9 December: On this day in history

9 December 1872

Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback became the first person of African-American descent to become governor of a US state, when he briefly held office as the 24th governor of Louisiana.

9 December 1917

The British capture Jerusalem from the Turks.

9 December 1939

Corporal Thomas Priday of the First Battalion, King's Shropshire Light Infantry was killed leading a patrol near the Maginot Line in France. He is believed to be the first British soldier killed in action in the Second World War.

9 December 1940

General O'Connor's Western Desert Force launched Operation Compass, a counter-attack against General Graziani's 10th Italian Army at Sidi Barrani, Egypt. By early February 1941, over 130,000 prisoners had been taken together with 500 tanks and 800 guns.

9 December 1960: Coronation Street hits TV sets

Millions of viewers tune in as the first episode of the working-class domestic saga airs

For British audiences, 9 December 1960 was a milestone in television history. At seven that evening, with more than 3 million people staring at their sets, a brass band struck up a mournful tune, the grainy black and white picture showed a long street of terraced back-to-backs, and Coronation Street began its record-breaking run as the nation's best-loved soap opera.

Coronation Street was the brainchild of a young Granada scriptwriter, Tony Warren. In keeping with the sociological trends of the late 1950s, Warren was keen to explore working-class life in the urban north, a world already being transformed by postwar affluence.

“A fascinating freemasonry, a volume of unwritten rules,” began his note on the new series. “These are the driving forces behind life in a working-class street in the north of England. To the uninitiated outsider, all this would be completely incomprehensible.” The point of his new show, he explained, was “to entertain by examining a community of this kind and initiating the viewer into the ways of the people who live there”.

Yet although viewers clearly loved the new soap, the critics were not kind to Coronation Street. In the Mirror, one writer thought Warren had focused on the "wrong folk. For there is little reality in his new serial, which, apparently, we will have to suffer twice a week." The paper's main reviewer, Jack Bell, struck a similar note. Who, he wondered, could possibly want this "continuous slice-of-life domestic drudgery two evenings a week"? | Written by Dominic Sandbrook

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