The Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould hastily penned the lyrics for a "Hymn for Procession with Cross and Banners", for a children's choir procession this day in Horbury, near Wakefield in Yorkshire.  The music used then was a theme from a Joseph Haydn symphony. Several decades later Sir Arthur Sullivan added the far more familiar music he called "St. Gertrude." The hymn remains popular, if often controversial, up to today.  (By John Osborne) 

At nine in the morning, observers in Vernon County, Wisconsin saw an object several miles in the sky moving with speed from the north-east to the south-west, accompanied with a loud rumbling noise.  They watched the object explode at around four miles up and at least two large pieces fall to the ground.  These were found five days later and one of them, dubbed the "Claywater Meteorite," became an important artifact for the study of meteorology.  (By John Osborne) 

Erich Ludendorff was born near Poznan, in present-day Poland, but then a part of Prussia, the third child but eldest son of a Prussian railway official.  He attended military school and was commissioned in 1882 as an infantry officer.  Through severe application he worked his way up through the notoriously aristocratic German Army structure and in 1914 was a Major-General.  He later commanded the Eastern Front and then became virtual co-dictator of Germany with Hindenburg in 1917.  He died in 1937 in Munich. (By John Osborne)

Henry Edward Manning had been a prominent member of the conservative wing of the Church of England but lost faith in the Church's direction and converted to Roman Catholicism in 1851.  The loss of such a high ranking member of the established church caused a sensation.  He was consecrated at ten o'clock in the morning as the second Archbishop of Westminster at a ornate ceremony at St. Mary's Church in Moorfields in London.  He became a cardinal in 1875.  (By John Osborne)  

A passenger train from Folkestone to London on the South-Eastern Railway encountered a work gang repairing a bridge near Staplehurst in Kent that had just pulled up two rails.  The train derailed and eight out of the fourteen cars went off the bridge into the stream below. Ten people were killed and others in the four crushed first-class carriages, including the novelist Charles Dickens travelling with his mistress, narrowly escaped death.  Dickens was much affected by the incident and avoided trains when he could from then on.  (By John Osborne)  

Near Rednal in central England, an excursion train from Liverpool to Birmingham, encountering unsteady track, derailed at high speed with disastrous results. The exceptionally large train, with thirty-two passenger carriages drawn by two locomotives, carried more than eight hundred people.  Considering the circumstances, it was perhaps fortunate for all but the victims that only ten people were killed and around fifty injured.  (By John Osborne)