The £21,000 Masque
RETRO
With a cast of over 800, and a budget equivalent to £3 million, James Shirley’s extravagant masque ‘The Triumph of Peace’ was performed on 3rd February, 1634. Unusually, it was such a popular show that, despite the enormous cost of staging it, King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria requested that it be repeated. Though …
Killing King Carlos
RETRO
The only Portuguese monarch to be assassinated, King Carlos I, was shot through the neck by Republican activists on 1st February, 1908, as his open carriage rode through Lisbon. His elder son Luis Filipe was also killed, leaving 18 year-old Manuel to become the last King of Portugal. The murder followed Portugal’s former colony Brazil …
Chimps In Space!
RETRO
Before Yuri Gagarin, before Alan Shepard… a chimp called Ham was blasted into space for six-and-a-half minutes of weightlessness on 31st January, 1961. He successfully returned to Earth without serious physical injury, albeit over 100 miles away from NASA’s intended splashdown location. Travelling at 5,857 m.p.h, Ham was seated in a special chair called a …
Hannah Hauxwell: Britain’s First Reality Star
RETRO
Running a remote Yorkshire farm, with no flushing toilet and no electricity is an unlikely route to TV stardom, but 46 year-old spinster Hannah Hauxwell managed it on 30th January, 1973, when ITV aired the landmark documentary ‘Too Long A Winter’. Speaking lyrically about her singlehood, how she braved the bitter Winter, and how she …
Let’s Embalm Lenin
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The corpse of Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Soviet Union, was placed on display in Moscow’s Red Square on 27th January, 1924 – where, astonishingly, he remains viewable to this day. He’d wanted to be buried next to his mother in Saint Petersburg, but after he suffered a series of strokes, the Soviet government instead …
The Nellie Bly Express
RETRO
Pioneering journalist Nellie Bly returned from her 72-day trip around the world on 25th January, 1890. The final leg of the journey was upon a chartered train to New Jersey, nicknamed ‘the Nellie Bly Express’, and Bly was greeted by adoring fans as she traversed the country. Inspired by Jules Verne’s novel, Bly had a …
27 Years in the Jungle
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Japanese ‘holdout’ Shoichi Yokoi had been hiding out in the jungles of Guam since the Second World War when he was discovered by hunters on 24th January, 1972, dressed in clothes woven from tree fibre. The 57 year-old soldier had endured 27 years living in an underground shelter he dug himself, eating toads, river eels …
Rock N Roll’s Big Night
RETRO
The Rock And Roll Hall of Fame welcomed its first inductees in a star-studded event at the Waldorf Astoria, New York on 23rd January, 1986. But the ceremony was not the glamorous HBO spectacular we have come to expect today: the audience was mostly music executives, and it was not filmed for television. Conceived by …
Lalli and the Axe
RETRO
According to Finnish legend, a peasant farmer named Lalli murdered the Christian missionary Bishop Henry on the ice of lake Köyliönjärvi on January 20, 1156, dispatching him with an axe blow to the head. It is fair to say things didn’t go terribly well for Lalli after that. He met a gruesome fate that takes …
The 17th Century UFO
RETRO
One of earliest recorded UFO sightings in America happened on 18th January, 1644 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony when lights rose out of the water near Boston, zoomed across the sky and vanished over the horizon. The events, as documented by the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony John Winthrop in his journal, took place …