Interesting Facts

31st October 1984 - Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minister of India, was killed by two assassins believed to be her own bodyguards. Booh - It's Halloween!

23rd July 1942 – The Treblinka extermination camp was opened. 1961 – The Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) was founded in Nicaragua. 1967 – Riots broke out in Detroit, Michigan, one of the worst riots in United States history, by the end 43 people were killed, 342 injured and 1,400 buildings burnt to the ground. 1974- The military government in Greece collapses and the former prime minister Constantine Karamanlis was invited to return. 1982 – The International Whaling Commission voted to end commercial whaling by 1985-86. 1983 – The Sri Lankan Civil War began with the killing of 13 Sri Lanka Army soldiers by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. In the subsequent government-organised pogrom of Black July, about 1,000 Tamils were slaughtered, some 400,000 Tamils fled to neighbouring Tamil Nadu, India and many found refuge in Europe and Canada. 1984 – Vanessa Williams became the first Miss America to resign when she surrendered her crown after nude photos of her ...

8th July 1949 – Celebrities Helen Keller, Dorothy Parker, Danny Kaye, Fredric March, John Garfield, Paul Muni and Edward G. Robinson were named in an FBI report as Communist Party members. 1953 – The United States Supreme Court ruled that Washington, D.C. restaurants could not refuse to serve black patrons. 1965 - Ronald Biggs who was serving a 30-year prison sentence for his part in the Great Train Robbery escaped from Wandsworth prison. 1968 – James Earl Ray was arrested for the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. 1984 – Homosexuality was declared legal in the Australia state of New South Wales. 1996 - Three young children and four adults were attacked by a man with a machete at an infant school in Wolverhampton, England. 2001 – Mamoru Takuma stabbed 8 school pupils to death at Ikeda Elementary School. 2003 - Conjoined Iranian twins, Ladan Bijani and Laleh Bijani (in Persian: لادن و لاله بیژنی ), who had volunteered to go ahead with a major operation to separate the...

23rd June 1973 – A fire at a house in Hull, England, which killed a six year old boy was passed off as an accident; it later emerged that it was the first of 26 deaths by fire caused over the next seven years by arsonist Peter Dinsdale. 1983 - Pope John Paul II privately met banned union leader Lech Walesa, the founder of Solidarity, on a visit to Poland. 1984 - An auction of John Lennon's possessions raised $430,000, including $19,000 for a guitar used while Lennon was with the Beatles. 1985 – A terrorist bomb brought a Boeing 747 down off the coast of Ireland, killing all 329 people on board. 1988 – James Hansen testified to the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources that it was 99% probable that global warming had begun. 1991 – Moldova declared independence. 1992 - New York crime boss John Gotti (the Teflon Don) was sentenced to life imprisonment with no chance of parole. 1996 - The Nintendo 64 went on sale in Japan. 2004 - A U.S. lawyer...

22nd June 1633 – The Holy Office in Rome forced Galileo Galilei to recant his view that the Sun, not the Earth, is the center of the Universe. 1907 – The London Underground's Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway opened. 1922 – 19 strikebreakers and 2 union miners were murdered in Herrin, Illinois . 1941 - Hitler's German troops invaded the Soviet Union. 1969 – The Cuyahoga River, in Northeast Ohio in the United States, caught fire, which triggered a crack-down on pollution in the river. Time magazine described the Cuyahoga as the river that "oozes rather than flows" and in which a person "does not drown but decays." 1969 – Judy Garland died. 1978 – Charon, a satellite of the dwarf planet Pluto, was discovered. 1981 - Mark Chapman changed his plea to guilty and admitted he murdered John Lennon in December 1980. 1984 – Virgin Atlantic Airways launched. Its first flight was from London Heathrow Airport. 1987 – Fred Astaire died. ...

8th June 1949 - George Orwell's book 1984 (Nineteen eighty-four) was published.

6th June 1944 - The Battle of Normandy began as thousands of Allied troops started landing on the beaches of Normandy in northern Franc: the beginning of D-Day, which was code named Operation Overlord, 1966 - James Meredith, the first black man to brave the colour bar at the University of Mississippi, was shot in the back and legs while on a civil rights march. 1975 - British voters backed the UK's continued membership of the EEC by two-to-one in a nationwide referendum. 1982 – The Lebanon War began. 1984 - Nearly 300 people were killed as Indian troops stormed the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India, which was being held by Sikh militants. 2004 – Tamil was established as a "classical language" by the President of India.

23rd May 1701 - Capt. William Kidd was hanged in London for piracy and murder. 1977 - More than 100 children and six teachers were taken hostage in a primary school in Northern Holland (The Netherlands). 1984 - At least four people were killed and dozens more injured in an explosion at a Lancashire water treatment plant.

19th May 1499 – Catherine of Aragon, was married by proxy to Arthur Tudor, Prince of Wales. Catherine was just 13 and Arthur 12. 1536 – Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII of England, was beheaded for adultery, treason, and incest. 1568 – Queen Elizabeth I of England ordered the arrest of Mary Queen of Scots. 1649 – An Act of Parliament declaring England a Commonwealth was passed by the Long Parliament. England would be a republic for the next eleven years. 1890 – Ho Chi Minh, the1st President of Vietnam was born. 1897 – Oscar Wilde was released from Reading Prison. 1943 – British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt set Monday, May 1, 1944 as the date for the cross-English Channel landing (D-Day). It would be delayed over a month due to bad weather. 1962 - Marilyn Monroe sang "that" birthday salute to U.S. President John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden, New York City. 1984 – Poet John Betjeman, who had been B...

17th May 1521 – Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham, was executed for treason. 1536 – George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford and four other men were executed for treason. 1590 – Anne of Denmark was crowned Queen of Scotland. 1792 – The New York Stock Exchange was formed. 1814 – The Constitution of Norway was signed and Danish Crown Prince Christian Frederik elected King of Norway by the Norwegian Constituent Assembly. 1974 – Thirty-three people were killed by terrorist bombings in Dublin and Monaghan, Ireland. 1978 - Charlie Chaplin's stolen body was found. 1984 – Prince Charles called the proposed addition to the National Gallery, London, a "monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend," sparking controversies on the proper role of the Royal Family and the course of modern architecture. 1992 – The WHO (World Health Organisation) took homosexuality out of its list of mental illnesses. 1994 - The U.N. Security Council approved sendi...

19th April 1587 – Francis Drake sank the Spanish fleet in Cádiz harbour. 1775 – The Battle of Lexington and Concord began, which started the American Revolution against the British. 1839 – The Treaty of London established Belgium as a kingdom. 1961 – The Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba ended. 1984 – Advance Australia Fair was chosen as Australia's national anthem, and green and gold as the national colours. 1987 – The Simpsons premièred as a short cartoon on The Tracey Ullman Show. 1989 – Daphne du Maurier, British novelist died. 1992 – Benny Hill, and Frankie Howard died. They were both English comic actors. 1995 – A bomb in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA, killed 168 people. 1999 – The German Bundestag returned to Berlin. 2005 – Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected Pope Benedict XVI on the second day of the Papal conclave.

17th April 1397 – Geoffrey Chaucer recited the Canterbury Tales for the first time at the court of Richard II. (And it's been torturing British schoolchildren ever since.) 1521 – Martin Luther spoke to the assembly at the Diet of Worms, refusing to recant his teachings. 1961 – A group of CIA financed and trained Cuban refugees landed at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba with the aim of ousting Fidel Castro. 1984 - WPC (Woman Police Constable) Yvonne Fletcher was shot and killed outside the Libyan embassy in central London. 1986 - British journalist John McCarthy was kidnapped, by the militant group Islamic Jihad, in Beirut. He spent more than five years in captivity. 1986 - Three bodies of murdered hostages, were found on the streets of Beirut. They were Leigh Douglas, Philip Padfield from the UK and an American, Peter Kilburn. 1986 – The 335 Years' War (1651–1986) between the Netherlands and the Isles of Scilly officially ended. It was both one of the world's longest ...

15th April 1452 – Leonardo da Vinci was born. 1755 – Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language was published in London. 1802 – William Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy saw a "long belt" of daffodils, inspiring "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud". 1892 – The General Electric Company was formed. 1912 – The RMS Titanic sank in the North Atlantic, after hitting an iceberg two and a half hours earlier, killing over 1,500 people. 1923 – Insulin became generally available for use by people with diabetes. 1941 – 200 Luftwaffe bombers attacked Belfast, Northern Ireland, killing over 1,000 people. 1942 – The George Cross was awarded to "to the island fortress of Malta – its people and defenders" by King George VI. 1945 - British troops liberated the German concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. 1984 – Tommy Cooper died. 1989 - 96 Liverpool fans died in a crush at the Leppings Lane end of Hillsborough Football Stadium at the FA Cup...

1984 - The world's worst industrial disaster took place when 42 tonnes of toxic methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas leaked from the Union Carbide subsidiary pesticide plant in the city of Bhopal, India. More than 500,000 people were exposed to the toxic gases, with the symptoms bearing all the hallmarks of cyanide poisoning. The first official death toll was 2,259. A more probable figure is that 8,000 people died within two weeks. It is estimated that around 20,000 people have died from gas-related diseases since the disaster. http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/11/28/india-bhopal-gas-union-carbide-dow-idINKCN0JC0WC20141128 1992 - The first text message was sent.  

26th November 1865 - Lewis Carrroll (Charles Dodgson) published the book Alice in Wonderland (aka Alice's Adventures in Wonderland). 1984 - US troops withdrew from the Lebanese capital, Beirut. 1987 - The Church of England's General Synod voted by a huge majority in favour of the ordination of women priests.

Art Garfunkel is a long distance walker. (Seemingly the famous singer of Simon and Garfunkel fame has undertaken several long walks in his lifetime: In the early 1980s, he walked across Japan in a matter of weeks. From 1984 to 1996, Garfunkel walked across America, taking 40 excursions to complete the route from New York City to the Pacific coast of Washington. In May 1998, Garfunkel began an incremented walk across Europe. In late August 2012, during the 26th leg of his Eurowalk, Art reached Thessaloniki, Greece. He will be continuing his walk towards Istanbul.)

There have only ever been three voices for the BT Speaking Clock, apart from a two week period in March 2003 when Lenny Henry, a famous British comedian, did a special version of the Speaking Clock in aid of Comic Relief. (A London telephonist, Jane Cain was the first voice in 1936 and lasted until 1963. She was followed by a Miss Pat Simmons, a supervisor in a London telephone exchange, she was the second voice from 1963 until 1984. The present voice, belongs to Brian Cobby (73) who was an assistant supervisor at Withdean exchange in Brighton. He became the first male voice at 11 am on 2nd April 1985. Brian Cobby, an actor by profession before he joined BT, was selected from 12 finalists in BT’s Golden Voice competition, on 5th December 1984.) !Note - The speaking clock is a telephone service provided by British Telecom where you dial 123 to hear a recording of the time, but be warned, you will be charged 31p for doing so.