NOW & THEN
20 AUGUST
1745: Bonnie Prince Charlie reached Blair Castle.
1866: US president Andrew Johnson formally declared the Civil War to be over.
1882: Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture premiered in Moscow.
1897: Ronald Ross, first Scot to win a Nobel prize (1902), dissected an anopheles mosquito and discovered the link with malaria.
1913: Adolphe Pegoud baled out from a Bleriot aeroplane 700 feet above Buc in France. He was the first parachutist to jump from an aircraft.
1918: British offensive on Western Front opened in First World War.
1924: The Scottish sprinter, Eric Liddell, refused to run in the heats of the 100 metres at the Paris Olympics on a Sunday as it was against his religious convictions to do so. He had been tipped as the likely winner.
1940: Leon Trotsky, exiled Russian revolutionary, was hit on the head with an ice pick at his home near Mexico City. He died 26 hours later, and his killer was sentenced to 20 years in jail.
1940: Winston Churchill made his famous tribute to the RAF in the House of Commons, when he said: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
1944: British and US forces destroyed the German 7th Army at Falais-argentan Gap.
1956: Calder Hall in Cumbria, the world’s first large-scale atomic power station, began generating.
1966: The Beatles were pelted with rotten fruit during a concert at Memphis.
1978: A stewardess killed and nine others injured when gunmen opened fire on an Israeli El Al Airlines crew bus in Mayfair, London.
1979: The East Coast mainline rail route between Scotland and England was re-opened after the completion of the Penmanshield Diversion – a realignment of the railway following the collapse of the Penmanshield Tunnel, in which two people were killed.
1989: Fifty-one people partying on the Thames pleasure cruiser Marchioness drowned when it was hit by a dredger in central London.
1989: Said Aouita of Morocco set a new world record of 7:29.45 for the 3,000 metres.
1993: Britain’s Colin Jackson set a new world record of 12.91 seconds for the 110-metre hurdles.
1993: Mother Teresa was hospitalised with malaria.
1994: There were calls for an urgent investigation by the Lord Advocate into a third drugsrelated death in three months at a “rave” at the Hangar 13 nightspot in Ayr.
1998: The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Quebec could not secede from Canada with the federal government’s approval.
2008: 153 people were killed when a Spanish airliner bound for the Canary Islands crashed on take-off in Madrid. There were only 19 survivors in Spain’s most deadly air disaster in more than 20 years.
2009: The Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset Ali al-megrahi, left Scotland, bound for Libya, after being freed from prison on compassionate grounds.
BIRTHDAYS
Amy Adams, American actress, 46; Ronnie Browne, folk singer (The Corries) and painter, 83; Finlay Calder OBE, former Scotland rugby captain, 63; Jamie Cullum, singer, 41; Dame Anne Evans DBE, soprano, 79; Lord Macdonald of Tradeston CBE, Minister for the Cabinet Office 2001-03, Scottish TV executive, 80; Tom Mangold, broadcaster, 86; Robert Plant CBE, British rock singer (Led Zeppelin), 72; David Walliams OBE, comedian, actor and TV presenter, 49; Andrew Garfield, actor 37; Don King, boxing promoter, 89.
ANNIVERSARIES
Births: 1818 Emily Brontë, writer; 1833 Benjamin Harrison, 23rd United States president; 1922 Tetsuzo Akutsu, Japanese surgeon who built the first artificial heart; 1923 Jim Reeves (“Gentleman Jim”) country and pop music singer-songwriter; 1949 Phil Lynott, singer and musician (Thin Lizzy).
Deaths: 1912 General William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army; 1936 Frederico Garcia Lorca, dramatist and poet (murdered); 1969 Dudley D Watkins, cartoonist (The Broons, Oor Wullie and Desperate Dan); 2017 Jerry Lewis, US film comedian.