January 21st

National Day

• Squirrel Appreciation Day
• One-Liners Day
• National Hug Your Puppy Day

Birthdays

• 1950 – Billy Ocean, British singer-songwriter (“Caribbean Queen”, “Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car”), born in Fyzabad, Trinidad and Tobago.
• 1956 – Geena Davis, American actress (Thelma and Louise, The Fly, A League of Their Own), born in Wareham, Massachusetts, United States.
• 1966 – Wendy James, English singer-songwriter most notable for her work with the pop band Transvision Vamp (“Baby I Don’t Care”), born in London.
• 1976 – Emma Bunton, English singer (“What Took You So Long”) who rose to fame in the 1990s as a member of the Spice Girls (“Wannabe”), born in Finchley, London.
• 1977 – Phil Neville, English football manager (MLS club Portland Timbers), former player (Manchester United) and co-owner of Salford City, born in Bury, Lancashire.
• 2007 – Luke Littler, English professional darts player and current World No.1 winning in 2025 and 2026 the youngest world champion in darts history, born in Warrington, Cheshire.

On This Day

• 1919 – The birth, in Leith, of Captain Eric “Winkle” Brown, former Royal Navy officer and test pilot who flew more types of aircraft than anyone else in history. He is also the Fleet Air Arm’s most decorated pilot and holds the world record for aircraft carrier landings – around 1,500 deck landings on 22 different aircraft carriers.
• 1950 – The British writer George Orwell died after a three year battle against tuberculosis. His books included 1984 and Animal Farm. They were controversial and 1984, like Animal Farm, was widely viewed as an attack on the Communist system.
• 1966 – The Monte Carlo rally ended in uproar over the disqualification of the British cars expected to fill the first four places. They were all ruled out of the prizes, along with six other British cars, for alleged infringements of regulations about the way their headlights dipped.
• 1970 – Five RNLI volunteers died in the Fraserburgh lifeboat disaster. It left five women widowed and 15 children mourning the loss of a father. The 1970 disaster marked the third time that a lifeboat from Fraserburgh had been lost. The north east town had previously faced tragedy in 1953 (6 crew died) and 1919 (the death of 2 crew members).
• 1971 – The current Emley Moor transmitting station, situated in Kirklees, West Yorkshire, began transmitting UHF broadcasts for Yorkshire Television. At 330.4 metres (1,084 ft) tall, it is the tallest free-standing structure in the United Kingdom and is a Grade II listed building. Emley Moor transmitting station is 1 mile west of Emley, in Kirklees, West Yorkshire. The tower’s official name is Arqiva Tower.
• 1976 – The first Concorde jets carrying commercial passengers simultaneously took off, at 11:40 a.m. from Heathrow Airport and Orly Airport outside Paris. The London flight was to Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, and the Paris flight was to Rio de Janeiro. Nearly 3 hours was knocked off the normal flying time to Bahrain by the British Concorde but the Air France Concorde arrived 38 minutes late.
• 1981 – The iconic DeLorean DMC-12 sports car began production in Dunmurry, Northern Ireland, near Belfast, creating many jobs but ultimately facing financial collapse despite its fame from the Back to the Future films.
• 1990 – John McEnroe was disqualified from the 1990 Australian Open for misconduct after a series of code violations for verbal and racket abuse in his fourth-round match against Mikael Pernfors. He was unaware of a new rule that reduced the number of violations needed for immediate disqualification from four to three, leading to his default after arguing with officials, despite being up two sets to one.
• 2008 – Black Monday on the world’s stock markets saw the FTSE 100 have its biggest ever one-day fall. European stocks closed with their worst result since 11th September 2001, and Asian stocks dropped as much as 14%.
• 2014 – Pub chain JD Wetherspoon opened a new £1m pub, at junction 2 of the M40 in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, in spite of fierce criticism from road safety and alcohol campaigners. The Hope and Champion became Britain’s first pub ever to be opened at a motorway service area.
• 2019 – A Piper PA-46 Malibu light aircraft transporting Argentine football player Emiliano Sala crashed in the English Channel off Alderney in the Channel Islands. It had been travelling from Nantes, France, to Cardiff, Wales. Sala was due to begin his career at Cardiff City.
• 2020 – The Yarrabubba impact structure in Western Australia, dated to about 2.2 billion years ago, was confirmed as Earth’s oldest known meteorite impact crater, with the strike potentially ending a global “Snowball Earth” ice age by releasing vast amounts of water vapour into the atmosphere.

Music

• History1966 – George Harrison married Patti Boyd at Leatherhead Register Office in Surrey with Paul McCartney as Best man. George had first met Patti on the set of The Beatles movie A Hard Day’s Night. She left Harrison in the mid-’70s and started an affair with Harrison’s friend Eric Clapton, who wrote the song ‘Layla’ about her. The two married in May 1979 but split in 1988. Harrison and Clapton remained close friends with Harrison, taking to calling Clapton his “husband-in-law”.
• 1972 – Pink Floyd appeared at The Guildhall, Portsmouth, England. This was the first time that they were able to perform the whole of what became the The Dark Side Of The Moon album in its entirety, the previous night’s performance in Brighton having been halted for technical reasons.
• 1978 – The soundtrack album Saturday Night Fever started a 24-week run at No.1 on the US album charts and stayed on the chart for 120 weeks until March 1980. It went on to sell over 40 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling soundtrack albums of all time. Three singles from the album contributed by the Bee Gees ‘How Deep Is Your Love’, ‘Stayin’ Alive’ and ‘Night Fever’. The Bee Gees’ involvement in the film did not begin until post-production. John Travolta stated, “The Bee Gees weren’t even involved in the movie in the beginning. I was dancing to Stevie Wonder and Boz Scaggs.
• 1983 – British synth-pop duo Eurythmics released ‘Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)’. The single peaked at No.2 on the UK chart and No.1 on the US Billboard Hot 100 six months later. In 2025, Billboard reported that the music video for ‘Sweet Dreams’ had joined YouTube Billion Views Club since it had been featured on the soundtracks to multiple films, including House On Haunted Hill and Gamer, as well as in episodes of TV shows such as The Following and Luther.
• 1984 – Soul singer Jackie Wilson died aged 49. Wilson suffered a massive heart attack while playing a Dick Clark show at the Latin Casino in New Jersey on September 29, 1975, falling head-first to the stage while singing ‘Lonely Teardrops’, and remained in a coma until his death 8 years later. His 1957 single ‘Reet Petite’ became a posthumous No.1 when re-issued in 1987 due in part to a new animated video made for the song, featuring a clay model of Wilson.
• 1997 – ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker, Elvis Presley’s manager and agent died of a stroke in Las Vegas, Nevada, at the age of 87.
• 2007 – Mika scored his debut UK No.1 hit single with ‘Grace Kelly’, which went on to become the third biggest-selling single in the UK in 2007 and spent five weeks at the top of the chart. The song is titled after Academy Award-winning American film actress and Princess of Monaco, Grace Kelly. The bit of dialogue used in the song is from the film The Country Girl, which stars Kelly.
• 2022 – Adele postponed her entire Las Vegas residency, just 24 hours before the opening night due to half of her team having Covid. The shows would have been her first live concerts in five years and Adele was forecast to make more than £500,000 per performance.

History

• 1549 – Parliament passed the first of four Acts of Uniformity, the first requiring the exclusive use of the Book of Common Prayer in all public services of the Anglican Church.
• 1793 – Louis XVI of France is executed by guillotine in Paris, following his conviction for “high treason” by the newly created French Parliament (Convention nationale), during the French Revolution.
• 1799 – Edward Jenner’s smallpox vaccination was introduced. His work on vaccination prevented him from continuing with his ordinary medical practice. Supported by his colleagues and the King he petitioned Parliament and was granted £10,000 for his work on vaccination. In 1806 he was granted another £20,000 for his ongoing work in microbiology.
• 1807 – Streets in London were first illuminated by gaslight on Pall Mall in London, when engineer Frederick Winsor demonstrated the technology by lighting a series of lamps to celebrate King George III’s birthday, marking a major step in public street lighting and urban safety.
• 1846 – The publication of the first edition of the Daily News, edited by Charles Dickens. It merged with the Daily Chronicle to form the News Chronicle in 1930, and was ultimately absorbed by the Daily Mail in 1960.
• 1854 – The RMS Tayleur sinks off Lambay Island on her maiden voyage from Liverpool to Australia with great loss of life. The ship was chartered by the White Star Line and carried over 650 passengers and crew. Only 280 survived.