Welcome to our first ever On this Day feature! It’s a new fun facts corner which we hope you’ll find both interesting and helpful!
So, what happened on this day in:
23/10/1966 – In the same year that England won the World Cup, British racing driver John Surtees won the Mexican Grand Prix on this day! It was his second, and final, win of the season. The first was in the Belgian Grand Prix where Jackie Stewart crashed out and became trapped under his car surrounded by a pool of leaking fuel. Graham Hill and Bob Bondurant raced to free the Scotsman. Stewart later became a strong advocate of improving driver safety in motor racing vastly improving on-track medical facilities, something which was sparse when he crashed out.
23/10/1967 – In 1967 British farmers had to slaughter large amounts of their cattle following a deadly outbreak of ‘foot and mouth’ disease. In just 6 months nearly half a million animals were slaughtered from over 2000 farms. This was also the year of the last reported UK human having ‘foot and mouth’. The farm worker in question had apparently drank infected milk and was put into quarantine. A few weeks later the worker was released from hospital and recovered.
23/10/2012 – On this day in 2012 the switchover to digital telly in the UK was complete. On Tuesday night at 11:30 PM the analogue TV signal in Northern Ireland was switched off. Simultaneously BBC Ceefax, the world’s first teletext service, also came to an end. Who remembers the games on there, like Bamboozle?
Thanks for reading our first installment of On This Day!