The Press and Journal (Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire)

On this day

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1554: Mary I married Philip II of Spain. 1587: Christiani­ty was banned in Japan. 1848: Arthur James Balfour, 1st Earl, prime minister from 1902-05, was born in Scotland. 1894: Walter Brennan, US actor who played character parts in more than 100 films, was born.

1907: Sir Robert Baden-Powell’s experiment­al camp, to test the feasibilit­y of scouting, began on Brownsea Island, near Poole. Four days later, the Boy Scouts organisati­on was created.

1909: Louis Bleriot became the first man to fly across the Channel, flying his three-cylinder monoplane from near Calais to Northfall Meadow near Dover Castle. 1948: Bread rationing ended in Britain.

1959: The hovercraft, the SRN 1 as it was called, made its first English Channel crossing – from Dover to Calais – in a little over two hours.

1965: Former champion British boxer and nightclub owner Freddie Mills was found shot dead in his car in Soho.

1978: The first test-tube baby was born in Oldham General Hospital. It was a girl, and she was named Louise Joy Brown.

1989: Just 3.6 miles short of Dover, woman pilot Gloria Pullan had to ditch Louis Bleriot’s historic plane in the Channel while attempting to recreate his crossing in 1909.

ON THIS DAY LAST YEAR: Fraudsters had access to the personal details of 30,000 Barclays customers for up to seven years, it was revealed.

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