Anniversaries

Births: Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1489; Christoph Willibald Gluck, composer, 1714; Herman Hesse, poet and novelist, 1877; Jack Hylton, bandleader, 1892.

Deaths: Nostradamus (Michel de Nostre-Dame), astrologer, 1566; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, philosopher and writer, 1778; Sir Robert Peel, statesman, 1850; Joseph Chamberlain, statesman, 1914; Jose de la Cruz Porfirio Diaz, Mexican military leader and dictator, 1915; Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, actor-manager, 1917; Emile Coue, psychotherapist, 1926; Amelia Earhart, aviator, disappeared in the Pacific, 1937; Ernest Miller Hemingway, novelist, committed suicide, 1961; Betty Grable, actress, 1973; Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, novelist and lepidopterist, 1977.

On this day: Oliver Cromwell defeated the Royalist troops at the Battle of Marston Moor, 1644; the London dock strike began, 1923; the Vichy government was set up in France, 1940; a German submarine sank the British prison ship Arandora Star, carrying 1,640 interned Germans and Italians to Canada; of whom more than 1,000 were drowned, 1940; in the US, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, 1964.

Today is the Feast Day of St Monegundis, St Otto of Bamberg and Saints Processus and Martinian.