NOW & THEN
5 SEPTEMBER
1174: Canterbury Cathedral was destroyed by fire.
1666: The Great Fire of London ended, leaving 13,200 houses, 87 churches and St Paul’s Cathedral destroyed, and eight people dead.
1793: The “Reign of Terror” began in the the French Revolution.
1807: Britain seized the island of Heligoland from Denmark. 1839: The first Opium War began in China.
1889: Sixty- three miners died in an underground fire at Mauricewood Pit, Penicuik – the cause of which was never discovered. Most of them died from suffocation when smoke entered the ventilation system. 1914: The first Battle of the Marne started – lasting seven days – as French and British forces resisted the German advance on Paris.
1939: United States declared neutrality in the Second World War.
1960: Eighteen- year- old boxer Cassius Clay ( later to become Muhammad Ali), won the gold medal in the light heavyweight division at the Olympic Games in Rome, defeating three- time European champion Zbigniew Pietrzykowski of Poland.
1963: Christine Keeler, one of the women at the centre of the Profumo scandal, was arrested and charged with perjury. 1969: ITV began broadcasting in colour.
1972: Arab terrorists, members of the Black September group, killed 11 Israelis at the Munich Olympic Games.
1975: US president Gerald Ford survived an assassination attempt in Sacramento, by Charles Manson “family” member Lynette Fromme, whose gun failed to fire when she pointed it at him at arm’slength range. She served 34 years in prison.
1978: Egyptian president Anwar El Sadat, Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and US president Jimmy Carter began 12 days of secret negotiations at Camp David, which led directly to the Egypt- Israel Peace Treaty. 1979: The funeral of Lord Mountbatten was held in London.
1990: Iraqi president Saddam Hussein urged Arabs to rise up against the west.
1991: The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was wound up when the Congress of People’s Deputies scrapped the
old power structures built up over 70 years.
1991: Nelson Mandela was named president of the African Nations Congress.
1995: Labour leader Tony Blair dismissed claims he had tried to weaken his party’s stance on a devolved Scottish Parliament with tax- raising powers.
2012: An explosion at a fireworks factory in Sivakasi, southern India, killed 54 people and injured more than 70 others. 2014: The World Health Organisation estimated that, of 3,500 people in Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal and Sierra Leone who had been infected with the Aids virus, 1,900 had died.
2017: Hurricane Irma, the fiercest ever recorded in the Caribbean, reached Category 5., eventually causing at least 29 deaths.