Vincent van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853 in Groot-Zundert, a village close to Breda, in the predominantly Catholic province of North Brabant in the southern Netherlands. He was the oldest surviving child of Theodorus van Gogh and Anna Cornelia Carbentus. Vincent was given the name of a brother stillborn exactly a year before his birth. He felt unwanted as a child feeling he was a substitute for the other Vincent who his parents had tragically lost.
IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad was born on March 30, 1926. He first started selling matchboxes as a child, before selling fountain pens, cigarette lighters and nylon stockings. The then-17-year-old Ingvar Kamprad founded IKEA in 1943 as a mostly mail-order sales business, selling replicas of his uncle's kitchen table. The company's name is an acronym that consists of the initials of Ingvar Kamprad, Elmtaryd, the farm in south Sweden on which grew up and Agunnaryd, the nearby village.
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| The first Ikea store in Älmhult, Sweden. Photo by Christian Koehn |
Rock guitarist
Eric Clapton was born in Ripley, Surrey on March 30, 1945. He was the illegitimate son of a Canadian soldier Edward Walter Fryer, who returned to his wife in Canada before he was born and his 16-year-old mother Patricia Molly Clapton. Clapton was brought up by his maternal grandparents Rose and Jack Clapp believing that his mother was his sister.
For more March 30 anniversaries, including the first ever operation on a patient using ether anesthesia, the patenting of the all-in-one pencil eraser and United States purchase of Alaska, check out
OnThatDay.
