Graeme Donald - On This Day in History

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
Michael OMara Books Limited
9 Lion Yard
Tremadoc Road
London SW4 7NQ

Copyright Michael OMara Books Limited 2014

All rights reserved. You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78243-216-6 in hardback print format
ISBN: 978-1-78243-270-8 in e-book format

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Designed and typeset by Billy Waqar

For Rhona the best date I ever made!

For a book of such self-explanatory structure a foreword might seem a trifle superfluous but it should be said that deciding what not to include presented the most difficult choices.

For example, history is peppered with natural disasters, so their mention was restricted to only those of global import to prevent the book becoming a catalogue of such events. Much the same censorship was imposed on the two World Wars and other major conflicts. Some of the characters mentioned in the following pages will be familiar to many readers, so only their lesser-known activities and proclivities are included. And some persons and events may surprise.

Perhaps inevitably, many of the dates themselves presented a quandary; for example, events in space that took place early on the morning of, say, 5 June on GMT, could be presented as late on 4 June at the American launch-site; which to choose? GMT was eventually taken as the benchmark.

At the end of the day, the book was constructed to afford the reader an interesting and informative day-by-day trawl through the centuries; all involved in the books production hope you will find it so.

GRAEME DONALD

The last gladiatorial games are staged in Rome. The Games evolved from the funeral of Brutus in 264BC when men fought to the death to provide him with an escort in the afterlife.

1660

English naval administrator Samuel Pepys begins his famous diary with Blessed be God.

1772

With the rich indulging in their Grand Tours of Europe, the London Credit Exchange issues the first travellers cheques.

1892

Fifteen-year-old Annie Moore from Ireland becomes the first immigrant to be processed by the facilities on Americas Ellis Island.

1934

Alcatraz ceases to be a military prison when it is formally signed over to the civil prison authorities. Although notorious for its tough conditions, the 600-cell complex never holds more than 300 prisoners and by the time it closes in 1963 is considered a luxury stay by some inmates.

1959

After six years of strife, President Batista flees Cuba, which now falls to the forces of Fidel Castro and Ernie Guevara Lynch, better known today as Che Guevara.

1492

Arab control of Spain ends with the fall of Granada, the Moors last stronghold. Blue-blooded was coined by the Spanish nobility during the occupation to distinguish themselves from the invaders, whose dark skin prevented their veins from showing blue at the wrist.

1757

Robert Clive recaptures the British fort at Calcutta, India, from the Nawab of Bengal and learns the fate of British captured by the Nawabs troops: allegedly, of 146 British men and women imprisoned overnight in a tiny cell, 123 had died by morning in the stifling heat.

1833

Britain asserts sovereignty over the Falkland Islands.

1955

Jos Remn Cantera, President of Panama, is assassinated.

1959

Soviets launch Luna 1, the first craft to get to the Moon, where it establishes the absence of any magnetic field.

1979

New York trial of Sex Pistols singer, Sid Vicious, for the murder of his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, in Greenwich Village. While on bail, he takes a fatal overdose.

1868

Japan brings down the curtain on centuries of military rule as the Shogunate is replaced by the sixteen-year-old Emperor, Meiji.

1917

British physicist Sir Ernest Rutherford announces that he has split the atom.

1922

Howard Carter enters the burial chamber of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun. Following several mysterious deaths, the media reports a curse on anyone who disturbs the tomb, which is enough to frighten off the locals and would-be grave-robbers. No such inscription existed, either on the walls or on any artefact.

1925

Mussolini announces he is assuming the Dictatorship of Italy.

1967

Having killed Lee Harvey Oswald (the sniper who assassinated President John F. Kennedy), Jack Ruby himself dies in a Dallas hospital of natural causes.

1980

Conservationist Friederike Victoria Gessner, aka Joy Adamson, author of Born Free, is found murdered near her Kenyan home.

1809/13

The respective birthdays of two famous code writers Louis Braille and Isaac Pitman. Braille based his system for the visually impaired on an invention of Charles Barbier, a French Army officer, who had devised night writing for the distribution of orders among soldiers without having to use lanterns.

1847

The Texas Rangers give Samuel Colt his first order when they commission 1,000 of his new revolvers, soon to be advertised as The Equalizer.

1958

After circling the earth for about three months, the first artificial earth satellite Sputnik 1 succumbs to orbit-decay and crashes back to earth.

1960

Donald Campbell dies trying to break the water-speed record on Coniston Water in northern England. His body is not found until 2001.

2010

Dubais towering Burj Khalifa opens its doors as the worlds tallest building.

1781

In the American War of Independence, Richmond, Virginia, is put to the torch by a British force led by the American traitor, Benedict Arnold.

1896

Wilhelm Rntgen makes public his discovery of X-rays.

1919

Munich sees the registering of a new political faction, The National Socialist German Workers Party, led by an unemployed plumber called Anton Drexler; member 55 will be Adolf Hitler, who will later take over.

1925

Mrs Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming becomes Americas first female State Governor.

1930

Stalin institutes his disastrous Collectivization of Farms across the Soviet Union.

1941

British aviator Amy Johnson crashes and dies in the Thames Estuary.

1975

The Khmer Rouge mounts an all-out and successful offensive on Phnom Penh and rebrands Cambodia as Democratic Kampuchea.