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