NOW & THEN
13 OCTOBER
AD54: Roman emperor Claudius I died after eating poisoned mushrooms as a result of a plot inspired by his wife, Agrippina. He was succeeded by Nero.
1501: Maximilian of Austria and Louis XII of France signed the Treaty of Trente.
1659: General John Lambe rt drove out the English Rump parliament.
1775: The first US Navy was formed.
1812: At the Battle of Queenstown Heights, British forces defeated US forces attempting to invade Canada.r
1861: Kingdom of Italy was divided into prefectures.
1880: Transvaal declared independence from Britain.
1884: Greenwich was adopted as the universal time meridian of longitude from which standard times throughout the world are calculated.
1924: Ramsay Macdonald made the first election broadcast on the BBC, on behalf of the Labour Party.
1924: Mecca fell without a struggle to Saudi forces led by Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia.
1943: Italy declared war on Germany – its former Axis partner.
1950: The movie All About Eve, starring Bette Davis, premiered. It would win the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1951.
1952: Egypt reached agreement with Sudan on Nile waters.
1963: The term “Beatlemania” was coined when the Beatles performed at the London Palladium.
1969: Soviet Union sent a third spacecraft into orbit in as many days. At that point there were seven cosmonauts in space.
1972: The bank rate was abolished, to be called instead the minimum lending rate.
1988: The Queen sued the Sun newspaper for breach of copyright after it printed one of her private photographs.
1988: The government’s long legal battle to prevent any mention in the British media of Spycatcher, the memoirs of the former MI5 officer Peter Wright, failed when the House of Lords ruled unanimously against it.
1989: Wall Street suffered its biggest share price collapse since Black Monday in October, 1987.
1992: A political storm erupted as British Coal announced it was closing 27 pits, mothballing three others and cutting
30,000 jobs.
1993: More than 400 English hooligans arrested in Rotterdam as England lost to Holland.
1994: Peace moved a step closer in Northern Ireland as Loyalist paramilitary groups followed the IRA and announced a ceasefire.
1996: Damon Hill became world motor racing champion when he won the Japanese Grand Prix. His late father, Graham, had won the title in 1962 and 1968.
1999: The United States Senate rejected ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear-test Ban Treaty.
2008: The government announced it was to pump billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money into three British banks in one of the country’s biggest nationalisations . Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds TSB and HBOS were to have a total of £37 billion injected into them.