NOW & THEN
7 FEBRUARY
1301: The first Prince of Wales was created – Edward of Caernarvon later became King Edward II.
1845: The Portland Vase, a teninch Roman dark blue cameo glass vessel, was smashed by a stone, thrown by a theatrical scene painter while it was on loan to the British Museum. The vase was successfully restored.
1905: The world’s laziest man died in Bristol, aged 82. Tom Oaksby never worked, never walked further than the nearest pub, and spent 47 years in bed.
1912: The ice-cream cornet was introduced in Britain.
1920: Admiral Alexander Kolchak was executed by Soviet Communists.
1922: Foot-and-mouth disease swept through Britain, causing thousands of cattle to be slaughtered.
1940: Walt Disney’s Pinocchio had its world premiere.
1941: The British captured Benghazi.
1947: British proposal for dividing Palestine into Arab and Jewish zones with administration as trusteeship was rejected by Arabs and Jews.
1947: Main group of Dead Sea Scrolls discovered.
1962: Coal mine explosion in Saarbruecken, Germany, killed 298 miners.
1974: Grenada, in the Windward Isles, a British colony since 1783, became a fully independent state within the Commonwealth.
1976: Two women made sporting history: Joan Bazely became the first woman football referee of an all-male match at Croydon, and Diana Thorne became the first woman jockey to win under National Hunt Rules on Ben Ruler at Stratford.
1984: Bruce Mccandless, from Challenger, became the first person to walk in space without being attached to his craft.
1986: Haiti’s president-forlife, Jean-claude Duvalier, went into exile, ending 29-year family dynasty in the Caribbean republic.
1986: Linda Chamberlain, the mother convicted in the “dingo baby” case, was freed in Australia when new evidence emerged to support her innocence.
1988: Panamanian General Manuel Antonio Noriega said drug charges levelled against him in United States were false.
1989: River Ness burst its banks, flooding parts of Inverness and wrecking the 2 The ice cream cornet was introduced in Britain on this day in 1912 127-year-old railway bridge over the river.
1990: In the USSR, the Central Committee agreed to end the communists’ monopoly on power, paving the way for a multi-party democracy.
1991: The IRA launched a mortar bomb attack on 10 Downing Street from a van in Whitehall. One of the bombs blasted a hole in the back garden, shattering the window of the room in which John Major and his war cabinet were meeting. No-one was hurt.
1995: Allan Stewart resigned as Scottish Officer industry minister over a pick-axe incident with M77 protesters.
2008: The Archbishop of Canterbury, Doctor Rowan Williams, faced demands for his resignation after calling for parts of Islamic law, or sharia, including aspects of marriage, to be introduced in Britain.
BIRTHDAYS
Garth Brooks, country music singer, 57; Stuart Burrows OBE, British tenor, 86; Gerald Davies CBE, Welsh rugby player, 74; Peter Jay, British broadcaster, 82; Ashton Kutcher, US actor, 41; James Spader, US actor, 59; Brian Morton, Paisley-born journalist and broadcaster, 65
ANNIVERSARIES
Births: 1478 Sir Thomas More, Lord Chancellor to Henry VIII; 1804 John Deere, entrepreneur; 1812 Charles Dickens, British novelist; 1870 Alfred Adler, Austrian pioneer in psychiatry; 1908 Buster Crabbe, Olympic champion swimmer and actor; 1946 Pete Postlethwaite OBE, British actor; 1923 George Henry Hubert Lascelles KBE, 7th Earl of Harewood, artistic director of the Edinburgh Festival 1961-65.
Deaths: 1878 Pope Pius IX, after 31-year reign; 1894 Adolphe Sax, inventor of the saxophone; 1959 Daniel Malan, South African prime minister and creator of apartheid; 1993 Joseph Mankiewicz, film director and writer; 1998 Carl Wilson, guitarist and singer (The Beach Boys); 1999 King Hussein of Jordan; 2004 Norman Thelwell, cartoonist and illustrator; 2015 Billy Casper, three-time Major golf champion.