Today In History with The Retrospectors

The Boxer Rebellion was an anti-foreign, anti-colonial, anti-Christian uprising in China, reaching  Peking on 21st June, 1900, when Empress Dowager Cixi declared war on all foreign powers and demanded that they depart the country at once.  The rebels were known as the “Boxers” in English, because many of its members practiced Chinese martial arts; in their native language they went by the more evo...

When the East India Company surrendered Fort William (in modern-day Kolkata) to the Nawab of Bengal on 20th June, 1756, dozens of British captives were imprisoned in a cell measuring only 18ft long and 14ft wide, with just two tiny windows - ‘the Black Hole of Calcutta’. Among the prisoners was John Zephaniah Holwell, whose pamphlet describing the terrors of the airless room caused a sensation bac...

The Grand Knockout Tournament (also known as It’s a Royal Knockout) was a one-off charity event first shown on BBC1 on 19th June 1987, to an audience of 18 million gobsmacked viewers.  The brainchild of the then 23 year old Prince Edward, the slapstick spectacle featured the Princess Royal and the Duke and Duchess of York captaining rival teams in a series of preposterous rounds involving celebrit...

The world’s first animal charity, the RSPCA, was set up on June 16th, 1824, by a small group of men who met in Old Slaughter’s Coffee House in St. Martin’s Lane, London. They had been brought together by Arthur Broome, a vicar and animal-welfare campaigner, but the main member of the group was Irish MP Richard Martin, widely known as “Humanity Dick” who had recently passed the first legislation of...

Rerun. Rowan Atkinson headed up the cast and writing team, yet the first series of ‘The Black Adder’ drew a decidedly mixed reaction from audiences and critics when it debuted on BBC TV on 15th June, 1983. Set in 1484, and filmed in castles across England, the series led some wags to quip that it ‘looks a million dollars, but cost a million quid’. It was only later, when Ben Elton joined Richard C...

The most expensive musical of all time, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, finally opened on June 14th, 2011, after completing a record-breaking run of 183 preview performances. The show had been plagued by disaster even from its very beginnings when Tony Adams, the theatre producer who had approached Marvel to buy the stage rights to Spider-Man, died of a stroke just as the team was about to sign the...

The famous US police warning to suspects that begins “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law” dates back to a landmark ruling by the US Supreme Court on June 13th, 1966. Known as the Miranda rights, or Miranda warnings, the case of Ernesto Miranda, who was arrested on suspicion of kidnapping and rape, reached the highest court in th...

Until the mid-20th century, putting nappies on babies involved folding and pinning cloth towelling, then pulling a pair of rubber pants over the top. That all began to change on June 12th, 1951, when the US inventor Marion Donovan patented a new kind of nappy, with an envelope-like plastic cover and an absorbent insert. Her invention ultimately netted her a million dollars (nearly $10 million in t...

Nero, the final emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, killed himself on 9th June AD 68. Having fled Rome to a suburban villa after being declared a ‘public enemy’ by the Senate, he stabbed himself through the throat. Probably. Within months of his death, rumours began that Nero still lived and would return in glory to reclaim his empire. Instead, the historians of the era - albeit never averse to...

Rerun. Sam Panopoulos, creator of the Hawaiian pizza, died on 8th June, 2017 at the age of 83. Originally Greek, he moved to Ontario, Canada at the age of 20 and opened a restaurant where he experimented with toppings far beyond the typical ‘60s triumvirate of mushroom/bacon/pepperoni. Alongside a Chinese-American chef, he kick-started an international appetite for ham and pineapple that grows to...

When Prince announced he would no longer go by his birth name on June 7th, 1993, it took the public and his record label, Warner Brothers, by surprise. Henceforth he wanted to be known, he explained, as an unpronounceable ‘Love Symbol’; a bespoke mash-up of the Mars and Venus gender signs which wasn’t even available in font libraries. The dispute centred on the fact that ‘The Artist’ had 500 unrel...

Notorious Nazi doctor, ‘Angel of Death’ Josef Mengele, spent the last twenty years of his life on the run. His remains were recovered in São Paulo on 6th June, 1985, when Brazilian Police dug up the grave of a man named “Wolfgang Gerhard” - later proven to be Mengele, who’d drowned at a beach resort at the age of 68. Mengele, responsible for sending up to 400,000 Jews to their deaths at Auschwitz,...

Lizzie Borden’s murder trial began on June 5, 1893 in New Bedford Courthouse, Massachusetts. The 32 year-old was accused of killing her father, wealthy magnate Andrew Borden, and his wife Abby, her stepmother, who had been crushed by the blows of a hatchet - 11 and 19 times, respectively. In attendance were three judges, Borden’s high-powered defense team (paid for from her late father’s estate),...

Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson made an important discovery, by accident, on June 2, 1875. While working on their ‘harmonic telegraph’. Watson inadvertently plucked a reed that had been tightly wound around the pole of its electromagnet, producing a twang that Bell heard on a second device next door. Meanwhile, Elisha Gray, co-founder of Western Electric Company, was working on, as his pat...

‘Cafe coronaries’ were a fact of life until The Journal of Emergency Medicine published details of The Heimlich Manoeuvre on June 1, 1974. In so doing, they made a household name of thoracic surgeon Henry Heimlich, and saved countless diners from choking in restaurants. In this episode, Arion, Olly and Rebecca examine whether Heimlich’s notoriety was truly deserved; explain how his Hollywood conne...

Viral megahit ‘Gangnam Style’, by South Korean pop star Psy, became the first video to reach 2 billion plays on YouTube, on May 31st, 2014. The EDM/K-Pop banger, released in 2012 as the lead single from Psy’s sixth studio album, parodied the nouveau riche lifestyles associated with the Gangnam region of Seoul. But it was the video, with its iconic horse dance, that became a cultural phenomenon, wi...

The most significant rebellion of the Medieval era, the so-called Peasant’s Revolt, kicked off in Brentwood, Essex on 30th May, 1381, when tax collector John Bampton attempted to collect unpaid poll tax. The protest triggered a violent confrontation, rapidly spreading across the south-east of the country. Within a month, the rebels were marching towards London, massacring merchants and razing the...

A coalition of Australian community groups came together on May 26th, 1998 for the country’s first “National Sorry Day”, an annual day of atonement for the social-engineering policy that ripped an estimated 50,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families between 1910 and the 1970s. The first Sorry Day was marked with 300 events around the nation, and more than 1,000 peopl...

Rerun. Chinese citizens were once again able to read and perform the works of William Shakespeare on 25th May, 1977. Chiang Ching, Chairman Mao’s wife, had instituted the ban eleven years earlier - amidst concerns that the Bard’s works could be reinterpreted to undermine the Party’s rule and ideology. In this episode, Rebecca, Olly and Arion ask why British Literature has enjoyed a reversal of for...

The biggest hit of 1969, bubblegum pop song “Sugar, Sugar” was released on 24th May. The songwriters, Jeff Barry and Andy Kim, had a strong pedigree in penning 60s anthems. But the band itself was fictional - simply studio musicians providing a soundtrack to the Saturday morning TV cartoon ‘The Archie Show’, inspired by the Archie Comics. The brainchild of promoter Don Kirshner, creator of the Mon...

Hanged for piracy and murder, sea captain William Kidd was executed in Wapping on 23rd May, 1701. From the gallows he proclaimed to the large assembled crowd that he was innocent of the crimes, as he was a licensed privateer.  The vessel he’d captured, the Quedagh Merchant, was indeed sailing under a ‘French pass’ - though the documents that prove this lay unearthed until the 20th century. His tri...

Namco’s ground-breaking arcade game Pac-Man had its first focus test in a Tokyo cinema foyer on May 22nd, 1980. Created by 24 year-old Toru Iwatani, it was originally called ‘Puck-Man’ and designed to appeal to women as well as men. Each of the ghosts - Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde - was programmed to have its own personality using AI routines, creating a sense of ‘character’ despite the pixelate...

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Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s musical comedy-drama ‘Glee’ was first screened on Fox on May 19th, 2009. In a strategy to whip up excitement before the season premiere in the Autumn, the network showed the pilot in a plum post-‘American Idol’ slot, and then besieged websites and social networks with advertisements over the Summer. The strategy worked - justifying ‘Glee’s enormous budget, relatively...

Bram Stoker’s Dracula was first introduced to the world NOT via his canonical novel, but rather in the pages of a seldom-performed - and by all accounts appalling - play-reading at London's Lyceum Theatre on 18th May, 1897. The stage version was not intended to reach a mass audience; but was rather a clever wheeze of Stoker’s to ensure he was recognised as the creator of his iconic characters - as...