Born on this day
Sunday, December 18, 1707. : Methodist leader Charles Wesley is born.
Charles Wesley was the younger brother of John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement of Protestantism, but was also a leader of the Methodist movement in his own right. He was born on 18 December 1707, in Epworth, Lincolnshire, England. Whilst studying at Christ Church College, Oxford, Wesley formed the “Oxford Methodist” group among his fellow students in 1729, a group which his brother later joined. However, Charles did not wish to break away from the Church of England into which he and his brother were both ordained.
Charles Wesley is best known for writing up to six thousand popular and well-loved hymns, including:
“Amazing Love”
“And Can It Be?”
“Hark, The Herald Angels Sing”
“Jesu, Lover of My Soul”
“Christ the Lord Is Risen Today”
“Love Divine, All Loves Excelling”
“O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing”
Wesley’s name is listed in the Gospel Music Hall of Fame for the enduring nature of his hymns. He died on 29 March 1788.
Born on this day
Friday, December 18, 1778. : England’s most famous clown and the creator of the sad-clown face, Joseph Grimaldi, is born.
Grimaldi was born in Clare Market, London, on 18 December 1778. The son of an Italian ballet-master and a mother who was a theatre dancer, Grimaldi was destined for the stage in some capacity: when only three years old, he began to appear at the Sadler’s Wells theatre.
Grimaldi was beset by personal tragedy: he lost his father when he was two, his wife died in childbirth, and his son drank himself to death by age thirty. However, he was considered a brilliant pantomime clown, with his greatest success being in Harlequin and Mother Goose; or the Golden Egg at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden in 1808. This pantomime is still often revived. He developed the concept of the clown as a bumbling buffoon, and his physical dexterity was remarkable for achieving this. Grimaldi effectively developed the white painted “sad clown” face so popular with later clowns.
Suffering ill health, Grimaldi retired from the stage in the 1820s, and his performances were sadly missed. He died on 31 May 1837, and his grave lies in Joseph Grimaldi Park, formerly the courtyard of St. James’s Chapel, Pentonville Road in Islington.
Born on this day
Friday, December 18, 1863. : Franz Ferdinand, Austrian Archduke, whose assassination sparked WWI, is born.
Until 1878 Bosnia and Herzegovina, just outside Austria, had been governed by the Turks. After the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, Austria was granted the power to administer the two provinces. Bosnia was populated primarily by the Croats, ethnic Serbs and Muslims. Nationalism among the Bosnian-Serbs was inflamed when Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina directly into the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1908.
His Imperial and Royal Highness Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Este, was born 18 December 1863. He was an Archduke of Austria and from 1896 until his death, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne. The Archduke was one of the leading advocates of maintaining the peace within the Austro-Hungarian government during both the Bosnian Crisis of 1908-1909 and the Balkan Wars Crises of 1912-1913.
“The Black hand” was a secret nationalistic Serb society who determined to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand when he accepted the invitation of Bosnia’s governor to inspect the army manoeuvres outside Sarajevo. Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated at approximately 11:00am on 28 June 1914. The assassination led to war between Austria and Serbia, which escalated into World War I as other European countries allied themselves with one side or the other.
Australian History
Tuesday, December 18, 1894. : Women in South Australia unofficially gain the right to vote.
Women in South Australia gained the right to vote in 1894, and voted for the first time in the election of 1896. It is generally recognised that this right occurred with the passing of a Bill on 18 December 1894. However, a letter from the Attorney-General advising Governor Kintore that Royal Assent would be required to enact the Bill, is dated 21 December 1894. The Bill was enacted when Queen Victoria gave Royal Assent on 2 February 1895.
South Australia was the first colony in Australia and only the fourth place in the world where women gained the vote. The issue of women voting had been discussed since the 1860s, but gained momentum following the formation of the Women’s Suffrage League at Gawler Place in 1888. Between 1885 and 1894, six Bills were introduced into Parliament but not passed. The final, successful Bill was passed in 1894, but initially included a clause preventing women from becoming members of Parliament. Ironically, the clause was removed thanks to the efforts of Ebenezer Ward, an outspoken opponent of women’s suffrage. It seems that Ward hoped the inclusion of women in Parliament would be seen as so ridiculous that the whole Bill would be voted out. The change was accepted, however, allowing the women of South Australia to gain complete parliamentary equality with men.
World History
Monday, December 18, 1865. : Slavery is abolished in the United States of America.
The first African slaves arrived in north America in 1526, and though the practice of slavery took many years to become popular, it thrived under British colonialism. On 1 January 1808 American Congress voted to ban further importation of slaves, but children of slaves automatically became slaves themselves. There was no legislation against the internal US slave trade, or against the involvement in the international slave trade and the outfitting of ships for that trade by US citizens.
Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States, was not in favour of abolition of slavery, but he opposed its expansion into new territories and states in the American West. It was this issue that led to the secession of the southern states to form the Confederate States of America, and ultimately also led to the Civil War. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 made the abolition of slavery an official war goal and it was implemented as the Union of northern states retook territory from the Confederacy. The Republican Party introduced the Thirteenth Amendment into Congress to enable the implementation of the Proclamation as the War drew to a close. When the last Confederate troops surrendered on 26 May 1865, the final ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment took place on 6 December 1865, officially ending chattel slavery in the United States. Final recognition of the amendment occurred on 18 December 1865.
World History
Wednesday, December 18, 1912. : The skull of Piltdown Man, the fraudulent and so-called missing link between ape and man, is unveiled to the public.
On 18 December 1912, fragments of a fossil skull and jawbone were unveiled at a meeting of the Geological Society in London. These bone fragments, estimated to be almost a million years old, were considered to be evidence of early man. The skull became known as Piltdown Man, and was recognised as the “missing link” between ape and man. The remains, officially named Eoanthropus dawsoni, were supposedly discovered in Piltdown Quarry near Uckfield in Sussex, England, by Charles Dawson, a solicitor and an amateur palaeontologist.
Forty years later, on 21 November 1953, a team of English scientists exposed Piltdown Man as a deliberate fraud. The skull fragments were a mixture of bone parts: the skull belonged to a medieval human, the jaw was determined to be that of an orang-utan, from approximately 500 years ago, and the teeth came from a chimpanzee. It has never been determined whether Dawson himself was the perpetrator of the fraud, as he died in 1916. However, further research on his “discoveries” has determined several dozen of them to be frauds.