Famous deaths
2018 – Chas Hodges (b. 1943), English musician and singer. He was the lead vocalist, pianist and guitarist of the musical duo Chas & Dave.
On This Day 2025
Hello, … Welcome to day 333 of the year.

Saturday, November 29th Daily Prep.

Known as Throw Out Your Leftovers Day, National Square Dance Day, Small Business Saturday. Your star sign is Sagittarius and your birthstone is Topaz.
2015 – Great Britain won the Davis Cup for the first time since 1936 after Andy Murray beat Belgium’s David Goffin to clinch the decisive point in Ghent, Belgium.
Great Britain won the Davis Cup for the first time since 1936 after Andy Murray beat Belgium's David Goffin to clinch the decisive point in Ghent, Belgium.
Today’s birthdays
1964 – Don Cheadle (61), American actor (Iron Man, Ocean’s Trilogy, House of Lies), born in Kansas City, Missouri, United States.
1965 – Lauren Child (60), English children’s author and illustrator, best known for the Charlie and Lola books and CBeebies TV series of the same name, born in Berkshire.
1973 – Ryan Giggs (52), Welsh football coach and former player (Manchester United) and co-owner of Salford City, born in St David’s Hospital, Cardiff.
1979 – Simon Amstell (46), English comedian, writer and presenter (Never Mind the Buzzcocks), born in Gants Hill, Ilford, East London.
1982 – Lucas Black (43), American actor (Sean Boswell in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, Special Agent Christopher LaSalle on NCIS: New Orleans), born in Alabama, United States.
Famous deaths
1975 – Graham Hill (b. 1929), British racing driver, motorsport executive, and father of Damon Hill, who competed in Formula One from 1958 to 1975.

2001 – George Harrison (b. 1943), English musician who achieved international fame as the lead guitarist of the Beatles.

The day today
1907 – British nurse Florence Nightingale, aged 87, was presented with the Order of Merit by Edward VII for her work tending the wounded during the Crimean War.
1940 – World War II: The city of Liverpool endured nearly eight hours of bombing, which left 166 people dead and 2,000 people homeless. At the time, Prime Minister Winston Churchill described the tragedy as “the single worst civilian incident of the war.”
1956 – Panic-buying breaks out at garages across the country as the government gives details of its petrol rationing plans. On the same day, Chris Brasher becomes the first Briton to win an Olympic gold medal in track and field since 1936 with the 3,000m Steeplechase at the Melbourne Olympics.
1961 – Enos, the chimpanzee, was launched into space on the Mercury-Atlas 5 Mission. Enos became the first chimpanzee, and the third primate to orbit Earth, preceded only by the Russian cosmonaut’s Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov. Enos clocked more than 1,000 hours of training before the mission, including exposure to weightlessness and high g-forces. The following Mercury mission sent the first American, John Glenn, into Earth’s orbit.
1962 – Britain and France announced a joint agreement to design and build Concorde, the world’s first supersonic airliner. Construction began in February 1965, with the first prototype flying from Toulouse, France, on March 2, 1969.
1986 – The death of Cary Grant, British-born American actor. He was considered one of Hollywood’s definitive leading men and was named the second Greatest Male Star of All Time (after Humphrey Bogart) by the American Film Institute.
2013 – A double engine failure caused a police helicopter to crash into the Clutha Vaults pub in Glasgow. Ten people died in the accident; all three on board, six on the ground and another person died two weeks later from injuries received.
2015 – Great Britain won the Davis Cup for the first time since 1936 after Andy Murray beat Belgium’s David Goffin to clinch the decisive point in Ghent, Belgium.
2019 – Usman Khan, a 28-year-old British citizen kills two and injures three participants at a prisoner rehabilitation conference that he was attending at Fishmongers Hall by London Bridge. Khan who was shot dead at the scene, had been released from prison in 2018 on licence after serving a sentence for terrorist offences.
2021 – According to the 2021 Census results for England and Wales, for the first time, fewer than half of the population (46.2%) described themselves as “Christian”. The proportion of people identifying as Christian fell by 13.1 percentage points from 59.3% in the 2011 Census to 46.2% in 2021. Despite this decrease, it remained the most common religious affiliation.
2021 – Ghislaine Maxwell, British socialite and former girlfriend of Jeffery Epstein was found guilty on five of six counts related to the recruitment and grooming of four teenage girls for sexual abuse by Epstein between 1994 and 2004. She was sentenced to 20 years in a U.S. federal prison in June 2022.
Today in music
1963 – ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ by The Beatles was released in the UK. For the first time ever in the UK advanced orders passed the million mark before it was released.
1976 – Lancaster local council cancelled the Sex Pistols gig at Lancaster Polytechnic. The reason was given in a statement by the council saying: ‘We don’t want that sort of filth in the town limits.’ The cancellation was part of a wider moral panic and string of show cancellations during the band’s “Anarchy Tour” in the UK, which followed their infamous, profanity-laden appearance on the Today television show with Bill Grundy a few days earlier.
1980 – ABBA scored their ninth and last UK No.1 single with ‘Super Trouper’, the group’s 25th Top 40 hit in the UK. The name “Super Trouper” referred to the gigantic spotlights used in stadium concerts.
1983 – Now That’s What I Call Music was launched in the UK with a mission to anthologise the biggest chart hits of the day. The first track on the first album was You Can’t Hurry Love by Phil Collins and also contained hits like ‘Karma Chameleon’, ‘Red Red Wine’ and ‘Total Eclipse Of The Heart’. The series took its name from a 1930s advertising poster for Danish bacon, featuring a pig saying. “Now, That’s What I Call Music” as it listened to a chicken singing.
1997 – ‘Perfect Day’ performed by various artists including Elton John, Bono, Tom Jones & David Bowie went to No.1 on the UK singles chart. Originally written and recorded in 1973 by Lou Reed, this new collaboration of 29 major artists was a fund raiser for the BBC Children In Need charity.
2001 – Beatles guitarist George Harrison died in Los Angeles of lung cancer aged 58. Following the breakup of The Beatles Harrison had a successful career as a solo artist and later as part of the Traveling Wilburys. The youngest member of The Beatles, (aged 16 when he joined), his compositions include ‘Taxman’, ‘Here Comes the Sun’, ‘Something’, and ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’. Harrison released the acclaimed triple album, All Things Must Pass, in 1970, from which came the worldwide No.1 single ‘My Sweet Lord.’
2005 – Pop Idol creator Simon Fuller dropped his £100m copyright case against the X Factor’s Simon Cowell after Fuller settled the case out of court in a deal which made him a joint partner in the X Factor show. Mr Fuller had claimed Mr Cowell’s ITV talent show X Factor copied his successful Pop Idol format, in a case taken to London’s High Court. As part of the settlement, Mr Cowell agreed to appear in at least five more series of American Idol.
2009 – Susan Boyle’s album became the best-selling debut in UK chart history when it went to No.1 on the UK chart. The 48 year-old runner-up in ITV’s Britain’s Got Talent, sold 410,000 copies of ‘I Dreamed a Dream’. Boyle also topped the US charts, setting a first-week sales record for a female debut album with 701,000 copies sold in its first week.
2010 – Adele released the hit single “Rolling in the Deep”, as the lead single from her album 21. It won awards for Billboard’s Record of the Year 2011 and the Grammy’s Album and Record of the Year 2012.
2023 – Taylor Swift is Spotify’s most-streamed global artist of the year with 26.1 billion streams, and Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers” is the most-streamed song.
Today in history
1775 – Amateur British chemist Sir James Jay invented invisible ink. After experimenting and narrowing down his secret ingredients to just two fluids, Jay would send letters to his brother John in the US. James Jay even sent letters to Benjamin Franklin warning him of Britain’s plans for the forced submission of colonies.
1781 – The crew of the British slave ship Zong, murdered 133 Africans by dumping them into the sea to claim insurance. The resulting court cases, brought by the ship-owners, sought compensation from the insurers for their lost cargo. The court established that the deliberate killing of slaves could, in some circumstances be legal. It was a landmark in the battle against the African slave trade of the eighteenth century, and inspired abolitionists such as Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson, leading to the foundation of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787.
1877 – Thomas Edison demonstrated his hand-cranked phonograph for the first time. He demonstrated it at the USA’s Scientific American office, the first of many demonstrations of the phonograph worldwide. Edison patented the phonograph on February 19, 1878, which was the start of audio recording and was very advanced for the time.”
1898 – The birth of Clive Staples Lewis, best known as C.S. Lewis. He wrote more than 30 books that have been translated into 30 different languages. His books that make up The Chronicles of Narnia have also been featured on radio, television on stage and in the cinema.
1899 – FC Barcelona was founded by a group of English, German, Swiss, and Spanish soccer players. It started when Hans Gamper, a professional football player from Switzerland, posted an ad in a local Barcelona newspaper declaring his interest in starting a football club, asking anyone interested to simply show up. A total of eleven players turned up, and so the club’s history began.