May 30th "2024" Daily Prep
Welcome to day 151, known as Corpus Christi, International Hug Your Cat Day, Water A Flower Day. If you were born on this day, you were likely conceived the week of September 6th in the previous year. Your star sign is Gemini and your birthstone is Emerald.
1914 – The new, and at that time the largest Cunard ocean liner, RMS Aquitania weighing 45,647 tons, set sails on her maiden voyage from Liverpool to New York City.
Todays birthdays
1953 – Colm Meaney (71), Irish actor best known for playing Miles O’Brien in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, born in Dublin, Ireland.
1961 – Harry Enfield (63), English comedian, actor and writer (Kevin & Perry Go Large, Harry Enfield and Chums), born in Horsham, West Sussex.
1963 – Helen Sharman (61), British chemist and astronaut who became the first British person, first Western European woman and first privately funded woman in space, as well as the first woman to visit the Mir space station, in May 1991, born in Sheffield, South Yorkshire.
1975 – CeeLo Green (49), born Thomas DeCarlo Callaway-Burton, American singer (“Crazy”, “Forget You”), born in Atlanta, Georgia, United States.
1980 – Steven Gerrard (44), English professional football manager (Aston Villa, Al-Ettifaq) and former player (Liverpool, LA Galaxy, England), born in Liverpool.
Famous deaths
1849 – Anne Brontë (b. 1820), English novelist and poet (Agnes Grey, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall).
1984 – Eric Morecambe (b. 1926), English comedian who together with Ernie Wise formed the double act Morecambe and Wise.
The day today
1914 – The new, and at that time the largest Cunard ocean liner, RMS Aquitania weighing 45,647 tons, set sails on her maiden voyage from Liverpool to New York City. In her 36 years of service, Aquitania had the longest service career of any 20th century express liner, a record that stood until 2004, when the Queen Elizabeth 2 (with an ultimate career service of 40 years) became the longest-serving liner.
1959 – The first full-size experimental hovercraft, the SR-N1, built by Saunders-Roe and designed by Sir Christopher Cockerell, was launched at Cowes on the Isle of Wight.
1972 – Five children died and thirteen others were injured when a wooden roller coaster train came off its tracks at the Battersea Park funfair in London. After the accident, the ‘Big Dipper ‘ was closed and dismantled. With the lack of a main attraction, the fair’s popularity quickly declined and the funfair closed in 1974.
2013 – Mark Bridger was found guilty of abducting and murdering five-year-old April Jones, in a sexually motivated attack. The schoolgirl went missing on 1st October 2012 near her Machynlleth home, sparking the biggest search in UK police history. Her remains were never found, but fragments of bone consistent with a juvenile human skull were found among ashes in the woodburner at Bridger’s home, along with April’s blood near to a number of knives, including one which has been badly burned. From the time of his arrest, Bridger, the 37th person to be given a whole-life tariff, stuck steadfastly to his story that he could not remember where he had put April’s remains.
2019 – EE switched on the UK’s first high speed 5G mobile network service, with those in London, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Belfast, Birmingham and Manchester being the first to get the faster services. Prices for 5G – which required new handsets – started at £54 per month for 10 gigabytes of data. Huawei 5G phones were excluded from the launch, thanks to a recent US ban on American companies dealing with the Chinese owned Huawei.
Today in music
1968 – The Beatles began recording what became known as The White Album. The double-LP whose official title was simply ‘The Beatles’ became the first Beatles album released with the Apple label. The first track they recorded was ‘Revolution’.
1987 – David Bowie kicked off his 87-date Glass Spider world tour at the Feyenoord Stadium, Rotterdam, Holland. The tour’s set, described at the time as “the largest touring set ever,” was designed to look like a giant spider. It was 60 feet (18.3m) high, 64 feet (19.5m) wide and included giant vacuumed tube legs that were lit from the inside with 20,000′ (6,096m) of color-changing lights. A single set took 43 trucks to move.
2005 – Coldplay’s new album was illegally put on the internet a week before its UK and US release. The leak took place on the day copies were sent to UK radio stations and the day before it went on sale in Japan. Security measures around the release included hosting album playbacks at Abbey Road studios for journalists instead of sending them copies of the album, any CDs that were sent out were labelled with a false name – The Fir Trees – to throw would-be pirates off the scent.
2008 – Music mogul Simon Fuller married his long-term girlfriend Natalie Swanston at a ceremony in California’s Napa Valley. Guests at the wedding included Victoria Beckham, Emma Bunton, Geri Halliwell and Annie Lennox. Earlier this year Billboard magazine named him the “most successful British music manager of all time”, with an estimated fortune of $450m (£229m).
2009 – Mick Jagger offered to buy an ice cream van but was turned down by its owner – who’d promised his daughter he would drive her to her wedding in it. Guiseppe Della Camera, had spent ten years restoring the rusting van to perfection after he spotted it on a farm – being used as a chicken shed. The restoration was such a success Sir Mick offered to buy the vehicle when he saw it at a show on Wandsworth Common. Camera said, ‘Jagger told me he’d really fallen in love with my van and asked me if I would consider selling it. I was stunned when he offered me £100,000.
Today in history
1381 – An unpopular poll tax helped spark the Peasants’ Revolt, the first great popular rebellion in English history. A tax collector arrived in Fobbing, a village in Essex. The peasants refused to pay the poll tax and their opposition spread to surrounding villages in Essex and Kent. Peasants gathered together and started to march towards London, led by a man named Wat Tyler.
1431 – Joan of Arc, the French peasant girl who became a national heroine leading French troops against the English, was burnt at the stake in Rouen for heresy. For her execution, Joan of Arc asked two of the clergy to hold a crucifix in front of her. After her death, they burned the body two more times to turn it into ash and threw her ashes in the Seine river to prevent anyone from collecting her ashes.
1536 – Eleven days after he had his second wife Anne Boleyn beheaded, King Henry VIII married Jane Seymour, former lady-in-waiting to Anne.
1656 – The formation of the Grenadier Guards, the senior regiment of the British Army.
1842 – An assassination attempt was made on Queen Victoria as she drove down Constitution Hill in London with her husband Prince Albert. The would-be assassin was John Francis.