NOW & THEN
MAY 18
1642: City of Montreal founded. 1736: Witchcraft statutes repealed in England.
1804: Napoleon Bonaparte proclaimed Emperor of France.
1827: The Red Barn murder took place at Polstead, Suffolk, when Maria Marten was slain by one of her lovers, William Corder. He buried her under the barn floor and she lay there until her stepmother dreamed of the incident. Her father dug up the floor and discovered Maria’s body. Corder was hanged before a crowd of 7,000.
1830: Edwin Budding, of Stroud, Gloucestershire, signed an agreement for the manufacture of his invention, the lawn mower. The first customer was Regent’s Park Zoo, London.
1843: The Disruption, when more than 400 ministers and many elders left the Established Church of Scotland to form the Free Church of Scotland.
1882: The fourth Eddystone Lighthouse was opened.
1912: First automatic telephone exchange opened in Britain at Epsom.
1936: Jasmine Bligh and Elizabeth Cowell became the BBC’S first women announcers.
1944: Monte Cassino monastery in Italy was taken from German forces by Polish troops after bitter fighting.
1953: Jacqueline Cochrane, piloting a North American F- 86 Sabre, became the first woman to fly faster than sound.
1955: The first Wimpy Bar opened in London, beginning the fast- food invasion.
1960: Real Madrid beat Eintracht Frankfurt 7- 3 at Hampden to win the European Cup for the fifth year in a row.
1967: United Nations agreed to Egyptian demand to withdraw UN forces from Gaza Strip.
1969: Apollo 10 was launched with Thomas Stafford, John Young and Eugene Cernan.
1972: Four bomb disposal experts parachuted into the Atlantic from an RAF plane and boarded the QE2 after a bomb threat for ransom.
1974: India exploded its first nuclear bomb.
1980: Mount St Helens volcano in the American state of Washington, erupted, killing 57 people and creating a cloud of ash 2,500 miles long and 1,000 miles wide.
1991: Helen Sharman became Britain’s first woman in space, blasting off to spend a week on space station Mir with two Soviet cosmonauts.
1992: An inquest jury returned “unlawful killing” verdicts on nine British soldiers killed by American “friendly fire” in the Gulf War.
1993: The Danes reversed a previous rejection of the Maastricht Treaty, 56.8 per cent voting in favour at a second referendum.
2006: The Nepalese government passed a landmark bill curtailing the power of the monarchy and making the country secular.
2009: The Tamil Tigers were defeated by the Sri Lankan government, ending almost 26 years of fighting.
2014: Around 300 landslides triggered by unprecedented rain killed more than 30 people and caused more than 10,000 to flee their homes in Bosnia.