NOW & THEN
1MAY
1517: “Evil May Day” riots in London as apprentices attacked foreign residents. Sixty rioters were later hanged.
1522: England declared war on France and Scotland.
1648: Scots began second Civil War.
1650: The present metrical version of the Psalms came into official use in the Kirk.
1707: Act of Union between Scotland and England came into force.
1786: First performance, in Vienna, of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro.
1840: The first Penny Black stamps went on sale.
1841: London Library, founded by Thomas Carlyle, WE Gladstone, Lord Macaulay and others, was opened.
1851: The Great Exhibition was opened in Hyde Park by Queen Victoria. Punch dubbed its building The Crystal Palace.
1912: Statue of Peter Pan was installed in Kensington Gardens, London.
1925: Cyprus was declared a British crown colony.
1931: President Hoover opened New York’s Empire State Building.
1937: President Franklin D Roosevelt signed US Neutrality Act.
1941: Orson Welles’s first film, Citizen Kane, premièred.
1942: Japanese forces took Mandalay, Burma.
1949: Britain’s gas industry was nationalised.
1960: American U-2 reconnaissance plane, piloted by Gary Powers, was shot down in the Soviet Union.
1961: The Betting and Gaming Act came into force, and betting shops opened in Britain.
1971: America’s new rail passenger service, Amtrak, went into operation.
1978: May Day holiday celebrated for the first time in Britain.
1982: British Vulcan bombers flew 3,500 miles from Ascension Island to bomb Falklands airport at Port Stanley.
1990: Soviet protesters heckled president Mikhail Gorbachev at May Day parade on Red Square.
1990: Secret naval documents published in The Scotsman revealed history of accidents involving the submarine hoists at Faslane.
1993: Sri Lankan president Ranasinghe Premadasa was assassinated by a suicide bomber in Colombo.
1994: World motor racing champion Ayrton Senna died when his car hit a wall at 190mph in the San Marino Grand Prix.
1997: Seven Tory Cabinet ministers lost their seats as Labour swept back to power after 18 years in a general election landslide that saw Tony Blair become prime minister.
2003: President George Bush declared that military hostilities in Iraq were over.
2003: Estonia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia joined the European Union.
2010: New York City police defused an improvised car bomb parked in Times Square.
2011: The late Pope, John Paul II, was officially beatified at the Vatican.
BIRTHDAYS
Rodger Arneil, Scottish rugby player, 75; Naim Attallah CBE, publisher, 88; Steve Cauthen, US jockey, 59; Roger Chapman, British golfer, 60; Judy Collins, US singer, 80; Rita Coolidge, US pianist/singer, 74; Ian Curteis, British playwright and film director, 84; Tony Dobbin, Northern Irish jockey, 47; Danny Mcgrain MBE, Scottish footballer, 69; Una Stubbs, British actress, 82; Antony Worrall Thompson, British TV chef, 68; Aliona Vilani, Strictly dancer, 35
ANNIVERSARIES
Births: 1218 Rudolf I, founder of Habsburg dynasty; 1839 Hilaire, Comte de Chardonnet, rayon pioneer; 1896 General Mark Clark, US army commander; 1923 Joseph Heller, author.
Deaths: 1700 John Dryden, poet laureate for 32 years; 1859 John Walker, inventor of friction match; 1873 David Livingstone, missionary, traveller; 1904 Antonin Dvorák, composer; 1945 Joseph Goebbels, Nazi leader (suicide); 1952 William Fox, founder 20th Century Fox; 1998 Justin Fashanu, footballer (suicide); 2011 Ted Lowe MBE, snooker commentator; 2011 Sir Henry Cooper OBE, former British heavyweight boxing champion.