June 18th

Today is Waterloo Day, the date of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. It is remembered and celebrated by certain regiments of the British Army.( Well at least the ones that still exist!). Best remembered celebration was by ABBA in the 1970s.


1767  Samuel Wallis, an English sea captain, sights the island of Tahiti and becomes the first European to reach the island. Wallis was born near Camelford, Cornwall, in 1766 he was given the command of HMS Dolphin to circumnavigate the world.



1914 American actor E.G. Marshall was born at Owatunna, Minnesota as Everett Eugene Grunz. Best known for his television roles as the lawyer Lawrence Preston on The Defenders in the 1960s and as neurosurgeon David Craig on The Bold Ones: The New Doctors in the 1970s. Among his film roles he is perhaps best known as the unflappable, conscientious "Juror #4" in Sidney Lumet's courtroom drama, 12 Angry Men (1957).


1915 American fire fighting legend Red Adair was born at Houston, Texas as Paul Neal Adair. He became world notable as an innovator in the highly specialized and extremely hazardous profession of extinguishing and capping blazing, erupting oil well blowouts, both land-based and offshore.


1917 American actor, singer and director Richard Boone was born in Los Angeles. He starred in over 50 films and was notable for his roles in Westerns and for starring in the TV series Have Gun – Will Travel.


1920 Ian Gillette Carmichael was born at Hull, East Yorkshire.  He portrayed serious characters in Betrayed (1954), starring Clark Gable and Lana Turner, and in The Colditz Story (1955), but he made his name playing in a series of films for the Boulting brothers, including Private's Progress (1956), Brothers in Law (1957) and I'm All Right Jack (1959), as well as similar films for other producers, for example School for Scoundrels (1960). On television he was Bertie Wooster, opposite Dennis Price as Jeeves, in several series of The World of Wooster, based on the works of P.G. Wodehouse. In later years, he was heard on BBC radio as Galahad Threepwood, another Wodehouse creation. In the 1970s, he played Lord Peter Wimsey in several drama series based on the mystery novels by Dorothy L. Sayers.

1927 English actor Paul Eddington was born at St. John's Wood, London. He is best remembered for his TV roles as Jerry Leadbetter in "The Good Life" and as politician Jim Hacker in "Yes Minister" and its sequel "Yes Prime Minister".



1940  "The Appeal of 18th June", was a speech by Charles De Gaulle, the leader of the Free French Forces. It is often believed to be the origin of the French Resistance to the German occupation during World War II.


1940  " Their Finest Hour" speech by Winston Churchill was made in the House of Commons at 3.49pm and lasted for 36 minutes.


'What General Weygand has called the Battle of France is over: the Battle of  Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian  civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of  our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very  soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island  or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life  of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then  the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known  and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister,  and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us  therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that, if the British  Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say:  This was their finest hour '.


1941 Super chef Delia Smith was born at Woking, Surrey. She is the UK's best-selling cookery author, with more than 21 million copies sold.


1942 Musician/songwriter/ex Beatle Sir James Paul McCartney  is born in Liverpool.



1949/50 The British sect or cult " The Very Flat Earthists" climb to the top of Pendle Hill, believing that the world was to end at 11pm that evening.Basing their belief upon the writings of the West Yorkshire Nostradamus, Arthur Sugden of Pontefract who in his 1879 book, ' Ee Bah Gum am I Blessed' said, "On the eighteenth day of the sixth month in the year of one thousand nine hundred and forty nine, the Lord in his wisdom shall lay waste unto the world except for th'chosen ones who shalt climb t'top of that big 'I'll in Pendle." When the world carried on after 11pm the followers led by the Reverend Greene descended the hill but a year later they repeated the climb...and to this day they and their defendants still climb the hill to await the end of the world.





1972  British European Airways flight 548 crashed after less than three minutes when suffering a deep stall . It came to ground near the town of Staines, narrowly missing a busy main road. All 118 people on board died and the crash was blamed upon pilot error.



1984 "The Battle of Orgreave" took place during the Miners' strike when 5,000 strikers faced off with around 5,000 police, after the police charged the strikers on horseback with truncheons drawn, 51 picketers and 72 Police were injured.


2007 Stand-up comedian Bernard Manning died in North Manchester General Hospital two weeks after being admitted with a kidney complaint. He was 76yo. Manning told irreverent jokes about people from all walks of life, but his act was best known for material involving ethnic stereotypes and minority groups. This led to frequent criticism that his act was racist, which he always discounted, saying: "I tell jokes. You never take a joke seriously."


2012 Victor Giorgio Andrea Spinetti died aged 82yo from prostate cancer in Monmouth, Wales. He appeared in dozens of films and stage plays throughout his 50-year career and is best remembered today for appearing in the three Beatles films in the 1960s, A Hard Day's Night, Help! and Magical Mystery Tour.



2012 Surrey cricketer Tom Maynard's car was spotted being driven erratically and stopped by police, Maynard fled the scene and at around 5am he was electrocuted on a railway line near Wimbledon Park Station, subsequently he was hit by a London Underground  District Line train, his body being discovered at 5.10am. He was 23yo.