Welcome to the month that faces backwards to last year and forwards to this – which is why it’s named after Janus, the Roman god of transitions, who himself has two faces. Read on to discover January’s trivia, including a joke from Stevie Wonder, a mistake by David Blunkett’s officials, and the reason Heather Mills thinks her daughter is musical …
1 January 1900 – Nigeria becomes a British protectorate. Today the country is home to approximately one-fifth of the world’s black population. (230 million out of 1.2 billion.)
2 January 1921 – premiere of the play R.U.R. by the Czech writer Karel Capek. The play gave us the word ‘robot’ – the roboti are artificial people used to perform tasks for humans.
4 January – World Braille Day. For David Blunkett’s first meeting as education secretary with Tony Blair, his officials gave him notes produced by the braille machine they’d purchased specially. It was only as the meeting progressed that Blunkett realised the notes made no sense – the officials had unwittingly bought a Swedish machine.
5 January 1978 – birth of January Jones. The Mad Men actress was named not after the month but after January Wayne, a character in the Jacqueline Susan novel Once Is Not Enough.
6 January 1955 – birth of Rowan Atkinson. In 2013 he received the highest insurance payout in British motoring history – £910,000 for the McLaren F1 he’d crashed near Peterborough. Insurers only fund repairs when the car’s subsequent value will make them worthwhile – but the F1 is such a sought-after car that in this case, that was true. As Atkinson proved, when he sold the car two years later for a reputed £8 million.
9 January 1873 – death of Napoleon III. The French emperor is responsible for Chislehurst’s phone code of 467 – he’d lived in the then-village while in exile, so the numbers were chosen to denote IMP(erial).
12 January 1968 – birth of Heather Mills. When her daughter Beatrice was complimented on her musical ability, Mills commented: ‘All her family are musical. I play saxophone and oboe, my brother plays bass trombone and has a rock band, my sister plays the flute, my mother played piano and my dad played six instruments.’ She then added: ‘And then her dad’s musical.’
17 January 1950 – the Great Brink’s Robbery, in which thieves stole over $2 million from the Brink’s security company’s offices in Boston, the largest robbery in US history to that point. Over the course of several months, the robbers had removed every lock from the building, made a key that fitted, then returned the lock.
20 January 1934 – birth of Tom Baker. The actor’s Dr Who scarf was a mistake – the costume designer gave knitter Begonia Pope a huge selection of wool from which to choose, but Pope thought she needed to use it all. The resulting garment was 18 feet long.
23 January 1989 – death of Salvador Dalí. The melting watches in The Persistence of Memory were inspired when the artist saw some camembert cheese softening in the sun.
25 January 1949 – the first Emmy Awards are presented. The name comes from ‘immy’, the image orthicon tube used in early TV cameras.
27 January 1958 – birth of Alan Milburn. As a young man, the future Labour cabinet minister worked in a communist bookshop in Newcastle, called Days of Hope. It was known locally as Haze of Dope.
28 January 1985 – We Are The World, the US equivalent of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’, is recorded at A&M Studios in Hollywood. The assembled stars were told by Stevie Wonder that if they didn’t get the song done in one take, he and Ray Charles would drive everybody home.
30 January 1969 – The Beatles perform for the last time ever, on the roof of their Savile Row office. The first policeman on the scene to stop the gig was Ken Wharfe, who later became Princess Diana’s bodyguard.
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