Lord's hosts its first-ever Test match in 1884

 

The Mecca of Cricket, Lord's Cricket Ground has been an iconic venue in the history of the sport. Established in 1814, the Lord's was the leading sports venue for visiting teams who played against England over the years.

On July 21, 1884 a visiting Australian team took on Lord Harris' lead England team at the iconic venue hosting its first-ever Test match.

England won the Test by an innings and 3 runs against Bill Murdoch-led Australian side. Australia managed only 229 in their first innings after which a big hundred (148) from Allan Steel helped England take a 150-run lead. England then bundled Australia out for 145 with George Ullyet picking up 7 wickets in the 2nd innings.

In this historic Test, the first-ever substitute catch was also taken as Australia captain Billy Murdoch, who fielded for England, took the catch of his teammate Tup Scott of Allan Steel's bowling.

Gangubai Hangal's Death Anniversary

Gangubai Hangal, who passed away on 21 July 2009, in Hubballi, Karnataka, India, aged 96, was an Indian vocalist in the Hindustani (North Indian) classical tradition and doyenne of the Kirana gharana (community of performers who share a distinctive musical style). She was especially admired for her performances of songs of the khayal genre over the course of a career that spanned nearly seven decades.

Hangal’s reputation as a virtuoso started to rise in the mid-1930s, when she began to make recordings and perform more frequently outside her immediate community.

By the early 1940s, she had become a well-known figure in Hindustani music as a result of her broadcasts on All India Radio and her busy schedule of concert appearances across the country. Initially, she sang bhajans, or Hindu devotional songs, light Marathi-language songs, and semiclassical songs known as thumris, as well as khayal classical songs. By the mid-1940s, however, she had shifted her focus almost fully to khayal.

Hangal’s vocal quality, sensitivity to pitch and melody, and technical proficiency were among the most remarkable features of her style. She sang with a distinctively bold, almost masculine, tone. She typically introduced the melodic framework—the raga—of each piece gradually, so that the audience could savour and recognize the importance of each pitch. Impeccably intoned and ornamented passages of improvisation using solmization syllables also figured prominently in her performances.

For her contribution to Indian classical music, Hangal received several honours. In 1973 she received the Sangeet Natak Akademi (India’s national academy of music, dance, and drama) award. Hangal was also awarded the Padma Bhushan (1971) and the Padma Vibhushan (2002), two of India’s highest civilian honours.

 

Ernest Hemingway's Birth Anniversary

 

Ernest Hemingway, born on 21 July 1899, in Cicero [now in Oak Park], was an American novelist and short-story writer, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. He was noted both for the intense masculinity of his writing and for his adventurous and widely publicized life. His succinct and lucid prose style exerted a powerful influence on American and British fiction in the 20th century.

Hemingway started his career as a writer in a newspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. After the United States entered the First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. Serving at the front, he was wounded, was decorated by the Italian Government, and spent considerable time in hospitals. After his return to the United States, he became a reporter for Canadian and American newspapers and was soon sent back to Europe to cover such events as the Greek Revolution.

During the twenties, Hemingway became a member of the group of expatriate Americans in Paris, which he described in his first important work, The Sun Also Rises (1926). Equally successful was A Farewell to Arms (1929), the study of an American ambulance officer’s disillusionment in the war and his role as a deserter. Hemingway used his experiences as a reporter during the civil war in Spain as the background for his most ambitious novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Among his later works, the most outstanding is the short novel, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), the story of an old fisherman’s journey, his long and lonely struggle with a fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat.

Hemingway – himself a great sportsman – liked to portray soldiers, hunters, bullfighters – tough, at times primitive people whose courage and honesty are set against the brutal ways of modern society, and who in this confrontation lose hope and faith. His straightforward prose, his spare dialogue, and his predilection for understatement are particularly effective in his short stories, some of which are collected in Men Without Women (1927) and The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938). Hemingway died in Idaho in 1961.