NOW & THEN
NOVEMBER 6
1733: Spain and France signed Treaty of Escurial and formed alliance against Britain.
1783: Highwayman John Austin was the last person to be publicly hanged on the gallows at Tyburn ( now site of Marble Arch, London).
1872: The ill- fated 282- ton brigantine Mary Celeste set sail from New York for Genoa – a month later she was found sailing in the Atlantic near the Azores but with no- one on board.
1908: Professor Ernest Rutherford announced that he had discovered the atom.
1916: Jeanette Rankin, from Montana, was elected first woman member of US Congress. 1917: Bolshevik Revolution, led by Lenin, began setting up world’s first communist state. 1921: Benito Mussolini declared himself Il Duce, leader of the Italian National Fascist Party.
1931: Chinese Soviet Republic was established.
1944: Franklin D Roosevelt reelected US President for record fourth time.
1945: Flying over Herne Bay, Kent, a British RAF Gloster Meteor jet reached a record speed of 606mph.
1967: Henry Cooper beat Billy Walker and became the only boxer to win three Lonsdale belts outright.
1972: Richard Nixon was elected 37th United States president. He was the only president to resign.
1974: Lord Lucan disappeared the same night his children’s nanny was murdered and his wife seriously assaulted at their home in London.
1975: The Scottish Daily News ceased publication after six months.
1988: Sugar Ray Leonard completed collection of world titles at five different weights by knocking out Canadian Donny Lalonde.
1990: Mary Robinson, liberal feminist lawyer, was elected as Ireland’s first woman president. 1994: The Irish Republic announced that it would be releasing up to 30 IRA prisoners before Christmas in a “sensitive approach” to the terrorist ceasefire.
1999: The Beatles were named Best Band in a Music of the Millennium survey.
2003: Michael Howard replaced Iain Duncan Smith as leader of the Conservative Party.
2006: Three hundred soldiers executed in the First World War for offences including cowardice and desertion were pardoned with the passing of the Armed Forces Act. The campaign had been led by the family of Private Henry Farr, who was shot at dawn.
2008: Labour won the Glenrothes by- election, comfortably holding off a challenge from the SNP. 2009: Britain’s David Haye, 29, became the first Briton to hold a world heavyweight crown since Lennox Lewis retired in 2003 after he overcame Russian Nikolay Valuev in Nuremberg to claim the WBA heavyweight crown.
2011: Pop legend Michael Jackson’s personal physician, Dr Conrad Murray, was found guilty of the involuntary manslaughter of the star by a jury in Los Angeles. He was later jailed.