31st October

Jan Vermeer, the Dutch interior designer, was born today in 1632. He spent his entire artistic career painting kitchens, tiles and other rooms. One critic said his work was as 'dull as Dutchwater'. How true.

In other news ...

'Gentlemen,' said the Turkish leader Kemal Attaturk today in 1927, 'it was necessary to abolish the fez, which sat on the heads of our nation as an emblem of ignorance, negligence, fanaticism and hatred of progress ...' Which is pretty true, really. In the great days of the Ottoman Empire (14th-17th century) everybody wore turbans.

Mind you, the fez didn't do Tommy Cooper any harm.

30th October

Orson Welles frightened everybody today in 1938 when he produced and starred in a radio play based on H G Wells' The War of the Worlds. Even though the item was given plenty of publicity as fiction in advance, thousands of New Yorkers panicked and jammed roads and subways trying to leave the cities before the Martians arrived.

The knock-on effect was that when the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, announced that we were at war with Germany ten months later, everybody assumed it was a hoax and did nothing.

In other news ...
The first television personality appeared on the screen today at the workshop of John Logie Baird in 1925. His name was William Taynton and the show was called Britain's Got Taynton.

29th October

An anonymous Belfast citizen got it absolutely right today in 1991 in the midst of appalling sectarian violence there -

'It's not the bullet with my name on it that worries me. It's the one that says "To whom it may concern".'

In other news ...

One of the great guys of Elizabethan England, Walter Ralegh, was executed today in 1618. The reason, those incomparable historians Sellar and Yeatman once said, was because he was left over from the previous reign. The real reason of course is that men as popular and larger than life as Ralegh had no place in the narrow world of that vicious paranoid freak, King James I.

28th October

Sir Richard Doll was born today in 1912. You probably haven't heard of him but he is responsible for the greatest act of victimization of the 21st century. In establishing a link between lung cancer and smoking, he undoubtedly saved millions of lives but he also caused the sad clusters of determined smokers, dying of frostbite and pneumonia outside pubs and nightclubs and for those mysterious, locked cabinets behind counters in supermarkets. You may have wondered why those poor, lost souls are sticking pins into a waz effigy - that is a likeness of Sir Richard, known as a Voodoo Doll.

In other news ...
A Puritan college in Cambridge, Massachusetts got an injection of cash today from John Harvard who died of tuberculosis in 1638. The aim was that Harvard would one rival Oxford or Cambridge.

Perhaps one day ...

27th October

Today in 1913, President Woodrow Wilson said, 'I want to take this occasion to say that the United States will never again seek one additional foot of territory by conquest.'

Er ...

In other news ...
Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet, was born today in 1914. The midwife described him as a milk-sopping, bed-wetting sort of kid, Cartland-purple where he wasn't puce-pink, puking over the porcelain in the parlour while Captain Jack went out for a doubler and a pint.

26th October

Gilles de Rais was executed in Nantes today in 1440. Nobleman, Satanist, child molester and passing acquaintance of Joan of Arc, he was charged by the Catholic Church with Satanism and Heresy. Recently, a Catholic Court of Enquiry dismissed the charges against him. So, that just leaves the 140 or so children he is alleged to have murdered ...

In other news ...
The Beatles got their MBEs today in 1965 much to the disgust of other MBE holders who sent theirs back. The inhabitants of a wild life park in Chipping Sodbury also returned their Ancient Order of Buffalo medals.

25th October

All right, this is the one you've all been waiting for. Balaclava Day, 1854. When 678 men of Lord Cardigan's Light Brigade (most of whom are sitting in 54mm replica in my attic) rode into the Valley of Death and into legend after a confused order took them the wrong way.

'It was a mad-brained trick, men,' Cardigan said to the survivors afterwards, 'but it was no fault of mine.'

'Go again, sir?' an anonymous soldier asked him. Makes you proud to be British, doesn't it?

In other news ...
It was a good day for a battle today - Agincourt was fought in 1415 in the mud of Northern France. The French nobility were all but wiped out by a much smaller force, largely of archers, under Henry V. A while ago there was a move to have October 21 (Trafalgar Day) or October 25 (Agincourt Day) declared a public holiday in Britain, but that was shelved in case it upset our French colleagues in the EU. Actually, on the basis of that there ought to be no public holidays because I can't think of a day when we didn't knock seven bells out of them.