On This Day - 14th June

1381 Richard II met leaders of Wat Tyler's Peasants' Revolt on Blackheath. The Tower of London was stormed by rebels who entered without resistance. The revolt later came to be seen as a mark of the beginning of the end of serfdom in medieval England. Although the revolt itself was a failure it increased awareness in the upper classes of the need for the reform of feudalism in England and the appalling misery felt by the lower classes as a result of their enforced near-slavery.



1645 The Battle of Naseby (Northamptonshire) was fought. See picture. It was the key battle of the first English Civil War. 12,000 Royalist forces of King Charles I were beaten by 15,000 Parliamentarian soldiers commanded by Sir Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell.

1789 English Captain William Bligh and 18 others, cast adrift from the H.M.S. Bounty, reached Timor after travelling nearly 4,000 miles in a small, open boat. The Bounty had been sailing from Tahiti when crew members mutinied.

1822 Englishman Charles Babbage proposed an automatic, mechanical calculator (he called it a difference engine). He is considered a 'father of the computer' and is credited with inventing the first mechanical computer that eventually led to more complex designs.

1919 At 14.13 GMT, Captain John Alcock and Lt. Arthur Whitten-Brown took off from Newfoundland on the first non-stop transatlantic flight to Galway, Ireland, in a Vickers Vimy. They landed safely 16 hours later, on the 15th and claimed a £10,000 prize from the Daily Mail. They were eventually knighted by King George V. When Alcock was killed in an air crash in France in December 1919 his partner, Brown, never flew again.

1928 The death of the British suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst. Emmeline and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia lived for 10 years at this house (see picture) on 62 Nelson Street, Manchester. It was the birthplace of the Suffragette movement and is now the Pankhurst Centre (see plaque - picture)

1936 The death of the author G.K. Chesterton, well known for his fictional priest-detective Father Brown who is featured in a series of 53 short stories. They were made into a TV series, filmed in the village of Blockley (north Cotswolds) and primarily here, (see picture) at St. Peter & St. Paul Church. These photographs of the filming (see picture) are displayed in the church.

1944 World War II: After several failed attempts, the British Army abandoned Operation Perch, its plan to capture the German-occupied town of Caen. Caen was a major Allied objective in the early stages of the invasion of northwest Europe but a combination of fierce German resistance and failures at the British command level foiled the operation before its objectives were achieved.

1946 John Logie Baird, Scottish inventor who developed television died.

1968 British yachtsman Robin Knox-Johnson set out to sail solo around the world.

1970 Manchester United footballer Bobby Charlton played his 106th and last international match for England against West Germany in the World Cup finals in Mexico. His first game had been in April 1958 against Scotland.

1972 Hundreds of thousands of holidaymakers faced flight delays and cancellations as pilots threatened to strike over hijack fears.

1976 Former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson received a knighthood.

1982 Argentine forces surrendered at Port Stanley, ending the Falklands War. 255 Britons and 652 Argentines died in the conflict. See the picture of the Falklands Memorial in Holy Trinity Church, Hull and this memorial (see picture) which centres on a five-tonne rock from the Falkland Islands, a gift from the islanders.

1995 Pauline Clare, 47, became the first woman to be appointed chief constable in Britain.

1997 Queen Elizabeth II birthday honours included a George Medal for teacher Lisa Potts, survivor of a machete attack at her school (1996) and a posthumous Queen's Gallantry medal for headmaster Philip Lawrence murdered outside his school in December 1995.

2013 Airbus A350, the newest aircraft from European planemaker Airbus successfully completed its maiden test flight. The plane, seen as vital to the future of Airbus is a direct competitor to US rival Boeing's 787 Dreamliner.

2016 Rochdale Council re-opened the River Roch (which runs below the town centre), to expose the 14th century bridge (see picture). Seven bridges had been joined together for a distance of 446 metres in the early 1900s when tram lines were extended to the town, making it the widest bridge in Europe.

2017 A fire in the 24-storey Grenfell Tower block at North Kensington, West London caused 72 deaths. The fire started accidentally in a fridge-freezer on the fourth floor and the building burned for about 60 hours. The rapid spread of the fire destroyed the building and was thought to have been accelerated by the building's exterior cladding, which at the time was of a common type in widespread use. A full inquiry into the fire was opened on 21st May 2018.