People Who Snuffed It On My Birthday

People Who Snuffed It On My Birthday

I felt like I needed cheering up, as this year will be the last of my 20's. So I decided to find out who has had a worse time of it on April 15.

  • Godwin, Earl of Wessex and father of the unfortunate King Harold, keeled over on April 15, 1053 - although this was before my birth, so technically isn't really my fault
  • Jean-Paul Satre finally got to road-test his theories of existentialism in 1980
  • Arthur 'Captain Mainwaring' Lowe had his pulse go MIA in 1982
  • Tommy Cooper had the last laugh in 1984, and collapsed on stage, due to a heart attack
  • Two USAF pilots (and presumably lots of Libyans) shuffled off this mortal coil in 1986's Operation El Dorado Canyon
  • Kenneth Williams stopped messing about in 1988
  • 1989 was a busy year- 96 died in the Hillsborough tragedy, and Tiananmen Square became a less pleasant place to be than Slough, following the death of Hu Yaobang who died on this special day
  • Then-Sun Editor, Kelvin MacKenzie was very lucky not to get lynched himself, following allegations he made about the fans at Hillsborough in wannabe-Newspaper The Sun
  • Greta Garbo assumed room temperature in 1990
  • Pol Pot joined the Necrophiliac Singles Club in 1998
  • In 2000, Zimbabwean farmer David Stevens was abducted by veterans of the Zimbabwean War of Self-Genocide, and shot - making him the first white farmer to be killed by Mugabe's thugs.
  • In 2001, Joey Ramone cashed in his chips
  • April 15 is also Tax Return day in the US, and is therefore doubtless responsible for several Americans having a message tied to their toes and being declared ineligible for the census