NOW & THEN
26 JUNE
1284: According to legend, the Pied Piper reappeared in the German town of Hamelin. He had rid the town of rats but the townspeople refused to pay him, so he charmed away 130 children and sealed them in a cave on Koppenburg Mountain.
1483: The Duke of Gloucester, having usurped the boy king, Edward V, publicly declared himself to be King Richard III of England.
1498: The toothbrush was invented in China, using boar bristles.
1695: The company was formed which undertook the Darien Scheme and came to ruin five years later through English obstruction, Spanish hostility and Scottish mismanagement.
1794: The first use of a reconnaissance balloon was made at the Battle of Fleurus, where a coalition army of Great Britain, Hanover, the Dutch Republic and the Habsburgs was defeated by forces of the First French Republic.
1857: The first investiture ceremony of Victoria Cross medals took place in Hyde Park. Queen Victoria awarded 62 servicemen this highest military honour.
1862: Kent bowler Joseph Wells, father of the novelist HG Wells, became the first man to take four first-class wickets with four successive balls, against Sussex.
1870: Wagner’s opera Die Walküre (The Valkyrie) premiered in Munich.
1906: The first motor racing Grand Prix took place at Le Mans and was won by Hungarian Ferenc Szisz, driving a Renault at an average speed of 63mph.
1909: The Victoria and Albert Museum opened.
1917: King George V dropped the German titles from the Royal Family, and Saxe-coburg-gotha became Windsor. The name Battenberg was changed to Mountbatten.
1939: The first National Serviceman, number 10000001, Private Rupert Alexander, joined the Middlesex Regiment.
1962: Billie Jean Moffit, 18, knocked out top seed Margaret Smith – the start of Billie Jean King’s long reign at Wimbledon.
1977: Elvis Presley gave his last concert performance. He died two months later.
1991: After battling for 15 years to prove their innocence, the “Maguire Seven” were cleared of running an IRA bomb factory in England.
1990: Ten-year battle over ski development project for Lurcher’s Gully on Cairn Gorm ended with Secretary of State Malcolm Rifkind’s veto.
1994: The driver and a passenger died when vandals derailed a train at Greenock.
1995: Hamad bin Khalifa al-thani deposed his father, Khalifa bin Hamad al-thani, the Emir of Qatar, in a bloodless coup.
1996: Irish journalist Veronica Guerin was shot in her car while in traffic in Dublin.
2009: The Queen was given a year’s supply of ice-cream at the Royal Highland Show, at Ingliston, near Edinburgh.
2015: Thirty-eight people, 30 of them British, died when an armed terrorist embarked on a killing spree on a beach at a tourist resort near Sousse, Tunisia.