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Aneurin Bevan was born into an area of Wales where two-thirds of the male population worked underground in the mines. Throughout his career he championed the cause of the working classes and his service as Minister for Health gave the British universal healthcare through the National Health Service.
 Aneurin Bevan Aneurin “Nye” Bevan was born in Tredegar, Monmouthshire, on 15 November 1897. He was the sixth of ten children of David and Phoebe Bevan, although four of his siblings did not survive to adulthood.
Bevan underachieved at school due, in part, to a stammer and left in 1911 to join the other male members of his family down the mine of the Tredegar Iron and Coal Company. His education did not end, however, as he was able to take advantage of local social science courses based on the teaching of the Central Labour College. Also, with the help of Walter Conway of the local Independent Labour Party, Bevan defeated his stammer in public speaking.
Excused military service during the First World War due to nystagmus, an eye disease, Bevan became involved with the South Wales Miners’ Federation and, by the age of 19, he was the chairman of the local Miners’ Lodge. Two years at the Central Labour College in London from 1919 to 1921 studying economics, politics and history completed his education.
After his return to Tredegar, Bevan was only able to find work for ten months during the next five years. Then, in 1926, he started work as a union official just before the start of the General Strike. During the strike, and the continuing pit lock-outs after it ended, Bevan was responsible for distributing strike pay in Tredegar.
Bevan was elected to Monmouthshire County Council in 1928 and, in the following year, he was selected as the Labour Party candidate for Ebbw Vale in the general election. He won the seat comfortably. He used his first speech in the House of Commons to attack Winston Churchill and the pair became lifelong enemies.
Even members of Bevan’s own Labour Party were not spared his outspoken remarks. He criticized Margaret Bondfield for refusing to increase unemployment benefits and his own party leader, Ramsay MacDonald, for introducing means testing.
Always on the left of his party, Bevan joined the Socialist League (originally the Society for Socialist Inquiry and Propaganda) in 1931. Created by G. D. H. Cole, the Socialist League’s members included Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin, Stafford Cripps, Michael Foot and Jennie Lee (who Bevan married in 1934).
The Socialist League campaigned for a united socialist front against fascism during the 1930s to include all parties of the left, including the Communist Party. It also argued against non-intervention in the Spanish Civil War and the policy of appeasement. Bevan was expelled from the Labour Party in March 1939, along with Stafford Cripps and Charles Trevelyan, for speaking on the same platforms as members of the Communist Party, although all three were readmitted by the end of the year.
During the Second World War Bevan was critical of Churchill and his coalition government, both in parliament and in the pages of the Tribune newspaper, which he edited from 1941 to 1945. Again, he argued against not only the Conservatives but also ministers of his own party.
Following the Labour Party’s landslide general election victory in 1945, Bevan became the youngest member of Clement Attlee’s cabinet as Minister of Health with the added responsibility of rebuilding the country’s housing. If his record on housing was deemed to be slow, though far from a failure, it was only in comparison with the effort he gave to his greatest triumph.
The Beverage Report of November 1942 had recommended wide-ranging welfare reforms including universal healthcare. As Minister of Health, Bevan published the National Health Service Bill and white paper in March 1946 and saw it pass into law on 6 November 1946. The legislation would see the nationalisation of hospitals and medical staff become employees of the state. After almost two years of negotiations with doctors, who threatened to refuse to support the scheme, the NHS was born on 5 July 1948.
Bevan became Minister of Labour in January 1951 but resigned in April, along with Harold Wilson and John Freeman, over the introduction of prescription charges for denture and spectacles. The left of the Labour Party drifted towards Bevan and became known as the Bevanites.
The Labour Party lost the general elections of 1951 and 1955. Attlee resigned and left the party leadership to be contested between Bevan, Hugh Gaitskell and Herbert Morrison. In the first decisive ballot, Gaitskell beat Bevan into second place.
In 1956 Bevan agreed to serve as Shadow Foreign Secretary and in 1959 he became deputy leader and treasurer of the Labour Party. In December 1959 he was diagnosed with cancer of the stomach and on 6 July 1960 Aneurin Bevan died at his home in Buckinghamshire.
Other events on 6 July
- 1189 Death of Henry II, king of England
- 1483 Coronation of Richard III, king of England
- 1553 Death of Edward VI, king of England
- 1553 Accession of Mary I, queen of England
- 1935 Birth of Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama
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P. T. Barnum is remembered as the circus showman and promoter of “The Greatest Show on Earth”, but he did not start his circus venture until he was 60. In his earlier career he took on many roles, becoming a newspaper publisher, an exhibitor of curiosities, a concert promoter and a theatre owner.
 P. T. Barnum Phineas Taylor Barnum was born in Bethel, Connecticut, on 5 July 1810, one of the six children of Philo and Irene Barnum. His father died when Barnum was 15 years old, leaving the care of the family to the young Phineas.
Barnum did not find farm life agreeable but he did have a grasp of mathematics and business that would benefit his later career. After a variety of early jobs he first came to public notice as the publisher of the Herald of Freedom weekly newspaper in Danbury, Connecticut. Unfortunately, this notoriety derived largely from his three arrests for libel.
In 1829 Barnum married Charity Hallett. This was a relationship that would endure for 44 years and produce four daughters. The family moved to New York in 1834 and Barnum’s life as a showman began the following year.
The first curiosity he presented to the public was a blind slave called Joice Heth. Barnum claimed that she was the 161-year-old nurse of George Washington but, when she died in 1836, Joice Heth was exposed as the first of many hoaxes that Barnum would promote during his career.
In 1841 he purchased John Scudder’s American Museum on Broadway, New York. The five-storey museum, renamed Barnum’s American Museum, opened to the public on 1 January 1842 and was filled exhibits such as waxworks and stuffed animals. Over time Barnum shifted the focus of the museum from conventional attractions to more sensational exhibits.
Barnum was not afraid to mix genuine curiosities, like the Siamese twins Chang and Eng, with fakes, such as the Feejee mermaid, and his publicity was prone to exaggeration. His most successful, and profitable, exhibit was Charles Stratton, a dwarf who Barnum promoted as General Tom Thumb. During the 26 years that Barnum owned the museum it was visited by 82 million people.
While on a tour of Europe with General Tom Thumb, a tour that included a performance in front of Queen Victoria, Barnum heard about the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind and decided to take the biggest gamble of his career. Without hearing her sing, and with no knowledge of how she would be received by the American public, Barnum booked Lind to sing at 150 concerts over nine months for $1,000 per performance.
Promoted as “The Swedish Nightingale”, Barnum’s publicity of Lind created so much hype that 40,000 people welcomed her ship’s arrival. At the first concert on 11 September 1850, Lind performed in front of a capacity crowd of 5,000 people at Castle Garden in New York. So great was her success that she was able to renegotiate her contract with Barnum.
After the success of the Jenny Lind tour, Barnum turned his attention to theatre. His newly built theatre produced the plays of Shakespeare as well as contemporary works, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe‘s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In 1855 Barnum published his autobiography, The Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself, in which he revealed many of the hoaxes he had promoted during his career.
But the venture for which Barnum is remembered the world over did not start until he was 60 years old. In collaboration with W. C. Coup and Dan Castello, P. T. Barnum’s Grand Travelling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan and Circus opened on 10 April 1871 in Brooklyn. In true Barnum style it was promoted as “The Greatest Show on Earth”.
In 1881 the circus merged with James Bailey’s Great London Show and became the Barnum and London Circus. The following year the circus acquired Jumbo, a six-and-a-half-ton elephant, who was a popular attraction for the next three years before being hit by a train in 1885.
P. T. Barnum died in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on 7 April 1891 at the age of 80. His obituary was published by one New York newspaper, at Barnum’s request, two weeks before he died so that he would have a chance to enjoy reading it. A showman to the end, one of Barnum’s final acts was to ask after the day’s receipts for the circus.
Other events on 5 July
- 1948 Aneurin Bevan‘s National Health Service Act of 1946 came into force creating the British NHS
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George Everest was responsible for the great trigonometrical survey of India, but it is for the peak that bears his name that he is remembered. Despite this, he never saw the world’s largest mountain.
 George Everest George Everest, the eldest son and third of six children of William and Lucetta Everest, was born on 4 July 1790 in Greenwich. After an education at the Royal Military College, Marlow, and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, Everest joined the East India Company in 1806, serving in the Bengal artillery as a second lieutenant.
His mathematical and engineering skills came to the attention of Stamford Raffles in 1814 who requested the presence of Everest in Java to survey the island. With the survey complete he returned to India in 1816 where he took on the task of improving river navigation.
Then came the opportunity to work on the great trigonometrical survey of India under William Lambton, a task that would occupy the rest of his career. In 1818 Everest travelled to Hyderabad to complete Lambton’s work of measuring a meridian arc through India.
Everest was keen to carry out the work to the greatest possible accuracy, but faulty instruments and poor staff made this difficult. Ill health also held him back and he had to stop work in 1820 after contracting malaria for a second time. He returned to work the following year and in 1823, after Lambton’s death, Everest was appointed superintendent of the survey.
Long hours of survey work in the field had a detrimental effect on his already poor health and, in 1825, he became too ill to carry on. Everest returned to England and all work on the survey came to a halt.
On regaining his health, Everest set about improving conditions for the survey. He investigated instruments used by Ordnance Survey in Ireland and redesigned those to be used in India. He also persuaded the East India Company to secure the services of Henry Barrow in maintaining the instruments in India. Scientific interest in the project was raised by Everest’s success in networking and on 8 march 1827 be was elected a fellow of the Royal Society.
Everest returned to the subcontinent in June 1830 as surveyor-general of India and his work on the great trigonometrical survey of India resumed in 1832. The survey took a further nine years to complete, but by 1841 the meridian arc of almost 2,400km had been measured from Cape Comorin on the southern tip of India to the Himalayas in the north.
With the final calculations from the survey complete, Everest retired on 16 December 1843 and returned to England, recommending his colleague, Andrew Waugh, to succeed him. On 17 November 1846 he married Emma Wing with whom he had six children. The two volumes of his record of the survey, An Account of the Measurement of Two Sections of the Meridional Arc of India, won Everest the medal of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Yet it is for the mountain that bears his name rather than his surveying work that he is mainly remembered. When no local name could be agreed upon for Peak XV in the Himalayas, Andrew Waugh decided to name it after his predecessor. In 1856 Peak XV was renamed Mount Everest.
Everest continued to be as active as his health would allow and was knighted in 1861. He served as a manager of the Royal Institution, a vice-president of the Royal Geographical Society and on the council of the Royal Society.
George Everest died at his home in London on 1 December 1866 and was buried in St Andrew’s churchyard, Hove. It is unlikely that he ever saw the mountain that was named in his honour.
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The record set by the LNER’s Mallard locomotive on 3 July 1938 looks set to remain unbroken well into the future.
 LNER's Mallard by Steve F E Cameron In the 1930s the Chief Mechanical Engineer of the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER), Sir Nigel Gresley, took on the challenge of designing a class of faster and more reliable steam locomotives. High speed services in the USA and Germany used streamlined trains, so Gresley experimented with streamlining of existing locomotives.
The result of his trials was the A4 class. As well as a streamlined body shape, the A4 had improvements made to its valves and cylinders, an increased boiler pressure and subsequent changes to its exhaust and brakes. The first A4 locomotive reached a top speed of over 112mph in a demonstration between Kings Cross and Grantham on 27 September 1935.
Soon, other British railway companies were putting streamlined locomotives on the tracks, including the London Midland and Scottish (LMS) Railway’s Coronation class. LMS and LNER drivers competed for the fastest speed record, often ignoring safety in pursuit of glory, until the directors of both companies stopped the rivalry. At that time the 114mph record was held by one of the LMS Coronations.
But there was to be one more attempt at breaking the record. On 3 July 1938 the A4 4468 Mallard pulled a train of seven vehicles, including a dynamometer car to measure its speed, with a total weight of 240 tons. The train, crewed by driver Joseph Duddington and fireman Thomas Bray, left Barkston, just north of Grantham, and headed south.
After passing through Grantham at 24mph, Mallard ascended an incline and had achieved 75mph by the time it reached Stoke Summit. From there it was all downhill. Mallard accelerated down from the summit and quickly exceeded the LMS record. Along one three-mile stretch of track the locomotive’s speed did not drop below 120mph, and for a very short distance the dynamometer car recorded a top speed of 126mph.
Shortly after the record was set, one of the locomotive’s three cylinders overheated and it had to return to Doncaster for repairs. Mallard continued in service after its repairs until 1963. It now has a permanent home at the National Railway Museum in York (although from 23 June 2010 it is on temporary loan to the National Railway Museum’s locomotion site in Shildon, County Durham). The record set by Mallard on 3 July 1938 for the fastest steam locomotive has remained unbroken for 72 years and looks set to endure.
On 2 July 1900 the first rigid airship built by Count Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin flew over Lake Constance in Southern Germany. Although the test was not a complete success, it marked the start of a new era in powered flight.
 LZ-1 (The First Zeppelin) Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin first saw the potential for balloons during his service in the German army. He witnessed the flights of balloons used by the Union Army in the American Civil War and the French during the Franco-Prussian War, and by 1874 he had started to work on his own designs for a rigid airship.
After retiring from the army at the age of 52 in 1890, Zeppelin devoted himself, and a large amount of his own money, to creating a working airship. The plans he drew up were submitted to a committee for review in 1894 and the designs were patented on 31 August 1895. US patents were filed on 14 March 1899.
Construction of Zeppelin’s first airship began in June 1898 and was completed in the winter of 1899. It was built in a floating hangar on Lake Constance in Southern Germany that could be aligned with the wind direction to make entry and exit simpler.
Designated LZ-1 (Luftschiff Zeppelin 1), the airship was 128 metres long and 12 metres in diameter. Within a rigid metal alloy skeleton were seventeen cells containing 11,298 cubic metres of hydrogen gas. The airship was powered by two Daimler engines suspended beneath it and connected to propellers. A sliding weight under the hull allowed the pitch of the airship to be altered but no other controls were provided.
Inflation of the gas cells took place in June 1900 with the maiden flight scheduled for 2 July over Lake Constance. The flight lasted just 17 minutes before technical problems forced a landing in the lake. The zeppelin reached a height of 390 metres during its 6-kilometre flight, which ended when the pitch control jammed. Also, a weakness in the metal alloy frame caused the airship to bend, with the centre rising higher than the bow or stern.
Although the first flight of a zeppelin was not a great success, the concept of the design was proved sound. Many other zeppelins were built for commercial and military purposes, some being used for bombing raids during the First World War with LZ-38 being the first to bomb London.
LZ-127 Graf Zeppelin began the first transatlantic flights in 1928 and was joined by LZ-129 Hindenburg in 1936. Confidence in the airships was damaged, however, after the Hindenburg caught fire as it landed at Lakehurst, New Jersey on 6 May 1937 causing the deaths of 36 passengers.
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