Today In History with The Retrospectors

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 previous pe...

When George W Bush flew to Baghdad for a press conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on 14th December, 2008, he had hoped the headlines would reflect his triumphant appraisal of his deployment of American troops. Instead, it became known as the day he got some shoes thrown at him. The man throwing the shoes was Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi, who yelled in Arabic: “This is a fa...

Michelle "Cardboard Shell" Lesco achieved her third world record in competitive eating on 13th December, 2018 - this time for consuming the most amount of mayonnaise in three minutes. She consumed 2,448g - the equivalent of 3.5 jars, and 16,000 calories. Her previous titles were the fastest time to eat a bowl of pasta (26.69 seconds), and the fastest time to eat a hot dog with no hands (21.60 seco...

19 year-old singer Frank Sinatra, Jr was snatched from his casino dressing room on 10th December, 1962. His famous father was willing to pay the kidnappers a $1 million ransom - but they insisted they only required $240,000.  When the case went to trial, the defence suggested that the Sinatras may have been in on the crime - a slur that damaged Frank Jr’s reputation for the rest of his life. In th...

Now a 900 strong pub chain, with an annual turnover of £1.6 billion, J.D. Wetherspoon is a big name on the British high street. But when entrepreneur Tim Martin flung open the doors of the first branch in London’s Muswell Hill on 9th December, 1979, it was known as ‘Tim’s Free House’ - and closed down on its opening night. He built up the business by taking over leases at old buildings such as chu...

The Pope defined the dogma of The Immaculate Conception - 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 - on 8th December, 1854. Despite this having been an unofficial concept amongst the faithful for centuries prior, it still proved controversial, with 10% of Bishops believin...

Oscar-winning conductor André Previn was an unlikely choice of celebrity guest for the Christmas special of ‘The Morcambe and Wise Show’ recorded on 7th December, 1971 - but the 13-minute sketch they taped together remains one of Britain’s all-time favourites. The music hall-style caper - which revolves around a comically catastrophic interpretation of Grieg’s Piano Concerto - was actually a rever...

A female contestant had never scooped the jackpot on an American TV quiz show before New York psychologist Dr Joyce Brothers won $64,000 on 6th December, 1955. Her specialist subject was boxing - a topic about which she knew little, until she devoted herself to studying the annals of the sport in preparation for multiple appearances on the show. Despite the best efforts of sponsors Revlon to catch...

Renaissance Man Thomas Harriot was noted for many things - devising the theory of refraction, creating mathematical symbols including ‘greater than’ and ‘lesser than’, and being the first person to draw the Moon through a telescope. But the contribution for which he’s most remembered is bringing back the potato to Britain - an event commonly credited to 3rd December, 1586. On first spotting the ve...

Tinseltown’s most notorious pimp was convicted of providing high-class ‘call girls’ to undercover police officers on 2nd December, 1994. It followed a dramatic sting involving the LAPD, the Beverly Hills police department, the state alcoholic beverage control agency and the state attorney General's office. They seized her ‘little black book’ (actually a red Gucci diary) full of high-profile names,...

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 was contaminated with arsenic.  Over 6,000 members of the public were poisoned, mostly across Manchester and Salford, thanks to the practice of breweries padding out the barley with inexpensive glucose syrup.  In this episode,...

England played Scotland in a publicly-advertised game for the first time on 30th November, 1872 - kickstarting international football as we know it today. The English team included players drafted in from Oxford University. The Scottish team was entirely made up of teammates from Queen’s Park. The score was 0-0. Much of the game was yet to be codified - for example, that you couldn’t catch a ball...

Supersonic aircraft took a giant leap forward when the French and British governments signed a treaty to join forces on designing Concorde on 29th November, 1962. Up until this point, the two countries had been developing their aircraft separately - which had already cost the United Kingdom £150 million. Technologically superior and far more luxurious than any commercial passenger jet that had com...

Your TV signal wobbles. An alien voice (albeit one with a Southern English accent...) seizes control of your set. And, instead of newsreader Andrew Gardner reporting on the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army, you hear a voice claiming to be ‘Vrillon’, of Ashtar Galactic Command, with a message for humanity. Such was the experience for viewers attempting to watch the ITV Evening News on Sout...

Wearing an armoured breastplate, clasping a silver cross and seizing an Army spontoon, 31 year old Elizabeth Petrovna appeared at the HQ of the elite Preobrazhensky Regiment guards in St. Petersburg on 25th November, 1741 - intent on over-throwing Tzar Ivan VI (a baby), and seizing the Russian throne for herself. Although she was the daughter of Peter The Great, she was also illegitimate, and over...

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 a disco...

With cutesy graphics and a female-focussed origin story, Tamagotchi was positioned as a ‘nurturing toy’ for Japanese girls when Bandai launched the brand on 23rd November, 1996. But the gadget's massive popularity soon transcended gender and nationality - shifting 40 million units globally in just three years. Users had to check in regularly with their virtual pets, which buzzed when they were hun...

Capt. James T. Kirk (William Shatner) and Lt. Nyota Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) embraced and kissed on "Plato’s Stepchildren"; an episode of ‘Star Trek’ broadcast on 22nd November, 1968 - just a year after the Supreme Court declared interracial marriage to be legal.   However, despite popular belief that this was TV’s first interracial kiss, it wasn’t. It wasn’t even the first interracial kiss on TV...

After Mount Vesuvius erupted - and original hosts Rome pulled out - the British Olympic council sent a letter, dated 19th November, 1906, agreeing to host the fourth modern Olympic games. With just two years to go, the event was put together hastily, and on a paltry budget; a stadium erected at the White City home of the Franco-British exhibition, and the chosen events ones that British athletes e...

Switzerland’s most famous archer shot fruit off his own son’s head on 18th November, 1307. Or did he?  ‘Chronicon Helveticum’ by Aegidius Tschudi, from which the date comes, claims to be a serious historical account, but was written roughly 200 years later - and not published until nearly 200 years after that. And the myth bears remarkable similarities with the Danish folklore of Palnatoki, recor...

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 valet, a barber, two eunuchs, and a bandmaster.  In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly dig into the archives to see how the ev...

Disneyland Paris, now Europe’s most popular theme park, initially haemorrhaged money - at an estimated rate of $1 million per day. But, after three years, it finally returned its first profit on 16th November, 1995.  This change in the park’s fortunes can be attributed to the popularity of two trains: the opening of the Eurostar direct line from London, and the building of the world’s most expensi...

Anne Bonny and Mary Read - the most notorious women to swashbuckle and plunder in the ‘golden age of piracy’ - were captured near Jamaica by pirate-hunter Jonathan Barnet on 8th November, 1720. Disguised as men for most of their careers, they sailed (and cavorted) with Pirate Captain ‘Calico Jack’. But, when their crimes came to trial, they both avoided being sentenced to death by ‘pleading the be...

Jules Leotard first somersaulted off a trapeze at Cirque Napoléon in Paris on 12th November, 1859. His act inspired gymnasts and circus performers the world over - although Leotard is now best remembered as the inventor of the skin-tight outfits he wore on stage. Leotard had abandoned his studies as a lawyer to perfect his circus skills, spurred on by his acrobatic father. He developed his act int...

Geoffrey Chaucer’s granddaughter Alice was first married at the age of 11. She was granted a license to marry her third husband on 11th November, 1430; and became defined by her three powerful unions with men she outlived. Having lost her first two husbands in the Hundred Years War, she then settled down with William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk; a marriage that got her closer than ever to the seat...