NOW & THEN
17 OCTOBER
1346: David II of Scotland was taken prisoner at the Battle of Neville’s Cross, in Durham, and spent the next 11 years in captivity.
1651: Charles II escaped from Cromwell’s army across the English Channel.
1662: Charles II sold Dunkirk to France for 2.5 million livres (£ 320,000).
1800: The Dutch colony of Curaceo was transferred to British rule.
1814: In the London Beer Flood, a three- storey high vat exploded, causing a tidal wave of 323,000 gallons of beer, destroying two homes, crumbling the walls of a neighbouring pub and swamping two neighbouring streets with beer. Nine people were killed.
1850: James Young obtained a patent for the extraction of paraffin from shale, the beginning of the paraffin industry in West Lothian.
1855: Henry Bessemer patented his process for making steel. 1860: Willie Park senior scored 164 to win the inaugural Open Championship at Prestwick Golf Club.
1899: Boers defeated by British troops at Glencoe, South Africa. 1912: Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia declared war on Turkey. 1918: Republic of Yugoslavia was established formally.
1922: Scottish workers in Glasgow set off on a hunger march to London.
1931: US gangster Al Capone was jailed for 11 years for tax evasion.
1933: Albert Einstein arrived in the USA as a refugee from Nazi Germany.
1945: Colonel Juan Peron staged coup in Buenos Aires and became absolute dictator of Argentina.
1956: Calder Hall in Cumbria, Britain’s first large- scale atomic energy station, was opened by the Queen when power was first fed into the grid system.
1970: Anwar Sadat succeeded Gamal Nasser as president of Egypt.
1972: The Queen became the first reigning monarch to visit a communist country when she arrived in Yugoslavia.
1977: West German commandos stormed hijacked Lufthansa airliner at airport in Somalia and freed all 86 hostages aboard. 1990: The Pope allowed two married men to be ordained as priests on condition they gave
up sex and live forever as brother and sister with their wives. 1991: Four ITV companies, TVam, Thames, TVS and TSW lost their licences under changes announced by the Independent Television Commission.
1995: A long- awaited report by the Scottish Constitutional Convention envisaged a Scottish parliament of 129 members elected under a proportional representation system.
2000: Four died and more than 100 were injured when a GNER King’s Cross to Leeds express was derailed at over 100mph at Hatfield, in Hertfordshire. 2001: New guidelines to prepare for terrorist attacks using bubonic plague, smallpox and botulism were sent to doctors and hospitals throughout Britain. 2013: Fifty- nine people were killed during a wave of attacks on Shia Muslims in Iraq.