EVENTS: In 1327 Edward III acceded to the throne; in 1533 King Henry VIII married his second wife, Anne Boleyn, in secret; in 1919 the League of Nations was founded; in 1924 the first Winter Olympics began in Chamonix, France; in 1971 army officers led by Idi Amin deposed the Ugandan President, Milton Obote, while he was attending a Commonwealth conference in Singapore; in 1990 Benazir Bhutto, the Pakistani Prime Minister, gave birth to a baby girl, making her the first head of government to give birth while in office.
BIRTHS: St Edmund Campion, Jesuit martyr falsely implicated in a plot against Elizabeth I and hanged at Tyburn, born in London, 1540; Robert Boyle, whose book, The Skeptical Chymist (1661), proposing that matter was composed of irreducible elements, shattered the traditional Aristotelian view of the four elements, born in Lismore, Co Waterford, 1627; Joseph Lagrange, mathematician and astronomer who headed the commission that produced the French metric system of units in 1795, born in Turin, 1736; Robert Burns, poet, born in Alloway, Ayrshire, 1759; John Arbuthnot Fisher (1st Baron Fisher), Admiral of the Fleet who in a letter to The Times on September 2, 1919 (on overmanning and overspending within government departments), wrote “Sack the lot!”, born in Ceylon, 1841; William Somerset Maugham, novelist and dramatist, born in Paris, 1874; Virginia Woolf, novelist and critic, born in London, 1882; Wilhelm Furtwängler, conductor who took over the Leipzig Gewandhaus concerts in 1922 and conducted the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra from 1922 to 1954, born in Berlin, 1886; Witold Lutoslawski, composer noted for his orchestral music, born in Warsaw, 1913.
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DEATHS: Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), died in Oxford, 1640; Dorothy Wordsworth, writer who was William Wordsworth’s sister and devoted companion, died in Rydal, Westmorland, 1855; Frederic Leighton (Lord Leighton), president of the Royal Academy 1878-96, who shortly before his death, in Kensington, 1896, became the first English artist to be raised to the peerage; Ouida (pseudonym of Marie Louise de la Ramée), author of 45 novels including Two Little Wooden Shoes (1874), died in Viareggio, Italy, 1908; Al Capone, gangster, died in Florida, 1947.