ANNIVERSARIES
Helen Carr highlights events that took place in June in history
29 JUNE 1613
The Globe theatre burns to the ground
Cannon fire sparks a blaze during a Shakespeare play
It’s fair to say that All Is True isn’t one of Shakespeare’s best-known plays – not least because it’s now more widely called Henry VIII, and is believed to have been co-written with another playwright, John Fletcher. So its first recorded performance – at the Globe theatre on the banks of the Thames in June 1613 – might have sunk into obscurity had it not been for the disaster that brought it to an untimely end.
The production company clearly wanted the play – which centres on Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon – to go off with a bang. And so, at a climactic moment in the performance, a cannon was fired towards the theatre’s famous open roof.
The explosion certainly made an impact, but for all the wrong reasons. Sparks set the thick thatched roof smouldering and, before long, smoke was creeping through the rafters. At first, nobody in the crowd seemed to notice – according to one onlooker, “their eyes [were] more attentive to the show” – but soon the fire had become impossible to ignore. Remarkably, nobody was hurt in the blaze, though one man’s breeches caught alight (his skin was literally saved when someone soaked him in beer).
The Globe itself wasn’t so lucky and the inferno quickly swept through the building. The theatre that had been built by Shakespeare’s playing company in 1599, and had put on some of his most famous plays, was burned to cinders.
10 JUNE 1829
The first Oxford v Cambridge boat race takes place at Henley-on-Thames, with Oxford crossing the line first to win 500 guineas. The annual event now covers a 4.2-mile stretch of the Thames between Putney and Mortlake.
22 JUNE 1948
The Windrush arrives at Tilbury
West Indian émigrés answer Britain’s call for help
Ona grey, misty day in June 1948, a former German passenger liner arrived at Tilbury docks on the Thames Estuary – to a storm of media attention. The name of the vessel was the Empire Windrush and its arrival in Britain that day – after setting off from Kingston, Jamaica a month earlier – is now widely remembered as a landmark moment in modern British history.
The reason for its significance lies not in the identity of the ship itself, but in the men and women it had carried across the Atlantic. The hundreds of people who disembarked from the Windrush made up one of the first large groups of West Indians to emigrate to postwar Britain – and they had made the journey because their help was needed.
Three years after the end of the Second World War, severe labour shortages were proving a drag on the British economy. In response, the government came up with the British Nationality Act 1948, giving citizens of Britain’s colonies and the Commonwealth the right to settle in the UK.
Some of those who stepped off the Windrush in June 1948 had already arranged accommodation and work. Others, however, arrived with nothing to do and nowhere to live. Some 230 passengers set up home in an old air-raid shelter in Clapham before heading to the labour exchange in neighbouring Brixton. Hostility to their arrival was widespread. Those looking for homes to rent often encountered signs declaring “NO BLACKS”; others were beaten for befriending white people.
For all that, many of the Windrush’s passengers thrived in England. None more so than Sam King, a former RAF engineer. King not only went on to become mayor of Southwark, but helped launch the forerunner of the Notting Hill Carnival. Today, more than 70 years after the Windrush’s famous journey, the carnival is cherished as a celebration of Caribbean culture in London.
24 JUNE 1812
French forces under Napoleon Bonaparte cross the Neman river, so launching their invasion of Russia. The French leader captures Moscow in September but, his army largely destroyed, he retreats the following month.
14 JUNE 1381
The archbishop of Canterbury loses his head
The Peasants’ Revolt claims its most high-profile victim
The Tower of London is an imposing fortress, looming intimidatingly over the banks of the Thames. However, it isn’t completely impregnable – that much was proven in the most dramatic fashion in June 1381 by a group of rebels hell-bent on securing social justice.
During the early summer, an uprising had gathered pace in England –a “pitchfork rebellion” of the common people against the government. Known to posterity as the Peasants’ Revolt, the disorder reached a climax on 14 June when rebels broke into the Tower through an open gate, aiming to arrest and punish some of the most powerful men in the realm.
The rebels didn’t find King Richard II inside the fortress – he had already ridden out that morning to make terms with the “peasant” army at Mile End. However, they did discover Simon Sudbury, archbishop of Canterbury (whom they regarded as one of their chief oppressors), cowering in the chapel of the White Tower.
Unfortunately for Sudbury, his captors weren’t in a merciful mood, and he was soon dragged away to Tower Hill to meet his maker. It allegedly took eight clumsy blows to remove his head, which was then paraded through the streets before being impaled on London Bridge.
Sudbury’s skull survives to this day, and is held in St Gregory’s Church in Sudbury, Suffolk – a grisly memento of a momentary shift of power from the hands of the elite to the people of England.
9 JUNE 1865
Charles Dickens survives a deadly train crash
The author joins in with the relief effort
On the afternoon of 9 June 1865, Charles Dickens was sitting in a first-class train compartment racing across the Kent countryside. The author had visited Paris with his mistress, Ellen Ternan, and her mother – and now all three were heading back to London.
But the train would never reach its destination. At 3.13pm, as it sped across a viaduct at Staplehurst, it hit a missing section of the track, which had been removed by workmen. The train was thrown into the air, plunging seven carriages into the quagmire below. Dickens’s carriage was dragged partially off the bridge.
Luckily, the author was able to clamber free. He then rushed to the carcass of the crushed train to offer his help. He must have been greeted by a shocking scene: 10 passengers had died in the crash and 40 more were injured. According to one eyewitness, Dickens offered “comfort [to] every poor creature he met who had sustained serious injury”, and delivered brandy to a man dying on the banks.
Amid the turmoil, Dickens still found time to return to his carriage to retrieve an important item. There, from his overcoat pocket, he recovered the manuscript of the latest i nstalment of the novel he was working on. Dickens for the rest of his life. Following the incident, he suffered “faint” and “sick” sensations. Yet he still completed the novel. It would be known as Our Mutual Friend.
Helen Carr is a historian and writer. She is the author of The Red Prince (Oneworld, 2021)
WHY WE SHOULD REMEMBER…
200 YEARS AGO
The public announcement of the Difference Engine, which marked the start of automatic computing
By Doron Swade
What was the Difference Engine?
It was an automatic calculating machine designed by Charles Babbage (1791– 1871), English mathematician and polymath. He conceived the machine in 1821, in response to a dismaying number of errors in mathematical tables calculated by hand. The supposed infallibility of machinery would eliminate the risk of human error in the calculation and production of printed tables on which science, engineering and commerce heavily relied. On 14 June 1822 – 200 years ago this month – Babbage announced his invention, in a paper read to the Royal Astronomical Society.
When was a Difference Engine successfully built?
For a complex variety of reasons, Babbage failed to build a complete Difference Engine. His engineer, Joseph Clement, completed one-seventh of the full machine in 1832; it worked impeccably, but the project was abandoned following a dispute about payment. The first complete working Babbage engine is Difference Engine No 2, designed 1847–49 and completed at London’s Science Museum in 2002 – built faithfully to the original 19th-century designs. It weighs 5 tonnes, has 8,000 mechanical parts and is some 3.4 metres long.
How did it shape the future of computing?
Barely, if at all; pioneers of modern computingre-inventedtheprinciples and practice of computing almost entirely in ignorance of the detail of Babbage’s work. But the legend of what he had done endured, and the viability of machine computation was afterwards little doubted.
Why should we remember this invention today?
The Difference Engine was the first complete design for a computing engine. The small section completed in 1832 was the first successful automatic calculating machine to be built, and is the single most-celebrated icon in the prehistory of computing. A user, by cranking a handle, and without necessarily understanding how it worked, could achieve results that up to that time could be accomplished only by mental effort. “He [Babbage],” wrote a contemporary, “had taught wheel work to think.”
So Babbage’s engine represents the start of automatic computing, and also the start of machine intelligence, for which autonomous action is the first prerequisite. Though not itself a general-purpose machine (we would now call it a special-function calculator), the Difference Engine led directly to one that was – the Analytical Engine. This was conceived by Babbage by 1834, and its designs contain just about every logical feature of the modern digital computer.
Doron Swade is a museum professional specialising in the history of computing