21st October 1805 At the Battle of Trafalgar, Nelson gave his famous signal, ‘England expects...’ which flew from the HMS Victory shortly after 11:00 a.m. The British won this important battle against Napoleon’s combined French and Spanish fleets off Cape Trafalgar, south-west of Spain and left Britains navy unchallenged until the 20th century but Nelson was one of the day’s casualties. Burnham Thorpe - Nelsons birthplace. 1824 Portland cement, the modern building material, was first patented by Joseph Aspdin of Wakefield in Yorkshire. Its name is derived from its similarity to Portland stone, a type of building stone that was quarried on the Isle of Portland in Dorset. 1868 Sir Ernest Dunlop Swinton, the English inventor of the military tank, was born. 1940 Geoff Boycott, Yorkshire and England batsman was born. 1950 Korean War: Heavy fighting began between forces from the 27th British Commonwealth Brigade and the North Korean 239th Regiment at the Battle of Yongju, also known as the Battle of the Apple Orchard. 1956 Kenyan rebel leader Dedan Kimathi was captured by the British Army, signalling the ultimate defeat of the Mau Mau Uprising, and essentially ending the British military campaign in Kenya. 1958 The first women peers were introduced into the House of Lords. 1960 Britain launched its first nuclear submarine, HMS Dreadnought, at Barrow. 1966 144 people, 116 of them children, were killed in the small Welsh mining village of Aberfan when tons of slush, from a nearby coal slag tip weakened by rain, slid downhill and engulfed the village school, a farm and a row of terraced houses. 1975 Britains unemployment figure reached 1,000,000 for the first time since World War II. 1982 Gerry Adams & Martin McGuinness made history by becoming the first members of Sinn Fein to be elected to the Ulster Assembly. 1985 In one of Britains worst motorway crashes, 13 people were killed on the M6 motorway in Lancashire. 1988 A Greek cruise ship sank after a collision with a freighter. All 390 British schoolchildren and 81 teachers were rescued. 1996 Frances Lawrence, widow of headmaster Phillip Lawrence who was stabbed to death by a group of teenagers outside his school gates, launched a better citizenship campaign to promote good behaviour in schools. 1997 Candle in the Wind - the re-working of the hit single Elton John sang live at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, was declared the biggest selling single in music history. 2011 St Pauls Cathedral was closed to visitors for the first time since World War II because of anti-capitalist demonstrators (the Occupy London Stock Exchange movement) camping on its doorstep. The Right Reverend Graeme Knowles said that the decision had been taken with a heavy heart, for health and safety reasons. 2012 The death (aged 99) of William Walker, the oldest surviving pilot from the Battle of Britain, who was shot down in his Spitfire and wounded in 1940.
Posted on: Tue, 21 Oct 2014 20:58:22 +0000
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