7th October

Desmond Tutu, the Archbishop of Cape Town, was born today in 1931. He's a brilliant guy, loved and respected throughout the world. I must share with you, though, the unexpected thing for which he will always be remembered. If you are of average university ability, you will acquire a 2.2 (or Lower Second) degree; now affectionately known as a Desmond.

In other news ...
It was today in 1905 that one critic, viewing the works of Matisse in Paris, said, 'A paint pot has been flung in the face of the public.' He should have stuck around. Since then, 'art' has got much, much worse.

6th October

Two men died today in the electric chair in Florida in 1941. Their names were Frizzel and Willburn.

In other news ...
You don't mess with Basil II, Holy Roman Emperor. Today in 1014 he trounced the Bulgarian Army of Tsar Samuel and ordered that the prisoners should be blinded. Every hundredth man was to have one eye spared so that they could find their way back to the Tsar. Ah, the good old days.

5th October

'Gangin' doon, Geordie, gangin' doon, to the toon where the power lies.'

The unemployed men of the Tyneside shipyards marched to London today in 1936. Jarrow had a 66% unemployment rate and, wearing flat caps and blankets, 200 men set off to a rousing cheer. Everybody en route gave them tea and sandwiches, even the odd pint of beer. The hunger march didn't achieve much but it was a far cry from a similar march in 1817 when the Blanketeers set off from Manchester to protest about poverty. They were met by the army at Stockport and dispersed.

In other news ...
Monty Python's Flying Circus first appeared on the BBC today in 1969.

Why?

4th October

Karl Baedecker, the German publisher, died today in 1859. This is quite remarkable and an astonishing piece of research on my part (eat your heart out, Eric Hobsbawm RIP). Because during WW2 the Baedecker raids hit the very cities in Britain listed by Baedecker nearly a century earlier. Coincidence? I think not! Clearly, Karl Baedecker was an early member of the Nazi Party. Has nobody else noticed this?

In other news ...
As a kid I could never understand how the gadget developed by Paul Zoll at the Harvard Medical School actually worked. It was designed to control heartbeat and, as far as I knew, was called a peacemaker. I couldn't understand how a six-shot revolver carried by cowboys could be any help at all in that respect. That's why I became an historian rather than a cardiac surgeon and probably just as well.

3rd October

Elias Howe died today in 1867. Who he? i hear you cry. He was the chappie who invented the sewing machine and (unusually for pioneers in any field in the past) made a mint out of it (not literally, Seven Eff Em - he wasn't that clever). They even wrote a song about the sewing machine - 'A sewing machine, a sewing machine, a girl's best friend. If I didn't have my sewing machine, I'd go round the [expletive supplied by Seven Eff Em] bend.'

They don't make them - or write them - that way any more.

In other news ...
Postcodes were introduced in Britain today in 1959. Yes, I was surprised by that too. It was the start of the End of Civilization, of course and another step on the road to 1984 (naturally!). What happened to those glorious postal triumphs of the past when General Wilson of the First World War fame addressed an envelope to himself as 'The Ugliest Man in the British Army' (that was all he wrote) and it actually reached him.

2nd October

Can we get this straight once and for all, please? Today was the day in 1780 when John Andre  was executed by the American colonists as a spy and working with the traitor Benedict Arnold. Andre knew the risks he was taking and was unlucky; that's Africa. But Benedict Arnold was not a traitor. Today, thinking Americans equate him with Adolf Hitler, Vlad Dracula and Attila the Hun, but he was actually doing his duty as a British subject, which all American colonists were. it was all the rest who were the traitors, whatever gloss the slave-owning, line-pinching Thomas Jefferson tried to put on it in the Declaration of Independence.

In other news ...
'There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - they need the money.'

(With sincere apologies to John Fowles, who said something totally different today in 1977).

1st October

Kaiser Wilhelm II (he of the silly moustache and pickelhaube) gave orders to his generals today in 1914 - 'It is my royal and imperial command that you ... exterminate first the treacherous English and ... walk over General French's contemptible little army.'

He was obviously a tad confused. General French was an Englishman, despite his contrary surname and the German generals clearly weren't listening carefully enough. They didn't exterminate the British because the 'contemptibles' stopped them at Mons. I know I don't have to remind you of the score: Britain 1, Germany 0.

In other news ...
Louis Leakey died today in 1972. He was the brilliant, self-taught anthropologist who discovered 'Lucy', a partial skeleton in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. His findings put him at odds with almost every other anthropologist over the issue of who was descended from whom. You and I, for example, dear reader, are descended from homo sapiens by way of homo habilis and all points south. Year Ten at Leighford High School are descended from homo deeply-stupidicus and, according to his mother at least, the testicles of Henry Guttersnipe (not his real name) haven't descended at all. Although why that should excuse the late delivery of his most recent essay, I am at a loss to explain.