How many days and weeks until April 4th?

Martin Luther King was shot dead on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis at one minute past six on the evening of April 4th 1968. He was thirty-nine. Because of the time difference the news reached Britain in the small hours of the following morning. He had been in the city to support the sanitation workers’ strike, and had spoken at the Mason Temple the night before. Riots followed in more than a hundred American cities.

The North Atlantic Treaty was signed in Washington on April 4th 1949 by twelve nations, Britain among them. Its central provision, Article 5, comes down to a single sentence: an attack on one is an attack on all. Ernest Bevin, the former docker who was then Foreign Secretary, had done much of the work of assembling it, and regarded it as the most useful thing he ever did.

On April 4th 1581 Elizabeth I went aboard the Golden Hind at Deptford to knight Francis Drake, newly returned from circumnavigating the globe with a great deal of Spanish silver. She handed the sword to a visiting French envoy and had him perform the ceremony, thereby making the point and sharing the blame.

Maya Angelou, the writer remembered above all for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, did not speak for five years of her childhood and later wrote seven volumes of autobiography. She was born on April 4th 1928, the bluesman Muddy Waters, often called the father of modern Chicago blues, in 1913 and Heath Ledger, the actor known for playing the Joker in The Dark Knight, in 1979.

Born on April 4th: star sign, birthstone and birth flower

Maya Angelou and Robert Downey Jr — both named above — share this star sign with everyone else born in the same window.

None of this is settled fact in the way the history above is — zodiac dates, birthstones and birth flowers are conventions rather than laws, and different sources hedge them slightly differently. The birthstone is the most standardised of the three (set by the trade in 1912 and revised since); the birth flower is the least, resting on Victorian tradition rather than any governing body.

Gift ideas for a April 4th birthday

A small, themed starting point rather than a shopping list — diamond for the stone, Aries for the sign, and the sky itself on the day.

Personalised birth flower & birthstone disc

Engraved with a name, the April birthstone and the daisy — both in one pendant, in a gift box.

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Aries constellation necklace

Stainless steel, sign selectable at checkout — choose Aries for a April 4th birthday.

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Personalised star map print

The actual night sky over a chosen place on April 4th, whichever year — a print rather than jewellery.

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