On this day
10:00am Monday 6th July 2009 in News
1535: Sir Thomas More, English statesman and Lord Chancellor, was executed on Tower Hill for refusing to accept Henry VIII as head of the Church of England.
1685: The Battle of Sedgemoor in Somerset took place — the last on English soil — with victory for James II’s Royalist forces over the rebels under the Duke of Monmouth.
1876: South Cliff Tramway, the first cliff railway, opened in Scarborough.
1885: Louis Pasteur administered his first successful treatment with anti-rabies vaccine.
1886: Box numbers were introduced in classified advertisements by the Daily Telegraph.
1907: Brooklands motor racing track near Weybridge, Surrey, was opened. It closed in 1939.
1919: The British airship R34 became the first to cross the Atlantic, from Edinburgh to New York in 108 hours.
1971: Jazz legend Louis Armstrong died of a heart attack. He once said: “Musicians don’t retire, they stop when there’s no more music in them.”
1988: 167 men died in an explosion on the Piper Alpha oil rig in the North Sea.
LAST YEAR: Fuel duty would be reduced to help hard-pressed families deal with soaring prices under Conservative plans, shadow chancellor George Osborne said.
