How many days and weeks until November 10th?

Henry Morton Stanley walked into Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika, found the only other European for hundreds of miles, and greeted him with the most quoted sentence in the history of exploration. The meeting is conventionally dated to November 10th 1871, but both men had lost track of the calendar through illness, Stanley gave two different dates in his own accounts, and Livingstone realised at the start of Ramadan that his diary had run some three weeks ahead. Scholars now put the meeting in late October. Stanley may also have made the greeting up afterwards.

Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed in Nigeria on November 10th 1995, with eight others, after a trial widely condemned as a sham. The Commonwealth heads of government were in session in Auckland at the time; John Major called it judicial murder and Nigeria was suspended from the Commonwealth within hours.

Richard Burton, the Welsh actor with the voice everyone remembers, was born on November 10th 1925 at Pontrhydyfen, the twelfth of thirteen children of a collier, and took the surname of the schoolmaster who taught him to speak verse. He was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won none of them.

Tim Rice, the lyricist behind decades of musical theatre with Andrew Lloyd Webber, arrived in 1944 in a Buckinghamshire country house that had been requisitioned as a maternity hospital for the duration. The date also holds Martin Luther, the theologian whose protests split the Western Church, in 1483, and Ennio Morricone, the composer of some of cinema’s most recognisable film scores, in 1928.

Born on November 10th: star sign, birthstone and birth flower

Richard Burton and Sir Tim Rice — 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 November 10th birthday

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

November birthstone necklace

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

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Scorpio constellation necklace

Stainless steel, sign selectable at checkout — choose Scorpio for a November 10th birthday.

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Personalised birth flower & birthstone disc

Engraved with a name, the November birthstone and the chrysanthemum — 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 November 10th, whichever year — a print rather than jewellery.

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