EVENTS: A Kriegsmarine battle flag with a swastika in the collection of the RAF Museum at Hendon is a reminder of the surrender, south of Iceland, on this day in 1941, of U570, a German U-boat shaken by depth charges from a Hudson bomber of 269 Squadron, RAF Coastal Command. The flag is on loan to the museum from the squadron, and the U-boat itself was recommissioned as HMS Graph after much of its interior had been removed for use in Royal Navy training schools.
In 1783 Jacques Alexandre César Charles, a member of the French Academy of Science, launched the first balloon inflated with hydrogen gas; in 1859 the first commercially productive oil well was drilled at Titusville, Pennsylvania; in 1883 the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa erupted, killing more than 30,000 people; in 1990 the United States expelled 36 of the 55 staff at Iraq’s Washington Embassy.
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BIRTHS: When the BBC radio Saturday evening programme In Town Tonight was first broadcast in 1933, its last-minute choice of theme tune — made without any reference to the composer — was Eric Coates’s Knightsbridge march. The first that Coates knew of it was when his wife called out: “They’re playing something of yours on the wireless. I can’t think what it is.” Coates emerged from his study to declare: “No, neither can I.” Coates was born in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire, on this day in 1886.
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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, German philosopher, born in Stuttgart, 1770; Carl Bosch, German chemist and Nobel laureate, 1931, born in Cologne, 1874; Man Ray, photographer, painter and film-maker, born in Philadelphia, 1890; C.S. Forester, British novelist, born in Cairo, 1899; Lyndon B. Johnson, 36th American President, 1963-69, born near Stonewall, Texas, 1908; Mother Teresa, winner of the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize, born in Skopje, then in Serbia, 1910.
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DEATHS: When Carlo Marochetti died in 1867, having been Queen Victoria’s first choice of sculptor for the Albert Memorial statue of her husband, the job passed to John Henry Foley, who proved marginally luckier than his predecessor in that he was able to finish the piece before he died, in London on this day in 1874. Having caught a chill while working on another part of the memorial, he was already unwell when he started on the figure of Albert.
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Titian, Italian painter, died in Venice, 1576; Lope de Vega, Spanish playwright, died in Madrid, 1635; Sir Rowland Hill, originator of the Penny Post, died in London, 1879; Louis Botha, first Prime Minister of South Africa, 1910-19, died in Pretoria, 1919; Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, the architect Le Corbusier, died in Cap Martin, France, 1965; Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett, novelist, died in London, 1969; Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, 1930-74, died in Addis Ababa, 1975; Louis Mountbatten (1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma), naval commander and last Viceroy of India, assassinated by an IRA bomb in Donegal Bay, County Sligo, 1979.