EVENTS: Last year’s state banquet at Buckingham Palace for Laura Bush and her husband could be seen as belated reparation for the scare given to a previous American first lady, on this day in 1814, when British troops stormed Washington and set fire to the White House. As Dolley Madison’s husband James, the fourth President, was otherwise engaged at the Battle of Bladensburg a few miles outside the city, it was left to the heroic Dolley to secure national treasures such as the portrait of George Washington before making her escape.
In AD79 Mount Vesuvius erupted, burying Pompeii and Herculaneum in volcanic ash; in 410 Rome was overrun by the Visigoths; in 1572 the slaughter of French Huguenots known as the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre began in Paris; in 1690 Job Charnock, chief agent of the British East India Company, founded the city of Calcutta; in 1990 kidnappers released the Irish hostage Brian Keenan in Beirut after he had spent more than four years in captivity.
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BIRTHS: She took dictation from Churchill while he was sitting for Graham Sutherland’s controversial portrait of 1954 — later destroyed by Lady Churchill — but Sir Winston’s personal secretary Jane Portal never saw the painting. “The artist covered it up each evening and wouldn’t let Sir Winston see it either,” she says. “All the art historians are outraged when I say this, but when I saw a colour photograph of it I was absolutely horrified and told Sir Winston: ‘It’s not you.’ ” Sutherland was born in London on this day in 1903.
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Robert Herrick, poet, baptised in London, 1591; George Stubbs, painter, born in Liverpool, 1724; William Wilberforce, leader of the anti-slavery movement, born in Hull, 1759; James Weddell, British explorer of the Antarctic, born in Ostend, Austrian Netherlands, 1787; Sir Max Beerbohm, caricaturist and writer, born in London, 1872; Jorge Luis Borges, Argentinian poet, born in Buenos Aires, 1899.
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DEATHS: Like Graham Sutherland, the Polish-born artist Feliks Topolski, who died in London on this day in 1989, did not always elicit the response from his sitters that he might have wished. Evelyn Waugh, one of 20 writers portrayed by Topolski for the University of Texas in 1961-62, remarked that, although ordinarily he discouraged photographs for fear that they would lead to his being recognised in public, “this danger does not arise in connection with Topolski ‘s drawing”.
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Pliny the Elder, Roman scholar, died in Stabiae while observing the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, AD79; Francesco Mazzola, the painter known as Il Parmigianino, died in Casalmaggiore, Cremona, 1540; Thomas Digges, astronomer who, with his father Leonard, was a pioneer of the telescope, died in 1595; John Owen, theologian, died in Ealing, 1683; Thomas Chatterton, poet, committed suicide in London, 1770; Theodore Hook, playwright and novelist, died in London, 1841; Getúlio Vargas, President of Brazil 1930–45, 1951–54, committed suicide in Rio de Janeiro, 1954.