Today in history

29th November 1877

First "record player":
Thomas Edison demonstrates his phonograph for the first time.

Edison's Invention of the Phonograph.

Thomas Edison is best remembered as the inventor of the electric light bulb, but he first attracted great fame by creating an astounding machine that could record sound and play it back. In the spring of 1878, Edison dazzled crowds by appearing in public with his phonograph, which would be used to record people talking, singing, and even playing musical instruments.

It's hard to imagine how shocking the recording of sounds must have been. Newspaper reports of the time describe fascinated listeners. And it became clear very quickly that the ability to record sounds might change the world.

After some distractions, and a few missteps, Edison eventually built a company which created and sold recordings, essentially inventing the record company. His products made it possible for professional quality music to be heard in any home.

Edison's vision was for a sound to be captured by some mechanical method and then played back. He spent several months working on devices that might do that, and when he achieved a working model, he filed for a patent on the phonograph in late 1877, and the patent was awarded to him on February 19, 1878.

The process of experimentation seems to have begun in the summer of 1877. From Edison's notes we know he had determined that a diaphragm vibrating from sound waves could be attached to an embossing needle. The point of the needle would score a moving piece of paper to make a recording. As Edison wrote that summer, the "vibrations are indented nicely and there is no doubt that I shall be able to store up and reproduce at any future time the human voice perfectly."

For months, Edison and his assistants worked to build a device that could score the vibrations into a recording medium. By November they arrived at the concept of a rotating brass cylinder, around which tin foil would be wrapped. Part of a telephone, called a repeater, would function as a microphone, converting the vibrations of a human voice into grooves which a needle would score into the tin foil.

Edison's instinct was that the machine would be able to "talk back." And when he yelled the nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb" into it as he turned the crank, he was able to record his own voice so that it could be played back.

Until the invention of the phonograph, Edison had been a businesslike inventor, producing improvements on the telegraph designed for the business market. He was respected in the business world and scientific community, but he was not widely known to the general public.

The news that he could record sound changed that. And it also seemed to make Edison realize that the phonograph would change the world.

He published an essay in May 1878 in a prominent American magazine, the North American Review, in which he set forth what he called "a clearer conception of the immediate realizations of the phonograph."

Edison naturally thought of usefulness in the office, and the first purpose for the phonograph he listed was for dictating letters. Besides being used to dictate letters, Edison also envisioned recordings that could be sent through the mail.

He also cited more creative uses for his new invention, including the recording of books. Writing 140 years ago, Edison seemed to foresee today's audiobook business:


"Books may be read by the charitably-inclined professional reader, or by such readers especially employed for that purpose, and the record of such book used in the asylums of the blind, hospitals, the sick-chamber, or even with great profit and amusement by the lady or gentleman whose eyes and hands may be otherwise employed; or, again, because of the greater enjoyment to be had from a book when read by an elocutionist than when read by an average reader."

Edison's Amazing Invention in the Press
In early 1878, word of the phonograph circulated in newspaper reports, as well as in journals such as Scientific American. The Edison Speaking Phonograph Company had been launched in early 1878 to manufacture and market the new device.

In the spring of 1878, Edison's public profile increased as he engaged in public demonstrations of his invention. He traveled to Washington, D.C. in April to demonstrate the device at a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences held at the Smithsonian Institution on April 18, 1878.

The next day's Washington Evening Star described how Edison drew such a crowd that meeting room doors had been taken off their hinges to afford a better view to those left standing in the hallway.

An assistant of Edison spoke into the machine and played back his voice to the delight of the crowd.

​Edison's plans for the phonograph were ambitious, but they were essentially set aside for a time. He had a good reason to get distracted, as he directed most of his attention in late 1878 to working on another remarkable invention, the incandescent lightbulb.

In the 1880s, the novelty of the phonograph seemed to fade for the public. One reason was that recordings on tin foil were very fragile and couldn't really be marketed. Other inventors spent the 1880s making improvements on the phonograph, and finally, in 1887, Edison turned his attention back to it.

In 1888 Edison began marketing what he called the Perfected Phonograph. The machine was greatly improved, and used recordings engraved onto wax cylinders. Edison began marketing recordings of music and recitations, and the new business slowly caught on.

One unfortunate detour occurred in 1890 when Edison marketed talking dolls which had a small phonograph machine inside them. The problem was that the miniature phonographs tended to malfunction, and the doll business quickly ended and was considered a business disaster.

By the late 1890s, Edison phonographs began to flood the market. The machines had been costly, approximately $150 a few years earlier. But as prices dropped to $20 for a standard model, the machines became widely available.

The early Edison cylinders could only hold about two minutes of music. But as the technology was improved, a great variety of selections could be recorded. And the ability to mass produce cylinders meant the recordings could get out to the public.

30 th November 1936

Crystal Palace fire :
In London, the Crystal Palace is destroyed by fire.

The Crystal Palace fire In 1936 one of London's greatest attractions caught fire and burnt down.

Visit Crystal Palace today and there are only hints of what you would have found there a hundred years ago. At the north end you will see sphinxes, steps, pillars, terraces, and arches . What you won’t see is the actual Crystal Palace that gave the area its name, fame, train station, football team and focal point.

A home for the Great Exhibition
The original building of the Crystal Palace was commissioned for ‘The Great Exhibition’ of 1851 in Hyde Park, London. This was the O2 of its day. It was an exhibit which showed off all sorts of amazing natural and modern manufactured inventions from around the world. There were printing machines, a 50kg lump of gold, folding pianos, rare diamonds, jewels and much more. Millions of visitors enjoyed the spectacle.


The building was designed by Joseph Paxton who wasn’t an architect, but a naturalist and botanist. His greenhouse style design managed to encompass three large, precious elm trees. The main materials it was built from were iron and large glass panels.

After the Great Exhibition
In 1852, after the Great Exhibition ended, Paxton arranged to have the Crystal Palace moved to South London. Sydenham was then a rural area with bountiful green space. Not only was the Palace dismantled and transported there, it was expanded to become the largest building in the world and taller than Nelson’s Column.


It was a great leisure opportunity but most of the working population had only one day a week to visit. The owners failed to recuperate the amount of money invested and needed to run the building. Attractions inside started to close, and the building fell into disrepair.

The Crystal Palace Fire
At about 7pm on the 30th November 1936 the manager, Sir Henry Buckland, was doing his rounds. He was checking the palace with his daughter (whose name was Chrystal) when he noticed that a small fire had broken out at the Sydenham end of the Palace. She recalls… “Father saw the flickering light of the fire and told me to run through to warn the choir. As I did so, I noticed a blue flash running along the floor”.

Apparently, the Gas Company had warned of a leak within the building. Some accounts say it was in the women’s cloakroom, some say the Egyptian Court. Either way, on duty security guards tried unsuccessfully to deal with the fire, which was spreading. This delayed them calling the Fire Brigade until about 8pm when the first call was made.


Penge Fire Brigade was first to respond, followed by Beckenham and Croydon. They were not part of London Fire Brigade at that time.

Eventually London Fire Brigade was asked for assistance, and a major incident was declared. London's Chief Officer Major Morris took control, committing over 50 pumps. However, by the time the first of the 88 fire engines were on scene, the fire had spread throughout the building.


Whilst the cause for the fire starting will never be confirmed, the reason that it spread so rapidly is largely due to the wooden flooring. Being at the top of a big hill, the breeze helped to fan the flames.

Iron melts at approximately 1500 degrees celsius. Glass, melts at a similar temperature but is more likely to crack or shatter before reaching that level. From the footage of the fire that survives, it appears that the iron frames became weak with the heat, buckled and lost their stability due to the glass fracturing.


Unable to bear as much weight, they collapsed, creating a domino effect. There was little the firefighters could do to save the Palace. All that was standing afterwards were the water towers flanking the main structure. These survived until the Second World War, when they were considered to be an easy navigation tool for enemy bombers looking for London, and were dismantled.

The fire itself was massive and could be seen for miles around. One commuter described watching the glow as he took his train to Southend. Locals came to watch firefighters try in vain to save the building.

Would it happen now?
These days, a building of significant historical value is likely to be fitted with smoke and heat detectors, sprinklers, dedicated escape routes and early warning systems. Whilst these preventative measures can be expensive to install discreetly, some buildings are irreplaceable. Local Fire Stations would make regular familiarisation visits and have plans in place of how to deal with any fire that might break out.

The Park is still popular with areas to relax, play sports, enjoy the playground or get lost in the maze. The sphinxes remain undisturbed, looking out across Crystal Palace Park where they once guarded one of London finest attractions.

1 st December 1990

                Chunnel breakthrough:
                                                 Channel Tunnel sections started from the United Kingdom and France meet beneath the seabed.

                    Chunnel makes breakthrough.

Shortly after 11 a.m. on December 1, 1990, 132 feet below the English Channel, workers drill an opening the size of a car through a wall of rock. This was no ordinary hole—it connected the two ends of an underwater tunnel linking Great Britain with the European mainland for the first time in more than 8,000 years.

The Channel Tunnel, or “Chunnel,” was not a new idea. It had been suggested to Napoleon Bonaparte, in fact, as early as 1802. It wasn’t until the late 20th century, though, that the necessary technology was developed. In 1986, Britain and France signed a treaty authorizing the construction of a tunnel running between Folkestone, England, and Calais, France.

Over the next four years, nearly 13,000 workers dug 95 miles of tunnels at an average depth of 150 feet (45 meters) below the sea bed. Eight million cubic meters of soil were removed, at a rate of some 2,400 tons per hour. The completed Chunnel would have three interconnected tubes, including one rail track in each direction and one service tunnel. The price? A whopping $15 billion (more than 30 billion in 2020"

After workers drilled that final hole on December 1, 1990, they exchanged French and British flags and toasted each other with champagne. Final construction took four more years, and the Channel Tunnel finally opened for passenger service on May 6, 1994, with Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II and France’s President Francois Mitterrand on hand in Calais for the inaugural run. A company called Eurotunnel won the 55-year concession to operate the Chunnel, which is the crucial stretch of the Eurostar high-speed rail link between London and Paris. The regular shuttle train through the tunnel runs 31 miles in total—23 of those underwater—and takes 20 minutes, with an additional 15-minute loop to turn the train around. The Chunnel is the third-longest rail tunnel in the world, after the Seikan Tunnel in Japan and the Gotthard base tunnel in Switzerland.

                       

                                                         Graham Fagg and Philippe Cozette broke through and shook hands 40m below the sea bed
(Image credit: AFP via Getty Images)

2 nd December 1982

First artificial heart:
At the University of Utah, Barney Clark becomes the first person to receive a permanent artificial heart.

Dec. 2, 1982: Barney Clark Takes One for the Team
An ailing Seattle dentist becomes the first recipient of a permanent artificial heart. More or less permanent.

Barney Clark1982: A Seattle dentist named Barney Clark becomes the first human recipient of a permanent artificial heart. He survives the heart, and the accompanying media circus, for 112 days.

Clark, 61, was the ideal candidate, suffering from congestive heart failure so debilitating that he had trouble walking from his bedroom to the bathroom. Doctors determined that he was too sick to be eligible for a heart transplant, leaving the implant of an artificial heart his only option.

Clark's predicament coincided with the FDA approving a new artificial heart for human implantation, a device known as the Jarvik 7. It was named for one of its key developers, Dr. Robert Jarvik, who had been building and refining artificial hearts since his student days under artificial-organ pioneer Dr. Willem Kolff at the University of Utah.

The Jarvik 7 was state-of-the-art for its time, and was the first one designed for permanent use. It employed a heart-shaped pump that was implanted into the patient. An external pneumatic compressor, connected to the pump by tubes running through the chest wall, regulated blood flow.

The major problem with these devices -- apart from the fact that the washing-machine–sized air compressor left the patient virtually immobilized -- was the threat of infection and associated pulmonary problems. This had proven to be the Achilles' heel of every previous artificial heart used on both human and animal subjects. And so it would be in Barney Clark's case.

Clark understood going in that his chance of long-term survival was virtually nil, but agreed to undergo the surgery in the interest of advancing science. The implant was performed at the University of Utah by Dr. William DeVries, and the Jarvik 7 functioned as expected.

Before the surgery, Clark told doctors he didn't expect to survive more than a few days with his new heart, and no one seemed inclined to argue with him. But a few days turned into a few weeks and then a few months. Clark was still alive, but he was miserable: constantly plagued by infections, drifting into and out of consciousness, at several points asking to be allowed to die. He also suffered from chronic clotting, which led to a series of strokes.

All the principals involved agreed beforehand that there would be no individual talking to the media, that all information would be sent out through the university's press office. Despite the moderate approach, reporters swiftly glommed onto the story, and Barney Clark's saga became international news. Doctors were dunned for continual progress reports, while reporters turned Clark and his "stoic" wife into folk heroes.

The intense coverage also touched off a renewed debate about the ethics of using artificial organs in hopeless situations. Bioethics was a new field then, but there were plenty of critics who felt the Jarvik 7 was not ready for human implantation, and that the process for approving it had been flawed.

This was all beyond Clark, though, who died March 23, 1983. He had survived for 112 days.

The second patient to receive a Jarvik 7, an Indiana man named Bill Schroeder, lived 620 days. Unlike Clark, Schroeder initially responded well to the surgery, so much so that he was able to take a phone call from President Ronald Reagan and ride in a parade down the main street of his hometown.

But soon enough the complications caught up with him, too, and he died. So there was progress, but it wasn't really success.

To this day, no artificial heart has proved effective as a permanent replacement for nature's own. They're used only as stopgaps for patients waiting for a human donor and whose own hearts are so damaged that less-invasive devices, like portable pumps, can't help them.

Artificial-heart research, however, goes on.

3rd December 1992

First text message:
A test engineer for Sema Group uses a personal computer to send the world's first text message via the Vodafone network to the phone of a colleague.

First SMS text message is sent

On December 3, 1992, the first SMS text message in history is sent: Neil Papworth, a 22-year-old engineer, uses a personal computer to send the text message “Merry Christmas” via the Vodafone network to the phone of a colleague.

Papworth, while working for the now-defunct Anglo-French IT services company Sema Group Telecoms, was part of a team developing a “Short Message Service Centre” (SMSC) for the British telecommunications company Vodafone UK. At the time, Sema Group hoped to use these short messages as a paging service. After Papworth installed the system at a site west of London, he sat at a computer terminal and sent the simple message to the mobile phone of Richard Jarvis, director of Vodafone, who was attending a holiday party.

“It didn't feel momentous at all,” Papworth later said. “For me it was just getting my job done on the day and ensuring that our software that we'd been developing for a good year was working OK."

Shortly after, Papworth received a call from the Christmas party, letting him know that the outgoing message was a success, although cellphones themselves could not actually send messages in return yet.

One year later, Nokia released the first cellphone with an SMS feature, but messages (limited to 160 characters due to bandwidth constraints) could only be sent within the same mobile network—phone networks would finally allow users to SMS across rival companies in 1999. Texting as a means of casual communication blossomed with the introduction of the Tegic (T9) system of predictive texting and pre-paid phone plans, which originally did not charge for texts and appealed to young people. Because of the 160-character constraint, as well as the cumbersome nature of typing with a numeric keypad, an entire “language” of abbreviations and slang emerged through SMS and spread across internet-based messaging.

In the United Kingdom, the birthplace of texting, SMS messaging exploded in popularity—by February 2001, about one billion texts were being sent every month, and users were being charged 10 pence a text, generating about £100 million a month in corporate profits. By 2010, the International Telecommunications Union reported that 200,000 text messages were being sent every minute, but by 2012, texting across the world began to see a steady decline, with messages from instant-messaging apps concurrently spiking.

4 th December 1872

Mary Celeste mystery:
The American brigantine Mary Celeste is discovered drifting in the Atlantic. Her crew is never found.

Mary Celeste.
Mary Celeste, American brigantine that was found abandoned on December 4, 1872, some 400 nautical miles (740 km) from the Azores, Portugal. The fate of the 10 people aboard remains a mystery.

The ship was built in 1861 at Spencer’s Island, Nova Scotia, Canada, and named the Amazon. After being launched on May 18, 1861, it encountered a number of mishaps. During the maiden voyage, its captain caught pneumonia and later died, and the ship was damaged on several occasions, most notably in October 1867, when it ran aground in Cow Bay, Cape Breton Island. The following year the Amazon was sold to American Richard W. Haines, who renamed it the Mary Celeste. The ship underwent significant structural changes over the next several years, and it was eventually sold to a group that came to include Capt. Benjamin Spooner Briggs.

On November 7, 1872, the Mary Celeste set sail from New York City, with more than 1,700 barrels of alcohol destined for Genoa, Italy. On board were 10 people, including Captain Briggs, his wife, and their two-year-old daughter. Over the next two weeks, the ship encountered harsh weather. According to the last log entry—dated November 25—the Mary Celeste was some 6 nautical miles (11 km) from the Azores. nine days later the vessel was spotted by the British brig Dei Gratia. Crew from that ship boarded the Mary Celeste and discovered it deserted. Although there was more than 3 feet (1 metre) of water in the hold—an amount that would not have caused panic—the vessel was seaworthy. Adding to the mystery was the fact that the cargo and personal belongings were largely undisturbed, although a longboat was missing. It appeared that the ship had been abandoned quickly. Crewmen from the Dei Gratia sailed the Mary Celeste to Gibraltar, some 800 miles (1,482 km) away. There British authorities conducted an investigation, which ultimately found no evidence of foul play.


The mystery garnered some attention, but it became famous in 1884, when Arthur Conan Doyle published “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement,” a short story about a survivor of a ghost ship called the Marie Celeste. In his account, a revenge-seeking former slave killed the passengers. While that was purely fiction, many theories were put forward to explain what happened. Most, however, seemed unlikely. There were no signs of violence or missing cargo, casting doubt on claims of mutiny, murder, and piracy. In addition, there was no evidence to support the claim that an explosion caused by alcohol fumes caused the ship to be abandoned.

A more likely scenario is that Captain Briggs erroneously believed his ship was taking on too much water and was about to sink. This theory was supported by the fact that the sounding rod—used to determine the amount of water in the hold—was discovered on deck, suggesting that it had been used just before the ship was abandoned. In addition, one of the ship’s pumps showed signs of trouble; it was disassembled. A faulty reading of the sounding rod and an ineffective pump could have led Captain Briggs to believe the ship was foundering and order it abandoned. A mishap may then have occurred in the longboat, causing all to perish.

Despite being seen as unlucky, the Mary Celeste remained in service and went through a number of owners before being acquired by Capt. G.C. Parker. In 1885 he deliberately sailed it into a reef near Haiti as part of a plan to defraud an insurance company. When the vessel failed to sink, authorities discovered his scheme. The Mary Celeste, however, was damaged beyond repair, and it was left on the reef, where it deteriorated.

4 th December 1872

Mary Celeste mystery:
The American brigantine Mary Celeste is discovered drifting in the Atlantic. Her crew is never found.

Mary Celeste.
Mary Celeste, American brigantine that was found abandoned on December 4, 1872, some 400 nautical miles (740 km) from the Azores, Portugal. The fate of the 10 people aboard remains a mystery.

The ship was built in 1861 at Spencer’s Island, Nova Scotia, Canada, and named the Amazon. After being launched on May 18, 1861, it encountered a number of mishaps. During the maiden voyage, its captain caught pneumonia and later died, and the ship was damaged on several occasions, most notably in October 1867, when it ran aground in Cow Bay, Cape Breton Island. The following year the Amazon was sold to American Richard W. Haines, who renamed it the Mary Celeste. The ship underwent significant structural changes over the next several years, and it was eventually sold to a group that came to include Capt. Benjamin Spooner Briggs.

On November 7, 1872, the Mary Celeste set sail from New York City, with more than 1,700 barrels of alcohol destined for Genoa, Italy. On board were 10 people, including Captain Briggs, his wife, and their two-year-old daughter. Over the next two weeks, the ship encountered harsh weather. According to the last log entry—dated November 25—the Mary Celeste was some 6 nautical miles (11 km) from the Azores. nine days later the vessel was spotted by the British brig Dei Gratia. Crew from that ship boarded the Mary Celeste and discovered it deserted. Although there was more than 3 feet (1 metre) of water in the hold—an amount that would not have caused panic—the vessel was seaworthy. Adding to the mystery was the fact that the cargo and personal belongings were largely undisturbed, although a longboat was missing. It appeared that the ship had been abandoned quickly. Crewmen from the Dei Gratia sailed the Mary Celeste to Gibraltar, some 800 miles (1,482 km) away. There British authorities conducted an investigation, which ultimately found no evidence of foul play.


The mystery garnered some attention, but it became famous in 1884, when Arthur Conan Doyle published “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement,” a short story about a survivor of a ghost ship called the Marie Celeste. In his account, a revenge-seeking former slave killed the passengers. While that was purely fiction, many theories were put forward to explain what happened. Most, however, seemed unlikely. There were no signs of violence or missing cargo, casting doubt on claims of mutiny, murder, and piracy. In addition, there was no evidence to support the claim that an explosion caused by alcohol fumes caused the ship to be abandoned.

A more likely scenario is that Captain Briggs erroneously believed his ship was taking on too much water and was about to sink. This theory was supported by the fact that the sounding rod—used to determine the amount of water in the hold—was discovered on deck, suggesting that it had been used just before the ship was abandoned. In addition, one of the ship’s pumps showed signs of trouble; it was disassembled. A faulty reading of the sounding rod and an ineffective pump could have led Captain Briggs to believe the ship was foundering and order it abandoned. A mishap may then have occurred in the longboat, causing all to perish.

Despite being seen as unlucky, the Mary Celeste remained in service and went through a number of owners before being acquired by Capt. G.C. Parker. In 1885 he deliberately sailed it into a reef near Haiti as part of a plan to defraud an insurance company. When the vessel failed to sink, authorities discovered his scheme. The Mary Celeste, however, was damaged beyond repair, and it was left on the reef, where it deteriorated.

5 th December 1958

Britains first motorway:
The Preston By-pass, the UK's first stretch of motorway, opens to traffic for the first time. (It is now part of the M6 and M55 motorways.)

Opened on 5 December 1958 by Harold Macmillan, prime minister at the time of its inauguration, the by-pass was described by The Engineer as ‘of special significance’ due to its status of being the first road in the British Isles for motor traffic only, designed to full motorway standards and eventually forming part of what would become the M6.

The road was of special interest as an achievement in civil engineering construction, with its design described as being ‘as modern in concept as the traffic aspect, set out to take the maximum advantage of mechanised constructional methods.’

The Engineer explained that the stretch of road was viewed as a ‘guinea pig’ to test various factors ahead of the opening of the London to Birmingham route, the first ‘major length’ of the British motorway which was completed the following Autumn. These factors included the use of motorway traffic signs, efficacy of the motorway code, drivers’ reactions and opinions, the necessity for speed limits and the presence of abnormal loads.




Describing the details of the road’s layout, The Engineer wrote:

“In general, the overall width of the by-pass is 112ft with dual carriageways 24ft wide. A contrasting marginal strip 1ft wide (the strip is of concrete, and the carriageway is ‘black top’) flanks each carriageway, so the effective width is 26ft. The outer verges are 14ft wide, including an 8ft width constructed to form a hard shoulder abutting on to the carriageway. The central reservation is 32ft wide, so ultimate widening from two-lane to three-lane carriageways will still leave a reservation 12ft wide.

“The three-lane road will be needed, it is considered, for carrying the estimated 46,000 vehicles daily. Continuous steel fenders are put outside the hard shoulders on all embankments higher than 20ft, on the straight, and 10ft on the right-hand curves.”

The Engineer went on to report that the features followed closely with the Ministry of Transport’s recommended standards with minor differences. Noted to be of particular interest were the advantages brought by those standards in comparison to the previous route.



Earthworks were heavy for the construction of the by-pass, with excavation carried out to the extent of 2,250,000 cubic yards and the maximum depth of cutting 62ft. The Engineer reported that a fleet of heavy plant including tractors, scrapers, large capacity excavators and rear dump trucks were assembled to deal with the heavy earth-moving in June 1956, but the heavy rains of that autumn meant it was ‘virtually impossible’ to work the sandy clay sub-soil, so work was postponed until the following spring in 1957 - then once again, due to another rainy spell, until spring 1958. Problems that arose from the rains were described as ‘many and varied’, including the removal of an unsuspected peat bog in the Ribble Valley.

A total of twenty-two bridges were built over or under the motorway, with the cost of the bridge works ‘about a third of the total’. Total estimated costs for the main works, including land acquisition, alteration of services, design and resident staff was quoted at £3,147,000.

6 th December 1969

Altamont:
Altamont Free Concert: At a free concert performed by the Rolling Stones, eighteen-year old Meredith Hunter is stabbed to death by Hells Angels security guards.

Altamont At 54: The Disastrous Concert That Brought The ‘60s To A Crashing Halt.
If the Woodstock festival in August 1969 represented peace and hippie idealism, then the Altamont Free Concert, held almost four months later, symbolically shattered that innocence. On December 6, 1969, about 300,000 gathered at the Altamont Speedway in Tracy, California to see the Rolling Stones perform a free concert that was seen as a ‘Woodstock West.’ It was also supposed to be a triumphant conclusion for the band that year, following their successful U.S. tour. But the event was marred by violent confrontations between the Hells Angels (who were hired to do security) and the crowd, in addition to lack of organization and bad drugs. By the end of the show, a total of four people died—among them 18-year-old Meredith Hunter, who was stabbed to death by a Hells Angels member, a moment captured in the Maysles Brothers and Charlotte Zwerin’s classic documentary film Gimme Shelter.

Fifty years later, Altamont is not only considered one of the most disastrous moments in rock, but it has become a convenient shorthand term for the death of the ‘60s. To San Francisco-based veteran music writer Joel Selvin, who wrote the 2016 book Altamont: The Rolling Stones, the Hells Angels, and the Inside Story of Rock's Darkest Day, now out in paperback, the concert was a toxic cocktail of greed and innocence. “It's a subject of never-ending fascination and not just for people who were there,” he explains on the eve of the milestone. “It's such an anomalous event in our history. And it also is commemorated by [Gimme Shelter], which is a great movie. But that movie is a patented fiction. It’s an apology for the Stones and paints them as victims.”

There were a number of reasons why the free concert happened. For the Stones, said Selvin, mounting the event — which also included the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, and Santana — was their way of being part of the counterculture hippie zeitgeist as represented by Woodstock, according to Selvin. The band was previously criticized over charging high ticket prices for their U.S. tour, particularly from San Francisco Chronicle music critic Ralph Gleason. And another incentive for mounting the show was because of the documentary film, which the Stones, primarily Mick Jagger, had a financial interest in.

“They wanted a piece of that pie... to be a part of this underground that had sprung up since 1966 when they were last in America,” Selvin says of the Rolling Stones. “The free concert and the Woodstock ethos certainly were part of it. They definitely had their heads turned by the immense reaction to their tour in 1969, they were surprised by how famous they were and how intense the excitement was. And by that time, the movie was underway. So there's no doubt they were thinking about these things. And I know that, because Jagger’s deal with the Maysles was contingent on them delivering a finished print to theaters ahead of the Woodstock movie in March [1970].

“Jagger was clearly sitting there thinking they never had a big time movie deal, they didn't do A Hard Day's Night. So he's going to go into this and he's going to surf that Woodstock wave. He doesn't quite realize that Altamont was going to have its own cachet and become an event in itself, and that the movie was worth one-million bucks, a big hunk of dough to the Rolling Stones in 1969.”

In hindsight, it's remarkable that the event— as the Stones were touring America starting in early November 1969—was put together in a short amount of time. Driven by both the Stones and the Grateful Dead, the concert was supposed to take place at San Francisco's Golden Gate Park until the city squashed that. Plans to host it at Sears Raceway in Sonoma fell through when the company that owned the site wanted $100,000 upon learning the concert was being filmed. Finally Altamont Speedway in Tracy stepped in. In a matter of days, the staging was set up, albeit in somewhat makeshift fashion (the stage was so low, creating not much of a barrier between performers and fans). According to Selvin's book, there was no central command or figurehead running the whole concert and handling the logistics; nobody in the crew knew who was in charge.

“At the end of their tour on a Monday, [the Stones] went to Muscle Shoals to record “Brown Sugar” and a couple other songs,” says Selvin. “They sent their people to San Francisco to make the concert happen for the next weekend. There was no site, there was no sound system. There was no staging, although some of that was being sent to the Bay Area. There was no crew. There was no nothing. 'You know, we'll be there over the weekend. We'll do the show on Saturday.' The hippies that the Grateful Dead marshaled behind this were idealists and innocent in some ways. They just figured that they could do it. It just didn't matter what obstacles were thrown in their way.”

The decision to have the Hells Angels to do security for $500 worth of beer would have serious consequences. On the day of the show, they Angels were physically violent towards the crowd with pool cues; they even assaulted Jefferson Airplane co-singer Marty Balin during his band's set when he tried to intervene in a scuffle. Adding to the sense of drama were the bad drugs going around; health professionals at the medical tent were dealing with numerous people experiencing freak-outs. “It's like a toxic mass psychosis,” says Selvin. “And the drugs were terrible. There were no longer sacraments of a movement. They were cut with all kinds of things.”

Such factors as the Angels, drugs, and the lack of police intervention and proper facilities all contributed to a tense and dark environment throughout the day. Sensing the chaos, the Grateful Dead decided at the last minute to pull out. And as the Rolling Stones were trying to play “Sympathy for the Devil,” Jagger was telling everybody to cool out when things started to get out of control within the audience.

Meanwhile, Meredith Hunter, a young black man who went to the show with his girlfriend, was beaten up by members of the Hells Angels. Trying to get away from them, Hunter pulled out his gun near the stage and was fatally stabbed by Hells Angels member Alan Passaro (he was later acquitted in court). “[He was] in many ways,” Selvin says of Hunter, “emblematic of being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong blonde girlfriend—caught between the Hells Angels and the Rolling Stones where no black [person] could watch, dressed in a lime green suit, with his Afro combed out, having been shooting speed.”

Ironically, the Stones performed, in Selvin's opinion, a great set. “They'd pick it back up finally when Mick Taylor says, ‘Let’s do the new one,’ and they did “Brown Sugar” for the first time. They just put their chins to their chests and played the set of their lives. Richard's and Taylor just locked in, and Charlie and Bill are holding down the bottom. Jagger put in a vocal performance that is so sincere, as opposed to as usual sort of cartoonish caricature type of voice. Not this time, man. He's for real and they burned from “Brown Sugar” to the end of their set “Street Fighting Man.” It could be one best sets I've ever heard from the Stones.”

In the years after Altamont, the Stones have rarely mentioned that event publicly, although Keith Richards recently said to The Washington Post: "It was just sort of a nightmarish day. Not just for us, but for everybody." On why the band didn’t just cancel the show, Richards responded: “It could have gotten a lot worse, man. That could have been a really big disaster...Who knows what else would have happened?”

“The few times they've addressed it,” says Selvin of the Stones, [it’s,] ‘We're the victims.’ There has not been the slightest acceptance of responsibility. The Stones left town without paying any of their bills. That was a pirate trip: they came to the island, they ransacked it for booty and young maidens, and then they made it back home.”

While the Stones and the Dead came out of it relatively unscathed, the incident forever changed them in Selvin’s view. “I don't think the Stones would ever be so fierce and fearless and unrestrained ever again, having had to confront real evil face to face in the performance of their music. You can see [in the movie] the fear, anxiety and despair that the Stones experienced when their stage was nearly invaded and taken over by these Hells Angels, who are very clearly the masters of the stage. And that has been an inviolate space for them, it was a humbling experience to the bone. I don't believe the Stones ever really recovered from it as artists.”

Today Selvin takes issue with the idea that Altamont represented the death of the ‘60s. “The probable end to the ‘60s was the fall of Saigon in ‘75. Woodstock was a disaster. [The violence there] just didn't happen. That's all it was. They burned down the concession stand when they got there and saw the prices. They broke the fences, they turned it into a free concert. They blocked the interstate highway. The Woodstock myth is pretty fragile, and don't blow on it too hard because it'll just crack under pressure.”

Now 54 years later, much has changed for the Stones as their subsequent live tours have been extremely professional and tightly-organized affairs. So has the live music business in general—yet there have been occasional disasters from Woodstock '99 to most recently the Fyre Festival. As for lessons to take from Altamont, Selvin says: “Everybody has a different lesson to learn. Meredith Hunter’s lesson was entirely different from Mick Jagger's. There's abundant evidence to indicate that whatever lessons there were, [they] were not learned.”

7 th December 1941

World War 11, Pearl Harbour:
World War II: Attack on Pearl Harbor: The Imperial Japanese Navy carries out a surprise attack on the United States Pacific Fleet and its defending Army and Marine air forces at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.


Pearl Harbor

December 7, 1941 was a "date which will live in infamy," according to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese led the United States to enter World War II.

Overview
On the morning of December 7, 1941, Japan attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
The surprise attack by some 350 Japanese aircraft sunk or badly damaged eighteen US naval vessels, including eight battleships, destroyed or damaged 300 US aircraft, and killed 2,403 men.
Across the nation, Americans were stunned, shocked, and angered. The attack turned US public opinion in favor of entering the Second World War. The United States declared war on Japan on December 8, 1941.
Japan’s allies, Germany and Italy, declared war on the United States on December 11. The United States responded in kind, and therefore entered World War II.

The Pearl Harbor attack
The Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor began just before 8 a.m. local time Sunday morning, December 7, 1941. For over an hour, in two waves, some 350 Japanese aircraft—having taken off from six aircraft carriers 230 miles north of Oahu—attacked the naval base. Japanese forces wreaked havoc on US naval vessels and on US aircraft on the island’s airfield.
In all, 2,403 Americans, including 68 civilians, died in the attack. In comparison, Japan suffered relatively light causalities—it lost only 29 aircraft and a few mini-submarines.


The USS Shaw explodes during the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941. Image courtesy National Archives.
The American people were shocked, bewildered, surprised, and angered by the attack. On December 8, President Roosevelt addressed a joint session of Congress in the Capitol, his words broadcast on radio to the nation: “Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”

In his address, Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war against Japan, which it did that day. Three days later, Japan’s allies Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, and Congress reciprocated the same day. All previous domestic opposition to US entry into the war ceased. The United States was now immersed in a war it would conduct simultaneously in Europe and the Pacific.

Motive for the attack
The Japanese government decided to attack Pearl Harbor after the United States cut off US oil exports to Japan in the summer of 1941. Japan relied on the United States for eighty percent of its oil, and without US oil supplies its navy would be unable to function. In attacking Pearl Harbor the Japanese hoped to cripple or destroy the US Pacific fleet so that the Japanese navy would have free reign in the Pacific.

Japan was also motivated strategically by ideas of creating an Asian co-prosperity sphere—“Asia for Asians”—in which Japan would take over the Asian colonial holdings of Europe and the United States. With the British, French, and Dutch caught up in the war in Europe, the Japanese believed the European powers would be unable to defend their Asian colonial holdings. Indeed, in the eight hours following the Pearl Harbor attack, Japan also attacked British-held Singapore, Hong Kong, and Malaya, and the US territorial possessions of the Philippines, Guam, and Wake Island.

Forewarnings about the attack
The United States was caught unprepared for the attack on Pearl Harbor, but things might have turned out differently were it not for some bad luck. The United States had broken the Japanese diplomatic code in project “Magic,” and General George Marshall, having been handed a decoded Japanese message on the very day of the attack, had sent word to the US base at Pearl Harbor prior to the assault to “be on the alert.” Atmospheric conditions delayed transmission of Marshall’s message, and it did not arrive until after the attack.

Moreover, the United States had known that a Japanese attack was imminent somewhere in the Pacific, but US military and government personnel had thought the Philippines or some other area of the South Pacific closer to Japan was the likely target. Pearl Harbor was 3,500 miles from Japan and had seemed to the US government and military an unlikely target.

After Pearl Harbor, the United States rapidly mobilized for World War II.

8 th december 1980

Murder of John Lennon:
John Lennon is murdered by Mark David Chapman in front of The Dakota in New York City.


Murder of John Lennon

On the evening of 8 December 1980, English musician John Lennon, formerly of the Beatles, was shot and fatally wounded in the archway of the Dakota, his residence in New York City. The killer, Mark David Chapman, was an American Beatles fan who was jealous and enraged by Lennon's rich lifestyle, alongside his 1966 comment that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus". Chapman said he was inspired by the fictional character Holden Caulfield from J. D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye, a "phony-killer" who loathes hypocrisy.

Chapman planned the killing over several months and waited for Lennon at the Dakota on the morning of 8 December. Early in the evening, Chapman met Lennon, who signed his copy of the album Double Fantasy and subsequently left for a recording session at the Record Plant. Later that night, Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, returned to the Dakota. As Lennon and Ono approached the entrance of the building, Chapman fired five hollow-point bullets from a .38 special revolver, four of which hit Lennon in the back. Lennon was rushed to Roosevelt Hospital in a police car, where he was pronounced dead on arrival at 11:15 p.m. at age 40. Chapman remained at the scene reading The Catcher in the Rye until he was arrested by the police. It was later discovered that Chapman considered Lennon's friend David Bowie a target.

A worldwide outpouring of grief ensued; crowds gathered at Roosevelt Hospital and in front of the Dakota, and at least three Beatles fans died by suicide.[4] The next day, Lennon was cremated at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. In lieu of a funeral, Ono requested ten minutes of silence around the world. Chapman pleaded guilty to murdering Lennon and was given a sentence of 20-years-to-life imprisonment. He has been denied parole twelve times since he became eligible in 2000.

9 th December 1960

Corrie:
The first episode of Coronation Street, the world's longest-running television soap opera, is broadcast in the United Kingdom.


9 December 1960: Coronation Street is first broadcast
The first episode of Coronation Street, the world's longest-running soap opera, was broadcast live on this day in 1960. But its was far from assured.

The mournful wail of a lone cornet in the evening must be one of the most recognisable sounds in British television. For over 50 years, the theme music to Coronation Street has beckoned millions to the sofa every week.

It is in many ways the most unlikely of siren songs. Drab and depressing, it depicted life in the fictional town of Weatherfield, on a bleak, working-class terraced street originally called Florizel Street by its creator Tony Warren.

Later renamed Coronation Street after Edward VII's enthronement and the architectural era of the houses, the soap set out to examine "the driving forces behind life in a working-class street in the North of England", wrote Warren, "and, in doing so, entertain."

It was an idea spun out of the “kitchen sink” genre of the 1950s, with its angry young men, and it didn't go down well with the executives of Granada Television, who found it dreary. Nonetheless, they were persuaded to make 13 pilot episodes, the first of which was aired on 9 December 1960 and it was performed live.

The programme's representation of working-class families struck a chord with viewers, who tuned in to watch student Ken Barlow (still played by William Roache) coming to terms with his humble origins. Right from the get-go,Coronation Street acquired a loyal following.

With its north-west accents and use of regional dialect, Coronation Street contrasted with the London middle-class focus preferred by the BBC. Commercial television had only been around for five years, and the programme helped give Britain's second channel an identity, as well as ensure the success of its maker, Granada.

In 2010, Coronation Street became the longest-running soap opera in the world, and it has consistently attracted some of the highest ratings in television. And if you find yourself in Australia, New Zealand or Canada, you can still tune into life on Britain's favourite street.


Violet Carson as Ena Sharples and Jack Howarth as Albert Tatlock, two of the series' early regulars

10 th December 1907

The brown dog riots:

The worst night of the Brown Dog riots in London, when 1,000 medical students, protesting against the existence of a memorial for animals that have been vivisected, clash with 400 police officers.

Brown Dog Riots
A Brief History
On this date, December 10, 1907, a long running feud between the medical community and anti-vivisectionist activists boiled over into the worst of the riots and disturbances over the statue of a dog!

Digging Deeper
Digging deeper we find the turn of the century London medical community leaving the dark ages of medicine and trying to approach something more like the research we have today. Part of that scientific quest included the practice of vivisection, dissecting animals while they are still alive. This practice was used for research and also for the instruction of medical students, and an attempt at humane practices was made by using anesthesia on the animals. When they used man’s best friend instead of rodents, well, they went too far and were sure to generate some backlash.

The doctors and students claimed the animals did not feel pain, but the anti-vivisectionists disagreed and said that during such operations the subject animals demonstrated extreme discomfort despite the anesthesia. Lawsuits and public outcry on both sides continued through the early 1900s and was taken to another level when the anti-vivisectionists erected a memorial statue of a dog (brown, of course).


The statue by Joseph Whitehead was erected in 1906 in Battersea’s Latchmere Recreation Ground and presumed destroyed in 1910.
Medical researchers and students were highly offended by this memorial and the rhetoric from the activists and on December 10, 1907 decided to tear down the memorial. Police had been contending with a campaign of vandalism of the memorial and were trying to protect it when a mob of perhaps a thousand medical students and others (known as “anti-doggers”) descended upon the park where the memorial stood!

About 400 police were deployed to protect the property and the fight was on. Somehow the violence expanded to include trade union members and suffragettes, causing quite a disruption. Other less extensive disturbances occurred off and on for a few more years, and the memorial was removed by local authorities in 1910 and melted down.


Not content to allow the “anti-doggers” the last word, a new memorial statue was erected in Battersea Park in 1985. No riot this time, but sure enough the “anti-doggers” had it removed in 1992. Restored in 1994, the memorial was moved to its current home in a less conspicuous part of the park.

No animals were harmed in the writing of this article!

11 th December 2005

Buncefield oil fire:
The Buncefield Oil Depot catches fire in Hemel Hempstead, England.

Buncefield fire.

The Buncefield fire was a major fire at an oil storage facility that started at 06:01 UTC on Sunday 11 December 2005 at the Hertfordshire Oil Storage Terminal, located near the M1 motorway, Hemel Hempstead, in Hertfordshire, England. The terminal was the fifth largest oil-products storage depot in the United Kingdom, with a capacity of about 60 million Imperial gallons (273 million litres) of fuel. The terminal is owned by Total UK Limited (60%) and Texaco (40%).

The first and largest explosion occurred near tank 912, which led to further explosions which eventually overwhelmed 20 large storage tanks. The emergency services announced a major emergency at 06:08 and a firefighting effort began. The cause of the explosion was a fuel-air explosion in a vapour cloud of evaporated leaking petrol. The British Geological Survey monitored the event, which measured 2.4 on the Richter scale. News reports described the incident as the biggest of its kind in peacetime Europe and certainly the biggest such explosion in the United Kingdom since the 1974 Flixborough disaster. The flames had been extinguished by the afternoon of 13 December 2005. However, one storage tank re-ignited that evening, which firefighters left to burn rather than attempting to extinguish it again.

The Health Protection Agency and the Major Incident Investigation Board provided advice to prevent incidents such as these in the future. The primary need is for safety measures to be in place to prevent fuel escaping the tanks in which it is stored. Added safety measures are needed for when fuel does escape, mainly to prevent it forming a flammable vapour and stop pollutants from poisoning the environment.

Incident
Explosion and fire

The fire seen from a vantage point between the Northgate and 3Com Corporation buildings. Note the broken windscreen and rear window on the vehicle in the foreground.
The first and largest explosion occurred at 06:01 UTC on Sunday, 11 December 2005 near container 912. Further explosions followed which eventually overwhelmed 20 large storage tanks. From all accounts, it seems to have been an unconfined vapour cloud explosion of unusually high strength – also known as a fuel-air explosion. Because of an inversion layer, the explosions were heard up to 125 miles (200 km) away; there were reports that they were audible in Belgium, France, and the Netherlands.

The British Geological Survey monitored the event, which measured 2.4 on the Richter scale. It was reported that people were woken in south London, and as far west as Wokingham (about 28 miles (45 km)), where in its southern suburb, Finchampstead, numerous people felt the shockwave after the initial explosion. Subsequent explosions occurred at 06:27 and 06:28.

Witnesses many miles from the terminal observed flames hundreds of feet high; the smoke cloud was visible from space, and from as far north as Lincolnshire (about 70 miles (110 km) away). Damage from the blasts included broken windows at various buildings including the Holy Trinity church and Leverstock Green School, blown-in or warped front doors, and an entire wall being removed from a warehouse more than 0.5 miles (0.80 km) from the site. Buildings in neighbouring St Albans also suffered; Townsend School had serious blast damage, and a window was blown out of St Albans Abbey (about 5 miles (8 km) away).

Several nearby office blocks were hit so badly that almost every window, front and back, was blown in as the explosion ripped through them. The timing of the explosion before work hours possibly prevented additional casualties. Reports also indicated that cars in nearby streets caught fire. The roof of at least one house was blown off. Buildings in the vicinity were evacuated by police, not only because of the smoke and possibility of more explosions, but because of the danger of structural damage making the buildings unstable.

There were 43 reported injuries; two people were deemed to be seriously injured enough to be kept in hospital, one in Watford General Hospital, with breathing difficulties, and another in Hemel Hempstead Hospital, although they were not in a life-threatening condition. Some early media reports spoke of eight fatalities, but these may have been persons missing. Allmembers of staff from the terminal were accounted for.

Hertfordshire police and fire services and the member of parliament for the area, Mike Penning, said that there were seven fuel tanks on the site which, as of 14:00 on 12 December, had not been affected. These tanks were at risk of exploding if the fire were to spread.

12 th December 1988

Clapham junction rail crash:
The Clapham Junction rail crash kills thirty-five and injures hundreds after two collisions of three commuter trains—one of the worst train crashes in the United Kingdom.

Clapham junction rail crash:
The Clapham Junction rail crash occurred on the morning of 12 December 1988, when a crowded British Rail passenger train crashed into the rear of another train that had stopped at a signal just south of Clapham Junction railway station in London, England, and subsequently sideswiped an empty train travelling in the opposite direction. A total of 35 people died in the collision, while 484 were injured.

The collision was the result of a signal failure caused by a wiring fault. New wiring had been installed, but the old wiring had been left in place and not adequately secured. An independent inquiry chaired by Anthony Hidden, QC found that the signalling technician responsible had not been told that his working practices were wrong, and his work had not been inspected by an independent person. He had also performed the work during his 13th consecutive seven-day workweek. Hidden was critical of the health and safety culture within British Rail at the time, and his recommendations included ensuring that work was independently inspected and that a senior project manager be made responsible for all aspects of any major, safety-critical project such as re-signalling work.

British Rail was fined £250,000 for violations of health and safety law in connection with the incident.

Collisions
On 12 December 1988 the 07:18 from Basingstoke to London Waterloo, a crowded 12-car train made up of four-car 4VEP electric multiple units 3033, 3119 and 3005, was approaching Clapham Junction when the driver saw the signal ahead of him change from green ("proceed") to red ("danger"). Unable to stop at the signal, he stopped his train at the next signal and then reported to the signal box by means of a line-side telephone. He was told there was nothing wrong with the signal. Shortly after 08:10, the following train, the 06:30 from Bournemouth, made up of 4REP unit 2003 and 4TC units 8027 and 8015, collided with the Basingstoke train. A third train, carrying no passengers and comprising 4VEP units 3004 and 3425, was passing on the adjacent line in the other direction and collided with the wreckage immediately after the initial impact. The driver of a fourth train, coasting with no traction current, saw the other trains and managed to come to a stop behind the other two and the signal that should have protected them, which was showing a yellow "proceed with caution" aspect instead of a red "danger" aspect.

13 th December 1989

Derryard checkpoint attack:
The Troubles: Attack on Derryard checkpoint: The Provisional Irish Republican Army launches an attack on a British Army temporary vehicle checkpoint near Rosslea, Northern Ireland. Two British soldiers are killed and two others are wounded.

Attack on Derryard checkpoint

On 13 December 1989 the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) attacked a British Army permanent vehicle checkpoint complex manned by the King's Own Scottish Borderers (KOSB) near the Northern Ireland–Republic of Ireland border at Derryard townland, a few miles north of Rosslea, County Fermanagh. The IRA unit, firing from the back of an armoured dump truck, attacked the small base with heavy machine-guns, grenades, anti-tank rockets and a flamethrower. A nearby Army patrol arrived at the scene and a fierce firefight erupted. The IRA withdrew after leaving a van bomb inside the complex, but the device did not fully detonate. The assault on the outpost left two soldiers dead and two wounded.

Attack
The target was a permanent vehicle checkpoint at Derryard. Described as a "mini base", it included an accommodation block and defensive sangars. It was manned by eight soldiers of the 1st Battalion, King's Own Scottish Borderers and a Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officer. The 11 IRA members would be driven to the checkpoint in the back of a makeshift Bedford armoured dumper truck. They were armed with 7.62mm AK-47s, 5.56mm Armalite AR-18s, two 12.7mm DShK heavy machine-guns, RPG-7s, different kinds of grenades, and a LPO-50 flamethrower. The heavy machine guns and the flamethrower were mounted on a tripod on the lorry bed. To assure widespread destruction, the column would detonate a van bomb after the initial assault.

The attack took place shortly after 4PM.[6] IRA members sealed off roads leading to the checkpoint in an attempt to prevent civilians from getting caught up in the attack. The truck was driven from the border and halted at the checkpoint. As Private James Houston began to check the back of the truck, the IRA opened fire with assault rifles and threw grenades into the compound. Two RPG-7s were fired at the observation sangar while the flamethrower stream was directed at the command sangar. Heavy shooting continued as the truck reversed and smashed through the gates of the compound. At least three IRA volunteers dismounted inside the checkpoint and sprayed the portacabins with gunfire and the flamethrower's fire stream, while throwing grenades and nail bombs. The defenders were forced to seek shelter in sangars, from where they fired into their own base. A farmer some distance away saw an orange ball of flames and heard gunfire 'raking the fields'. As the truck drove out of the now wrecked compound, a red transit van loaded with a 400 lb (182 kg) bomb was driven inside and set to detonate once the IRA unit had made its escape. However, only the booster charge exploded.

The attack was finally repulsed by a four-men Borderers section from the checkpoint that was patrolling nearby, with the support of a Wessex helicopter. The patrol fired more than 100 rounds at the IRA unit. The Wessex received gunfire, and was forced to take evasive action. The IRA column, at risk of being surrounded, fled toward the border in the armoured truck. It was found abandoned at the border with a 460-pound (210 kg) bomb on board.

Two soldiers were killed in the attack: Private James Houston from England and Lance-Corporal Michael Patterson from Scotland. Corporal Whitelaw was badly wounded by shrapnel and later airlifted for treatment. Another soldier suffered minor injuries.

14 th December 1918


The 1918 General Election:
The 1918 United Kingdom general election occurs, the first where women were permitted to vote. In Ireland the Irish republican political party Sinn Féin wins a landslide victory with nearly 47% of the popular vote.

1918 United Kingdom general election.

The 1918 United Kingdom general election was called immediately after the Armistice with Germany which ended the First World War, and was held on Saturday, 14 December 1918. The governing coalition, under Prime Minister David Lloyd George, sent letters of endorsement to candidates who supported the coalition government. These were nicknamed "Coalition Coupons", and led to the election being known as the "coupon election". The result was a massive landslide in favour of the coalition, comprising primarily the Conservatives and Coalition Liberals, with massive losses for Liberals who were not endorsed. Nearly all the Liberal MPs without coupons were defeated, including party leader H. H. Asquith.

It was the first general election to include on a single day all eligible voters of the United Kingdom, although the vote count was delayed until 28 December so that the ballots cast by soldiers serving overseas could be included in the tallies.

It resulted in a landslide victory for the coalition government of David Lloyd George, who had replaced H. H. Asquith as Prime Minister in December 1916. They were both Liberals, and continued to battle for control of the party, which was rapidly losing popular support, and never regained power.

It was the first general election to be held after enactment of the Representation of the People Act 1918. It was thus the first election in which women over the age of 30 (with some property qualifications), and all men over the age of 21, could vote. Previously, all women and many poor men had been excluded from voting. Women generally supported the coalition candidates.

It was the first parliamentary election in which women were able to stand as candidates, following the Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act 1918, believed to be one of the shortest Acts of Parliament ever given Royal Assent. The Act was passed shortly before Parliament was dissolved. It followed a report by Law Officers that the Great Reform Act 1832 had specified parliamentary candidates had to be male, and that the Representation of the People Act passed earlier in the year did not change that. One woman, Nina Boyle, had already presented herself for a by-election earlier in the year in Keighley, but had been turned down by the returning officer on technical grounds.

The election was also noted for the dramatic result in Ireland, which showed clear disapproval of government policy. The Irish Parliamentary Party were almost completely wiped out by the Irish republican party Sinn Féin, who vowed in their manifesto to establish an independent Irish Republic. They refused to take their seats in Westminster, instead forming a breakaway government and declaring Irish independence. The Irish War of Independence began soon after the election. Because of the resulting partition of Ireland, this was the last United Kingdom general election to include the entire island of Ireland.

15 th December 1944.

Glenn Miller:
World War II: a single-engine UC-64A Norseman aeroplane carrying United States Army Air Forces Major Glenn Miller is lost in a flight over the English Channel.

Glenn Miller clue found in Reading plane-spotter's log.

It was a foggy afternoon on 15 December, 1944 when the Norseman aircraft carrying Glenn Miller flew close to Maidenhead, Berkshire.

Soon after it would be seen for the last time at Beachy Head in East Sussex.

What happened next to the craft and its famous passenger, who led the World War II big band craze, has never been uncovered.

No sign of the aircraft was ever found and Miller's disappearance remains one of World War II's most enduring mysteries.

And until now, it had never been confirmed the route the aircraft had taken saw it travel by Maidenhead.

The band leader and jazz trombonist, famous for records including Pennsylvania 6-5000 and In The Mood, was on his way from Bedfordshire to entertain US troops in Versailles, France - a flight which should have taken him across the English Channel.

Sylvan Anderton, 77, said he had kept his brother's plane-spotter notebooks for 28 years
His UC-64A Norseman, an American transport aircraft, never arrived. No trace of the aircrew, passengers or plane has ever been found.

Varying theories about different flight paths have abounded, but the Berkshire route has now been confirmed by the Glenn Miller Archive at Colorado University, and will feature as one of the facts in an official report on the musician's disappearance, commissioned by Glenn Miller's children.

The most recent discovery started with a 17-year-old plane-spotter in 1944, who meticulously logged each plane he saw flying overhead while he worked at an airfield in Woodley, Reading.

The now deceased Richard Anderton had two small notebooks filled with details of the locations of passing aircraft, estimated altitude and directions of flight.

'Pinch of salt'
On 15 December 1944, he logged a UC-64A-type aircraft passing on the horizon to his east and flying below the fog in a south-easterly direction.

It was not until his brother, 77-year-old Sylvan Anderton, brought the books into the BBC's Antiques Roadshow TV programme 67 years later that the entry came to light.

"I'd had them for about 28 years and really didn't do anything about it," said Mr Anderton, who grew up in Reading but now lives in Bideford, Devon.

"I knew there was a connection because he'd cut out an article from the Daily Express in 1969 about Glenn Miller's disappearance and he'd put it in the pages in the notebook for 15 December 1944."

Roadshow expert Clive Stewart-Lockhart, who valued the books at around £1,000, said Glenn Miller was "one of the great mysteries of that part of the war," and that he found the teenager's dedication to plane-spotting extraordinary "when a bomb could've dropped on him".

He has never questioned the authenticity of the notebooks.

"You'd have to be an absolute genius to make it up," he said.

'Very valuable'
But when it came to official verification, Dennis Spragg, senior consultant at the Glenn Miller Archives in Colorado, said he initially took the notebook entry "with a pinch of salt".

"I was a bit sceptical," he said.

"If I had £10 for every time I heard someone with a new bit of information on Glenn Miller I'd have bought my own Caribbean island by now."

But when he looked into it, and found out Mr Anderton was based at Woodley - within eight miles of the Maidenhead waypoint - pieces of the puzzle started to fit.


Mr Spragg said if the craft was passing to the east of Mr Anderton, he indeed would have been able to have seen it on his horizon.

"I went back and consulted the records for what would've been the route of the flight," he said.

"I worked out flight times and the speed of the aircraft and worked out that he probably saw the airplane to his east at eight or nine minutes past two in the afternoon."

He said the discovery was "very valuable".

"It's a piece of the entire story. The notebook confirms that the plane was on time and on course."

It also eradicates other theories about alternate routes the plane could have taken.

"All the speculators saying he went east of London have now gone out the picture," said Mr Anderton.

Aside from the notebook's historic significance, his late brother's unexpected new status as the next-to-last known observer of Glenn Miller's plane has caused some excitement in the Anderton household.

"We're part of the Glenn Miller story, we're very thrilled about that," he said.

"We've even started playing his music."

The notebook entry will feature in Dennis Spragg's report called Major A Glenn Miller, 15 December 1944, The Facts, was published 1n 2012.

16 th December 1944

The battle of the Bulge:
World War II: The Battle of the Bulge begins with the surprise offensive of three German armies through the Ardennes forest.

1944

Battle of the Bulge begins

On December 16, 1944, the Germans launch the last major offensive of the war, Operation Autumn Mist, also known as the Ardennes Offensive and the Battle of the Bulge, an attempt to push the Allied front line west from northern France to northwestern Belgium. The Battle of the Bulge, so-called because the Germans created a “bulge” around the area of the Ardennes forest in pushing through the American defensive line, was the largest fought on the Western front.

The Germans threw 250,000 soldiers into the initial assault, 14 German infantry divisions guarded by five panzer divisions-against a mere 80,000 Americans. Their assault came in early morning at the weakest part of the Allied line, an 80-mile poorly protected stretch of hilly, woody forest (the Allies simply believed the Ardennes too difficult to traverse, and therefore an unlikely location for a German offensive). Between the vulnerability of the thin, isolated American units and the thick fog that prevented Allied air cover from discovering German movement, the Germans were able to push the Americans into retreat.

One particularly effective German trick was the use of English-speaking German commandos who infiltrated American lines and, using captured U.S. uniforms, trucks, and jeeps, impersonated U.S. military and sabotaged communications. The ploy caused widespread chaos and suspicion among the American troops as to the identity of fellow soldiers—even after the ruse was discovered. Even General Omar Bradley himself had to prove his identity three times–by answering questions about football and Betty Grable—before being allowed to pass a sentry point.

The battle raged for three weeks, resulting in a massive loss of American and civilian life. Nazi atrocities abounded, including the murder of 72 American soldiers by SS soldiers in the Ardennes town of Malmedy. Historian Stephen Ambrose estimated that by war’s end, “Of the 600,000 GIs involved, almost 20,000 were killed, another 20,000 were captured, and 40,000 were wounded.”

The United States also suffered its second-largest surrender of troops of the war: More than 7,500 members of the 106th Infantry Division capitulated at one time at Schnee Eifel. The devastating ferocity of the conflict also made desertion an issue for the American troops; General Eisenhower was forced to make an example of Private Eddie Slovik, the first American executed for desertion since the Civil War.

The battle would not end until better weather enabled American aircrafts to bomb and strafe German positions.

17 th December 1983

The Harrods bombing:
Provisional IRA members detonate a car bomb at Harrods Department Store in London. Three police officers and three civilians are killed.


The Harrods bombing usually refers to the car bomb that exploded outside Harrods department store in central London on Saturday 17 December 1983. Members of the Provisional IRA planted the time bomb and sent a warning 37 minutes before it exploded, but the area was not evacuated. The blast killed three police officers and three civilians, injured 90 people, and caused much damage.

The IRA Army Council claimed it had not authorised the attack and expressed regret for the civilian casualties. The IRA had been bombing commercial targets in England since the early 1970s, as part of its “economic war”. The goal was to damage the economy and cause disruption, which would put pressure on the British government to withdraw from Northern Ireland.

Harrods was the target of a much smaller IRA bomb almost ten years later, in January 1993, which injured four people.



1983 bombing
Following the first Dublin bombings the Provisional IRA decided to take its campaign to Britain. From 1973 the Provisional IRA had carried out waves of bombing attacks in London and elsewhere in England, as part of its campaign. Harrods—a large, upmarket department store in the affluent Knightsbridge district, near Buckingham Palace—had been targeted before by the IRA.

On 10 December 1983, the IRA carried out its first attack in London for some time when a bomb exploded at the Royal Artillery Barracks, injuring three British soldiers.



One week later, on the afternoon of 17 December, IRA members parked a car bomb near the side entrance of Harrods, on Hans Crescent. The bomb contained 25 to 30 lb (14 kg) of explosives and was set to be detonated by a timer.

It was left in a 1972 blue Austin 1300 GT four-door saloon car with a black vinyl roof, registration plate KFP 252K.[4] At 12:44 a man using an IRA codeword phoned the central London branch of the Samaritans charity. The caller said there was a car bomb outside Harrods and another bomb inside Harrods, and gave the car’s registration plate.

However, according to police, he did not give any other description of the car.

The bomb exploded at about 13:21, as four police officers in a car, an officer on foot and a police dog-handler neared the suspect vehicle.

Six people were killed (three officers and three bystanders) and 90 others were injured, including 14 police officers. The blast damaged 24 cars and all five floors on the side of Harrods, sending a shower of glass down on the street.

The police car absorbed much of the blast and this likely prevented further casualties.

The bystanders killed were Philip Geddes (24), a journalist who had heard about the alert and went to the scene , Jasmine Cochrane-Patrick (25) and Kenneth Salvesen (28), a US citizen.

The Metropolitan Police officers killed were Sergeant Noel Lane (28); Constable Jane Arbuthnot (22); and Inspector Stephen Dodd (34), who died of his injuries on 24 December. Constable Jon Gordon survived, but lost both legs and part of a hand in the blast.

At the time of the explosion, a second warning call was made by the IRA. The caller said that a bomb had been left in the C&A department store at the east end of Oxford Street. Police cleared the area and cordoned it off but this claim was found to be false.

In the aftermath of the attack, hundreds of extra police and mobile bomb squads were drafted into London. Aleck Craddock, chairman of Harrods, reported that £1 million in turnover had been lost as a result of the bombing.

Despite the damage, Harrods re-opened three days later, proclaiming it would not be:



“defeated by acts of terrorism”.

Denis Thatcher, the husband of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, visited the store and told reporters:

“no damned Irishman is going to stop me going there”.

18 th December 2015

Kellingly, the demise of coal mining:
2015 – Kellingley Colliery, the last deep coal mine in Great Britain, closes.

The rise and fall of Kellingley Colliery near Knottingley
With the announcement of 2,000 new jobs arriving in the area through the Konect 62 warehouse development on the former site, we take a look back at the rise and fall of Kellingley Colliery near Knottingley.

The sprawling Kellingley Colliery was the last deep mine in the UK when it closed after 50 years of operation in 2015.
The pit, which straddled the boundary of Knottingley and Selby, North Yorkshire, opened in 1965 after years of exploratory digging and construction.During the planning phase, 3,000 workers were expected to be employed at the mine but due to updates to mining methods and machinery, only around 2,000 men were employed at its peak.

Known affectionately as the ‘Big K’, the pit was once Europe’s largest deep coal mine and sat on tens of millions of tonnes of reserves.

The mine’s two main shafts were almost 800m deep, with one used to move men and materials and the other to move coal, at a rate of up to 900 tonnes an hour.

The coal mined at Kellingley was primarily supplied to Drax power station in Selby – the UK’s biggest coal-fired power station that generated around 7 per cent of the UK’s electricity at the time of the mine’s closure.

It also supplied Ferrybridge power station around three miles away and produced coal to be used inside homes.

Like other mines, Kellingley was plagued with issues after the industry was nationalised in January 1947 and the creation of the National Coal Board.

On a good day the pit produced 350,000 tonnes of coal but in 1986, Kellingley achieved a record 404,000 tonnes in a single shift but overall production fell sharply from 128 million tonnes in 1981 to 17.8 million tonnes in 2009, six years before its closure.

The miners took part in the 1984 miners’ strike organised by Arthur Scargill of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) against the National Coal Board, although there was a higher number of opposition to the strike at Kellingley than in most other Yorkshire pits.

In June 1984, a 55-year-old miner was killed after a collision with a lorry and two others died in industrial accidents in the following year.

These three men are among a total of 17 people who lost their lives during the operation of the mine and are honoured in a memorial statue, which was unveiled in September 2010.

The mine closed its doors for the last time in December 2015, marking the end of deep mining in the UK.

With the closure of Kellingley, 450 miners were made redundant with a severance pay of twelve weeks’ worth of wages.

The last shift at the mine was on Friday, December 18 2015, before the shafts of the colliery were emptied of cables and ropes and filled with concrete and demolition of surface buildings.

Shaun McLoughlin, the mine manager told Wakefield Express at the time: "I would like to thank my colleagues for all their hard work and determination at this difficult time.

"Like them, I thought that I would see out my career here but it is not to be.

"This is a very sad day for everyone connected with the mine but I am proud that we have done the job safely and professionally."

On the day, one miner simply told the Express: "Done".

For then 50-year-old locomotive driver Paul Hine, the closure of the pit marked the end of his family’s three generation association with mining.

Mr Hine worked in the industry for 34 years, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather.

He started at Woolley Colliery before moving to Kellingley 28 years ago.

Mr Hine said to the Express at the time: "It's been an emotional day for all of us, shaking hands with colleagues and friends that we will probably never see again.

"I never thought I would see this day in my working career. I knew one day it would end but I didn't think I'd see it.

"If the government announced that they wouldn't be burning coal any more, I think we could take it better.

"But knowing they will be burning imported coal just down the road for up to 10 years is a real kick in the teeth."

Chris Kitchen, general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), told media it was a "sad day" for the country as well as the industry.

"I am sure people will argue not burning coal is better for the environment, but as far as I am concerned this is another vindictive act."

Miners from the pit joined a march in Knottingley on the following Saturday to mark the closure.

The land was sold for redevelopment in 2016 to Harworth Group and the first work at the site began last year when the company sold 3.04 acres of land to CRT Property Developments Ltd, a subsidiary of THe Coalfields Regeneration Trust.

It was announced this week (2022) that development firms Henderson Park and Cole Waterson are set to bring an eye-watering 1.1 million sq. ft. state-of-the-art warehouse, Konect 62, to the area, which will employ up to 2,000 people when phase one is completed, and double the number when the next phase is completed.

Christopher Kuhbier, managing director at Henderson Park, said: “This strategically located site is optimally placed to deliver much needed capacity into the critically undersupplied Yorkshire industrial market.

“We are confident that the sustainability and technical specifications of the scheme we are developing will appeal to the highest quality logistics operators as well as traditional industrial occupiers, who are increasingly energy conscious.

“We are excited to get the project underway and deliver what we believe will be an exemplary regeneration of a major brownfield site.”

19 th December 1981

The Penlee lifeboat disaster:
Sixteen lives are lost when the Penlee lifeboat goes to the aid of the stricken coaster Union Star in heavy seas.

1981: Penlee lifeboat disaster
On 19 December 1981, the crew of the Penlee lifeboat Solomon Browne were lost attempting to rescue the crew and passengers onboard a stricken coaster.

On a stormy December evening, the Penlee lifeboat Solomon Browne battled heavy seas and hurricane force winds to reach the Union Star, a stricken coaster being swept towards the coast of Cornwall.

After several attempts to get alongside the coaster, the lifeboat crew rescued four of the eight people onboard. But rather than turn back to shore, they made a final heroic rescue attempt - and all radio contact was lost.

Powerful winds and a treacherous coastline.

The Union Star was on her maiden voyage, sailing from Holland to Ireland with a cargo of agricultural fertiliser.

As well as Captain Henry Morton and his crew of four, she carried the captain's wife and two teenage stepdaughters, who had joined the ship so that they could be together for the holidays.

At 6pm on 19 December 1981, disaster struck. The Falmouth Coastguard received a call from the Union Star: her engines had failed and would not restart. There was a fierce storm underway and the rough seas and powerful winds were blowing the coaster towards the treacherous Cornish coastline.

In Mousehole, word spread that the lifeboat may be needed and Penlee’s Solomon Browne was put on standby. A dozen men answered the call for crew, but only eight were needed.

A rescue under such severe conditions would be difficult and Coxswain William Trevelyan Richards chose the best crew for the task:

Second Coxswain and Mechanic James Stephen Madron
Assistant Mechanic Nigel Brockman
Emergency Mechanic John Blewett
Crew Member Charles Greenhaugh
Crew Member Kevin Smith
Crew Member Barrie Torrie
Crew Member Gary Wallis.

A Sea King helicopter.

The Union Star’s fuel system had become contaminated with water, making an engine restart impossible. The coaster was drifting dangerously close to the shore, so the Coastguard called in an RNAS Sea King helicopter to rescue the crew.

The coaster was rolling and pitching on the wild seas, so violently that her mast threatened to collide with the helicopter overhead.

The aircrew decided it had become too dangerous to continue the rescue mission – the Union Star’s mast was too close and their line wasn’t long enough to reach the deck from further away.

The coaster had drifted to just 2 miles from the perilous coastline, so the Solomon Browne was finally launched, 2 hours after the first alert.

The greatest act of courage.

The helicopter stood by as Penlee's lifeboat, a wooden 47ft (14.3m) Watson class, launched in the hurricane force 12 wind, fighting against 90-knot winds and 18m waves.

The powerless Union Star had already lost one anchor, but was desperately trying to hold her position as the lifeboat fought the harsh breaking seas to come alongside it.

The Solomon Browne struck against the side of the coaster and the lifeboat crew stood against the railings, throwing lines across to the coaster.

The lifeboat valiantly battled to come alongside the coaster for half an hour.

From the helicopter, Lieutenant Commander Russell Smith saw dark shadows of people in fluorescent orange lifejackets run across the deck from the wheelhouse to the lifeboat, where the crew were waiting to catch them as they jumped.

The Solomon Browne radioed back to the Coastguard: ‘we’ve got four off’ and the helicopter turned back to base, assuming the lifeboat would head to shore.

But the lifeboat decided to make a final rescue attempt – and after that point, all radio contact was lost.

The search
The Coastguard radioed back to the lifeboat, but there was no response. Ten minutes later, the lights of the Solomon Browne disappeared.

The helicopter refuelled and launched once more. Lifeboats from Sennen Cove, The Lizard and St Mary’s were also sent to help their colleagues, but their searches were unsuccessful.

At daybreak, the Union Star was found capsized on the rocks by Tater Du Lighthouse and wreck debris from the lifeboat began to wash ashore.

20 th December 1984

The Summit tunnel fire:
The Summit Tunnel fire, one of the largest transportation tunnel fires in history, burns after a freight train carrying over one million litress of gasoline derails near the town of Todmorden, England, in the Pennines.

History.
Main article: Summit Tunnel.
l
The tunnel, which is 1.6 miles (2.6 km) in length, was built in the late 1830s. The construction shafts, at intervals of (approximately) 220 yards (200 m), were left open to help vent smoke and steam from the locomotives that passed through it.

Fire
The fire occurred at 5:50 a.m. on 20 December 1984 just after the 01.40 a.m. goods train from Haverton Hill to Glazebrook oil distribution terminal in Merseyside, carrying more than 1,000,000 litres (220,000 imp gal; 260,000 US gal) (835 tonnes or 822 long tons or 920 short tons) of four-star petrol in thirteen tankers entered the tunnel on the Yorkshire (north) side. One-third of the way through the tunnel, a defective-axle bearing (journal bearing) derailed the fourth tanker, which promptly knocked those behind it off the track. Only the locomotive and the first three tankers remained on the rails. One of the derailed tankers fell on its side and began to leak petrol into the tunnel. Vapour from the leaking petrol was probably ignited by the damaged axle box.

The three train crew members could see fire spreading through the ballast beneath the other track in the tunnel, so they left the train and ran the remaining mile to the south portal (where they knew there was a direct telephone connection to the signaller) to raise the alarm.

Crews from Greater Manchester Fire Brigade and West Yorkshire Fire Brigade quickly attended the scene. Co-ordination between the brigades appears to have worked well, perhaps because they had both participated in an emergency exercise in the tunnel a month before.

The train crew were persuaded to return to the train, where they uncoupled the three tankers still on the rails and used the locomotive to drive them out. Greater Manchester fire brigade then loaded firefighting equipment onto track trolleys and sent a crew with breathing apparatus (BA) in to begin their firefighting operation at the south end of the train. They also lowered hoselines down one of the ventilation shafts to provide a water supply. At the same time, crews from West Yorkshire fire brigade entered the tunnel and began fighting fires in the ballast at the north end of the train.

However, at 9.40 a.m., the pressure in one of the heated tankers rose high enough to open its pressure relief valves. The vented vapour caught fire and blew flames onto the tunnel wall. The wall deflected the flames both ways along the tunnel, the bricks in the tunnel wall began to spall and melt in the flames and the BA crews from both brigades decided to evacuate. They managed to leave just before the first explosion rocked the tunnel.

Left to itself, the fire burned as hot as it could. As the walls warmed up and the air temperature in the tunnel rose, all 10 tankers discharged petrol vapour from their pressure relief valves. Two tankers melted and discharged their remaining loads as floods.

The fuel supply to the fire was so rich that some of the combustibles were unable to find oxygen inside the tunnel with which to burn; they were instead ejected from vent shafts 8 and 9 as superheated, fuel-rich gases that burst into flame the moment they encountered oxygen in the air outside. At the height of the fire, pillars of flame approximately 45 metres (148 ft) high rose from the shaft outlets on the hillside above.

The gases are estimated to have flowed up these shafts at 50 metres per second (110 mph). Air at this speed is capable of blowing around fairly heavy items: hot projectiles made from tunnel lining (rather like lava bombs from a volcano) were cast out over the hillside. These set much of the vegetation on fire and caused the closure of the A6033 road. In the cleanup operation afterwards, small globules of metal were found on the ground surrounding shaft 9; these had been melted from the tanker walls, swept up with the exhaust gases, and dropped out onto the grass around the top of the shaft.

Unable to get close enough to safely fight the fire directly, the fire brigades forced foam into ventilation shafts far from the fire. This created blockages that starved the fire of oxygen. By mid-afternoon the next day, the inferno was no longer burning, though the fire was by no means knocked down. Petrol continued to leak from the derailed wagons through the tunnel drainage and ballast and the vapour sporadically reignited when it came into contact with the hot tunnel lining. It also became apparent that petrol vapour had leaked into the nearby River Roch, possibly creating explosive atmospheres in the nearby towns of Summit and Todmorden, which were partially evacuated in response.

The brigades continued to fight the fire for another two days, until West Yorkshire Fire Brigade issued the stop message just after 6:30 p.m. on Christmas Eve. Fire crews remained at the site until 7 January 1985.

21 st December 1988

Lockerbie:
A bomb explodes on board Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland, killing 270.[8] This is to date the deadliest air disaster to occur on British soil.

On December 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 from London to New York explodes in midair over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew members aboard, as well as 11 Lockerbie residents on the ground. A bomb hidden inside an audio cassette player detonated in the cargo area when the plane was at an altitude of 31,000 feet. The disaster, which became the subject of Britain’s largest criminal investigation, was believed to be an attack against the United States. One hundred eighty nine of the victims were American.

Islamic terrorists were accused of planting the bomb on the plane while it was at the airport in Frankfurt, Germany. Authorities suspected the attack was in retaliation for either the 1986 U.S. air strikes against Libya, in which leader Muammar al-Qaddafi’s young daughter was killed along with dozens of other people, or a 1988 incident, in which the U.S. mistakenly shot down an Iran Air commercial flight over the Persian Gulf, killing 290 people.

Sixteen days before the explosion over Lockerbie, the U.S. embassy in Helsinki, Finland, received a call warning that a bomb would be placed on a Pan Am flight out of Frankfurt. There is controversy over how seriously the U.S. took the threat and whether travelers should have been alerted, but officials later said that the connection between the call and the bomb was coincidental.

In 1991, following a joint investigation by the British authorities and the F.B.I., Libyan intelligence agents Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah were indicted for murder; however, Libya refused to hand over the suspects to the U.S. Finally, in 1999, in an effort to ease United Nations sanctions against his country, Qaddafi agreed to turn over the two men to Scotland for trial in the Netherlands using Scottish law and prosecutors. In early 2001, al-Megrahi was convicted and sentenced to life in prison and Fhimah was acquitted. Over the U.S. government’s objections, Al-Megrahi was freed and returned to Libya in August 2009 after doctors determined that he had only months to live. In December 2020, reports surfaced that the U.S. Justice Department would unseal criminal charges against another suspect in the bombing, Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud.

In 2003, Libya accepted responsibility for the bombing, but didn’t express remorse. The U.N. and U.S. lifted sanctions against Libya and Libya agreed to pay each victim’s family approximately $8 million in restitution. In 2004, Libya’s prime minister said that the deal was the “price for peace,” implying that his country only took responsibility to get the sanctions lifted, a statement that infuriated the victims’ families. Pan Am Airlines, which went bankrupt three years after the bombing, sued Libya and later received a $30 million settlement.

In December 2022, the U.S. Justice Department announced Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud was arrested by the FBI for his suspected role in the bombing.

22 nd December 1965

70 M.P.H. speed limit:



In the United Kingdom, a 70 miles per hour (110 km/h) speed limit is applied to all rural roads including motorways for the first time.

National Speed Limit of 70mph introduced


The 22nd of December 1965 AD

The day that must be etched on Jeremy Clarkson ’s heart.

Just before Christmas 1965 Transport Minister Tom Fraser (not Barbara Castle, as many seem to think) introduced a 70mph limit for drivers on motorways, following several pile-ups in the foggy autumn and winter of that year, though another cause is sometimes cited - the era’s super-cars being seen on motorways in legal-speak: “Travelling at speeds in excess of 150mph”.

Like Income Tax in 1799 this was to be a temporary measure. In the sixties many car drivers were the first in their family to own a vehicle, so with fewer points of reference as regards driving than is the case today. The engineering on some cars (especially in those days brakes) was not great, with many struggling to reach 70mph. At the time then few voices were raised against the measure.

Barbara Castle confirmed the limit as a permanent fixture when she was transport minister in 1967. The genie was out of the bottle to stay.

As driving experience has become ingrained, cars have radically improved, and road building likewise, voices are now starting to be heard about raising the limit, comparing things with France where the top speed is 130kph (80mph), for example. But the chances of this happening are roughly equivalent to those of proportional representation and free beer for all. Indeed it should be recalled that in a period of energy crisis in 1973 the limit was dropped to 50mph for a time, so the smart money would be on a decrease before any increase.

By way of interest, if you feel the need, the need for speed, try the Isle of Man , where rural roads are still de-restricted. Or Germany where much of the autobahn network has no limit. Or if you fancy going a bit further afield, Nepal is another option, though you might want to watch out for a few of those mountain bends.