Anniversaries

Births: Henry VIII, King, 1491; Sir Peter Paul Rubens, painter, 1577; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, writer and philosopher, 1712; Joseph Joachim, composer and violinist, 1831; Luigi Pirandello, playwright, 1867; Floyd Dell, novelist and playwright, 1887; James Mallahan Cain, novelist, 1892; Richard Charles Rodgers, composer and lyricist, 1902.

Deaths: George Hadley, barrister and meteorologist, 1768; Francis Wheatley, portrait and landscape painter, 1801; Gerhard Johann David von Scharnhorst, general, 1813; James Madison, fourth US President, 1836; Fitzroy James Henry Somerset, first Baron Raglan, soldier, 1855; Robert O'Hara Burke, explorer of Australia, 1861; Victor Thomas Trumper, cricketer, 1915; Alfred Noyes, poet, 1958; Rod Serling, writer and screenwriter, 1975; William Wyler, film director, 1981.

On this day: Spanish troops recovered Minorca from the French, 1756; Queen Victoria was crowned, 1838; a mutiny of Russian sailors took place on the battleship Potemkin, when many officers and the captain were killed, 1905; the first Zeppelin airliner, the Deutschland, crashed in a forest near Osnabruck, 1910; Westminster Cathedral was consecrated, 1910; the Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria and his wife were shot by Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian revolutionary, at Sarajevo, 1914; the Treaty of Versailles was signed, 1919; ruins of a pre-Mayan city were discovered near Orizaba, Mexico, 1925; the British Eighth Army retreated to El Alamein, 1942; the British/American airlift to Berlin began, 1948; Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform because of "hostility to the Soviet Union", 1948; Seoul was taken by North Korean forces, 1950; workers in Poznan, Poland, rebelled and 44 were killed in conflict with the police, 1956; the Seychelles became an independent republic within the Commonwealth, 1976.

Today is the Feast Day of St Heimrad, St Irenaeus of Lyons, St John Southworth, St Paul I, Pope, Saints Plutarch, Potamiaena and Companions and Saints Sergius and Germanus of Valaam.