NOW & THEN
16 NOVEMBER
1700: James Macpherson, freebooter, was hanged at Banff. The town clock was said to have been advanced to forestall a messenger carrying a reprieve. He was said to have played his fiddle up to the last.
1776: British troops captured Fort Washington during the American Revolution.
1797: Royal Navy withdrew from the Mediterranean.
1849: A Russian court sentenced author Fyodor Dostoevsky to death for antigovernment activities linked to a radical intellectual group. The sentence was later commuted to hard labour.
1907: Militant suffragettes disrupted a speech by Herbert Asquith, chancellor of the Exchequer, at Nuneaton. Thirty women were carried out and treated so roughly that it brought strong protests from men.
1907: Oklahoma became the 46th state of USA.
1918: The Hungarian People’s Republic was declared.
1920: Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services Ltd (Qantas) was founded.
1932: Eleven killed in firedamp explosion at Cardowan Colliery, Lanarkshire.
1936: The German Luftwaffe began bombing Madrid.
1937: MPS voted in favour of air raid shelters being erected in towns and cities.
1945: Unesco (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) founded.
1950: US president Harry S Truman proclaimed an emergency crisis caused by the threat of communism.
1955: Donald Campbell, in his speedboat, Bluebird, broke his own world water speed record, reaching a speed of 239.5mph on Lake Mead, Nevada.
1959: The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, The Sound of Music, was first performed on Broadway. It ran for 1,443 performances.
1965: The USSR launched Venus III, an unmanned spacecraft that successfully landed on Venus.
1967: In Cyprus, 23 Turkish Cypriots were killed in fighting.
1976: An eight-man gang was jailed for 25 years for robbing deposit boxes at the Bank of America, Mayfair, of £8 million.
1992: Cambridge, Massachusetts, became first US town to give legal recognition to
homosexual couples.
1997: After nearly 18 years of incarceration, the People’s Republic of China released Wei Jingsheng, a pro-democracy dissident, from jail for medical reasons.
2000: Bill Clinton became the first US president to visit Vietnam since the end of the Vietnam War.
2008: The Iraqi Cabinet approved a pact with the US which paved the way for the withdrawal of American troops by the end of 2011.
2010: Prince William and Kate Middleton announced their engagement at Clarence House.
2012: Labour snatched a seat from the Conservatives in a by-election for the first time in 15 years, taking Corby in Northamptonshire. Andy Sawford won by 7,791 votes, with the Tories second and Ukip third.
BIRTHDAYS
Michael Billington OBE, author and arts critic, 80; Willie Carson OBE, jockey and racing commentator, 77; Maggie Gyllenhaal, actress, 42; Marg Helgenberger, actress, 61; Professor Malcolm Jeeves CBE, president, Royal Society of Edinburgh 1996-9, emeritus professor of psychology St Andrews University, 93; Diana Krall, jazz singer and pianist, 55; Griff Rhys Jones OBE, actor, writer and producer, 66; David Wilson-johnson, bass-baritone, 69; Professor Sir Magdi Yacoub OBE, cardiothoracic surgeon, 84; Gemma Atkinson, actress, 35.
ANNIVERSARIES
Births: 42BC Tiberius, Roman emperor; 1811 John Bright, statesman and orator; 1839 William Frend De Morgan, artist, Pre-raphaelite and novelist; 1896 Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of British Union of Fascists; 1907 Burgess Meredith, actor.
Deaths: 1093 Margaret, Queen of Malcolm Canmore; 1272 King Henry III; 1960 Clark Gable, actor; 2006 Professor Milton Friedman, Nobel-winning monetarist economist; 2014 Dessie Hughes, racehorse trainer; 2015 Stewart Cruckshank, Scottish radio producer; 2018 William Goldman, novelist and screenwriter.