EVENTS: On this day in 1961 Rudolf Nureyev defected to the West. “He is a curious wild animal, very beguiling and fairly unpredictable,” wrote Noël Coward three years later, having just spent two days at the Spoleto Festival with the volatile Russian and his dance partner Margot Fonteyn. “He is given to sudden outbursts of rage and is liable to bite people. He actually bit me during dinner but it was only on the finger and didn’t draw blood.”
In 1903 the Ford Motor Company was founded; also in 1903 the trade name “Pepsi-Cola” was registered with the US Patent Office; in 1917 the first All-Russia Congress of Soviets was convened; in 1963 the Soviet Union launched the first woman into space: 26-year-old Valentina Tereshkova.
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BIRTHS: The German chemist Georg Wittig, born in Berlin on this day in 1897, shared the 1979 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with the American Herbert C. Brown “for their development of the use of boron and phosphorus compounds, respectively, into important reagents in organic synthesis”. Other highlights include Wittig’s 1930 textbook on stereochemistry, his papers on ring tension, and his development of ylide chemistry.
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Sir John Cheke, writer and scholar, born in Cambridge, 1514; Gustav V, King of Sweden 1907-50, born in Drottningholm, 1858; Arthur Meighen, Prime Minister of Canada 1920-21 and 1926, born in Anderson, Ontario, 1874; Stan Laurel, comedian, born in Ulverston, Lancashire, 1890; Lupino Lane, music-hall performer, born in London, 1892; Barbara McClintock, geneticist and Nobel laureate 1983, born in Hartford, Connecticut, 1902.
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DEATHS: Sir Winston Churchill was hugely proud of the victory of his forebear the 1st Duke of Marlborough at the Battle of Blenheim in 1704. “England rose with Marlborough to the summit,” he wrote in A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, “and the Islanders, who had never known such a triumph since Crécy and Agincourt, four centuries earlier, yielded themselves to transports of joy.” John Churchill, military strategist and 1st Duke of Marlborough, died in Windsor on this day in 1722
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Joseph Butler, Bishop of Durham and theologian, died in Bath, Somerset, 1752; Charles Sturt, explorer in Australia, died in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, 1869; Elmer Sperry, inventor of the gyrocompass, died in Brooklyn, New York, 1930; Margaret Bondfield, trade union organiser and Minister of Labour 1929-31, died in Sanderstead, Surrey, 1953; John Scott Lidgett, theologian, died in Epsom, Surrey, 1953; Imre Nagy, Prime Minister of Hungary 1953-55 and 1956, was executed in Budapest, 1958; Harold Alexander (1st Earl Alexander of Tunis), field marshal and Governor-General of Canada 1946-52, died in Slough, Buckinghamshire, 1969; John Reith (1st Baron Reith), first Director-General of the BBC, 1927-38, died in Edinburgh, 1971; Wernher von Braun, pioneer of rocketry, died in Alexandra, Virginia, 1977.