EVENTS: “It goes much further than anyone dreamt,” declared the Berlin-based American foreign correspondent William L. Shirer when the USSR and Germany signed a non-aggression pact on this day in 1939. “It’s a virtual alliance, and Stalin, the supposed arch enemy of Nazism and aggression, by its terms invites Germany to go in and clean up Poland.”
In 1617 the first one-way streets were established in London; in 1942 the Battle of Stalingrad began; in 1979 Bolshoi Ballet dancer Alexander Godunov sought political asylum in New York; in 1990 the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein provoked outrage by appearing with hostages on state television and ruffling the hair of a young British boy.
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BIRTHS: Patients and students alike seem to have relished the confident and cheerful demeanour of the surgeon Sir Astley Paston Cooper, who was born in Brooke, Norfolk, on this day in 1768. Perhaps even more significant than his income soaring from five guineas in his first year of practice to an astonishing high of £21,000, and his being sergeant surgeon to King George IV, King William IV and Queen Victoria, was that his students at St Thomas’ Hospital in London went so far as to put their howl of protest into writing when he resigned his lectureship in 1825.
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Louis XVI, King of France 1774-92, born in Versailles, 1754; Georges, Baron Cuvier, zoologist and statesman, born in Montbéliard, France, 1769; William Ernest Henley, poet, critic and editor, born in Gloucester, 1849; Arnold Toynbee, economist and social philosopher, born in London, 1852; Eleuthérios Venizélos, five times Prime Minister of Greece, born in Crete, 1864; Houari Boumédienne, Algerian political leader and president, 1965-78, born in Guelma, Algeria, 1927; Keith Moon, drummer of The Who, born in Wembley, 1947.
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DEATHS: French author Roger Martin du Gard must have experienced a sense of déjà vu when he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1937 “for the artistic power and truth with which he depicted human conflict . . . in his novel-cycle Les Thibault”. In the climax of that cycle, L’Été 1914, he had hauntingly described the atmosphere of Europe on the threshold of the First World War, and now it was on the brink of conflict once more. He died in Bellême on this day in 1958.
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Sir William Wallace, Scottish patriot, executed in London, 1305; Luis de León, mystic, poet and translator, died in Madrigal de las Altas, Spain, 1591; George Villiers (1st Duke of Buckingham), statesman and favourite of King James I, assassinated in Portsmouth, 1628; Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, physicist, died in Paris, 1806; Alexander Wilson, Scottish-born ornithologist and poet, died in Philadelphia, 1813; Rudolph Valentino, silent film actor, died in New York, 1926; Adolf Loos, architect, died near Vienna, 1933; Oscar Hammerstein II, songwriter, died in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, 1960.