TODAY IN HISTORY
TODAY is Wednesday, November 18, the 323rd day of 2020. There are 43 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:
1845 — Captain George Grey becomes Governor of New Zealand. His title was changed to governorinchief in 1848, then Governor of New Zealand in 1853, a role he resigned from later that year when appointed governor of the Cape Colony in South Africa.
1874 — The Cospatrick, an immigrant ship bound for Auckland with 473 passengers and crew, catches fire at night and sinks off South Africa. Three crew members discovered drifting in a lifeboat a week later were the sole survivors.
1916 — In World War 1, General Douglas Haig calls off the first Battle of the Somme after five months of futile fighting, including the first use of tanks.
1928 — Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse makes his debut at the Colony Theatre in New York in a film called Steamboat Willie.
1941 — New Zealand troops perform military service in Libya as part of the Eighth Army. They became involved in a number of actions, including Tobruk.
1947 — Ballantynes department store in Christchurch is destroyed by fire. In the inferno, 41 staff members, mostly women, lose their lives. An inquiry later found that the building was unsafe and that store management did not take the fire seriously, compounded by a lack of leadership among the attending fire crew.
1963 — The first pushbutton telephone is introduced.
1977 — A fire engulfs the top floor of hardware merchant John Edmond Ltd in Princes St, causing extensive damage.
1978 — Peoples Temple founder Jim Jones kills more than 900 of his followers and himself in Jonestown, Guyana. Cult members were forced to drink a cyanidelaced fruit drink, and those who refused to drink it were shot.
1982 Neil Roberts, a 22yearold punk anarchist, blows himself up in an attack on the Wanganui Computer Centre.
1987 — A total of 31 people die at King’s Cross station on the London Underground in a fire which starts on a wooden escalator.
1993 — In South Africa, 21 political parties approve a new constitution, expanding voting rights and ending white minority rule.
1994 — Scientists in Berlin claim to have found a new element, a fusion of nickel and lead atoms that exists for less than onethousandth of a second.
1996 — A fire occurs on a train travelling through the Channel Tunnel from France to England causing several injuries and damaging approximately 500m of tunnel.
1999 — At Texas A&M University, the Aggie Bonfire collapses killing 12 students and injuring 27 others.
2004 — After 18 months, the Government’s much debated foreshore and seabed legislation is passed by Parliament. The Greens and Maori Party label the Bill racist legislation, while others say it is fatally flawed.
2018 — A tornado sweeps across paddocks in rural Mid Canterbury, causing minor damage.