NOW & THEN
16 OCTOBER
1442: Christopher Columbus’s fleet anchored in the Bahamas at Long Island, which he renamed “Fernandina”.
1775: British naval forces landed at Falmouth (now Portland), Maine during the American War of Independence and, within two days had burned the town, leaving three-quarters of it in ashes.
1793: Marie Antoinette, Queen of France as wife of Louis XVI, was convicted of treason and guillotined in Paris.
1834: The Palace of Westminster was burned down; firemen managed to save Westminster Hall and St Stephen’s Chapel.
1847: Charlotte Bronte’s novel, Jane Eyre, was published.
1859: American anti-slavery campaigner John Brown, who inspired the song John Brown’s Body, raided the arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. He was later hanged for the offence.
1869: Girton College, the oldest women’s college of Cambridge University, was opened.
1900: Great Britain and Germany signed the Anglo-german Treaty, in which they agreed to maintain the territorial integrity of China.
1902: The first young offenders’ home opened in the village of Borstal, Kent.
1908: The first aeroplane flight in Britain was made, at Farnborough in Hampshire, by American Samuel Frank Cody.
1909: Jack Johnson knocked out Stanley Ketchel in the 12th round in Colma, California to retain the world heavyweight boxing title.
1916: World’s first birth control clinic opened in Brooklyn, New York.
1922: The world’s longest mainline tunnel, the Simplon II under the Alps, was completed after four years’ work.
1923: The Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio was founded.
1942: A cyclone in the Bay of Bengal resulted in 40,000 deaths in the region south of Calcutta, India.
1946: The Nuremberg executions took place. The war criminals hanged included Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Alfred Jodl, Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Wilhelm Keitel.
1949: Civil war ended in Greece.
1950: The first edition of C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe was published in London.
1958: Blue Peter started on BBC television with presenters Leila Williams and Christopher Trace.
1962 C b Mi il C i i
Cardinal Karol Wojtyla was elected Pope in conclave in Vatican, taking name John Paul II - the first non-italian Pope since 1522.
1994: A biography of the Prince of Wales by broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby said he was forced into a loveless marriage by the Duke of Edinburgh. The Prince described life at Gordonstoun school as “absolute hell”.
1997: The government announced it would ban highcalibre handguns and semiautomatic weapons after Lord Cullen’s report into the Dunblane massacre in which 16 children and a teacher died. Labour and the SNP called for a total ban on guns.
1998: Former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London on a warrant from Spain requesting his extradition on murder charges.