Manly Council allows Daytime Ocean Bathing - 2 November 1903

It wasn't until this day 109 years ago that Manly Council finally allowed daytime swimming.

Manly Surf Beach early 20th century

It had been local newspaper owner William Henry Gocher, who repeatedly defied existing rules, was arrested because of it and the resulting publicity those instances evoked, which finally led Manly Council to rescind its old by-law and pass a new one allowing daytime swimming. However, the law still required men and women to bathe at different times and neck-to-knee costumes to be worn by any person above the age of 8.

Elsewhere in the world, New Zealand became the first country to officially adopt a standard time to be observed nationally (1868), UK Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour wrote a letter to Baron Rothschild voicing official British support for the creation of a Jewish State in Palestine, aka the Balfour Declaration (1917), 84-year-old Alexander Kennedy became the first passenger on a scheduled Qantas flight on the Longreach-Cloncurry section of the inaugural mail run between Charleville and Cloncurry, Queensland (1922), a London jury found Penguin Books not guilty of obscenity for publishing D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover" (1960) and the first resident crew arrived at the ISS (Space, 2000).

Born on this day were Marie Antoinette, wife of Louix XVI (Vienna/Austria, 1755), Czech nobleman and Austrian General Graf Radetzky, immortalised in Johann Strauss' "Radetzky March" (Trebnice/Bohemia, 1766), American actor Burt Lancaster (New York, 1913) and the last Australian Formula 1 Champion, Alan Jones (Melbourne, 1946). Irish writer and Nobel laureate George Bernard Shaw died on this day (Ayot St. Lawrence/UK, 1950).