26th February

[chenrezig]

1564 The birth of Christopher Marlowe, English dramatist and poet of the Elizabethan era. He was the foremost Elizabethan writer next to William Shakespeare.

1797 The Bank of England issued the first ever one pound note. Printed on watermark paper with a vignette of Britannia on the top left hand corner, the hand-signed white £1 notes were withdrawn in the 1820s.

1839 The first Grand National Steeplechase was run at Aintree near Liverpool. The winner was ‘Lottery’ ridden by Jem Mason.

1852 The British troopship, Birkenhead, sank off Simon’s Bay, near Cape Town, South Africa, with the loss of 485 lives.

1914 The launch of HMHS (Her Majesty's Hospital Ship) Britannic, sister to the RMS Titanic, at Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast. She was the third and largest Olympic-class ocean liner of the White Star Line and was intended to enter service as a transatlantic passenger liner. However, she was launched just before the start of the First World War and was laid up at her builders in Belfast for many months before being put to use as a hospital ship in 1915. She struck a mine off the Greek island of Keain in November 1916, and sank with the loss of 30 lives.

1931 The birth of Ally MacLeod, professional Scottish football player and manager of Scotland at the 1978 FIFA World Cup.

1935 Robert Watson-Watt first demonstrated RADAR (radio detection and ranging) at Daventry, Northamptonshire.

1935 Adolf Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to be re-formed, violating the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles.

1952 Churchill told the House of Commons that Britain now had an atomic bomb which it intended to test in Australia.

1962 The start of filming of Dr. No, the first film involving English agent 007 - James Bond.

1968 Twenty-one female patients died in a fire which swept through a wing of the Shelton Mental Hospital near Shrewsbury.

1979 Accused of forging old masters, painter Tom Keating’s trial at the Old Bailey was halted due to Keating’s ill health. Keating, a brilliant technician, went on to present a television series on painters and became a celebrity in his remaining years.

1987 The Church of England's General Synod voted by a huge majority in favour of the ordination of women priests.

1995 Barings, the country's oldest merchant bank, declared bankruptcy after discovering that Nicholas Leeson, the firm's chief trader in Singapore, had lost approximately £625 million of the bank's assets on unauthorized futures and options transactions.

1997 Armed Forces Minister, Nicholas Soames, fought off Labour demands for his resignation over the Ministry of Defence's suppression of information about the still unexplained 'Gulf War syndrome'.

2002 London Mayor Ken Livingstone confirmed that motorists would be charged £5 per day to drive into London on weekdays.

2014 Michael Adebolajo (aged 29) was given a whole-life term and Michael Adebowale (aged 22) was jailed for a minimum of 45 years for murdering 25 year old Fusilier Lee Rigby. They had driven into Fusilier Rigby with a car, before hacking him to death in Woolwich, south-east London, on 22nd May 2013. The two men claimed that they were 'soldiers of Allah' and that the killing was a legitimate act because Britain was at war with Muslim people.

[wendy]

[annie]

than999

[Rosalind]

go90 tha22222