NOW & THEN
OCTOBER 31
Halloween. All Saints’ Eve. The first night of winter when the Celtic year began. 1485: Coronation of King Henry VII started Tudor dynasty in England.
1517: Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of Wittenberg Church, Germany, at the start of the Reformation.
1541: Michelangelo completed his painting of The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican.
1815: Sir Humphrey Davy patented his miner’s safety lamp. 1828: A beggar woman named Docherty was invited back to a house in Edinburgh by William Burke. William Hare turned up soon after and strangled her. She was the last victim of the body snatchers; her death was discovered and police were called. 1837: The Mississippi riverboat, Monmouth, carrying 700 Creek indians upriver, was struck by the sail boat, Trenton, and immediately sank, with the loss of 300 lives.
1888: Pneumatic bicycle tyres were patented by Scottish inventor John Boyd Dunlop. 1892: Edinburgh- born author Arthur Conan Doyle published The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
1903: Hampden Park, Queen’s Park Football Club’s stadium, opened in Glasgow.
1914: Great Britain and France declared war on Turkey.
1922: Benito Mussolini became the premier of Italy.
1940: The end of the Battle of Britain. The RAF lost 915 aircraft, the Luftwaffe 1,733.
1941: The American destroyer USS Reuben James was sunk by a German torpedo, even though USA had not entered the war. 1951: Zebra crossings came into effect in Britain.
1956: British and French bombed Egyptian airfields in Suez War.
1958: In Stockholm, Doctor Ake Senning implanted the first internal heart pacemaker. 1959: USSR and Egypt signed contracts for building the Aswan Dam.
1961: British Honduras was struck by Hurricane Hattie, which claimed 400 lives.
1968: US president Johnson ordered a halt to all bombing in Vietnam.
1971: Three floors of London’s Post Office Tower destroyed by IRA bomb.
1975: Bob Geldof made his first appearance with the Boomtown Rats.
1984: India’s prime minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated in her garden by Sikh bodyguards.
1998: Iraq announced it would no longer co- operate with United Nations weapons inspectors. 2005: David Mcletchie resigned as leader of Scottish Conservatives after allegations about his Scottish Parliament expenses.
2008: Business secretary Lord Mandelson cleared the planned merger between Lloyds TSB and HBOS after ruling the deal was in the public interest.
2011: According to the United Nations, the world’s population reached 7 billion.
2017: Scottish comedian Billy Connolly was knighted by Prince Edward at Buckingham Palace.