EVENTS: In 1862 Nathaniel Gordon became the only American to be executed for slave trading; in 1916 the ten-month-long Battle of Verdun began with nine hours of the heaviest artillery bombardment ever witnessed; in 1964 24,000 rolls of Beatles wallpaper were flown to America.
BIRTHS: Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, 11 times President of Mexico who led the assault on the Texas rebels at the Alamo, born in Jalapa, Mexico, 1794; Cardinal John Henry Newman, churchman, born in London, 1801; Leo Delibes, composer, born in St-Germain-du-Val, France, 1836; August von Wasserman, bacteriologist, born in Bamberg, Germany, 1866; Constantin Brancusi, sculptor, born in Pestisani, Gorj, Romania, 1876; W. H. Auden, poet and academic, born in York, 1907; Sir Douglas Bader, Second World War fighter ace, born in London, 1910.
DEATHS: Baruch Spinoza, philosopher, died in The Hague, 1677; Jethro Tull, agricultural writer and inventor, died near Hungerford, Berkshire, 1741; Sir Frederick Banting, Canadian physician and Nobel laureate (1923) for his isolation of insulin, killed in an air crash, Newfoundland, 1941; Malcolm X (Malcolm Little), American Muslim leader, died in New York, 1965; Howard Walter Florey (Baron Florey), pathologist who shared the 1945 Nobel prize for his work on the extraction of penicillin, died in Oxford, 1968; Dame Margot Fonteyn, prima ballerina, died in Panama, 1991.