17th September

[chenrezig]

1701 King James II of England died whilst in exile in France.

1745 The Jacobite supporters of Bonnie Prince Charlie occupied Edinburgh.

1827 'Wides' in cricket were first scored in the Sussex v Kent game at Brighton.

1877 William Henry Fox Talbot, English photographic pioneer, died. He made the earliest known surviving photographic negative in the late summer of 1835, with a photograph of the oriel window at his home at Lacock Abbey.

1901 The birthday of Sir Francis Chichester, British yachtsman and aviation pioneer. He made a solo circumnavigation of the world at the age of 65 in his yacht Gipsy Moth IV.

1929 Stirling Moss, English racing driver, was born.

1939 World War II: A German U-boat U 29 sank the British aircraft carrier HMS Courageous. She sank in 20 minutes with the loss of 519 of her crew.

1944 Blackout regulations eased in Britain to allow lights on buses, trains and at railway stations for the first time since the beginning of World War II in 1939.

1956 Norman Buckley, a 48-year-old solicitor from Manchester broke the one-hour world water speed record in his motorboat, Miss Windermere III when he averaged 79mph during his hour on the course on Lake Windermere.

1961 Police made 1,314 arrests during sit-down demonstrations by CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) members in Trafalgar Square, London.

1985 The death, aged 60, of Laura Ashley, Welsh designer and fabric retailer.

1993 The British National Party won its first council seat in a by-election in East London, provoking fear in the local Asian community.

1998 There was chaos in Staffordshire, when animal rights activists release around 6,000 animals from a mink farm.

2000 Paula Yates, television personality and former wife of Bob Geldof, was found dead in bed from a suspected drug overdose. She was 40 years old.

2007 Worried savers continued to flock to some Northern Rock bank branches to withdraw their savings when the bank applied to the Bank of England for emergency funds. Chancellor Alistair Darling appealed for calm, nevertheless £2bn was withdrawn from Northern Rock accounts in just 3 days.

2008 Lloyds TSB announced that it was in advanced merger talks with HBOS to create a UK retail banking giant worth £30bn.

2012 Italy's Chi magazine pushed ahead with its plan to publish a series of topless photos of the Duchess of Cambridge, complete with a curt dismissal of the protests raised by the royal family.

2013 It was announced that the abandoned NHS patient record system has so far cost the taxpayer nearly £10bn. The project would have been the world's largest civilian computer system, with the final bill likely to be several hundreds of millions of pounds higher.

2013 A wedding service was delayed when an owl that was bearing the wedding rings fell asleep in the church roof. Darcy the barn owl was meant to fly down the aisle at Holy Cross Church in Sherston, Wiltshire, and deliver rings to Sonia Cadman and Andrew Matley but flew into the church roof to roost. It took about an hour to get her down, using a long ladder.

[annie]

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[wendy]