EVENTS: This day in 1945 was the turning point in the Battle of Britain, and has been celebrated since the war as Battle of Britain Day. During the day, 34 German bombers were destroyed, 20 were badly damaged, and 26 fighter planes shot down. The action was described by the Prime Minister two days later in the House of Commons as “the most brilliant and fruitful of any fought upon a large scale up to that date by the fighters of the Royal Air Force”.
In 1916 the Battle of Flers-Courcelette, part of the Somme offensive, began, with the British using tanks for the first time; in 1928 Alexander Fleming discovered the antibiotic effect of penicillin; in 1938 the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain visited Adolf Hitler at Berchtesgaden; in 1950 the United Nations landed troops at Inchon, Korea; in 1966 Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother launched HMS Resolution, the first Resolution Class ballistic missile submarine.
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BIRTHS: Henry Sweet, philologist and phonetician, author of The History of English Sounds (1874) and the man upon whom Bernard Shaw based some aspects of Henry Higgins in Pygmalion (1916), was born in London on this day in 1845. “Sweet, being a very English Englishman, was extremely quarrelsome,” wrote Shaw. “Being moreover the brainiest Oxford don of his time, he was embittered by the contempt with which his subject . . . was treated by his university, which was and still is full of the medieval notion . . . that English is no language for a gentleman.”
James Fenimore Cooper, novelist, born in Burlington, New Jersey, 1789; Dame Agatha Christie, crime novelist, born in Torquay, Devonshire, 1890; Jean Renoir, film director, born in Paris, 1894.
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DEATHS: Opened in 1935 by the Duke and Duchess of York, the De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea in East Sussex was Britain’s first major welded steel-framed building. The work of the Prussian-born Erich Mendelsohn (who died in San Francisco, California, on this day in 1953) and the Russian-born Serge Chermayeff, it was welcomed by Charles Reilly in The Architects’ Journal for “the straightforward spaciousness of the interiors and the great spatial staircase gracefully mounting in their glass cylinders . . . things we have all dreamed about”.
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Thomas Overbury, poet, poisoned in the Tower of London, 1613; Richard Boyle (1st Earl of Cork), Lord High Treasurer of Ireland, died in Youghal, County Cork, 1643; William Huskisson, MP for Liverpool and the world’s first railway fatality, died in Eccles, Lancashire, 1830; Isambard Kingdom Brunel, civil engineer, died in London, 1859; John Speke, explorer, died in Box, Wiltshire, 1864; William Seward Burroughs, pioneer of adding machines, died in Citronelle, Alabama, 1898; Thomas Wolfe, novelist, died in Baltimore, Maryland, 1938; Anton von Webern, composer, died in Mittersill, Austria, 1945; Willy Messerschmitt, German aircraft designer, died in Munich, 1978.