Born on this day
Saturday, October 19, 1833. : Australian horseman and poet, Adam Lindsay Gordon, is born.
Adam Lindsay Gordon was born on 19 October 1833, at Fayal in the Azores, a group of Portuguese islands in the Atlantic Ocean, about 1,500 km from Lisbon, Portugal. Educated in his teenage years in England, he was a wayward youth. After completing his education, his father sent him to South Australia, where he worked variously as a horse breaker, mounted policeman, poet and even a member of parliament. He had an intense love of horses and riding, but this proved to be his undoing: in July 1868, he suffered a riding accident which caused some brain damage, and plummeted him into depression.
His poetry expressed his love of horses. It also captured the emerging Australian identity and use of Australian idioms. The day after the publication of his poems as “Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes” he took himself off to Brighton Beach in Melbourne, where he committed suicide. He was just 36 years old.
Australian Explorers
Sunday, October 19, 1845. : Leichhardt discovers the Roper River in northern Australia, but loses three of his best horses whilst attempting to cross.
Ludwig Leichhardt was born in Prussia and studied in Germany. He was a passionate botanist who had an interest in exploration, although he lacked necessary bush survival skills. In October 1844, he left from Jimbour, on the Darling Downs, on an expedition to find a new route to Port Essington, near Darwin.
Whilst making his way up the western side of the Gulf of Carpentaria a year later, on 19 October 1845, his party came to a freshwater river, estimated to be 460km wide. Leichhardt named it after one of his own men, John Roper, who had seen the river two days earlier on an advance scouting mission to find the best route. As the party began to cross the Roper River, three of the best horses stumbled down steep banks and drowned. With fewer horses remaining to carry the load, Leichhardt regretfully had to destroy most of his botanical specimens which he had been collecting for the past year.
Australian History
Saturday, October 19, 1872. : The largest single piece of reef gold ever discovered in the world is found at Hill End, in New South Wales.
Hill End, originally known as Bald Hill, is a gold-mining ghost town with a population of around one hundred people. It is located about 66km from Mudgee in the New South Wales central-west.
Alluvial gold was discovered at Hill End in 1851 and within a month, there were 150 miners working the area. The Hill End goldfield was one of the richest gold mining areas in NSW, and the first reef mining area in Australia.
The Beyers and Holtermann nugget, the largest single piece of reef gold ever discovered in the world, was found by workers at the Star of Hope Gold Mining Co on Hawkins Hill, on 19 October 1872. It weighed about 286kg, measured 150cm by 66cm, and was worth at least £12,000 at the time.
Australian History
Thursday, October 19, 1933. : Aviator Charles Ulm sets a new flight record between England and Australia.
Charles Thomas Philippe Ulm was born on 18 October 1898 in Melbourne, Australia. When just 16 years old, he enlisted in the 1st Battalion of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) under the name Charles Jackson, claiming he was 20. He was among the first troops to land at Gallipoli in April 1915 but was wounded later that same month. He returned to Australia where he was discharged as a minor. However, he re-enlisted the AIF under his own name two years later. He was wounded on the Western Front in July 1918 and evacuated to Britain before being demobilised in 1919. After returning to Australia, he began to develop his interest in commercial aviation, investing in a number of short-lived aircraft companies.
In June 1927, Ulm partnered with Charles Kingsford Smith to circumnavigate Australia by air in order to raise public awareness and gain support for their intended goal of being first to cross the Pacific Ocean from the United States to Australia. Their journey was completed in 10 days, five hours and 30 minutes, more than halving the previous record of 22 days, set by Captain E J Jones and Colonel H C Brinsmead in 1924. Ulm and Kingsford Smith then departed the US on their Pacific crossing in May 1928, arriving in Brisbane, Australia nine days later. The entire 11585 km crossing had been made in 83 hours and 38 minutes of actual flying time, and the men were feted as heroes.
Ulm and Kingsford Smith founded Australian National Airways (ANA) in December 1928. The company operated until the Depression caused the company to go into liquidation in 1933: when it folded, the two men parted company. Ulm purchased one of the ANA’s Avro X aircraft, renaming it ‘Faith in Australia’. Hoping to secure an overseas airmail contract by circumnavigating the world, thereby proving the viability of regular commercial air services, Ulm flew the aeroplane to England, with Gordon Taylor as navigator. The aircraft was damaged in Ireland after it sank in the sand at Portmarnock beach. This, together with continuing bad weather, necessitated Ulm’s return to Australia. Having heard that Kingsford Smith had just completed a new record crossing of England to Australia in 7 days, 4 hours and 50 minutes, Ulm set out to break the record. It was on this return journey that he set a new flight record of 6 days, 17 hours and 56 minutes, arriving in Derby, Western Australia on 19 October 1933, an improvement of some eleven hours on Kingsford Smith’s flight.
In 1933, Ulm formed Great Pacific Airways Ltd and bought an Airspeed Envoy, the ‘Stella Australis’. After taking receipt of the craft in 1934, Ulm and his crew of two disappeared while on a test flight from California to Honolulu. Bad weather caused the men to miss the Hawaiian islands in the darkness. Despite a massive search, no trace of the men or the craft was ever found.
World History
Sunday, October 19, 1856. : A stampede kills 7 during a Sunday evening service led by the great preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon, more commonly known as C H Spurgeon, was England’s best-known and most-loved preacher for most of the latter half of the nineteenth century. He was born in Kelvedon, Essex, on 19 June 1834 and converted to Christianity when he was fifteen years old. He preached his first sermon a year later: even then, his style, depth of thought and delivery were seen as being far above average. At age 18, Spurgeon was placed in charge of a small congregation at Waterbeach, Cambridgeshire, and at age 20, went to London as pastor of the New Park Street Chapel in Southwark. Under Spurgeon’s leadership, the congregation quickly outgrew its building, moving to Exeter Hall, then to Surrey Music Hall, where there would sometimes be an audience of 10,000.
It was here that Spurgeon experienced his first major setback. During the Sunday evening service on 19 October 1856, someone shouted, “Fire!” The ensuing panic caused a stampede in which seven people were killed, and scores more injured. There was no fire. Spurgeon was just 22 years old and was overcome by this tragedy. For weeks afterward, his distress prevented him from preaching and his whole ministry appeared to be finished. However, his faith sustained him and he grew through the experience to return to preaching, extending his ministry through his published sermons which are still highly regarded today.
World History
Monday, October 19, 1987. : The Dow Jones Industrial Average falls 22.6%, the largest one-day decline in recorded stock market history.
19 October 1987, became known as “Black Monday” when the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 508 points, or 22.6%, in the largest single-day decline in recorded stock market history. The crash rebounded around the world, as within a fortnight, stock markets in Australia had fallen 41.8%, Hong Kong 45.8%, and the United Kingdom 26.4%. The crash was unexpected, and did not seem to have been precipitated by any major news or events. In retrospect, some theories have pointed to the announcement of a particularly steep trade deficit and news of an American attack against Iran as the cause of the plunge. However, economists have not been able to agree on any reason for the crash.