EVENTS: “Here’s looking at you/ From out of the blue./ Don’t make a fuss,/ Just settle down and look at us.” Introduced by Leslie Mitchell, written by Ronnie Hill and performed by Helen McKay, the song Here’s Looking at You helped to launch the BBC’s first high-definition television service from Alexandra Palace on this day in 1936. It was a demonstration transmission, seen by an estimated 123,000 visitors to the Radio Show at London’s Olympia hall, and by commuters at Waterloo Station.
In 55BC Roman legionaries led by Julius Caesar landed in Britain; in 1346 King Edward III, aided by his son the Black Prince, defeated the French at the Battle of Crécy; in 1839 the US Navy seized the Cuban schooner Amistad off Long Island, New York, which led to a legal ruling upholding the right of illegally enslaved Africans to mutiny on board a slave ship; in 1920 the US Secretary of State certified ratification of the 19th Amendment, giving American women the right to vote.
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BIRTHS: Said to have directed creation of the royal gardens at Osborne House by semaphore from the flag tower, Prince Albert was equally enthusiastic about providing comfortable conditions for his garden staff. “It was December when I started work here in 1996,” says Debs Goodenough, English Heritage’s head gardener at Osborne today, “but the warmth of the under-floor heating he installed in the potting shed bowled me over.” Queen Victoria ‘s husband was born near Coburg, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, on this day in 1819.
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Robert Walpole (1st Earl of Orford), considered to have been Britain’s first Prime Minister, born near King’s Lynn, Norfolk, 1676; Johann Heinrich Lambert, mathematician, astronomer and physicist, born in Mülhausen, Alsace, 1728; Joseph-Michel Montgolfier, hot-air balloonist, born in Annonay, France, 1740; John Buchan (1st Baron Tweedsmuir), Governor-General of Canada 1935-40, novelist, born in Perth, Scotland, 1875; Guillaume Apollinaire, poet, born in Rome, 1880; Christopher Isherwood, writer, born in Highlane, Cheshire, 1904.
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DEATHS: Words by the 17th-century Welsh poet George Herbert, “Let all the world in every corner sing”, will be baritone Sir Thomas Allen’s invitation to audience participation when he sings the final part of Vaughan Williams’s Five Mystical Songs at the Last Night of the Proms on September 11. Vaughan Williams died in London on this day in 1958.
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Anton van Leeuwenhoek, naturalist and microscopist, died in Delft, 1723; George Sackville-Germain (1st Viscount Sackville), soldier and politician, died near Withyham, Sussex, 1785; Louis-Philippe, King of the French 1830–48, died in Claremont, Surrey, 1850; Lon Chaney, actor, died in Los Angeles, 1930; Sir Francis Chichester, who circumnavigated the world, solo, in 1966-67, died in Plymouth, 1972; Charles Lindbergh, who in 1927 flew solo across the Atlantic, died in Maui, Hawaii, 1974; Charles Boyer, French-born actor, died in Phoenix, Arizona, 1978.