August 1st "2024" Daily Prep
Welcome to day 214 of the year! Known as Yorkshire Day, World Wide Web Day, Woman Astronomers Day. If you were born today you were likely conceived the week of November 7th in the previous year. Your star sign is Leo and your birthstone is Peridot.
2017 – The reopening, after a £19 million restoration, of the Piece Hall in Halifax, one of Britain’s most outstanding Georgian buildings. Originally built in 1779 to support the trading of cloth, it has been a meeting point of Halifax’s commercial, civic and cultural life for almost 250 years.
Todays birthdays
1965 – Sam Mendes (59), British stage and film director (1917, American Beauty, Skyfall), born in Reading, Berkshire.
1969 – Graham Thorpe (55), English former cricketer (England, Surrey) who represented his country in 100 Test matches, born in Farnham, Surrey.
1970 – David James (54), English former professional goalkeeper (England, Manchester City, Liverpool), born in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire.
1979 – Jason Momoa (45), American actor (Game of Thrones, Aquaman), born in Honolulu, Hawaii.
1984 – Bastian Schweinsteiger (40), German former professional footballer (Bayern Munich), born in Kolbermoor, Germany.
Famous deaths
2015 – Cilla Black, born Priscilla Maria Veronica White (b. 1943), English singer (“Anyone Who Had a Heart”, “You’re My World”) and television presenter (Blind Date).
The day today
1966 – The British Empire officially came to an end as the Colonial Office closed its doors and lowered its flag, giving way to the Commonwealth.
1984 – Commercial peat-cutters discovered the preserved body of a man they called Lindow Man, at Lindow Moss in Cheshire. It is thought that he was deposited some time between 2 BC and 119 AD.
1994 – Thousands of historic documents and more than 100,000 books are destroyed in a blaze at Norwich Central Library.
2007 – The worldwide centenary of Scouting took place at Brownsea Island, the largest of the islands in Poole Harbour in the county of Dorset. The first camp in 1907 is regarded as the real origin of the worldwide Scout movement.
2012 – Tour de France winner Bradley Wiggins and the women’s rowing duo (Helen Glover and Heather Stanning) scooped Britain’s first gold medals of the Olympic Games.
Today in music
1987 – MTV Europe was launched, the first video played being ‘Money For Nothing’ by Dire Straits which contained the appropriate line ‘I Want My MTV’.
1998 – The Spice Girls scored their seventh UK No.1 single with ‘Viva Forever’. The song was originally set to be released alongside the track ‘Never Give Up on the Good Times’ as a double A-Side which was pulled as member Geri Halliwell left the group.
2000 – Madonna’s forthcoming single ‘Music’ had its release date brought forward by two weeks after the track was made available as an illegal MP3 file on the Internet.
2013 – The British government was trying to stop American Idol singer Kelly Clarkson from taking a rare turquoise and gold ring once owned by Jane Austen out of the country. The 2002 winner of the Idol TV show bought the jewellery at auction the previous year for more than £150,000, but Culture minister Ed Vaizey had put a temporary export bar on it saying he wanted the “national treasure” to be “saved for the nation”.
2020 – Taylor Swift was at No.1 on the UK album chart with her eighth studio album Folklore. It was a surprise album, after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, Swift cancelled the concert tour for her seventh studio album Lover (2019) and conceived Folklore during quarantine.
Today in history
1740 – Rule Britannia was sung for the first time, for the then Prince of Wales’s daughter’s third birthday.
1774 – British scientist Joseph Priestley discovered oxygen by removing it from the air. This experiment was groundbreaking for understanding what oxygen is and how it works. Priestley isolated oxygen in its gaseous state not only to discover the element oxygen but to understand what it does. Priestley was not the first to experiment with oxygen, as Carl Wilhelm had similar findings the year before. However, his discovery was not published until 1777, making Priestley officially the first person to discover oxygen.
1798 – The English, under Nelson, destroyed the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile, in Aboukir Bay, stopping Napoleon Bonaparte’s plans to invade the Middle East.
1800 – The Act of Union 1800 was passed which merged the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
1834 – The Slavery Abolition Act 1833 came into force throughout the British Empire and an estimated 770,000 slaves were freed. The foundation stone of the Wilberforce monument in Hull was laid On This Day, in recognition of Hull born abolitionist William Wilberforce.