Interesting Facts

26th July 1745 – The first recorded women's cricket match took place near Guildford, England 1803 – The Surrey Iron Railway, arguably the world's first public railway, opened in south London. 1847 – Liberia declared independence. 1944 – The first German V-2 rocket hit Great Britain. 1945 – The Potsdam Declaration was signed in Potsdam, Germany. 1945 - Clement Attlee became Britain's new prime minister after Labour won a sweeping victory. (It's always a bit surprising to think of this when you consider how popular Churchill was during the war. Maybe people just wanted to look to the future and forget the past.) 1952 - Eva Peron died. 1963 - Thousands were killed during an earthquake in the Yugoslavian city of Skopje. 1989 – A federal grand jury indicted Cornell University student Robert T. Morris, Jr. for releasing the Morris worm. He was the first person to be prosecuted under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

The next English £5, £10 and £20 banknotes will be printed on plastic. (The fiver will be issued first in September 2016, followed by the tenner, which will be issued in 2017, but the £20 note will have to wait until 2020. Their appearance will change too. Sir Winston Churchill will feature on the £5 banknote, replacing Elizabeth Fry, ​​Jane Austen will replace Charles Darwin on the £10 banknote, and artist J.M.W. Turner will feature on the £20 not, replacing economist Adam Smith. Nothing has been said about the £50 note, which features the engineers Matthew Boulton and James Watt. Historical characters have only appeared on bank notes since 1970.  Other people depicted on previous notes have been: Sir Edward Elgar (composer) Michael Faraday (scientist) Sir John Houblon (first Governor of the Bank of England) Sir Isaac Newton (scientist) Florence Nightingale (nursing) William Shakespeare (poet/playwright) George Stephenson (engineer) 1st Duke of Wellington (gener...

Oscar Wilde was voted Britain's greatest wit. (In a poll conducted by UK TV station "Dave" people were asked to vote for their favourite "wit". The results were a bit surprising and all men: The highest ranked woman in the poll, taking 12th place, was, believe it or not, former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher! Here is a list of the top ten, with a sample of their wittiness. 1 Oscar Wilde: "Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast." 2 Spike Milligan: "A sure cure for seasickness is to sit under a tree." 3 Stephen Fry: "It is a cliche that most cliches are true, but then like most cliches, that cliche is untrue." 4 Jeremy Clarkson: "Speed has never killed anyone, suddenly becoming stationary… That's what gets you.." 5 Sir Winston Churchill: "I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals." 6 Paul Merton: "My school days were the happiest of my life: ...

According to the Sunday Times, Fidel Castro stopped smoking cigars in 1985. (There aren't many iconic cigar smokers any more: Hemingway, Churchill, Che Guevaras, Groucho Marx; all gone, and even their photos often have the cigar airbrushed out. How times have changed.) Source: Sunday Times  

Winston Churchill felt he had been "sold a pup" when he found out that the bunkers he used as his wartime headquarters in Whitehall were not bomb-proof. (The idiom, to be sold a pup, means to be swindled, or tricked into buying something that is not worth what you paid. The saying comes from medieval times, where sometimes if you bought a piglet and the seller placed it in a bag or sack he might slip a puppy into the sack instead of a piglet.)

It's only 62 years since the last person was prosecuted for witchcraft in the UK. (Helen Duncan (1897 – 1956) was a Scottish medium. During World War II, she held a seance in Portsmouth at which she indicated knowledge that a warship had been sunk. Because this fact had been kept from the public, the British Admiralty chose to attempt to discredit her. She was arrested and eventually charged at first with conspiracy and then witchcraft, she was jailed for nine months. Winston Churchill was less than impressed with the whole thing and eventually repealed the Witchcraft Act in 1951.)