20th November

[chenrezig]

868 St. Edmund, Saxon king of East Anglia, was martyred by the Vikings, who tied him to a tree, shot at him with arrows, then beheaded him. He gave his name to the town Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk.

1620 The birth of Peregrine White a child of William and Susanna White, Mayflower passengers. He was the first English child born in the Plymouth Colony at Cape Cod Harbour.

1759 The British fleet, under Admiral Hawke, defeated the French at the Battle of Quiberon Bay, thwarting an invasion of England.

1787 Birth of Sir Samuel Cunard, a ship owner born in Nova Scotia who came to Britain in 1838 and, together with two partners, established what became the Cunard Line in 1839. Their first ship, the Britannia, set sail the following year taking 14 days and 8 hours to cross the Atlantic.

1906 Charles Stewart Rolls and Frederick Henry Royce formed Rolls-Royce.

1908 Birth of Alistair Cooke, British-born US-based broadcaster and journalist who began his famous commentaries, Letters from America, in 1938.

1944 World War II: The end of the 'blackout' in London. After five years in the dark, the lights were switched back on in Piccadilly Circus, the Strand and in Fleet Street.

1947 Princess Elizabeth (Queen Elizabeth II) married Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten (Duke of Edinburgh) at Westminster Abbey. The BBC made the first tele-recording of the event, which was broadcast in the US 32 hours later.

1951 Snowdonia in Wales was designated a National Park. It was the third area to be designated 'National Park', the first being the Peak District.

1970 The ten-shilling note (50p) was officially withdrawn by the Bank of England.

1979 Anthony Blunt, the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, was stripped of his knighthood after admitting to being a spy for Russia, thereby exposed as the Fourth Man in the Burgess, Maclean and Philby spy scandal.

1990 Margaret Thatcher failed by four votes, to gain outright victory over Michael Heseltine, for leadership of the Conservative Party.

1992 Fire severely damaged the 'Brunswick Tower', at Windsor Castle when a spotlight ignited a curtain. The castle is the largest inhabited castle in the world and one of the official residences of Queen Elizabeth II. The question of how the funds required should be found raised important issues about the financing of the monarchy, and led to Buckingham Palace being opened to the public for the first time to help to pay for the restoration.

2007 Two computer discs holding the personal details of all families in the UK with a child under 16 went missing. The Child Benefit data on them included the name, address, date of birth, National Insurance number and, where relevant, bank details of 25 million people. Chancellor Alistair Darling said there was no evidence the data had gone to criminals - but urged people to monitor bank accounts "for unusual activity".

2012 32 year old Kweku Adoboli, a City trader who lost £1.4bn of Swiss bank UBS's money was jailed for seven years after being found guilty of two counts of fraud.It was Britain's biggest banking fraud and a 'a gamble or two away from destroying Switzerland's largest bank'.

2013 Hull was chosen as the UK's city of culture for 2017, beating off challenges from Dundee, Leicester and Swansea.

2014 Radio 2 presenter Jeremy Vine was stopped on his way to work at the BBC by a police officer holding a speed radar gun. The device showed that he had been cycling at 16mph through Hyde Park, where the limit is 5mph.

2014 The UK's first bus powered entirely by human and food waste went into service between Bristol and Bath. The 40-seat 'Bio-Bus' runs on biomethane gas generated through the treatment of sewage and food waste.

[Rosalind]

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[JaneJ]

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