July 18th – On This Day
1970 - UK BBC Radio 1 DJ Kenny Everett was sacked after he joked on air that the wife of the conservative transport minister Mary Peyton had 'crammed a fiver into the examiner's hand', when taking her driving test'.
July 17th – On This Day
1964 - British speed pioneer Sir Donald Campbell set a new land speed world record of 403.10 mph in his car, Bluebird. It was a massive and expensive project, costing an estimated £1,000,000 to build.
July 16th – On This Day
1945 - The Manhattan Project: The world’s first nuclear explosion occurred, when a plutonium implosion device was tested at a site located 210 miles south of Los Alamos, New Mexico. It was led by the United States with the support of the United Kingdom and Canada.
July 15th – On This Day
1381 - Poll Tax Triggers the Peasants’ Revolt: John Ball, a leader in the Peasants’ Revolt, is hung, drawn and quartered in the presence of Richard II of England.
July 14th – On This Day
1951 - Ferrari secured its first Grand Prix victory at the British Grand Prix at the Silverstone Circuit in Northamptonshire. The winning Ferrari 375 was driven by Argentinian racer, Jose Froilan Gonzalez.
July 13th – On This Day
1943 - The Battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle in history between the forces of Germany and the Soviet Union, involving some 6,000 tanks, 2,000,000 troops, and 4,000 aircraft, ended in defeat for Germany.
July 12th – On This Day
2017 - Iceberg A-68 broke from the Larsen C Ice Shelf, along the east coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. At the time, it was the largest iceberg in the world and the sixth-largest berg in three decades of records.
July 11th – On This Day
1900 - Charlotte Cooper from Ealing in Middlesex won a gold medal in the women’s tennis singles tournament in the 1900 Summer Olympics in Paris. She also won a gold medal in the mixed doubles, making her the first individual female Olympic champion.
July 10th – On This Day
1997 - More than 100,000 people packed Hyde Park in London for a countryside rally to protest against Government proposals to ban fox hunting.