Past times

On this day

ROYAL ICING: The Queen asks a customer ‘Is this what you would like?’ as she helps out at one of the stalls at the Crathie Church sale of work on Deeside in 1955 1453: The Hundred Years War ended when the French defeated the English at Castillon.

1717: George I, Hanoverian King of England, held a public concert on the Thames for Handel to conduct his hour-long Water Music. The king enjoyed it so much he asked for two complete encores.

1841: The first issue of the magazine Punch was published in London.

1889: Erle Stanley Gardner, US author and lawyer who created Perry Mason, was born.

1917: The British royal family adopted the name House of Windsor in place of House of SaxeCoburg-Gotha.

1945: The Potsdam Conference began with world leaders Truman, Stalin and Churchill planning for the future peace at the end of the Second World War.

1955:

Walt Disney, pictured, oversaw the opening of his Disneyland theme park in Anaheim, California.

1959: Billie Holiday, jazz singer – probably the greatest of them all – was arrested on her death bed in hospital for possession of narcotics. She died later that day.

1969: Oh Calcutta! – the sex revue devised by theatre critic Kenneth Tynan – opened in New York. Critic Clive Barnes said the show gave pornography a dirty name.

1975: An international space link-up between US astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts took place when they crossed over from their docked spacecraft and shook hands 140 miles above Britain’s south coast.

ON THIS DAY LAST YEAR: Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman was sentenced to life behind bars in a US prison, a humbling end for a crime lord once notorious for his ability to kill, bribe or tunnel his way out of trouble.

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