ON THIS DAY

NOVEMBER 30

1667: Author Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels) was born in Dublin.

1900: Oscar Wilde, Irish-born playwright, died in Paris aged 46.

1936: The Crystal Palace was destroyed by fire.

1955: The first floodlit football match at Wembley was played, between England and Spain.

1968: The Trades Description Act came into force.

DECEMBER 1

1135: Henry I died “of a surfeit of lampreys”.

1761: Madame Marie Tussaud, waxworks modeller, was born in Strasbourg.

1887: The 28th Beeton’s Christmas Annual went on sale. It featured A Study In Scarlet by A Conan Doyle, which introduced the detective Sherlock Holmes. 1959: Twelve countries signed an agreement to preserve Antarctica for peacescientific ful research.

1990: The two halves of the Channel Tunwere nel joined under the sea.

CEMBER 2

1814: The Marquis de Sade, French aristocrat whose perverted lifestyle gave the word sadism to the language, died in anasylum.

1859: John Brown, anti-slavery campaigner whose soul marched on in the famous song, was executed for treason in Charleston, West Virginia.

1901: King Camp Gillette patented the safety razor.

1907: English footballers formed the Professional Footballers’ Association. 1954: Four years of anti-Communist witch-hunts in America came to an end when its instigator, Joseph McCarthy, was condemned for conduct unbecoming a senator.

DECEMBER 3

1894: Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island and other works, died of a stroke at his villa in Samoa.

1910: Neon lighting, developed by French physicist Georges Claude, was displayed forthefirsttimeattheParisMotor Show.

1967: The first heart transplant was performed by Dr Christiaan Barnard and a team of surgeons in South Africa.

1984: More than 3,000 people died in a chemical factory spillage at Bhopal, central India.

1988: Health minister Edwina Currie claimed that most of Britain’s egg production was affected by salmonella.

DECEMBER 4

1154: Nicholas Breakspear became the only English Pope – as Adrian IV.

1865: Edith Cavell, the nurse shot by the Germans in 1915 for helping refugees, was born in Norfolk.

1935: The game of Monopoly was born – the brainchild of unemployed engineer Charles Darrow.

1937: The Dandy comic was first published by DC Thomson, featuring Desperate Dan.