On This Day - 23rd July
1745
Charles Stuart, the 'Young Pretender' landed in the Outer Hebrides in his attempt to win back the throne for the Stuarts.
1886Arthur Whitten Brown, British aviator was born. He was the navigator of the first successful non-stop transatlantic flight, (14th June 1919), with John Alcock as pilot.
1901Tennis player Tim Henman's great-grandmother (Ellen Stawell Brown) became the first woman to serve overarm at the All England Tennis Club.
1902William Hesketh Lever (the soap magnate with products now branded under the Unilever name) bought Hall i' th' Wood, (see 
picture) near Bolton and opened it as a textile museum. It was here that Samuel Crompton invented his Spinning Mule (see 
picture).
1912The birth of the actor Michael Wilding. He appeared in numerous British films, often opposite Anna Neagle.
1913Michael Foot, Former Labour Party leader (1980-83), was born.
1940The Local Defence Volunteers were renamed the Home Guard by Winston Churchill.
1950The ordination as a priest of Basil
Hume. He was both a pupil and teacher at Ampleforth School (see 
picture) and joined the Benedictine monastery at Ampleforth Abbey (see 
picture) in North Yorkshire and was its abbot for 13 years until his appointment in 1976 as Archbishop of Westminster and cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church.
1955British speed enthusiast Donald Campbell broke the world water speed record on Ullswater, in the Lake District, when his jet-propelled hydroplane - Bluebird, reached 202.32mph. (Note:- Donald Campbell died on 4th January 1967 in his attempt to break his own world water speed record on Coniston Water in the Lake District. He is buried in Coniston graveyard (see - 
picture).
1957There were violent scenes around Britain as the strike by busmen entered its fourth day.
1980Cliff Richard received his OBE from the Queen at Buckingham Palace.
1984A government report into cancer levels near the controversial nuclear plant at Sellafield in Cumbria confirmed suspicions of higher than-normal levels of leukaemia in the area, but said it could not definitely link this to the nuclear plant itself.
1986Prince Andrew, the second son, and third child of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip married Sarah Ferguson at Westminster Abbey. Their divorce in May 1996 attracted a high level of media coverage.
1995Britain sent 1,200 troops to relieve the besieged Bosnian capital, Sarajevo.
1996The BSE scare was extended after laboratory research showed that mad cow disease could also be transmitted to sheep.
1997 Tony Blair's Government announced that students would have to pay tuition fees and that maintenance grants would be abolished.
1997History was made when for the first time in 127 years hen harriers were raised in Derbyshire, 1500 feet above the Goyt Valley near Buxton.
2008'Back-from-the-dead' canoeist John Darwin and his wife Anne were jailed for more than six years for fraudulently claiming £250,000. The couple had conned family, friends, police and insurance companies into believing that Mr Darwin drowned in the North Sea off Teesside in 2002.
2009The number of new swine flu infections in England doubled, with an estimated 100,000 new cases of swine flu recorded in one week.
2014The 20th Commonwealth Games opened in Celtic Park, Glasgow.
2014The death, aged 91, of Dora Bryan, veteran British actress whose long career encompassed theatre, film, radio and television. She won a Bafta for her performance in the classic 1962 film A Taste of Honey.