Historical anniversaries | November

2 November

1917: The Balfour Declaration (named after British foreign secretary Balfour) supports Jewish settlement in Palestine

3 November

1957: Russians launch Sputnik II

On board is the dog Laika, the first known living animal to travel in space.

4 November

1839: Chaos ensues in the Newport Rising

In the late 1830s, south Wales was not a happy place. Thousands lived in grinding poverty, while the government’s rejection of the People’s Charter of 1838 – which demanded the right to vote for working men – had provoked intense political discontent.

Having divided into two vast streams, a crowd of 7,000 marchers united in front of the Westgate Hotel, where the guests would usually have been eating breakfast. After a great deal of shouting and cheering, they promptly laid siege to the hotel. Gunshots echoed back and forth between armed demonstrators and the soldiers within: “Nothing,” one observer told The Times, “can heighten the horror of the scene at this moment.”

The town’s mayor, who attempted to read the Riot Act, was badly wounded by Chartist musket-fire, but the soldiers' superior discipline and firepower won the day. 22 people had been killed and dozens were injured. The rising’s leaders were sentenced to death by hanging and quartering, commuted to transportation to Tasmania for life. Newport’s mayor, however, ended up with a knighthood.

5 November

1605: The Gunpowder Plot is foiled and the conspirators arrested

In the small hours of the following morning, James I’s men discovered Fawkes, calling himself John Johnson, in a large cloak and hat, carrying a pocket watch, lantern and matches. Beneath his so-called firewood were at least 30 barrels of gunpowder.

When Fawkes’ captors asked what he was doing, he said defiantly that he wanted to “blow you Scotch beggars back to your native mountains”. For the next two days, even under torture, he refused to name his co-conspirators. But the king’s interrogators broke him eventually. Hanged almost three months later, Fawkes was reincarnated every bonfire night for centuries to come.

6 November

1429: Henry VI is crowned king of England in Westminster Abbey

This event was a month before his eighth birthday. He had inherited the throne as an eight-month-old baby following the early death of his father, Henry V, in 1421.

7 November

1940: Washington State's Tacomah Narrows bridge collapses during a severe gale

The third longest suspension bridge in America at the time, it had only been open to traffic for a few months. Incredibly, the only casualty was a small dog called Tubby.

8 November

1519: Conquistador Cortés meets emperor Moctezuma. This encounter leads to the fall of the Aztec empire

Historians still dispute what the two men said that day. Did Moctezuma seriously believe, for example, that Cortés was a god, come to reclaim his kingdom? What is not in doubt, though, is the Spaniards’ eagerness to emphasise that they came in peace. “There is nothing to fear,” Cortés told his interpreter. “We have wanted to see him for a long time, and now we have seen his face and heard his words. Tell him that we love him well and that our hearts are contented.”

Then they went into the city. Six days later, Moctezuma was a prisoner; seven months after that, he was dead.

9 November

1989: The Berlin Wall comes down

At 10.45pm the border guards, having given up trying to control the waves of people, opened the gates. At that moment, politician Günter Schabowski said later, East Germany simply “ceased to exist”.

The scene that night, which immediately flashed around the world, became one of the iconic moments of the 20th century. Even as West and East Germans wept, hugged and shared bottles of champagne, the communist empire was falling apart.

10 November

1871: Welsh reporter Henry Morton Stanley finds the missing David Livingstone

By the autumn of 1871, the missionary David Livingstone had been missing for more than five years. He had set out from Zanzibar to find the source of the Nile, believing that it was probably located further south than previous explorers had suggested.

Salvation, however, was at hand, in the form of the Welsh reporter Henry Morton Stanley, who had been sent to Africa by the New York Herald to find the missing missionary. On 10 November, after a nightmarish journey of some 700 miles, Stanley walked into Ujiji on the banks of Lake Tanganyika. And when he saw Livingstone’s pale, bearded face, he knew he had struck gold.

11 November

1619: Sir John Bourchier is knighted by King James VI and I

Thirty years later he signed the death warrant of James's son, Charles I. At the Restoration, Bourchier was too ill to stand trial and he died unrepentant.

12 November

1980: After a three-year journey, the Voyager One space probe flies by Saturn

It sent back the first high-definition images of the planet, its rings and satellites.

13 November

1002: Æthelred massacres the Danes on St Brice’s Day

More than a millennium later, the St Brice’s Day Massacre remains one of the most blood-curdling events in English history. For years Æthelred II had been struggling to cope with Viking raids on England’s shores. Often Æthelred paid the raiders off and allowed them to settle in the eastern part of his country, known as the Danelaw, where Scandinavian settlers already used Danish language and law. But shortly after the turn of the new century, the king’s patience ran out.

We will never really know the tensions and motives that provoked Æthelred to order the extermination of the Danes in England. Nor will we know how many were killed, although possible sites for mass graves have been identified in the West Country and Oxford, where a royal charter later described Danish men being burned alive in St Frideswide’s Church.

14 November

1770: James Bruce reaches the Blue Nile’s source

Emotion overcame him. “Though a mere private Briton,” Bruce later wrote, “I triumphed here, in my own mind, over kings and their armies.” He took out a cup made from a coconut shell, which he had bought in Arabia, and filled it with water from the spring. Then, at last, he drank a toast “to His Majesty King George III, and a long line of princes”.

• Read more | The quest for the source of the Nile

15 November

1979: Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher informs the House of Commons that the former surveyor of the queen's pictures and director of the Courtauld Institute, Anthony Blunt, had been a Soviet spy

16 November

1632: Gustavus Adolphus is killed at Lützen

On the morning of 16 November 1632, fog hung over the fields of Lützen. For more than a decade, central Europe had been torn apart by war, with rival Protestant and Catholic armies tramping back and forth amid scenes of appalling slaughter, hunger and devastation.

Leading a cavalry charge, Protestant hero Gustavus Adolphus had become separated in the mist from his fellow officers. An enemy bullet shattered his left arm; another disoriented his horse, which ran wild behind enemy lines. Another shot hit the king in the back. He fell to the ground, where one last shot, this time to the head, brought his life to an end.

17 November

1558: Elizabeth I hears of Mary I’s death

Legend has it that Mary’s half-sister, Elizabeth, was reading beneath a tree at Hatfield House, in Hertfordshire, when the council arrived with the news. Just 25 years old, she had recently spent months under house arrest. Now she was queen. According to one account, she fell to her knees. “This is the Lord’s doing: it is marvellous in our eyes,” she reportedly said.

18 November

1978: More than 900 followers of cult leader Jim Jones take part in a mass suicide by drinking cyanide at the People's Temple Agricultural Project in Jonestown, Guyana

19 November

1969: Apollo 12 astronauts Charles 'Pete' Conrad and Alan Bean became the third and fourth men to have walked on the moon

20 November

1947: Princess Elizabeth marries Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, at Westminster

21 November

1920: Carnage unfolds on Bloody Sunday

Thousands of spectators poured into Croke Park for the Gaelic football match between Dublin and Tipperary. Unfortunately, the British had identified the match as a potential flashpoint, and as the clock ticked towards half past three, the stadium was surrounded by policemen, auxiliaries and ‘Black and Tans’ – British recruits drafted into the local police force, most of whom were unemployed war veterans.

• Read more | Why we should remember Bloody Sunday

What followed was carnage. Almost as soon as the first Black and Tans reached the stadium, they began shooting. According to one republican paper, “the spectators were startled by a volley of shots fired from inside the turnstile entrances. Armed and uniformed men were seen entering the field, and immediately after the firing broke out, scenes of the wildest confusion took place. The spectators made a rush for the far side of Croke Park and shots were fired over their heads and into the crowd.”

The gunfire lasted for just two minutes; but that was all it took. Fourteen civilians were killed or mortally wounded, including a young woman about to get married and two boys, aged 10 and 11. Ever since, Bloody Sunday has been a near-sacred day in Irish history.

22 November

1718: The navy bring down Blackbeard

On 21 November 1718, a British naval lieutenant, Robert Maynard, tracked Blackbeard down to Ocracoke Island, off the coast of North Carolina. Early the next morning, Maynard’s two sloops moved in for the kill. But Blackbeard was not going down without a fight. In his first devastating exchange of fire, he effectively disabled one of Maynard’s ships; then Teach’s ship, the Adventure, closed in for boarding.

Convinced that most of Maynard’s men had been killed, Blackbeard led his men abroad, cutlasses and flintlocks in hand. But then Maynard’s men burst out of the hold, where they had been hiding, and took the pirates by surprise. The fighting was brief but savage. Pushed back, Teach was slashed across the neck by one of Maynard’s men; then the others moved in to finish the job.

By the time it was over, Blackbeard was dead, with five bullet wounds and about 20 stab wounds. His legend, however, endures to this day.

23 November

1963: The Doctor steps inside the TARDIS for the very first time

Even as its unearthly title music filled the air, few knew what to expect from Doctor Who. The Radio Times had billed the programme as “an adventure in space and time”, explaining that its heroes might find themselves in “a distant galaxy where civilisation has been devastated by the blast of a neutron bomb or they may find themselves journeying to far Cathay in the caravan of Marco Polo”.

Yet most of the first episode was set in a contemporary London secondary school. Indeed, the programme itself had unpromising origins, having been designed as a schedule-filler to follow Grandstand.

24 November

1877: Black Beauty hits the shelves

It was a colossal hit, selling tens of millions of copies worldwide.

Sewell died five months after publication, just long enough to see Black Beauty become a success. One scholar calls it “the most influential anti-cruelty novel of all time”.

25 November

1963: America mourns John F Kennedy

The American people were still in shock, three days after John F Kennedy’s murder in Dallas.
The funeral itself was the largest gathering of world leaders since that of Edward VII in 1910. CBS called it “the most majestic and stately ceremony the American people can perform”.

26 November

1559: The future Bishop of Salisbury, John Jewel, preaches his famous 'Challenge Sermon' from Paul's Cross

In it he challenged the Catholic church to provide biblical authority for 27 of its articles of faith.

27 November

43 BC: Rome’s Second Triumvirate is formally constituted by law

Meeting near Bologna in November, Mark Antony, Lepidus and Octavian came to an arrangement. After two days of talks, the result – passed into law on 27 November – was the “Three-Man Commission for Organising the State”, better known as the Second Triumvirate. From now on, the three triumvirs could pass laws without the approval of the Senate or the Roman people, name magistrates as they pleased and make judgments with no risk of appeal. They were, in other words, dictators.

28 November

1660: The Royal Society is born

On 28 November 1660, Christopher Wren was due to give an astronomy lecture at Gresham College. Afterwards, a group of 12 men, including Wren, piled into the rooms of Gresham professor Lawrence Rooke. They were a mixed bunch: astronomers, mathematicians, physicians and inventors. Some were parliamentarians; others had links with the royal court. What united them, though, was a commitment to science.

That evening, as the 12 men discussed Wren’s lecture, they also debated their journal – later named ‘A Designe of Founding a Colledge for the Promoting of Physicall-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning’. According to the journal, they agreed to meet every Wednesday at 3pm, with an initial membership fee of 10 shillings and a regular fee of a shilling a week. Seven days later, at the next meeting, royalist intellectual Sir Robert Moray reported that no less a person than “the king had been acquainted with the design of this meeting. And he did well approve of it, and would be ready to give encouragement to it.” The Royal Society was up and running.

29 November

1781: British sailors throw 142 slaves overboard

On 29 November 1781, the crew of the slave ship Zong made a genuinely fatal decision. Three months earlier, their ship, owned by a syndicate of Liverpool merchants, had left Accra with some 442 African slaves, at least twice the number that was common on a ship of that size.

But as it ploughed across the Atlantic, things began to go wrong. The ship’s captain, Luke Collingwood, was taken seriously ill, his officers quarrelled among themselves, and as a result, the Zong failed to make a stop at Tobago to take on more drinking water.

• Read more | The Zong Massacre: what the dark episode meant for the British slave trade and abolition

By 29 November, the situation was desperate. The ship had overshot Jamaica, and water supplies were running low. Collingwood proposed a chillingly ruthless idea. If the slaves died of illness, the ship’s insurers would not cover them. But if they drowned, the insurers would have to pay up. It would, he said, be “less cruel to throw the sick wretches into the sea than to suffer them to linger out a few days, under the disorder with which they were afflicted”. And so, in the next few days, he and his men threw about 142 slaves overboard, many of them women and children. According to some accounts, of this number 10 threw themselves overboard.

The ensuing legal dispute horrified public opinion. The Liverpool syndicate demanded compensation; the insurers, however, refused to pay, and eventually won their case. Nobody, however, was ever prosecuted for the massacre, and the Zong became a rallying cry for the abolitionist movement.

30 November

1936: Fire destroys the Crystal Palace

When Sir Henry Buckland, manager of the Crystal Palace, went to investigate a strange red glow inside the great glass edifice, he found two night watchmen struggling to put out a fire inside the central office area.

Within minutes, the blaze was out of control, and at 7.59pm the first telephone call reached Penge fire station. The first fire engine arrived just four minutes later. But already the Crystal Palace’s fate was sealed; as the Radio Times later put it: “The cavernous building glowed with an eerie incandescence, like some vast chandelier.”