EVENTS: Less than three weeks after the liberation of Paris on this day in 1944, Duff Cooper flew to France (with an escort of 48 Spitfires) as Britain’s ambassador. He found the embassy “in very good condition” but uninhabitable for the present. “There was no water or electricity, and on the ground floor was the furniture of thirty-two separate households who had stored it there for safety when they had to leave Paris in 1940.”
In 1875 Captain Matthew Webb from landlocked Shropshire became the first person to swim the English Channel; in 1931 Ramsay MacDonald formed a National Government; in 1997 a Berlin court sentenced the former East German leader Egon Krenz to six and a half years in prison for instigating the shoot-to-kill policy of border guards at the Berlin Wall.
Advertisement
BIRTHS: The legacy of the composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein lives on in the careers of musicians such as the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s principal conductor Marin Alsop, who attributes her decision to become a conductor to having heard him conduct the New York Philharmonic in a young people’s concert in 1965 when she was 9. She won the Leonard Bernstein Conducting Fellowship to the Tanglewood Music Centre in 1988, and became a pupil of Bernstein there. Her mentor was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, on this day in 1918.
Advertisement
Charles-Etienne Camus, mathematician and author, born in Crécy-en-Brie, 1699; Allan Pinkerton, founder of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in Chicago, Illinois, born in Glasgow, 1819; Bret Harte, writer and editor, born in Albany, New York, 1836.
Advertisement
DEATHS: “I can hardly believe it, but of course that is nonsense because I believe it only too well,” wrote Noël Coward. “It is never difficult to believe that someone young and charming and kind is dead. They are always dying. The Duke of Windsor and Hannen Swaffer, etc., remain alive but Prince George has to die by accident.” George, Duke of Kent, who was a younger brother of King George VI and father of the present Duke, was killed in an aircraft crash near Dunbeath, Caithness, while on active service on this day in 1942.
Advertisement
David Hume, philosopher, historian and economist, died in Edinburgh, 1776; James Watt, engineer and inventor after whom the unit of power is named, died in Birmingham, Warwickshire, 1819; Sir William Herschel, German-born British astronomer who discovered Uranus, died in Slough, Buckinghamshire, 1822; Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher, died in Weimar, Thuringian States, 1900; Henri Fantin-Latour, painter, died in Buré, France, 1904; Grigori Zinoviev, Russian revolutionary, executed in Moscow, 1936; Stanley Bruce (1st Viscount Bruce of Melbourne), Prime Minister of Australia 1923-29, died in London, 1967; Paul Muni, film actor, died in Montecito, California, 1967; Truman Capote, writer, died in Los Angeles, California, 1984.