the Battle of Britain, who was shot down in his Spitfire and wounded in 1940.

Famous Birthday's

Alfred Nobel
(1833 - 1896)

Carrie Fisher
(1956 - 2016)

Kim Kardashian
37th Birthday

Geoff Boycott
76th Birthday

Famous Deaths

Horatio Nelson
(1758 - 1805)

Jack Kerouac
(1922 - 1969)

Famous Weddings

1917 Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats (52) weds Georgie Hyde-Lees (25)

1929 Bank robber Willie Sutton (28) weds Louise Leudemann

1948 Science fiction pioneering author "Stranger in a Strange Land" Robert A. Heinlein marries 3rd wife Virginia "Ginny" Gerstenfeld

1977 Actor Peter Boyle (42) weds Loraine Alterman at the United Nations chapel in Manhattan

1995 "Family Ties" actress Meredith Baxter (48) weds screenwriter Michael Blodgett (56) in Los Angeles

[Altobelli]

22 OCTOBER

1633 Battle of Liaoluo Bay: Dutch East India Company defeated by Chinese Ming naval forces in southern Fujian sea

1707 Four British Royal Navy ships ran aground near the Isles of Scilly. Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell and more than 1,400 sailors drowned in one of the worst maritime disasters in the history of Britain. It was later determined that the main cause of the disaster was the navigators' inability to accurately calculate their positions.

1721 Tsar Peter the Great becomes "All-Russian Imperator"

1746 The College of New Jersey (later renamed Princeton University) receives its charter.

1877 An explosion at the Blantyre mine in Scotland killed 207 miners the youngest aged 11. It remains Scotland’s worst mining accident.

1878 The first floodlit rugby match took place, between Broughton and Swinton, at Broughton, Lancashire.

1879 Thomas Edison perfects carbonized cotton filament light bulb

1883 The Metropolitan Opera House in New York City opens with a performance of Gounod's Faust.

1884 International Meridian Conference in Washington, D.C. adopts Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) worldwide, creating 24 international time zones with longitude zero at the Greenwich meridian

1907 Panic of 1907: A run on Knickerbocker Trust Company stock leads to US wide run on banks

1910 American born Doctor Hawley Crippen was convicted at the Old Bailey Central Criminal Court in London of poisoning his wife Cora. Crippen was hanged on November 23rd at Pentonville prison.

1924 Toastmasters International is founded.

1930 The BBC Symphony Orchestra played their first concert, conducted by Sir Adrian Boult at the Queen’s Hall, London.

1934 In East Liverpool, Ohio, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents shoot and kill notorious bank robber Pretty Boy Floyd.

1937 The Duke and Duchess of Windsor arrived in Berlin to meet German leader Adolf Hitler, to study housing conditions.

1962 President Kennedy announces that American has discovered Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba, and that he has ordered a naval "quarantine" of the Communist nation.

1963 A BAC One-Eleven prototype airliner flown by test pilot Mike Lithgow, crashed during stall testing with the loss of all on board. Lithgow became the holder of the World Absolute Air Speed Record in 1953 flying a Supermarine Swift.

1966 A Russian KGB master spy, George Blake, escaped from Wormwood Scrubs in London where he was serving a 40 year sentence for spying against the British Government.

1966 The Supremes become the first all-female music group to attain a No. 1 selling album (The Supremes A' Go-Go).

1972 Gordon Banks, England’s star goalkeeper, damaged his eyes in a car crash.

1974 A bomb exploded in a London restaurant near to where opposition leader Edward Heath was dining. Three members of staff were injured.

1975 The 'Guildford Four' were sentenced to life imprisonment after being found guilty of planting IRA bombs in pubs in Guildford and Woolwich. Fifteen years later they had their convictions quashed by the Court of Appeal, following an extensive inquiry into the original police investigation.

1983 The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) held its biggest ever protest against nuclear missiles in London, with an estimated one million people taking part.

1983 Two correctional officers are killed by inmates at the United States Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois. The incident inspires the Supermax model of prisons.

1986 The world’s youngest heart transplant patient, a two-and-a-half-month-old baby from north west London, was given the heart of a five-day-old Belgian boy by Professor Magdi Yacoub at Harefield Hospital, Middle***.

2001 Grand Theft Auto III was released, popularizing a genre of open-world, action-adventure video games as well as spurring controversy around violence in video games.


2001 Towns and villages in Cambridgeshire and Es*** were on flood alert as forecasters predicted more torrential downpours following what experts said were the worst floods in 20 years.

2001 The launch of the Beautiful Britain website! The first desktop wallpaper was a picture of Glenfinnan in the Scottish Highlands. If you have an all time favourite desktop wallpaper from the Beautiful Britain website then I'd be interested to know, via the Contact Form.

2006 The first episode ('Everything Changes') of the cult British science fiction television programme Torchwood, a spin-off of Doctor Who. Alien hunter Ianto Jones was played by Welsh actor Gareth David-Lloyd. Remarkably, there is a shrine at Cardiff Bay in honour of Torchwood's fictional Ianto Jones who 'gave his life in defence of the children of this planet' in 2009.

2013 Former BBC broadcaster Stuart Hall was stripped of his OBE by the Queen after he was jailed for a series of ***ual assaults on young girls. In June, Hall, aged 83, admitted 14 counts against girls aged from nine to 17 between 1967 and 1985. The Queen directed that the honour should be "cancelled and annulled" and his name be "erased" from the register.

Famous Birthday's

Franz Liszt
(1811 - 1886)

Joan Fontaine
(1917 - 2013)

Shaggy
49th Birthday

Famous Deaths

Paul Cézanne
(1839 - 1906)

Pretty Boy Floyd
(1904 - 1934)

Arnold J. Toynbee
(1889 - 1975)

Famous Weddings

1945 Argentine military officer and politician Juan Perón (50) weds actress Eva Perón (26) at a civil ceremony in Junin

1948 Farm labor leader Cesar Chavez (21) weds labor activist Helen Fabela (20) in Reno, Nevada

1967 Actor Morgan Freeman (30) weds Jeanette Adair Bradshaw

1970 Singer James Brown (37) weds Deidre Jenkins in Barnwell, South Carolina

1981 Best-selling author Michael Crichton (39) weds broadcast journalist Suzanne Childs

Famous Divorces

2007 Black Crowes frontman Chris Robinson (40) divorces actress Kate Hudson (28) due to irreconcilable differences after nearly six years of marriage