December 11th "2024" Daily Prep
Welcome to day 346 of the “leap” year! Known as Kaleidoscope Day, National App Day, International Mountain Day. Your star sign is Sagittarius and your birthstone is Blue Topaz.
2005 – A huge fire continued to burn at Buncefield oil depot near Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire. It was the largest of its kind in peacetime Europe and the noise of the explosions could be heard as far away as the Netherlands.
Todays birthdays
1954 – Jermaine Jackson (70), American singer, songwriter, bassist and a member of the Jackson Five (“Blame It on the Boogie”), born in Indiana, United States.
1961 – Marco Pierre White (63), British chef and restaurateur. In 1995, he became the youngest British chef to be awarded three Michelin stars, born in Leeds, West Yorkshire.
1963 – Nigel Winterburn (61), English retired professional footballer (Arsenal, West Ham United), coach and current television personality for BT Sport, born in Arley, Warwickshire.
1964 – Justin Currie (60), Scottish singer/songwriter and a founding member of the alternative rock band Del Amitri (“Roll to Me”), born in Glasgow, Scotland.
1974 – Ben Shephard (50), English television presenter (Tipping Point) and journalist (Good Morning Britain), born in Epping, Essex.
Famous deaths
2017 – Keith Chegwin (b. 1957), British TV presenter also known by the nickname Cheggers (Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, It’s a Knockout, Cheggers Plays Pop).
The day today
1952 – Derek Bentley, aged 19, and 16 year old Christopher Craig, were found guilty of the murder of a policeman in south London. Because of his age, Craig was sentenced to be detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure, while Bentley, who did not fire the gun, was sentenced to hang. Despite a public outcry, the sentence was carried out on 27th January 1953.
1967 – Concorde, the world’s first supersonic airliner, was rolled out of its hangar for public viewing for the first time.
1975 – An Icelandic gunboat opened fire on unarmed British fishery support vessels in the North Atlantic Sea, heightening the ‘Cod War’.
1990 – The Government set aside £42M to British haemophiliacs who became infected with the HIV virus after being treated with contaminated Factor VIII.
2022 – Four boys, aged 6, 8, 10 and 11 fell through ice into a lake at Babbs Mill Park, in Solihull, West Midlands. They were pulled from the freezing lake in cardiac arrest and taken to hospital, but tragically all four subsequently died. They were brothers Samuel and Finlay Butler, their cousin Thomas Stewart and Jack Johnson.
Today in music
1968 – Liverpool folk group The Scaffold were at No.1 on the UK singles chart with ‘Lily The Pink’, this year’s Christmas No.1. ‘Lily the Pink’ was a new version of an older folk song entitled ‘The Ballad of Lydia Pinkham’, and a similar version was the unofficial regimental song of the Royal Tank Corps, at the end of World War II.
1971 – UK comedian Benny Hill was at No.1 on the UK singles chart with the innuendo-laden novelty song, ‘Ernie (The Fastest Milkman In The West)’, giving Hill his only No.1 and the Christmas No.1 hit of 1971. The song was originally written in 1955 as the introduction to an unfilmed screenplay about Hill’s milkman experiences.
1983 – The Flying Pickets were at No.1 on the UK singles chart with their version of the Yazoo song ‘Only You’. Also this years Christmas No.1 and the first a cappella chart-topper in the UK.
1993 – The character Mr Blobby as featured on UK TV’s ‘The Noel Edmunds House Party’, started a one-week run as the UK No.1 single with the novelty song ‘Mr Blobby’. The single later received the dubious honour of being voted the most irritating Christmas No.1 single in a HMV poll.
2019 – Ed Sheeran was named the UK’s artist of the decade by the Official Charts Company. Sheeran achieved the milestone after a combined run of 12 No.1 singles and albums between 2010 and 2019 – more than any other artist. He’s also had the most weeks (79) at No.1 in both the album and singles charts in this period.
Today in history
1282 – The death of the last native Prince of Wales – Llewelyn ap Gruffydd, prince of Gwynedd.
1688 – James II fled to France, never to return and was forced to abdicate after William of Orange (William III) had landed in England from Netherlands on 5th November.
1769 – Venetian blinds were patented (in London) by Edward Beran.
1877 – English photographer Eadweard Mubridge won a long standing bet for a millionaire by proving that a horse’s four feet are all off the ground simultaneously once every stride. He used multiple cameras around the track, each taking a single frame via a series of trip wires.
1895 – The death, at Much Wenlock in Shropshire of William Penny Brookes. He was an English surgeon, magistrate, botanist, and educationalist especially known for inspiring the modern Olympic Games, the Wenlock Olympian Games and for his promotion of physical education and personal betterment.