ON THIS DAY: 13 October 1917 – around 50,000 people gathered at Cova da Iria, a scrubland area near Fatima in Portugal, owned by the Santos family and used for grazing their sheep. They had come to witness what three young shepherd children claimed would be an apparition of the Virgin Mary. For several months, … Read more
ON THIS DAY: 4 October 1918 – Cher Ami, a homing pigeon, saved a battalion of American soldiers. Cher Ami – French for ‘Dear Friend’ – was a homing pigeon serving with the U.S. Army Signal Corps during the First World War. His bravery on 4 October 1918 would make him one of the most … Read more
ON THIS DAY: 30 October 1918 – William Walker, the diver who saved Winchester Cathedral in Hampshire, England, died of the Spanish flu. Born in South London, Walker trained as a diver with Siebe Gorman, pioneers of modern diving equipment. Skilled and fearless, he was accustomed to working in some of the most difficult underwater … Read more
ON THIS DAY: 23 October 1533 – the fourteen-year-old Catherine de’ Medici entered the port city of Marseilles astride a magnificent roan horse. It was one of those dazzling ceremonial moments where dynastic ambition, politics, and pageantry met in perfect Renaissance harmony. Catherine, niece of Pope Clement VII, had come to France to wed Henry, … Read more
ON THIS DAY: 17 October 1814 – Eight people perished in what has become known as the London Beer Flood. At Meux & Co.’s Horse Shoe Brewery on Tottenham Court Road, a colossal wooden vat containing over 135,000 gallons (610,000 litres) of porter burst. On that fateful afternoon, the culprit was a massive fermentation vat, … Read more
ON THIS DAY: 30 October 1938 – The War of the Worlds radio play caused mass hysteria across America. Twenty-three-year old Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre on the Air, based in New York, adapted H.G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds into a series of fake news bulletins describing a Martian invasion of … Read more
ON THIS DAY: 23 October 1998 – Several thousand people assembled at Khulile, a small village near Debe Nek in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. Nontetha Nkwenkwe, a Xhosa prophetess, healer, and black nationalist, was officially buried 60 years after her death. Nontetha had died 600 miles (960 km) away in 1935 while incarcerated in … Read more
ON THIS DAY: October 15, 1666 – Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary that King Charles II was wearing a vest. This new garment was described by Pepys as ‘a long cassock close to the body, of black cloth, and pinked with white silk under it, and a coat over it…’ This marked the first … Read more