View todays celebrity birthdays and find out what happened in history today.
What : day is it
1913 – Suffragettes increased their militant activities by cutting telephone lines and damaging post boxes.
1944 – Pay As You Earn (PAYE) income tax was introduced into Britain. It was devised by Cornelius Gregg.
1963 – Britain and the USA signed the Polaris missile agreement. Polaris was a submarine launched, nuclear tipped weapon designed as a nuclear deterrent.
1965 – The British Government announced the cancellation of the TSR-2 aircraft project. Only one airframe flew. It was the victim of ever rising costs and inter-service squabbling over Britain’s future defence needs.
1974 – Swedish pop group ABBA won the 19th annual Eurovision Song Contest in Brighton, Sussex, with ‘Waterloo’. The Swedish version single was coupled with ‘Honey, Honey’, while the English version featured ‘Watch Out’ as the B-side.
1975 – During ‘Operation Babylift’ a plane carrying 99 Vietnamese orphans, victims of the war in Vietnam, landed at Heathrow airport.
1984 – The 17-year-old South African barefooted, long and middle distance runner, Zola Budd, was granted British citizenship by Home Secretary, Leon Brittan, after only a matter of weeks, enabling her to compete as a British citizen in the Olympic games. The decision provoked considerable controversy.
1989 – The government announced it was to abolish legislation which guaranteed ‘jobs for life’ for more than 9,000 dockers.
1990 – Married women in Britain became independent entities for income tax purposes for the first time, making them responsible for their own tax declarations. Their income was no longer assessed with that of their husbands.
1993 – Following public disquiet, Queen Elizabeth II began paying income tax.
2012 – A ban on tobacco displays was announced in England, with other parts of the UK planning similar action to drive down smoking rates. Cigarettes and other products are to be kept below the counter in large shops and supermarkets, while small outlets are exempt until 2015.
2014 – Polish MP Artur Debski arrived in London to live as a migrant on £100 a week, in an attempt to see why so many Poles prefer Britain to their homeland. Poland has one of the EU’s most successful economies; nevertheless, 72% of Poles living in the UK intend to stay and 40% are thinking of applying for British citizenship.
2020 – Prime Minister Boris Johnson remained in hospital after being admitted yesterday evening with persistent coronavirus symptoms. Mr. Johnson, aged 55, tested positive for coronavirus 10 days ago and had been self isolating at Downing Street.
“DO NOT TOUCH” would probably be a really unsettling thing to read in braille.
There exists an area so unfathomably large that humans refer to it simply as “space.”
A group of Storks is called a Mustering or Muster.
The biggest film of 1928: The Singing Fool.
You have to be odd to be number one.
J.K. Rowling cited This Is Spinal Tap’s running joke about the death of their drummer as the inspiration for how Harry Potter’s Defense of The Dark Arts professor vacates their position yearly for various reasons.
Hieronymus Bosch – Real Name: Jerome Van Aken
We can refer to anything that doesn’t require horses to work as being horseless. The horseless carriage. The horseless pencil. The horseless laptop. The Horseless Large Hadron Collider.
Anne Frank and MLK Jr. were both born in the same year, yet we associate them as being in completely different periods in history.
Floccinaucinihilipilification, the declaration of an item being useless, is the longest non-medical term in the English language. #Floccinaucinihilipilification
The Capital of Tunisia is Tunis
“When one is painting one does not think.” – Raphael
“If you’ve only got one horn playing, I still want the sense of ensemble.” – Gerry Mulligan
“Failures not a bad thing. It builds character. It makes you stronger.” – Billy Dee Williams
“If you’re going to do good work, the work has to scare you.” – Andre Previn
“You don’t always have to have the ending, but you want to have a satisfactory conclusion.” – Barry Levinson
“I don’t know how many days I worked there (Star Wars), the thing I do remember was I somehow got a parking space next to Kermit the Frog. It was Jim Henson’s space, with this Kermit the Frog sign. I took a photo of it and sent it to my mom with a caption that read, “Look, Mom. I made it. I got a parking space next to Kermit the Frog.” I was always fascinated by the film-set infrastructures.” – John Ratzenberger
1993 – The Holbeck Hall Hotel in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, fell into the sea following a landslide, making news around the world.
1805 – The first Trooping of the Colour took place on Horse Guards Parade. It was Edward VII who moved Trooping the Colour to its June date, because of the vagaries of British weather.
2012 – The Thames Diamond Jubilee Pageant took place on the Tideway of the River Thames, as part of the celebrations of the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II.