TODAY
EVENTS: In 1851 the first issue of The New York Times was published; in 1914 the third Irish Home Rule Bill received the Royal Assent but its implementation was suspended; in 1975 the heiress Patty Hearst was arrested in San Francisco for crimes committed with the terrorist group, the Symbionese Liberation Army, that had kidnapped her; in 1981 France abolished capital punishment and the guillotine.
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BIRTHS: James Shirley, dramatist and poet, born in London, 1596; Samuel Johnson, writer, critic and lexicographer, born in Lichfield, Staffordshire, 1709; Jean Foucault, physicist, born in Paris, 1819; Siegfried Marcus, automobile pioneer, born in Malchin, Mecklenburg, 1831; Greta Garbo, actress, born in Stockholm, 1905.
DEATHS: Matthew Prior, poet and diplomat, died in Wimpole, Cambridgeshire, 1721; Joseph Locke, civil engineer, died in Moffat, Dumfries, 1860; Dion Boucicault, dramatist and actor, died in New York, 1890; Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary-General of the United Nations 1953-61, killed in an air crash near Ndola, Northern Rhodesia, 1961; Sean O’Casey, Irish dramatist, died in Torquay, Devon, 1964; Jimi Hendrix, American rock musician, died in London, 1970.
TOMORROW
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EVENTS: In 1876 the American inventor Melville Bissell patented the carpet sweeper; in 1888 the world’s first beauty contest was held in Belgium and won by 18-year-old Bertha Soucaret, from Guadeloupe; in 1945 William Joyce, known as Lord Haw-Haw, was sentenced to death for treason; in 1955 Juan Perón, President of Argentina since 1946, resigned and went into exile in Paraguay; in 1973 Paul Theroux left Victoria Station on the 3.30pm train for Folkestone and Paris, beginning the journey chronicled in his 1975 book The Great Railway Bazaar; in 2000 the People’s Fuel Lobby was formed at a meeting in Altrincham, Cheshire, to protest against increased petrol prices.
BIRTHS: Hartley Coleridge, writer, born near Bristol, 1796; William Dyce, painter, born in Aberdeen, 1806; George Cadbury, Quaker, social reformer and chocolate manufacturer, born in Birmingham, 1839; William Lever (1st Viscount Leverhulme), soap maker and philanthropist, born in Bolton, Lancashire, 1851; Arthur Rackham, illustrator, born in London, 1867.
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DEATHS: Mayer Amschel Rothschild, founder of the banking house, died in Frankfurt am Main, 1812; Thomas Barnardo, founder of the Barnardo’s children’s charity, died in Surbiton, Surrey, 1905; Georg Schweinfurth, German botanist and traveller, died in Berlin, 1925; Sir David Low, cartoonist, died in London, 1963.