Today In History with The Retrospectors

The ‘Frost Fair’, held on the frozen River Thames, caused a sensation on 20th December, 1683, when all London society, from Charles II down, came out to enjoy a bacchanalian Christmas on the ice. The festivities were a great relief for a nation riddled with smallpox, and enduring what was possibly Britain’s coldest ever Winter. Among the entertainments on offer were fox-hunting, cock-fighting, sle...

Charles Dickens’ novella ‘A Christmas Carol’ was written in just six weeks, and published on 19th December, 1843. The timeless story, which introduced the world to Ebeneezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, was conceived in part to get its author out of a sticky financial situation. Dickens’ other motive was to put into an accessible fable the political idea...

30 Avenue Montaigne, Christian Dior’s atelier in Paris, opened its doors on 16th December 1946. His staff had just six weeks to get it ready for their first show on February 12th, 1947 - the landmark post-war collection that became known as ‘the New Look’. Bettina Ballard, fashion editor of Vogue, wrote: “Never has there been a moment more climatically right for a Napoleon, an Alexander the Great,...

Rerun. Napoleon was buried in an unmarked grave in St. Helena. But, 19 years later, on 15th December, 1840, he got buried again: this time at Les Invalides, Paris.   It was an ornate state occasion, involving multiple caskets, 500 sailors, 14 semi-naked female statues... and a lot of lardy cakes.    In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly reveal what Napoleon’s cadaver looked like; explain why a...

Lionel Bart’s musical ‘La Strada’, based on the hit Fellini film, suffered the ignominy of closing after its opening night in New York on 14th December, 1969, losing $650,000. Heroin addict Bart never made it over to the States for the previews, during which time his songs were chopped and changed to such an extent that on opening night a Playbill could not be produced, because it would have been...

Celestine V rocked the Catholic world on 13th December, 1294, when he stood up, gave a short speech, stripped himself of his Papal insignia and resigned the Pontificate. He was 79 years old, and had been Pope for just 15 weeks.  Previously a well-regarded hermit who’d lived a humble life in the mountains, he got the gig after writing a letter to the conclave, urging them to choose a new Pope soon,...

Winona Ryder was arrested for shoplifting from Saks Fifth Avenue, Beverly Hills on 12th December, 2001. Amongst the products she had stuffed into her hat was a Marc Jacobs sweater worth $760, and Frederic Fekkai hair adornments listed at $600. At first, the Oscar nominated actress claimed she had been under the impression that her assistant would pay for the items later. Then, she said she had sto...

Coronation Street, the world’s longest-running soap opera, first aired on 9th December, 1960. But only 13 episodes had been commissioned by Granada, following a torturous development process. Boss Sidney Bernstein remained far from convinced that the show would attract either audiences or advertisers for ITV. Created by 24 year-old Tony Warren, the new serial aimed to portray real lives on a subur...

The Pope finally defined the dogma of The Immaculate Conception on 8th December, 1854; confirming that, in the view of the Catholic Church, Christ’s mother Mary had not only been ‘full of grace’, but was completely absent of sin even at her own conception. Even though this had been an unofficial concept for centuries prior, it still proved controversial, with 10% of Bishops believing it should not...

The most famous photograph of Earth - the ‘Blue Marble’ shot captured by NASA astronauts on Apollo 17 - was taken on 7th December, 1972.  The deep blues of the ocean, the green continent of Africa, the yellow edges of the Arabian Peninsula, and the vast empty blackness all around our planet are memorably captured within it. But what can’t be said with certainty is who actually took it - as all thr...

The Rolling Stones topped the bill at Altamont Speedway in Livermore, California on 6th December, 1969 - a free festival intended to rival the recent Woodstock in New York. But it was an organisational shambles, and turned deadly when an audience member was murdered.  Notorious gang Hell’s Angels had been hired (allegedly in return for free beer) to provide ‘security’ for the event. They sat on a...

James Christie held his first auction on 5th December, 1766 - billed as a sale of “genuine household furniture, jewels, plate, firearms, china and a large quantity of madeira and high flavoured claret” belonging to a “Noble Personage (deceased)”. His auction-house, Christie’s, went on to become one of the world’s leading dealers of fine art. But it took Christie many years to exploit this opportun...

Sir Christopher Wren was officially appointed architect for the rebuilding of St Paul's Cathedral on 2nd December, 1697, though in truth he had been advising on it for some years already. Three decades later the celebrated British architect had produced a building that broke radically with the past, even if his original plans had to be adapted to the whims of the king, the clergy and the parliamen...

Rerun. Thousands of beer barrels were emptied into the streets across Lancashire on 1st December, 1900 - when it finally dawned on people that the cheap stout they’d been drinking with years was in fact contaminated with arsenic.  Over 6,000 victims were poisoned, mostly across Manchester and Salford, thanks to the practice of padding out the barley used in the brew with inexpensive glucose syrup....

On 30th November, 1803 a surgeon called Dr Francisco Javier de Balmis left Spain at the head of the world's first ever international public health expedition.  His ship was bound for the New World, supplied with smallpox vaccines. But the vaccines weren't in syringes or in vials, they were inside the 22 orphans who were on the ship with him. In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly look into how t...

Shortly after US president John F. Kennedy was shot dead, the Warren Commission was convened on 29th November, 1963 to answer the question on everybody’s lips: who did this and why? The shooting of America’s young president was a moment of trauma for many Americans, but when the commission returned its findings, most people were happy with their conclusions. However, as the years progressed conspi...

Towards the end of 1983, frenzied parents battled with one another in stores across the US in a desperate bid to buy their children the toy of the moment, the Cabbage Patch Kid. The so-called Cabbage Patch Riots culminated on 28th November 1983 at a Zayre department store in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, when a melee broke out that was so intense a store manager grabbed a baseball bat to protect him...

Elián González was just five years old when he was found clinging to an inner tube off the coast of Florida on 25th November, 1999. His mother, step-father, and all the other Cuban migrants who had been attempting to cross to the United States with him were lost at sea. Elián’s future then became a matter of high-stakes diplomacy between the two Cold War countries: should he be granted residency w...

Rerun. It took over three million years to find her. But palaeontologists Donald Johanson and Tom Gray uncovered the remains of ‘the Lucy Fossil’ - a previously undiscovered species of pre-human - in Hadar, Ethiopia on 24th November, 1974. Despite the find’s massive significance, the event was not greeted with untrammelled joy by all their rival fossil hunters. Some - who had wanted to claim such...

The ‘Nickel In The Slot Player’ - the world’s first jukebox - made its debut at the Palais Royale Saloon bar in San Francisco on 23rd November, 1889. Created by Louis Glass and William S. Arnold, the contraption was an Edison Class M wax cylinder phonograph fitted with a coin mechanism and four stethoscope-like listening tubes, each operated individually and activated when a patron put a nickel in...

History’s most notorious pirate, Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach, was killed and decapitated by lieutenant Robert Maynard, who besieged Blackbeard’s boats in Ocracoke on 22nd November, 1718.  Now recalled as a fearsome and gratuitous murderer, Blackbeard’s demonic character is not documented in contemporary sources. In fact, very little is truly known about Teach (even, indeed, whether that was his real...

La Ronde, the USA’s first revolving restaurant, opened on 21st November, 1961, at the Ala Moana Center in Honolulu. On the menu in the 298ft-tall tower was shrimp cocktail, mahi-mahi, and ‘the Queen of beefdom’. It had a predecessor, though, in perhaps an unlikely city: post-war Dortmund, Germany.  In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly trace the origins of rotating restaurants back to Ancient R...

The official trailer for ‘The Phantom Menace’ was uploaded to the Star Wars website on 18th November, 1998 - a reaction to the franchise’s rabid fans leaking their own camcorder footage to the web. It was the first time that an online preview of a movie trailer became a significant event in its own right. The trailer had been released into North American cinemas the day before, ahead of select scr...

Rerun. Mehmet VI stepped on to a British warship to seek refuge in Malta on 17th November, 1922 - thereby becoming the last Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, a dynasty stretching back to the 14th Century.  He was accompanied by his first Chamberlain, his doctor, two secretaries, a velt, a barber, two eunuchs, and a bandmaster.  In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly dig into the archives to see how...

Why did Ivan The Terrible kill his son, Ivan? Ever since the day he supposedly brought a sceptre crashing down upon his head - 16th November, 1581 - this question has divided people. Did he suspect his son of a plot to overthrow him? Was he sexually assaulting his daughter-in-law? Was the whole tale dreamt up as a Catholic plot? It’s a controversy that remains a live issue in Russia, resulting in...