NOW & THEN
3 JUNE
AD959: Edgar, first King of All England, was crowned in Bath by Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury.
1621: Dutch West India Company received charter for New Netherlands – now New York.
1899: England cricket captain WG Grace played his final Test Match, aged almost 51, against Australia at Trent Bridge.
1931: Derby Day races at Epsom became first sports and news event to be televised in Britain.
1937: The Duke of Windsor, the abdicated King Edward VIII, married Mrs Wallis Simpson in Monts, France.
1950: Himalayan peak of Annapurna was first climbed, by Maurice Herzog and Louis Lachenal.
1956: Third class rail travel was abolished in Britain and renamed second class.
1959: Singapore became selfgoverning.
1965: Gemini 4 was launched, with James Mcdivitt and Edward White. During the flight White became the first American to walk in space.
1971: The longest-running comedy in theatre history,
No Sex Please – We’re British, by Alistair Foot and Anthony Marriott, opened in London. It ran for 16 years.
1973: Soviet supersonic airliner crashed during international air show near Paris, killing six crew and seven French villagers.
1976: Bolivia’s former president, Juan Jose Torres, was found murdered in Argentina.
1978: The Guinness Book of Records went into the Guinness Book of Records as the most stolen book from British libraries.
1981: Shergar won the Derby by ten lengths.
1984: Punjab came under virtual martial law as army troops sealed off India’s troubled state and prepared to flush out Sikh terrorists.
1988: United States president Ronald Reagan said summit meetings with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had started to “take down the barriers” of the Cold War.
1989: Tiananmen Square massacre of students demanding democratic reforms in China began as troops cleared central Peking; the death toll eventually reached 2,600.
1989: Seamus Heaney, Irish poet, was elected Oxford University’s professor of poetry after a two-day poll, in which only 0.6 per cent of the electorate turned up to vote.
1990: The Social Democratic Party national committee voted 17 to five to suspend its constitution, thereby ending its existence.
1992: The Earth Summit, the United Nations conference on environment and development, opened in Rio de Janeiro, attended by many world leaders.
1998: An ICE high speed train derailed in Lower Saxony, Germany, causing 101 deaths.
2006: The union of Serbia and Montenegro came to an end with Montenegro’s formal declaration of independence.
2011: A fire at a scrap metal yard in Fife caused a huge plume of smoke to drift across the Firth of Forth. No-one was injured.
2012: The Queen’s Jubilee celebrations were held.
BIRTHDAYS
Raúl Castro, president of Cuba, 89; Anita Harris, British singer and actress, 78; Kelly Jones, singer and guitarist (Stereophonics), 46; Clive Mantle, British actor, 63; Michael Moore MP, Secretary of State for Scotland, 2010-2013, 55; Rafael Nadal, Spanish tennis champion, 34; James Purefoy, British actor, 56; Deniece Williams, US singer, 69; Dame Penelope Wilton, British actress, 74; Michelle Keegan, British actress, 33
ANNIVERSARIES
Births: 1906 Josephine Baker, US singer and dancer; 1912 William Douglas-home, playwright; 1924 Curtis Mayfield, soul singer; 1925 Cardinal Thomas Winning, Archbishop of Glasgow; 1925 Tony Curtis, film actor; 1926 Allen Ginsberg, poet; 1928 Archie Hind, author (The Dear Green Place).
Deaths: Dame Anna Neagle, actress; 1992 Robert Morley, actor; 1995 Alastair Webster Mackie, Aberdeen-born poet; 1999 Peter Brough, ventriloquist; 2001 Anthony Quinn, Mexicanus actor; 2009 David Carradine, US actor; 2010 Rue Mcclanahan, US actress; 2011 James Arness, US actor; 2011 Miriam Karlin OBE, British actress; 2016 Muhammad Ali, former world heavyweight boxing champion.