NOW & THEN
13 MARCH
1567: Margaret of Parma, Regent of the Netherlands, used German mercenaries to annihilate 2,000 Calvinists.
1770: Daniel Lambert, born on this day, grew to 738lb. When he died it took 20 men to lower his coffin into the grave.
1781: Amateur astronomer Sir William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus – 1,783 million miles from the Sun. Herschel lived to be 84, the number of Earth years it takes for Uranus to orbit the Sun.
1873: Scottish Football Association formed with constituent clubs Queen’s Park, Clydesdale, Vale of Leven, Dumbreck, Third Lanark, Eastern, Granville, and Kilmarnock.
1881: Alexander II, Tsar of Russia, was assassinated when a bomb was thrown at him near his palace. Succeeded by Alexander III.
1918: MPS voted to raise the school-leaving age to 14.
1925: MPS approved Summer Time Bill making daylight saving permanent.
1930: Discovery of planet Pluto was announced by Clyde Tombaugh at the Lowell Observatory, Arizona, although its existence had been predicted earlier by Percival Lowell.
1935: The driving test was introduced in Britain. It became compulsory three months later. 1938: Nazi Germany invaded Austria. It was declared part of the German Reich (the Anschluss) under the name of Ostmark.
1942: British bombers staged saturationraidon Cologne. 1961: Black and white Bank of England £5 notes ceased to be legal tender.
1972: Clifford Irving admitted to a New York Court that he had fabricated Howard Hughes’s autobiography after receiving a $750,000 advance from his publishers. He had hoped the reclusive millionaire would not venture into the public limelight to denounce him.
1990: Israeli coalition government collapsed over Likud members’ refusal to agree to American proposals for peace talks with Palestine.
1992: Pravda, for eight decades the official newspaper of the Communist Party, suspended publication because of lack of funds.
1994: Sir Peter Harding, Chief of the Defence Staff, resigned after newspaper reports of a relationship with the wife of former Con
servative defence minister, Sir Anthony Buck.
1996: Thomas Hamilton shot dead 16 children and a teacher at their Dunblane primary school, and then turned the gun on himself.
2003: 350,000-year-old footprints of an upright-walking human have been found in Italy, according to the journal Nature.
2005: Terry Ratzmann shot and killed six members of the Living Church of God and the minister at Sheraton Inn in Brookfield, Wisconsin, before killing himself.
2008: Gold prices in the United States hit $1,000 per ounce for the first time.
2013: Jorge Mario Bergoglio, from Argentina, was elected the 266th Pope, and would be known as “Pope Francis”. He was the first Jesuit pope, the first from the Americas and the first from the Southern Hemisphere.