Anniversaries

Births: Mark Akenside, poet and physician, 1721; Walter Geikie, painter, 1795; Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, playwright, 1818; Edward VII, King, 1841; Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, architect, 1880; Anthony Asquith, film director and producer, 1902.

Deaths: William Camden, antiquarian and historian, 1623; Gilbert Sheldon, archbishop, 1677; Thomas Girtin, painter and etcher, 1802; Paul Sandby, water-colour painter, 1809; Sir Joseph Joel Duveen, art dealer and collector, 1908; Guillaume Apollinaire (Wilhelm Apollinaris Kostrowitsky), poet, 1918; James Ramsay MacDonald, statesman, 1937; Arthur Neville Chamberlain, statesman, 1940; Chaim Weizmann, first president of Israel, 1952; Dylan Marlais Thomas, poet, 1953; General Charles de Gaulle, statesman, 1970.

On this day: Moses Montefiore was the first Jew to be knighted in England, 1837; the New York Symphony Orchestra gave its first concert, 1858; flogging in the British army was abolished, 1859; the German battleship Emden was destroyed, 1914; Adolf Hitler failed in an attempt to seize power in Munich, 1923; the Japanese took Shanghai, 1937; the death penalty for murder was abolished in Britain, 1965; Edward Brooke of Massachusetts was elected as the first black member of the US Senate, 1966.

Today is the Feast Day of St Benignus or Benen, St Theodore the Recruit and St Vitonus or Vanne.