NOW & THEN
14 MARCH
1885: At the first night of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado at the Savoy Theatre, London, the Japanese Ambassador presented a petition to have it banned for racism. It ran for two years.
1891: First submarine telephone lines laid across English Channel.
1915: The German cruiser Dresden was sunk.
1917: China severed diplomatic relations with Germany.
1917: German army began retreat to Hindenburg Line.
1930: The Channel Tunnel Committee in London gave approval for the building of a tunnel between Britain and France.
1945: The heaviest bomb of the war, Grand Slam, weighing 22,000lb, was dropped by the RAF on Bielefeld railway viaduct.
1947: Twenty Questions, billed as a radio parlour game, began on BBC radio with questionmaster Stewart Macpherson and panel members Richard Dimbleby, Anona Winn and Jack Train.
1957: EOKA offered to suspend terrorist activities on Cyprus if Archbishop Makarios was released.
1962: Eric Lubbock captured Orpington for Liberals in sensational by-election, turning Tory majority of 14,760 into Liberal majority of 7,855.
1964: Jack Ruby was found guilty of killing Lee Harvey Oswald, alleged assassin of President Kennedy, and was sentenced to death. He died of a blood clot in 1967.
1965: Israel’s Cabinet formally approved establishment of diplomatic relations with West Germany.
1968: George Brown resigned as Labour Foreign Secretary after objecting to the way the government was run – and the manner in which it reached its decisions.
1978: Israeli troops invaded Lebanon on mission Israel said was designed to root out terrorist bases.
1984: Gerry Adams, head of Sinn Fein, was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt in central Belfast.
1988: Iran and Iraq unleashed missiles on each other’s capitals as so-called “war of the cities” erupted.
1989: Israeli foreign minister Moshe Arens accused Palestine Liberation Organisation of worst atrocities since Second World War.
1991: Birmingham Six were freed after wrongfully serving 16 years in jail for 1974 Birmingham pub bombings.
1992: Eleven died when helicopter transferring workers from Shell Cormorant Alpha platform to nearby accommodation flotel, Safe Supporter, crashed in North Sea.
1994: Government rejected IRA demands for talks on Northern Ireland, saying there would be no negotiations until violence stopped.
2011: Figures revealed that the number of women given prison sentences in Scotland had almost doubled in the past decade.
2012: Perth became Scotland’s seventh city after winning a UK competition marking the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.