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New Brompton F.C. in 1894

During their 1894–95 season, New Brompton F.C. (known as Gillingham F.C. since 1912) competed in the Southern Football League Division Two. The club had been formed a year earlier but in the inaugural season played only friendly matches and games in the qualifying rounds of the FA Cup and FA Amateur Cup. In 1894, New Brompton turned professional and joined the newly formed Southern League. The team dominated Division Two of the new league, winning all but one of their matches, and gained promotion to Division One by winning an end-of-season "test match" against Swindon Town, who had finished bottom of the higher division. New Brompton also entered the FA Cup, reaching the third qualifying round. The team played 15 competitive matches, winning 13, drawing none, and losing two. Arthur Rule was the team's top goalscorer for the season. The highest attendance recorded at the club's home, the Athletic Ground, was approximately 8,000 for the visit of Chatham in the FA Cup. (Full article...)

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Yuan Shikai dollar

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... that Henry Charles Swan, a law graduate from Oxford, spent more than 25 years living on a yacht in a stream in New Zealand?
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Alberto Fujimori in 1991

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On this day

September 19: International Talk Like a Pirate Day

Statue of Our Lady of La Salette

1692 – Salem witch trials: Giles Corey was crushed to death for refusing to enter a plea to charges of witchcraft, reportedly asking the sheriff for "more weight" during his execution.
1846 – Near La Salette-Fallavaux in southeastern France, shepherd children Mélanie Calvat and Maximin Giraud reported a Marian apparition, now known as Our Lady of La Salette (statue pictured).
1940 – World War II: Polish resistance leader Witold Pilecki allowed himself to be captured by German forces and sent to Auschwitz to gather intelligence.
1970 – The first Glastonbury Festival was held at Michael Eavis's farm in Glastonbury, England.
1995 – Industrial Society and Its Future, the manifesto of American domestic terrorist Ted Kaczynski, was published in The Washington Post almost three months after it was submitted.

Theodore of Tarsus (d. 690)
Paterson Clarence Hughes (b. 1917)
Judith Kanakuze (b. 1959)
Wu Zhonghua (d. 1992)

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Today's featured picture

W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) was an English dramatist, librettist and illustrator best known for his fourteen comic operas produced in collaboration with the composer Arthur Sullivan. The most popular Gilbert and Sullivan collaborations include H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado, one of the most frequently performed works in the history of musical theatre. These Savoy operas continue to be performed regularly today throughout the English-speaking world and beyond. Gilbert's creative output included more than 75 plays and libretti, numerous stories, poems, lyrics and various other comic and serious pieces. His plays and realistic style of stage direction inspired other dramatists, including Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, and his comic operas inspired the development of American musical theatre, especially influencing Broadway writers. The journalist Frank M. Boyd wrote of Gilbert: "Till one actually came to know the man, one shared the opinion ... that he was a gruff, disagreeable person; but nothing could be less true of the really great humorist. He had ... precious little use for fools ... but he was at heart as kindly and lovable a man as you could wish to meet." This cabinet card of Gilbert was produced by the photographic studio Elliott & Fry around 1882–1883.

Photograph credit: Elliott & Fry; restored by Adam Cuerden

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