On This Day 2026
Hello, … and welcome to day 87 of the year.

Saturday, March 28th

Today is International Women in Music Day, Earth Hour and Respect Your Cat Day. Your star sign is Aries and your birthstone is Aquamarine.
Today’s birthdays
1960 – Chris Barrie (66), English actor (Tomb Raider, The Brittas Empire), best known for his role as Arnold Rimmer in Red Dwarf, born in Hanover, Germany.
1968 – Tim Lovejoy (58), English television presenter (Soccer AM, Sunday Brunch), born in Hillingdon, London.
1969 – James Atkin (57), English musician and singer with dance band EMF (“Unbelievable”), born in Birmingham.
1970 – Vince Vaughn (56) American actor (Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, Hacksaw Ridge, Wedding Crashers), born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States.
1972 – Nick Frost (54), English actor (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, Paul, The World’s End), born in Dagenham, East London.

1973 – Scott Mills (53), English radio DJ (Scott Mills Show BBC Radio 1 from 2004 to 2022 and since then, on BBC Radio 2), born in Eastleigh, Hampshire.

1984 – Nikki Sanderson (42), English actress known for playing Candice Stowe in the television soap opera Coronation Street and Maxine Minniver in Hollyoaks, born in Blackpool.
1986 – Lady Gaga (40), American singer, songwriter (“Bad Romance”, “Paparazzi”) and actress (A Star Is Born), born in Lenox Hill Hospital, New York, United States.
1988 – Lacey Turner (38), English actress (Bedlam), best known for her role as Stacey Slater in Eastenders, born in Edgware, London.
Famous deaths
2004 – Peter Ustinov (b. 1921), English-Swiss actor (Spartacus, Hercule Poirot in Death on the Nile), director, producer, and screenwriter.
2013 – Richard Griffiths (b. 1947), English actor (Harry Potter, Pie in the Sky, Sleepy Hollow).
2023 – Paul O’Grady (b. 1955), English comedian, actor and drag queen (Lily Savage).
The day today
1917 – The Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) was founded. They were Britain’s first official service women. It was the first time women had served in the British Army other than as nurses. The corps was eventually disbanded in 1921.
1941 – English novelist Virginia Woolf, suffering from depression, filled her overcoat pocket with stones and walked into the River Ouse near her home in Sussex and drowned herself. Her body was not found until 18th April.
1945 – Germany dropped its last V2 bomb in Britain on Hughes Mansions on Vallance Road, in Whitechapel. The V-weapons inflicted immense suffering in Britain, causing over 30,000 civilian casualties and left hundreds of thousands homeless.
1949 – English astronomer Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) coined the term “Big Bang” during a BBC radio talk show, intending it as a derisive, metaphorical description of a rival theory, while actually arguing for his own steady-state theory. Hoyle’s coining of the term is considered one of the great ironies in the history of science, as a skeptic named the dominant theory.
1960 – A Scotch whisky factory explodes in Glasgow, Scotland killing 19 firefighters and salvage corps members. The explosion caused the front and rear walls of the building to collapse into the street, trapping the firefighters and crushing fire appliances. It was the biggest fire-related disaster in Scotland since World War II, taking an entire week to fully extinguish.
1964 – Pirate radio station, Radio Caroline, began transmitting from a ship in the North Sea. Simon Dee, who later became the first ‘pirate DJ’ to join the BBC was the first voice to be heard on Radio Caroline.
1964 – The seaside holiday resort of Clacton became the scene of pitched battles by rival gangs of ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’ over the Easter weekend of 1964 (specifically 27–30 March). The confrontations started on Easter Saturday, 28 March 1964, following a high volume of teenagers arriving for the holiday. Fights erupted at locations including Pier Avenue and the seafront.
1989 – The Louvre Pyramid, designed by Chinese-American architect I. M. Pei, was inaugurated by French President François Mitterrand in Paris. Serving as the new main entrance to the museum, this 21.6-meter-high, steel-and-glass structure was commissioned to modernize the museum and ease visitor flow, despite initial controversy over its modern design.
1991 – A jury returned a verdict of accidental death at the end of the inquest into the Sheffield Hillsborough disaster in which 96 football fans died. The 90-day inquest was the longest in British history and recommended extra security measures at football stadiums. On 19th December 2012 the original accidental death verdict was overturned, paving the way for a new investigation. On 27th March 2014 the police watchdog identified 13 ‘suspects’ (a mixture of retired and serving officers) at the centre of the probe into the Hillsborough investigation, with a fresh inquest into the 96 deaths, which began in Warrington on Monday, 31st March 2014.
1994 – BBC Radio 5 Live launched for the first time at 5:00 am on Monday, 28 March 1994, replacing the original Radio 5. Launched with a focus on 24-hour news and live sport, the first voice on air was Jane Garvey, launching from a new, faster-paced format. The station became famous for its mix of sports coverage and live news, replacing a more educational-focused predecessor.

2003 – During the invasion of Iraq, two US Air National Guard A-10 Thunderbolt 2’s from the 190th Fighter Squadron mistakenly attacked British armored vehicles from D Squadron, The Blues and Royals. The incident, known as the 190th Fighter Squadron, Blues and Royals friendly fire incident, resulted in the death of British soldier Matty Hull.

2006 – At least 1 million union members, students and unemployed take to the streets in France in protest at the government’s proposed First Employment Contract law.

2014 – Beryl Walker, 88, was named as the oldest paper girl in the world by Guinness World Records. “Beryl has been doing the round for 35 years, gets up at 6am every morning and hops on her bike ‘Hercules’ to deliver papers to homes in Gloucester. She works six days a week and cycles over eight miles a day.

2017 – Britain introduced a new 12-sided £1 coin into circulation, marking the first redesign of the coin in over 30 years and features a hologram-like image that changes from a ‘£’ symbol to the number ‘1’ when viewed from different angles. Billed as the “most secure coin in the world”, it was designed specifically to combat counterfeiting, as roughly 1 in 30 of the previous “round pounds” in circulation was fake.
2017 – The world’s largest dinosaur footprint, measuring approximately 1.7 meters (5.5 feet) long, was discovered in the Kimberley region of Western Australia and was made by a long-necked, plant-eating titan that lived around 130 million years ago.
2019 – The European Union Parliament declared single-use plastics were to be banned by 2021 including forks, knives, spoons, plates and straws.
2019 – A 71-year-old British woman, identified as Jo Cameron from Scotland, became the subject of major scientific study after researchers discovered she lives almost completely pain-free, an effect linked to a previously unidentified gene mutation. In addition to painlessness, Cameron reported never feeling anxious or fearful, scoring a zero on common anxiety scales, and having no memory of panic even during stressful events.
2021 – Mexico revises its COVID-19 death toll up by 60% to more than 321,000 giving it the second highest COVID death toll in the world.
2022 – Actor Will Smith issues an apology on Instagram to Oscars host Chris Rock for slapping him live on stage during the ceremony.
Today in music

1964 – Madame Tussauds, London unveiled the wax works images of The Beatles, the first pop stars to be honoured. Madame Tussaud’s reworked the figures on several occasions throughout the 1960s, to reflect The Beatles’ ever-changing image.

1968 – Pink Floyd recorded a performance for the BBC 2 TV Omnibus – The Sound of Change show from Barnes Common, London, England. The special, which was produced by Tony Palmer, also featured performances by The Who, Cream and The Jimi Hendrix Experience. The show was later broadcast in September of that year.
1970 – Simon and Garfunkel were at No.1 on the UK singles chart with ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, the duo’s only UK No.1. Only Art Garfunkel sang on the track.
1973 – Led Zeppelin released their fifth studio album, Houses Of The Holy in the UK. The album title was a dedication by the band to their fans who appeared at venues they dubbed ‘Houses of the Holy’. The cover is a collage of several photographs which were taken at the Giant’s Causeway, Northern Ireland, by Aubrey Powell of Hipgnosis. The two children who modelled for the cover were siblings Stefan and Samantha Gates.
1975 – At an Elvis Presley concert at the Hilton in Las Vegas, Barbra Streisand went backstage and offered Elvis the lead role in her upcoming film A Star Is Born. Elvis was interested, but on the advice of his manager Colonel Parker, he demanded too much money and top billing. Kris Kristofferson was chosen for the role instead.

1976 – Genesis began their first North American tour since Peter Gabriel left the band, appearing in Buffalo, New York, with Phil Collins taking over as lead singer.

2000 – Jimmy Page accepted substantial undisclosed libel damages from a magazine which claimed he had caused or contributed to the death of his Led Zeppelin bandmate John Bonham. Page’s solicitor, Norman Chapman, told High Court Judge Mr Justice Morland that the feature in Ministry magazine printed in 1999 claimed Page was more concerned with keeping vomit off his bed than saving his friend’s life, and that he stood over him wearing Satanist robes and performing a useless spell.
2005 – After playing a warm-up date the night before at the Los Angeles Sports Arena, U2 kicked off their Vertigo tour at the iPay One Center in San Diego, California. The 131 date world tour would see the band playing in North America, Europe, South America and Japan. By the time it finished, the Vertigo Tour had sold 4,619,021 tickets.
2014 – Tickets for Kate Bush’s first live shows in 35 years sold out in less than 15 minutes. The “Before the Dawn” concerts, which were booked to take place that August and September, marked the singer’s first return to the stage since “The Tour Of Life” in 1979. Demand was so high that the singer’s own website, as well as some ticket-selling sites, crashed as people tried to log on.
2018 – George Ezra was at No.1 on the UK album chart with his second studio album Staying at Tamara’s. It became the UK’s best selling artist album of the year in 2018 and was nominated for British Album of the Year at the 2019 Brit Awards.
2025 – Dua Lipa won the dismissal of a lawsuit that accused her of copying her hit single ‘Levitating’ from two other songs. The star was sued in 2022 by songwriters L Russell Brown and Sandy Linzer, who accused her of plagiarising their 1979 disco track ‘Wiggle and Giggle All Night’. US Judge Katherine Polk Failla ruled that the songs only had generic similarities, including non-copyrightable musical elements that had also previously been used by Mozart, Gilbert and Sullivan, and the The Bee Gees in their song ‘Stayin’ Alive’.
Today in history
1760 – The birth of Thomas Clarkson, a leading campaigner against the slave trade in the British Empire. He helped found The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade and helped achieve passage of the Slave Trade Act of 1807, which ended British trade in slaves. In his later years Clarkson campaigned for the abolition of slavery worldwide.
1800 – The Irish Parliament passed the Act of Union with England. The Act included joining Ireland to Great Britain to form a single kingdom, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
1819 – The birth, at Crimble Hall – Rochdale of Roger Fenton, noted as one of the first war photographers (Crimean War) and co-founder of the Royal Photographic Society.
1819 – The birth of Sir Joseph William Bazalgette, English civil engineer. As chief engineer of London’s Metropolitan Board of Works he created a sewer network for central London which was instrumental in relieving the city from cholera epidemics, whilst also beginning the cleansing of the River Thames.
1854 – Great Britain and France formally declared war on Russia, escalating the existing Russo-Turkish conflict into the Crimean War. Motivated by the need to maintain the balance of power, protect the Ottoman Empire, and curb Russian expansionism, the allied powers intervened after Russia’s refusal to withdraw from the Danubian Principalities.
1891 – The world’s first weightlifting championship took place in London. There were only seven athletes who took part in the event, and the winner was Edward Lawrence.
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