How many days and weeks until July 15th?

Swithun, Bishop of Winchester, died in 862 and asked to be buried outside the cathedral where the rain would fall on him and ordinary people would walk over his grave. On July 15th 971 his remains were moved indoors to a shrine, and the tradition that grew up afterwards holds that it rained for forty days in protest. The Met Office has observed that no run of forty consecutively wet or dry days has ever followed the date.

Napoleon surrendered aboard HMS Bellerophon off Rochefort on July 15th 1815, four weeks after Waterloo, having failed to find a ship to America. Captain Maitland brought him to Torbay and then Plymouth, where sightseers hired boats by the hundred to row out and look at him. The government, alarmed by his popularity, sent him to St Helena without letting him set foot ashore.

Mariner 4 passed within about six thousand miles of Mars on the night of 14 to July 15th 1965 and took twenty-two photographs, the first close-up images of another planet. They were transmitted as strings of numbers over several days and showed a cratered, apparently dead surface, which ended a century of speculation about canals rather abruptly.

Iris Murdoch, the novelist and philosopher born in Dublin on July 15th 1919, wrote twenty-six novels and every one of them in longhand. Rembrandt, the Dutch painter, was born in 1606, Linda Ronstadt, the singer, in 1946 and Forest Whitaker, the actor, in 1961.

Born on July 15th: star sign, birthstone and birth flower

Rembrandt and Iris Murdoch — 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 July 15th birthday

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

July birthstone necklace

A simple pendant in the actual July birthstone colour, from a long-running UK jewellery brand.

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Cancer constellation necklace

Stainless steel, sign selectable at checkout — choose Cancer for a July 15th birthday.

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Personalised birth flower & birthstone disc

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

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Personalised star map print

The actual night sky over a chosen place on July 15th, whichever year — a print rather than jewellery.

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