Well, if it’s 15 August, it’s the 102nd anniversary of the House of Lords debating whether “Any act of gross indecency between female persons shall be a misdemeanour, and punishable in the same manner as any such act committed by male persons”.
The Earl of Malmesbury opened proceedings with the words “My Lords, I am extremely sorry to raise a discussion upon what must be, to all of us, a most disgusting and polluting subject.” He did slightly redeem himself later by noting:
…but only slightly. The Earl of Desart, too, does his posthumous reputation no favours with:
we all know of the sort of romantic, almost hysterical, friendships that are made between young women at certain periods of their lives and of its occasional manifestations.
In other crime news, it’s the 697th anniversary of Roger Styward of Hamptone being beaten to death “in the High Street of Chepe, in the Ward of Candelwikstrete” for the heinous misdemeanour of dropping eel skins.
It may be the 108th anniversary of this woman being photographed with her cat and her cannabis plants in her French garden.
It’s the 828th anniversary of the birth of St Anthony of Padua
And it’s the 44th anniversary of this (spoof though it may have been) entirely reasonable and probably unimprovable letter:
