NOW & THEN
28 AUGUST
1413: Bull of Pope Benedict XIII (of Avignon) ratifying the founding of St Andrews University.
1833: Parliament banned slavery throughout British Empire.
1841: Sir Robert Peel succeeded Lord Melbourne as prime minister for his second term.
1850: The Channel telegraph cable was completed between Dover and Cap Gris Nez.
1850: Wagner’s opera Lohengrin was first performed and the conductor was the composer, Franz Liszt. It contains the Bridal Chorus, better known as Here Comes The Bride.
1879: British troops captured Cetywayo in Zulu War.
1895: RL Thomas, secretary and treasurer of Kinetoscope Co of New Jersey, became the first film actor, playing the part of the Queen in The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots. A dummy was also used for the first time – for the beheading.
1917: The Order of the British Empire (OBE), and the Companion of Honour (CH), were awarded for the first time.
1928: All-party Congress at Lucknow, India, voted for dominion status within British Empire.
1931: Ramsay Macdonald was ousted as Labour leader after joining national government. He was succeeded by Arthur Henderson.
1933: The BBC made the first broadcast appeal on behalf of the police, for Stanley Hobday, wanted for murder. He was captured near Carlisle and hanged at Winson Green Prison, Birmingham on 29 December.
1963: Black civil rights leader Martin Luther King made his famous “I have a dream…” speech to a rally of 200,000 people in Washington.
1967: Britain’s hippie movement held its great Festival of the Flower Children at Woburn Abbey, Buckinghamshire.
1989: Masked Sikh gunmen raided a passenger train in India’s Punjab State and massacred at least 22 Hindu passengers.
1990: Ernest Saunders was jailed for five years, Gerald Ronson for one year and fined £5million and Anthony Parnes was jailed for two-and-a-half years in the Guinness trial. Sir Jack Lyons, also convicted, was later fined £2million.
1992: All 82 people aboard an Aeroflot airliner died in a crash north-east of Moscow.
1995: More than 30 people were killed when Bosnian Serbs shelled the centre of Sarajevo, hitting market shoppers.
1996: The 15-year marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales was formally ended when they were granted a decree absolute.
2003: An electricity blackout cut off power to around 500,000 people in south east England and brought 60 per cent of London’s Tube network to a halt.
2007: Two companies which owned the Stockline plastics factory in Maryhill, Glasgow, in which nine people died in an explosion in 2004, were fined £400,000.
2008: Hundreds of people were left stranded and up to 60,000 lost bookings after the collapse of low-cost transatlantic airline Zoom.