NOW & THEN
10 SEPTEMBER
1297: Scots under William Wallace defeated the English at Cambuskenneth.
1547: The Battle of Pinkie, in which the Scots, under the Earl of Arran, were heavily defeated by English, with thousands of Scottish soldiers killed.
1846: Elias Howe patented the sewing machine.
1875: Wille Park Senior shot 166 at Prestwick Golf Club to win the 15th Open Championship and equal Tom Morris Junior’s record of four victories
1897: Marlborough Street Court, London, fined a taxi driver, George Smith, £1 to make him the first person in Britain to be convicted for drunken driving.
1907: British colony of New Zealand became a dominion.
1923: The Irish Free State joined the League of Nations.
1939: German Army gained complete control of western Poland; Canada declared war on Germany; first British forces arrived in France.
1942: RAF dropped 100,000 bombs on Dusseldorf in a single raid.
1945: Vidkun Quisling, the puppet premier of Norway, was sentenced to death for collaboration and was executed on 24 October.
1948: Australian cricketer Don Bradman scored 153 runs in his final first-class innings in England while playing against HDG Leveson-gower’s XI in Scarborough.
1950: Joe di Maggio became the first baseball player to hit three home runs in the same game while playing for the New York Yankees against the Washington Senators.
1960: Abebe Bikila of Ethiopia, running barefoot, set a new world record of 2:15:16.2 in the marathon at the Olympic Games in Rome, becoming the first subSahara African to win a gold medal.
1966: Muhammad Ali retained his world heavyweight boxing title by defeating Karl Mildenberger with a technical knockout in the 12th round, in Frankfurt, the first heavyweight title fight to be held in Germany.
1967: Gibraltar referendum resulted in overwhelming vote to retain link with Britain rather than Spanish sovereignty.
1976: Two airliners collided over Yugoslavia, killing all 176 people aboard.
1981: Picasso’s Guernica returned to Spain after 40 years custodianship in the Unit
ed States. Picasso refused to allow the painting to be shown in Spain until democracy was restored.
2001: Charles Ingram cheated his way into winning £1 million on the television quiz show Who Wants to be a Millionaire.
2002: Switzerland became a member of the United Nations.
2007: Wendy Alexander became leader of the Labour Party in Scotland, replacing Jack Mcconnell, the former first minister who stood down following the party’s defeat in the Scottish Parliament elections.
2008: the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, reported to be the biggest scientific experiment ever, went live in Geneva.
2012: Scotland’s Andy Murray defeated Novak Djokovic 7-6, 2-5, 2-6, 3-6, 6-2 to win the US Open men’s singles title at Flushing Meadows.