Among many other events, December saw the birth of John Milton, the abdication of Edward VIII and the Boston Tea Party (pictured above)…
| 1 Dec. | 1135 | England’s King Henry I died. He had fallen ill seven days earlier after eating too many lampreys. He was 66, and had ruled for 35 years. | |
| 2 Dec. | 1697 | Sir Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral is opened in London. | |
| 3 Dec. | 1989 | The Cold War ended after 52 years of superpower rivalry. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and US President George Bush ended their shipboard summit meeting off Malta. | |
| 4 Dec. | 1872 | Crew from the British brigantine Die Gratia boarded a deserted ship drifting mid Atlantic. The captain’s table was set for a meal aboard the US ship Marie Celeste but the Captain, crew and passengers were all missing. | |
| 5 Dec. | 1905 | The roof of Charing Cross Railway Station in London collapsed, killing five people . | |
| 6 Dec. | 1921 | Ireland’s 26 southern states were granted independence from Britain, becoming the Irish Free State. Ulster in the north remains part of the UK. | |
| 7 Dec. | 1783 | William Pitt became British Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer at the tender age of 24. | |
| 8 Dec. | 1980 | Forty-year-old ex-Beatle John Lennon was murdered in New York. | |
| 9 Dec. | 1608 | Birthday of John Milton, English poet whose works included Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. | |
| 10 Dec. | 1901 | The first Nobel Peace Prizes were awarded worth $30,000 each. Nobel, a Swedish chemist, had died five years earlier leaving the fortune he had amassed from his invention dynamite, to the awarding foundation. | |
| 11 Dec. | 1936 | Britain’s King Edward VIII renounces the throne in a radio broadcast to the nation. After the broadcast he boards a ship to join the twice-divorced Mrs Wallis Simpson in France. | |
| 12 Dec. | 1955 | British engineer Christopher Cockerell patented a new kind of vehicle. Half-ship and half-aircraft, his “hovercraft” floats on an air cushion. | |
| 13 Dec. | 1989 | In South Africa, ANC leader Nelson Mandela meets President F. W. de Klerk for the first time. | |
| 14 Dec. | 1895 | Birthday of King George VI, who succeeded to the throne when his brother, Edward VIII, abdicated. | |
| 15 Dec. | 1791 | The Bill of Rights becomes part of the United States Constitution providing protection for the basic rights of the individual to free expression and justice. | |
| 16 Dec. | 1773 | Unruly American colonists boarded three ships in Boston harbour and emptied 342 chests of tea into the sea. | |
| 17 Dec. | 1778 | Birthday of Sir Humphrey Davy, English inventor of the safety lamp for miners, who also discovered sodium, magnesium, calcium, barium and strontium | |
| 18 Dec. | 1946 | Clement Atlee’s Labour government won the vote on state ownership which lead to the nationalizing of the railways, ports, mines, etc. | |
| 19 Dec. | 1848 | Emily Bronte, English author of Wuthering Heights, dies of tuberculosis at the tender age of 30. | |
| 20 Dec. | 1803 | The United States doubles in size when it acquires 88831,321 square miles of land from France for $15 million – The Louisiana Purchase. | |
| 21 Dec. | 1988 | A Pan American jumbo jet bound for New York is blown out of the sky by a terrorist bomb and crashes onto the Scottish town of Lockerbie killing all 259 passengers and 11 people on the ground. | |
| 22 Dec. | 1715 | James Edward Stuart, son of James II, the deposed Catholic King of England, lands in north-east Scotland to lead a Jacobite rebellion. | |
| 23 Dec. | 1922 | The world’s first regular entertainment radio broadcasts are transmitted by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). | |
| 24 Dec. | 1508 | London houses receive piped water again, for the first time in over a thousand years, since the Romans left town! | |
| 25 Dec. | 440 | Church leaders agree to fix the date of the birth of Christ. Previously some people had celebrated it in May, others in January. | |
| 26 Dec. | 1943 | In World War II, a Royal Navy convoy including the battleship Duke of York and cruiser Jamaica attack and sink the mighty German battlecruiser Scharnhorst. | |
| 27 Dec. | 1831 | The Royal Navy vessel HMS Beagle sets sail from Devonport, the official naturalist onboard is recent BA graduate Charles Darwin. | |
| 28 Dec. | 1918 | The results of the first General Election in Britain in which women have been allowed to vote, confirmed David Lloyd George as Prime Minister. | |
| 29 Dec. | 1170 | Four of King Henry II’s knights murdered the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas a Becket, in Canterbury Cathedral. | |
| 30 Dec. | 1879 | First performance of the Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera The Pirates of Penzance, at the Royal Bijou Theatre, Paignton, Devon. | |
| 31 Dec | 1720 | Birthday of Charles Edward Stuart, Scottish royal better know as Bonnie Prince Charlie or the Young Pretender, son of James, the Old Pretender. | |
