April 28th "2024" Daily Prep
Welcome to day 119, known as National Superhero Day, International Workers’ Memorial Day. If you were born on this day, you were likely conceived the week of August 5th in the previous year. Your star sign is Taurus and your birthstone is Diamond.
1923 – The first FA Cup Final was held at Wembley Stadium. 200,000 people arrived at a stadium which was only designed to hold 125,000 and when 60,000 irate fans rushed the turnstiles a human torrent swept onto the pitch.
Todays birthdays
1968 – Howard Donald (56) English singer best known as a member of pop group, Take That (“Relight My Fire”, “Back For Good”), born in Droylsden, Greater Manchester.
1974 – Penelope Cruz (50), Spanish actress (Vanilla Sky, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Ferrari), born in Municipality of Alcobendas, Spain.
1974 – Vernon Kay (50), English broadcaster (All Star Family Fortunes, Just the Two of Us, Beat the Star, The Whole 19 Yards), born in Bolton, Greater Manchester.
1980 – Bradley Wiggins (44), British former professional road and track racing cyclist, born in Ghent, Belgium.
1981 – Jessica Alba (43), American actress (Fantastic Four, Sin City, The Love Guru, Machete), born in Pomona, California, United States.
Famous deaths
1976 – Sid James (b. 1913), South African-English actor best known for numerous roles in the Carry On film series.
1999 – Jill Dando (b. 1961), English journalist and television personality.
The day today
1910 – Frenchman Louis Paulhan won the London to Manchester air race and the £10,000 prize. It was the first long-distance aeroplane race in England and was first proposed by the Daily Mail newspaper in 1906.
1923 – The first FA Cup Final was held at Wembley Stadium. 200,000 people arrived at a stadium which was only designed to hold 125,000 and when 60,000 irate fans rushed the turnstiles a human torrent swept onto the pitch. Players were engulfed by the crowd and 1,000 men, women and children were injured. Finals were made ‘all ticket’ after that. The game began one hour late and Bolton beat West Ham 2-0.
1967 – Boxing Champion Muhammad Ali lost his boxing title after refusing to join the army. Muhammed Ali stated he could not join due to religious reasons. He had changed his name and converted to Islam in 1964.
2014 – Teacher Anne Maguire (aged 61) was stabbed to death in front of pupils inside Corpus Christi Catholic College – Leeds where she had taught for 40 years. 15-year-old Will Cornick was detained by teaching staff and later sentenced to life imprisonment.
2014 – New research showed that half of patients diagnosed with cancer today would effectively be ‘cured’. They could expect to survive for at least 10 years, by which point their prognosis was as good as that of those without the disease.The study also showed that survival rates in England and Wales had doubled since the 1970s.
Today in music
1973 – David Bowie released ‘Starman’ as a single in the UK, which became his first hit since 1969’s ‘Space Oddity’ three years before. The song was a late addition to the album The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars included at the insistence of RCA’s Dennis Katz, who heard a demo and loved the track, believing it would make a great single. The lyrics describe Ziggy Stardust bringing a message of hope to Earth’s youth through the radio, salvation by an alien ‘Starman’.
1973 – Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon went to No.1 in the US. The album went on to enjoy a record-breaking 741 discontinuous weeks on the Billboard chart, and has now sold over 45 million copies world-wide. After moving to the Billboard Top Pop Catalog Chart, the album notched up a further 759 weeks there, and had reached a total of over 1,500 weeks on the combined charts by May 2006.
2002 – Sugababes scored their first UK No.1 single with ‘Freak Like Me.’ The song was originally by American Adina Howard (1995) and was mixed with the synth line from Gary Numan’s 1979 hit ‘Are ‘Friends’ Electric?’.
2003 – Apple launched the iTunes Store, which gave users the ability to purchase and download music from the Internet directly to their iTunes library; in 2010 the store sold its 10 billionth song.
2013 – Emeli Sande set a new record for the most consecutive weeks on the UK’s Official Album Chart top 10 of any debut album. ‘Our Version Of Events’ was released in February 2012 and went on to become the biggest selling album that year. The album hadn’t dropped out of the top 10 since its release and had been in the UK’s Official Album Chart for 63 weeks. The 26-year-old singer had overtaken The Beatles who previously held the record.
Today in history
1442 – Edward IV, King of England and son of Richard, Duke of York, was born. He was the first king of the House of York.
1603 – Queen Elizabeth I’s funeral took place at Westminster Abbey.
1721 – The death of the pirate Mary Read (also known as Mark Read). She began dressing as a boy at a young age, at first by her mother in order to receive inheritance money and then as a teenager in order to join the British military. She and her crew-mate Anne Bonny (also in male disguise) are two of the most famed female pirates of all time, and among the few women known to have been convicted of piracy during the early 18th century, a golden age for piracy. On their arrest, both delayed execution on the grounds of being pregnant, though Mary died the following year, in prison, of a violent fever.
1770 – English navigator Captain James Cook and his crew, including the botanist Joseph Banks, landed in Australia, at Stingray Bay, which was later named Botany Bay.
1789 – The crew of the Bounty, led by Fletcher Christian, mutinied against the harsh life at sea under Captain Bligh. They were on the return journey from Tahiti where they had spent six months gathering breadfruit trees. Bligh and 17 others were cast adrift in a small boat without a chart. While the mutineers eventually colonized Pitcairn Island, Bligh managed to sail the small craft 3,618 miles to Timor, near Java, arriving there on 14th June.