Born on this Day 8th November
1656 Edmond Halley
1847 Bram Stoker
1900 Margaret Mitchell
1922 Dr Christian Barnard
1927 Ken Dodd
1939 Liz Dawn
1946 Roy Wood
1963 Paul McKenna
1966 Gordon Ramsey
1978 Emma Lewell-Buck
1980 Holly Walsh
1981 Joe Cole
1983 Nikola Rachelle
1984 Steven Webb
2000 Jasmine Thompson
2003 Lady Louise Windsor

Died On This Day
1986 Vyacheslav Molotov
2000 Eric Morley
2003 Bob Grant

Music
1958 The soundtrack album to the film ‘South Pacific’ hit the top of the LP chart for the first time, a position it was to hold for 69 weeks

1975 David Bowie reached No.1 in the UK charts with ‘Space Oddity’

1980 Dennis Waterman entered the charts at No.31 with ‘I Could Be So Good For You’

1986 Berlin reached No. 1 with ‘Take My Breath Away’, from the film Top Gun

Sport
1994 According to the Radio 5 Live Sports Year-Book, the comeback of Torvill and Dean at the Winter Olympic Games in Lillehammer was the most popular sporting event on British TV. 10 million more watched this than watched the World Cup Final between Brazil & Italy

1996 Football hardman Vinnie Jones vowed that he got sent off again, he would retire from football. He had been sent off 12 times in his pro career

People & Showbiz
1966 Ronald Reagan was elected Governor of California

1968 Bruce Reynolds, the last of the Great Train Robbers, was finally arrested

General Events
1793 The anniversary of the opening of the Louvre.

1899 Montana became the 41st US State.

1895 Wilhelm Rontgen discovered x-rays, for which he was awarded the first Nobel Prize for Physics, in 1901 and which revolutionised modern medecine

1973 The cod war between Britain and Iceland came to an end

1987 In Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, an Irish Republican Army bomb exploded, at a ceremony honouring Britain’s war dead, killing 11 people.

1996 The RSPCA discovered that a flood of ‘sick-looking hedgehogs’ in East-Grinstead, Sussex, were due to them eating cider-soaked worms after a local publican had poured away bad ‘Scrumpy’ onto his lawn