Today's the Day

[teamsaint]

Pleased to see that a Southampton player finally made it in this week, Ferney . you could only hold out so long, I guess.........

Hopefully a good omen for our big game tomorrow.

[Richard Tarleton]

From a couple of days ago - the right John Williams this time - here he is on the, er, Val Doonican Show, giving a stonking performance of Albeniz' Serenata Torre Bermeja from the 12 Piezas Características - a piece inspired by the sunset on the westernmost tower of the Alhambra.

And talking of guitarists - also in the last couple of days - Duane Eddy - what would Health and Safety have made of this (balanced on a platform on a fork lift truck) - at least the guitars don't appear to be plugged in

[gurnemanz]

Happy 105th to Wilfrid Mellers (a week later than my own dear Dad). I did my PGCE at York University in 1971-72. Luckily our year at the Language Teaching Centre coincided with Prof Mellers' famous, packed-out series of Beatles lectures which we attended with great enthusiasm. Found one YouTube clip.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Pleased to see that a Southampton player finally made it in this week, Ferney . you could only hold out so long, I guess.........
Hopefully a good omen for our big game tomorrow.

Yes - Anita Loos' 1907-8 season as Centre Forward is one of the less-well-known parts of her biography, although it was honoured by the Romanian National team in 1998. She left after the one season, having noticed that there seemed to be more attendance at games held in North-West London, a point commemorated in her novel Gentlemen Prefer Barnets.

[Richard Tarleton]

[LMcD]

- in 1982: duly added to the list.


("Victoria Wood", surely? )

Whoops! Duly corrected. ('I must have got something in my eye' )

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

April 27th

The Feast Day of Saint Assicus, a contemporary and friend of St Patrick, who became the first Bishop of Elphin in (what is now) the North of the Irish Republic. Assicus was a renowned metalworker, and it was as a coppersmith that he became acquainted with Patrick, and a skilled Bell Founder. His followers established a school of Arts & Crafts in his memory, but he wasn't universally popular - and it was the result of a slanderous story told about him that led to Assicus' death; so ashamed was he of the reputation attached to his name that he fled his community and lived as a hermit for seven years. His followers eventually found him and persuaded him to return, but his spartan lifestyle had weakened him so much that he died on the journey home.

It's also Freedom Day in South Africa, commemorating the date of the first non-racial democratic elections held in the country on this date in 1994 -- and UnFreedom Day, also in South Africa, established in 2005 to highlight the lack of access to democracy for the poor and homeless in South Africa. The South African government attempted to ban events in 2009, in a move whose irony obviously went over their heads - and the police were anyway prevented from taking action by the crowds at the demonstration.

Also on this Date: Umayyad troops under Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād invade Gibralta, beginning the Muslim conquest of Hispania (711 - WIKI gives both this date and April 30th); Edward I defeats the army of Scottish King John Balliol at the Battle of Dunbar, and takes the Stone of Scone home with him as a souvenir :"I've brought the kids some rock like they asked" (1296); the Battle of Carbisdale, in which Royalists attempt to impose Charles II as King without the conditions demanded by the Scottish Government (1650); Samuel Simmons pays John Milton a total of £10 [worth about £2500 today] for the exclusive copyright to Paradise Lost (1667 - seven years later, Simmons gives Milton's widow £8 - £1500 - for all the remaining manuscripts of her husband that she still has); Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks is premiered [with "no fiddles" by Royal Command] in Green Park, London (1749); in spite of the heroic efforts of Sybil Ludington overnight, British forces attack Connecticut and win the Battle of Ridgefield (1777 - something of a pyrrhic victory, as this galvanises previously indifferent settlers to take arms to defend their property and rights); Beethoven completes, signs and dates the manuscript of his piano bagatelle, Fur Elise (1810); the London Zoo opens in Regent's Park (1828); Mississippi Steamship, Sultana, carrying over 2000 passengers [1400 of them ex-prisoners of the American Civil War being taken back to their homes] sinks after the four boilers explode - 1,168 people are killed (1865 - the boat has a capacity for 376 passengers, but the Captain has found the $2.75 per soldier offer too tempting); Gounod's Romeo et Juliette is premiered at the Lyric Theatre, Paris (1867); Massenet's opera Le roi de Lahore is premiered at the Palais Garnier, Paris (1877); Chris Watson becomes Australia's third Prime Minister, and the first leader of a Labour Government anywhere in the world (1904); the fourth Olympic Games, and the first held in Britain, open in London (1908); the first half of Fritz Lang's four-and-a-half-hour-long silent film Dr Mabuse the Gambler, is released in Germany (1922 - the remaining two hour conclusion is released a month later; the whole film is itself the first in a trilogy); Himmler approves the site used for the building of Auschwitz 1, which receives its first prisoners a month later (1940 - exactly three tears later to the day, Polish Resistance agent Witold Pilecki escapes from the Camp, where he has deliberately allowed himself to be held in order to gather information and evidence); Athens falls to Nazi invaders (1941 - the Greek forces had inflicted a humiliating defeat on Mussolini's forces earlier in the year, something Hitler could not allow to go unpunished); the last German troops retreat from Finland (1945 - on the same day, Mussolini is captured by anti-fascist Italisn partisans as he tries to escape to Germany); Sierra Leone wins independence from the United Kingdom (1961); Arnold Wesker's Chips With Everything is premiered at the Royal Court Theatre (1962 - John Noakes is in the cast); Afghan president Mohammed Daoud Khan is assassinated in a coup d'etat (1978); Austrian President Kurt Waldheim is banned from entering the United States for his wartime activities (1987); Betty Boothroyd becomes the first [and, so far, only] woman speaker of the House of Commons (1992); the contract to begin construction of the One World Trade Center is signed (2006);

Birthdays Today include: Mary Wollstonecraft (1759); Hyacinthe Jadin (1776); Charles Robert Cockerell (1788); ... .- -- ..- . .-.. / -- --- .-. ... . (1791); Friedrich von Flotow (1812 - the Paris Conservatoire was his alma martha); Ulysses S Grant (1822); Edward Whymper (1840); Serge Prokofiev (1891); Nicolas Slonimsky (1894); William Carrothers (1896); Cecil Day-Lewis (1904); Philip Radcliffe (1905); Guido Cantelli and Edwin Morgan (both 1920); Jack Klugman (1922); Igor Oistrach (1931); Casey Kasem (1932); Geoffrey Shovelton (1936); Judy Carne (1939); Michael Fish (1944); Russel T Davies (1963); Anna Chancellor (1965); Darcey Bussell (1969); Olari Elts (1971); Sally Hawkins (1976); Dai Fujikura (1977); and Jenna Coleman (1986).

Final Days for: Ferdinand Magellan (1521); Jan van Goyen (1656); Sigismond Thalberg (1871); William Macready (1873); Ralph Waldo Emerson (1882); Alexander Scriabin (1915); Hart Crane (1932); Antonio Gramsci (1937); Edmund Husserl (1938); Arthur Shields (1970); Olivier Messiaen (1992); and Mstislav Rostropovich (2007).


And the Radio 3 schedules for the morning of Sunday, 17th April, 1969 were:

What's New? (a weekly programme of recent records)
Bach Cantatas: BWVs 103 & 12
Your Concert Choice: (a request programme of gramophone records)
Music Magazine with features on Searle's Hamlet; Berlioz' Memoirs; Witold Lutoslawski; Duke Ellington at 70

[greenilex]

Looking forward to London Zoo’s bicentenary - hope I am still around to celebrate. I was determined to have a David Attenborough kind of career when I was a small child, and the Society was a big part of that. Alas, my school wasn’t able to offer Biology and I had to settle for pomes and stories instead.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

April 28th

The Feast Day of husband-and-wife Saints Vitatis and Valeria of Milan, very early Christians (late first/early second Century) - the former killed after he'd made his faith obvious by showing support and compassion to another Christian. Vitalis was tortured and then buried alive. Valeria was either beaten so severely after refusing to celebrate the Roman gods that she died of her wounds, OR was tortured and beheaded after attempting to give Christian martyrs a ... well, Christian burial. Vitalis and Valeria had two sons, Gervasius and Protasius, both of whom are also venerated as saints.
And it's International Workers' Memorial Day, a worldwide day of remembrance for those hundreds of thousands of workers each year killed, injured, disabled, or made unwell at their place of work. This is its 40th anniversary, and I cannot remember its being mentioned in Britain, nor ever seeing anyone wearing the purple ribbon commemorating the dead - or, for that matter, ever seeing them on sale. My bad - there were processions in Manchester in 2012.

Also on this Date: the "Good Parliament" sits for the first time, intending to root out corruption in the English Court and to reform Government in England (1376 - sitting for nearly three months, the longest parliament ever at that time, it meets with fierce opposition from chief pocket-liner, John of Gaunt); the Battle of Cerignola between Spanish and French forces ends with a decisive victory for the Spanish, who use arquebuses against the French cavalry - one of the earliest uses of small-arms gunpowder in a European conflict (1503); Acting Lieutenant Fletcher Christian wrests control of HMS Bounty from his commander, Lieutenant William Bligh (1789 - Bligh and 18 of his supporters are set adrift in the South Pacific, and manage to row 4000 miles to safety); Fetis' edition of Meyerbeer's unfinished opera L'Africaine is premiered at the Paris Opera (1864); Billy the Kid, under sentence of death, kills his jailer as he is taken to "an outhouse" and escapes (1881); Dvorak conducts the first performance of his Carnival Overture in Prague (1892); the first long-distance air race in England [from London to Manchester] is won by French aviator Louis Paulhan (1910 - the runner-up is Brit Claude Grahame-Wright, whose plane is beset by engine trouble; as a result, he gains the consolation prize of having made the first long-distance flight at night); Soviet troops invade Azerbaijan, bringing the 23-month-old independent republic back under Russian control (1920); the Empire Stadium opens in London, ready for the British Empire Exhibition of 1924-25 - it has cost £750,000 [around £45million today] (1923 - as it is bulit in Wembley Park, it quickly becomes known as "Wembley Stadium". The replacement stadium completed in 2007 cost £798million [just over £1billion today - or about the cost of a DUP bribe]); the Glenn Miller Orchestra records Pennsylvania 6-500 (1940 - the telephone number of the New York hotel in which the band frequently performed); Serbian fascists massacre nearly 200 Croatian Serbs in the Croatian village of Gudovac - the beginning of a genocidal campaign against Serbs that continues throughout the rest of World War 2 (1941); Thor Heyerdahl and five associates begin the Kon-Tiki Expedition (1947 - the raft is at sea for 101 days, sailing 4300miles from Peru to Polynesia); Stravinsky conducts the premiere of his ballet Orpheus [with choreography by George Balanchine] in New York (1948); Luciano Pavarotti makes his La Scala debut, in a revival of Zeffirelli's production of La Boheme, with Karajan conducting (1965); Muhammad Ali attends his induction into the US Army, but refuses twice to step forward when his name is called; he is warned that he is committing a felony punishable by five years in prison and a $10000 fine, but he still refuses to step forward and he is arrested - later that day, the New York State Athletics Commission strip him of his title of Heavyweight Champion of the World, and suspend his Licence to box (1967 - he is not allowed to box for the next three years); 78-year-old Charles de Gaulle steps down as President of France (1969); exactly a week after declaring that he would not resign, but would carry on fighting, South Vietnamese General Cao Van Vien resigns and flees the country as North Vietnamese troops continue their advance on Saigon (1975); members of the Red Army Faction, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and and Jan-Carl Raspe, are found guilty of several murders, other attempted murders, and of forming a terrorist group after a seven month trial (1977 - they are sentenced to life imprisonment); the new, People's Democratic Party government of Afghanistan announces that the former President, Mohammed Daoud Khan has resigned from office "for health reasons" - they neglect to mention that these have been caused by their having just shot him (1978 - the coup begins a period of violent Civil War in the country that continues to this day); the Soviet authorities announce the Chernobyl explosions after high levels of radiation are detected 900 miles away in Sweden (1986); Aldrich Ames, who had been a CIA counterintelligence officer with 31 years experience, pleads guilty to spying for and supplying classified information to the KGB (1994 - Ames' personal record was often marked "mediocre" and even "poor" but he was still given access to highly sensitive information. It was noticed that, with an annual salary of just $60,000, he could still afford to pay $540,000 home and a $50,000 jaguar car in cash, and a monthly credit card bill greater than his annual salary. But he passed polygraph ["lie detector"] tests twice in his career - those cunning swine the Soviets had given him top secret advice on how to deceive the equipment: "Just relax"); a gunman shoots at over sixty people at various parts of Port Arthur, Tasmania: 35 of them are killed (1996); CBS News releases evidence of American troops torturing and raping prisoners of war in Iraq - the "evidence" mostly consisting of photographs taken by the troops themselves (2004 - the torture is consistent with documents prepared by the US Department of Justice the year before, arguing that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to US "interrogators" working overseas); and 8 people are killed and many others injured after the Taliban attacks election candidates in Pakistan ahead of the next month's election (2013).

Birthdays Today include: Edward of York [later Edward IV] (1442); Tobias Asser (1838); Karl Kraus (1874); Lionel Barrymore (1878); Kurt Gödel and Paul Sacher (both 1906); Oskar Schindler (1908); Mildred Persinger (1918); Dick Ayers (1924); Francis Burt and Harper Lee (both 1926); Yves Klein and Eugene Merle Shoemaker (both 1928); Christopher Headington (1930); Mike Brearley (1942); Nicola LeFanu (1947); Terry Pratchett (1948); Bruno Kirby (1949); Jay Leno (1950); Gerald Barry (1952); Michael Daugherty (1954); Ian Rankin (1960); Penelope Cruz (1974); Marketa Dvorakova (1977); Bradley Wiggins (1980); Jessica Alba (1981);

Final Days for: Rhys ap Gruffydd (1197); Thomas Betterton (1710); Ludwig Tieck (1853); Samuel Cunard (1865); Carl Ferdinand Pohl (1887); Alexander Mackenzie (1935); Richard Hughes (1976); Francis Bacon (1992); Rolf Landauer and Alf Ramsey (both 1999); Kim Borg and Penelope Fitzgerald (both 2000); Percy Heath (2005); Milan Popović (2012); and Janos Starker (2013).


And the Radio 3 schedules for the morning of Saturday, 28th April, 1979 were:

Aubade: Vaughan Williams Toccata marziale; arr Canteloube L'Aio de rotso; Bailero; Malurous qu'o uno fenno (Songs of the Auvergne); Weber Polacca brillante; Elgar Variations on an original theme (Enigma).
Record Review: introduced by John Lade, who kept his mouth shut whilst Charles Osborne reviewed Mozart's Cosi, and whilst David Murray discussed "miscellaneous new records". I liked John Lade - he was good.
New Releases: Schumann Papillons (played by Peter Frankl); Schubert "Death & the Maiden" S4tet (the Chilingirians).
Russian Songs by Tchaikovsky and Georgi Sviridov sung by Irina Arkhipova with Craig Sheppard.
Robin Ray "presents for your pleasure a weekly selection of popular classics, in performances chosen from over 75 years of gramophone recordings".

[vinteuil]

The Feast Day of husband-and-wife Saints Vitatis and Valeria of Milan, very early Christians (late first/early second Century) - the former killed after he'd made his faith obvious by showing support and compassion to another Christian. Vitalis was tortured and then buried alive. Valeria was either beaten so severely after refusing to celebrate the Roman gods that she died of her wounds, OR was tortured and beheaded after attempting to give Christian martyrs a ... well, Christian burial. Vitalis and Valeria had two sons, Gervasius and Protasius, both of whom are also venerated as saints.

... the church of SS Gervais & Protais in Paris became the fiefdom of the Couperin dynasty :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St-Gervais-et-St-Protais

.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

[Richard Tarleton]

Janos Starker (2013).

By complete coincidence (hadn't looked at this) I listened to Starker's 6th Bach Cello Suite last night - I was thinking about the cello suites in view of the impending arrival of Ms Podger's set. Starker's 6th was my introduction to the Bach Cello Suites on a February night in Plymouth in 1971, something you don't forget - I had gone to someone's house for supper and he put the LP on - the Prelude made my hair stand on end. A year or two previously, Starker's had been the first version of the Dvorak Cello Concerto I ever heard, in the LP collection of my landlord, a Czech emigré, for my last 2 undergraduate years. His Kodaly Suite for unaccompanied cello was mentioned on the Forum recently - I think on the Ess. Classics tread (someone, presumably SK, had just played the first movement of it by Natalie Clein and left us dangling....)

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

April 29th

The traditional date that Noah decided that it was safe to leave the Ark.

And the Feast Day of St Cenheidlan - or, to give the latinised version of her name, St Endelianta - better known in English as St Endellion; ironically, as it was the invading English pirates who killed this Celtic-Brittonic saint. Believed to be a daughter of King Brychan of modern-day Breconshire, and supposedly a god-daughter of King Arthur, she settled with her siblings in her godfather's Kingdom of Cornwall, spreading the Christian gospel to the local people. The church and village of St Endellion is named after her, and the annual Music festivals and the String Quartet (with 'cellist nephew of Leeds Piano Competition founder Fanny Waterman) named after the village.
And it's International Dance Day - and Day of Remembrance for All Victims of Chemical Weapons.

Also on this Date: Joan of Arc enters the city of Orlean (1429 - the first decisive victory for the French in the Hundred Years' War since their defeat at Agincourt, fourteen years earlier); James Watt's patent for a steam engine with separate condenser is "inrolled" [sic](1769); Captain Cook sets foot in Australia, instantly naming the territory "Stringray Bay" - on reflection, he later decides that, in light of the scientific reason for the Endeavour's expedition, "Botany Bay" probably sounds a bit more inviting (1770); French Admiral Comte de Grasse successfully breaks a British blockade of the Fort Royal port of Martinique, allowing the four French ships anchored there to leave (1781); a week after it had been completed, Mantuan violinist Regina Strinasacchi gives the first performance of Mozart's Violin Sonata in Bb [K454] with the composer [who plays the piano part from memory, as he hasn't finished writing out yet] (1784); Haydn's Creation receives a public rehearsal/run-through at the Gesellschaft der Associierten ["Society of Associates"] in Vienna; the first time the work is heard (1798 - the "official" public premiere takes place the following year); Peter Mark Roget's Thesaurus is published (1852 - Roget himself had created it nearly 50 years earlier); Union Forces capture New Orleans, the largest city of the Confederate States (1862); Maori warriors inflict a humiliating defeat on the British Army at the Battle of Gate Pā, despite being heavily outnumbered (1864); a landslide of more than 90million tons of limestone rock obliterates the North West Canadian mining town of Frank - around 90 people are killed, and many of them remain buried under the rubble (1903); David Lloyd George, the Liberal Government's Chancellor of the Exchequer, presents the People's Budget - imposing Tax increases on the richest members of society in order to fund social welfare programmes for the poorest (1910 - Lloyd George is supported by the President of the Board of Trade, Winston Churchill); the five-month-long Siege of Kut ends when the British surrender to Ottoman Army (1916 - on the exact same day, the Easter Rising in Dublin comes to an end with the surrender of the Republican forces - they are jeered by the crowds as they are led to prison, but the British Army then manage to grasp defeat from the jaws of victory in their unjust treatment and summary executions of the prisoners); the German Army in Italy surrenders to the Allied forces (1945 - on the same day, American Troops under the command of Lieutenant Felix Sparks liberate Dachau Extermination Camp; Allied Bombers drop food and medical parcels on Holland to relieve the Nazi-imposed Dutch Famine [and saving, amongst thousands of others, 13-year-old Audrey Hepburn's life]; HMS Goodall becomes the last Royal Navy ship to be sunk by a U-Boat; and Adolf Hitler marries Eva Braun [the bride's mother is heard to mutter "it won't last"]); Frank Martin's oratorio Golgotha is premiered in Geneva (1949); Aretha Franklin's Respect, recorded on St Valentine's Day, is released (1967); South Vietnamese troops, backed by the United States, invade Cambodia (1970); President Nixon announces the release of the edited highlights of his Watergate tapes in an attempt to exonerate himself of all blame in the Scandal (1974); Operation Frequent Wind [and there's probably never been a more appropriate name] begins to evacuate US citizens and South Vietnamese allies from Saigon to escape the advancing North Vietnamese army (1975); an arson attack, on Los Angeles Public Library causes a fire that takes fire officers seven hours to extinguish and destroys 400,000 books, and damages 700,000 others (1986 - nobody is hurt); a cyclone devastates the South-East of Bangladesh, killing at least 138,866 people, and leaving ten million others homeless (1991 - on exactly the same day, an earthquake in Racha in western Georgia left 270 people dead, 100,000 homeless, and destroys many mediaeval buildings); riots break out in Los Angeles following the acquital of the police officers who had violently beaten up Rodney King, a black construction worker (1992 - the riots continue for the next five days, resulting in 63 deaths, 2383 people injured, 12,000 arrests, and damage to property worth over $1billion); the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993 outlawing the production, possession, and use of chemical weapons comes into force (1997 - Egypt, Israel, North Korea, and Sudan have never signed up); Prince William and Kate Middleton get married in Westminster Abbey (2011); and, this time last year, Amber Rudd resigns as Home Secretary after having "inadvertently misled the Home Affairs Select Committee ... on the issue of illegal immigration" following the Windrush cock-up.

Birthdays Today include: John Arbuthnot (1667); David Cox (1783); Karl Millöcker (1842); Joachim Andersen (1847); Raja Ravi Varma (1848); Henri Poincaré (1854); William Randolph Hearst (1863); Rafael Sabatini (1875); Friedrich Adler (1878); Thomas Beecham (1879); Malcolm Sargent (1895); Wallingford Riegger (1885); Fred Zinnemann (1907); Celeste Holm (1917); Harold Shapero (1920); Heinz Wolff (1928); Peter Sculthorpe and Jeremy Thorpe (both 1929); Frank Auerbach and Lonnie Donegan (both 1931); Joy Clements (1932); Rod McKuen and Willie Nelson (1933); Zubin Mehta (1936); Klaus Voorman (1938); Brenda Dean (1943); Francis Lee (1944); Jerry Seinfeld (1954); Kate Mulgrew (1955); Daniel Day-Lewis (1957); Michelle Pfeiffer (1958); Christian Tetzlaff (1966); Uma Thurman and André Agassi (both 1970); ... and, 120 years ago today, Edward Kennedy Ellington.

Final Days for: John Cleveland (1658); George Farquhar (1707); Ludwig Wittgenstein (1951); Paula Strasberg (1966); Alfred Hitchcock (1980); Mick Ronson (1993); Albert Hofmann (2008); Johannes Fritsch and Sandy Douglas (both 2010); and, five years ago, both Al Feldstein and Bob Hoskins.



And the Radio 3 schedules for the morning of Saturday, 29th April, 1989 were:

Morning Concert: Saint-Saens La Jeunesse d'Hercule; Franck Psyche et Eros; Berlioz Le Carnaval romain Ovt; Berwald Symphonie capricieuse
The Week on 3 with Penny Gore
Melvyn Tan plays Beethoven Sonata in F Op 10 #2, Variations on 'Menuet a la Vigano',
Sonata in Eb, Op 31 #3
Saturday Review: Stephen Johnson introduced [but kept his opinions to himself] Edward Greenfield's BaL on Schumann's "Rhenish" Symphony; and Christopher Headington's review of new releases of British Music. Record Release included [complete works]: Tippett Little Music for Strings; Stravinsky Renard; Davies' An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise; Mozart Pno3o in G (K 564); Beethoven Sonata in Eb, Op81a ("Les Adieux") [recorded by Godowski in 1929, and followed by the pianist's transcription of Home, Sweet Home]; Britten St Nicolas.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

April 30th

Walpurgis Night - celebrating the canonization of the 8th-Century Anglo-Saxon Saint Wallburga, who was born to an aristocratic family in present-day Devonshire. With her brothers Willibald and Winnibald (her father was called Richard) she became a missionary, assisting theor Uncle, St Bonniface, in spreading the gospel in the heathen parts of the Frankish Empire (mostly now in modern-day Germany). She is the Patron Saint of Eichstatt (where her remains were interred on 1st May, 870), Antwerp, and Zutphen in the Netherlands - and is evoked against rabies, storms (especially at sea) ... and witches; which explains the Hallowe'en-like activities associated with tonight. In parts of Britain, this has become diluted to "Mischief Night", in which children are supposed to be allowed to play tricks and practical jokes on their elders and betters. (One source I have describes this as being confined to "Lancashire, Yorkshire, and the surrounding counties", but living in both counties from 1960-81, I never encountered it - and it was not until I lived in Durham that I heard of the custom. I have a feeling that it was held on a different night, too - and involved cling film over a toilet seat.)

It's also International Jazz Day -

- and Honesty Day in the United States! (Reminds me of the cartoon - Washington: I cannot tell a lie; Nixon: I cannot tell the truth; Trump: I cannot tell the difference.)

Also on this Date: the eight-year-long Diocletian Persecution, aimed at rooting Christianity out of the Roman Empire (and responsible for the creation of several dozen saints from the massacred believers) comes to an end (311); French King Henry IV signs the Edict of Nantes, allowing certain rights for the remaining Huguenots in France (1598); William Congreve's Love for Love is premiered at Lincoln's Inn Square, London (1695); the Inauguration Ceremony of George Washington as first President of the United States (1789); the Louisiana Purchase is signed, in which the United States pays Napoleon $15million [money the Emperor needs to buy more armaments against the British] for territories that will nearly double the size of the United States (1803 - the US had hoped just to buy the much smaller territory of New Orleans, for which they'd been willing to pay $10million - they sign the Purchase agreement hurriedly, in case Napoleon realised how cheap he was offering his unwanted American territories); Berlioz conducts the premiere of his Te Deum in the Church of St Eustache in Paris (1855 - there are about 950 performers following his baton); the first of 31 installments of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities appears in the weekly magazine All the Year Round (1859); a besieged French Foreign Legion force of just 65 soldiers fights a force of 2000-3000 Mexican troops at the Battle of Camaron (1863); a group of around 140 vigilantes attack and murder as many unarmed Apache Indians who had surrendered to and were under the protection of the US government at Camp Grant in Arizona (1871 - only eight of the murdered were men of "fighting age"); David B Hill, Governor of New York, ensures that the Niagara Reservation becomes a State Park, ensuring that the area is not exploited for industrial/commercial purposes (1885); JJ Thomson, of the Cavendish Laboratory, announces the discovery of the Electron, a subatomic particle over 1800 times smaller than the Proton [which is already what scientists call "really, really tiny"] (1897); Casey Jones sacrifices his own life to prevent greater loss of life when the Cannonball Express crashes into an abandoned freight train - he is the only person to be killed in the crash (1900 - five years earlier, Jones had also risked his life to save that of a child who had become petrified with fear on a railway track as the train Jones was driving advanced on her); Andre Messager conducts the world premiere of Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande at the Opera Comique, Paris, with Mary Garden as Melisande (1902 - Maeterlinck had been expecting his wife to get the role of Melisande, and isn't at all happy with the opera until he actually hears it, two years after Debussy's death, at which point he publicly retracts his many earlier criticisms of the opera); at the St Louis World Fair, ice cream salesman Arnold Fornachou runs out of paper tubs, so improvises a solution by rolling waffles sold from the van next to his into cones - the idea is very popular (1904); Douglas Fairbanks [snr] and Mary Pickford become the first Hollywood stars to leave their palm prints in the concrete outside Grauman's Chinese Theater (1937); the New York World Fair opens (1939 - the opening ceremony is used by NBC as inaugurating their regular television service); Glyndor Michael, a homeless Welshman who has died on the street of Londion having eaten food contaminated with rat poison, becomes a posthumous War hero when his body, dressed in the uniform of a Royal Marines officer and handcuffed to a briefcase containing falsified documents headed "Top Secret", is launched off the coast of Spain (1943 - the body is recovered by Spanish fishermen, and Franco despatches the documents to Hitler); having been informed by his staff that they have less than a day's worth of ammunition left, Hitler gives permission for his staff to leave the fuhrerbunker, and shoots himself (1945 - Mrs Hitler swallows a cyanide pill; their bodies are cremated - on the same day, Stalag Luft I is liberated by Soviet troops, freeing 9000 British and American prisoners-of-war - and other Soviet troops raise the Soviet Banner of Victory over the Reichstag Building); Boulder Dam is renamed Hoover Dam (1947); the first Soviet nuclear-powered submarine, carrying nuclear ballistic missiles, is commissioned (1961); the Bristol Bus Boycott begins, protesting against the bus company's refusal to employ "coloured" staff to crew their services (1963 - the boycott lasts four months, before the company backs down, and is instrumental in the drawing up of the Race Relations Act two years later); celebrating Walpurgisnacht, the Church of Satan opens its doors at the Black House in San Francisco (1966); in an unsuccessful attempt to diffuse the Watergate Scandal, President Nixon announces the sacking and resignation of a number of his aides (1973); the 20-year-long Vietnam War comes to an end as Saigon falls and the South Vietnamese president surrendering unconditionally to the North Vietnamese (1975); six gunmen members of the Democratic Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Arabistan take control of the Iranian Embassy in London, beginning a six-day-long siege (1980); 17 members of the Ananda Marga faith are dragged from taxis, beaten to death and set on fire in broad daylight in Calcutta (1982 - no arrests were ever made, and an official inquiry into the murders only begins, after international pressure, fourteen years later, but is frustrated in its investigations by interference from the state government); 42million people watch the episode of sitcom Ellen, in which the lead character lets everyone know that she's Gay (1997); two skeletons discovered in Yekaterinburg are confirmed to be those of Tsarevich Alexei and his older sister Anastasia (2008); a ferry carrying 305 passengers capsizes on the Brahmaputra river in Assam; as there are no lifebelts on the boat, at least 103 passengers are drowned (2012 - a further 100 passengers are still unaccounted for); 2-year-old Hannah Warren, who had been born without a windpipe, becomes the first person to receive a replacement organ created by stem cell bioengineering (2013 - she dies three months later, as the genetic problem that resulted in her birth defect has weakened other tissues as well); two Turkestan Islamist terrorists detonate bombs at Ürümqi Railway Station in Xinjiang, killing themselves and a bypasser, and injuring 79 others (2014); and, this time last year in Western Australia, the world's oldest-known spider, a 43-year-old Trapdoor, dies when a wasp stings it.

Birthdays Today include: Mary II (1662); Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777); Franz Lehar (1870); Alice B Toklas (1877); Charl ...

... hold on a minute ...

A "forty-three-year-old spider"???!!!

... <ahem> ... Charles Exeter Devereux Crombie (1880); Jaroslav Hasek and Luigi Russolo (both 1883); Robert Shaw (1916); Roger L Easton (1921); Percy Heath (1923); Tony Harrison (1937); Ellen Taaffe Zwillich (1939); Jane Champion (1954); Adrian Williams (1956); Andrew Carwood (1963); Pooky Quesnel (1964); and Kirsten Durnst (1982).

Final Days for: Lucan (65); Robert Plot (1696); Robert FitzRoy (1865); Edouard Manet (1883); AE Housman (1936); Beatrice Webb (1943); Jacques Presser (1970); Agnes Moorehead (1974); George Balanchine and Muddy Waters (both 1983); Sergio Leone (1989); Charlotte von Mahlsdorf (2002); Leo Kraft (2014); Ben E King (2015 - and Ronald Senator, twelve days after his 89th birthday); and Harry Krato (2016).


And the Radio 3 schedules for the morning of Wednesday, 30th April, 1969 were:

Overture: gramophone records
Your Midweek Choice: a record request programme
This Week's Composer: Bach (Colin Tilney played the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue , BWV 903, and the D major Partitia BWV 828)
Orchestral Concert: gramophone records
Organ Recital by Michael Austin from Wimborne Cathedral
Music Making: Chamber Music performed by members of the Nash Ensemble, and Piano Music played by Sviatoslav Richter.

[gurnemanz]

Re "Wallburga, who was born to an aristocratic family in present-day Devonshire. With her brothers Willibald and Winnibald (her father was called Richard) she became a missionary, assisting theor Uncle, St Bonniface, in spreading the gospel in the heathen parts of the Frankish Empire (mostly now in modern-day Germany). She is the Patron Saint of Eichstatt"

I have been to Eichstätt (NB umlaut) - very pretty, very Catholic. When teaching in Bavaria I had a colleague called Wallburga. I have never come across the name in England.