EVENTS: “Come quickly, brothers, I’m drinking the stars” were the words that, according to legend, the Benedictine monk Dom Pierre Pérignon uttered as he sipped the world’s first champagne at the Abbey of Hautvillers on this day in 1693. Pérignon’s technique relied on a a second, short-lived fermentation, which he caused by adding a small amount of sugar to the wine in the cask; it is this that produces the characteristic effervescence. When Dom Pérignon died in 1715, he was buried among his vines.
In 1870 the Red Cross Society was founded in Britain; in 1914 Britain declared war on Germany; in 1954 Britain’s first supersonic fighter plane, the P1 English Electric Lightning, made its maiden flight; in 1966 John Lennon claimed that the Beatles were probably more popular than Jesus Christ.
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BIRTHS: Raoul Wallenberg first met Jews who had escaped from Nazi Germany in 1936 while in Haifa, Palestine (now Israel). After going into partnership with Koloman Lauer, a Hungarian Jew managing a Swedish company in Budapest, Wallenberg used embassy hideouts and Swedish diplomatic passes to rescue at least 100,000 Jews, 65,000 of them from the Budapest ghetto. In 1945 he was arrested as a US spy by Soviet troops entering Budapest, and from 1957 to 1991 the Russians claimed that he died in the hospital at Lubyanka prison. In 2000 the head of a Russian presidential commission investigating Wallenberg’s fate announced that the diplomat had in fact been executed in 1947. He was born on this day in Lidingö, Sweden, in 1912.
John Tradescant, gardener, born in Meopham, Kent, 1608; Edward Irving, the founder of the Catholic Apostolic Church, born in Dumfries, 1792; Percy Bysshe Shelley, poet who was expelled from Oxford at 18 for publishing the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism, born at Field Place, Horsham, Sussex, 1792; Walter Pater, critic, essayist, and humanist whose advocacy of “art for art’s sake” became a cardinal doctrine of the Aestheticism movement, born in Shadwell, London, 1839; W. H. Hudson, writer and naturalist who is commemorated by a bird sanctuary in Hyde Park, born near Buenos Aires, 1841; Knut Hamsun, novelist and poet (Nobel laureate 1920), born in Lam, Norway, 1859; Sir Harry Lauder, music hall entertainer, born in Edinburgh, 1870; Sir Osbert Lancaster, writer, born in London, 1908.
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DEATHS: Walther Flemming, the German anatomist and founder of the science of cytogenetics, the study of the cell’s hereditary material, died on this day in 1905. He was the first to observe and describe mitosis, the behaviour of chromosomes in the nucleus during normal cell division.
Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, killed at the Battle of Evesham, 1265; William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, statesman, died in London, 1598; Hans Christian Andersen, storyteller, died in Copenhagen, 1875; Rodney (Gypsy) Smith, evangelist, died on board the Queen Mary en route for Florida, 1947; Roy Thomson (1st Baron Thomson of Fleet), newspaper proprietor, died in 1976.