NOW & THEN
15 JULY
AD862: When St Swithin, Saxon Bishop of Winchester, died, he asked to be buried outside where rain could fall on his grave. Some 108 years later on the same day, when devoted monks decided to move the body from the “vile and unworthy grave”, a sudden deluge drenched the funeral party and it rained for nearly seven weeks.
1099: Jerusalem was captured by the Crusaders.
1381: John Ball, a leader of the Peasants’ Revolt, was hung, drawn and quartered in the presence of Richard II.
1783: The first steamboat, Pyroscaphe, was given its first run on River Saône in France.
1799: The Rosetta Stone – which holds the key to understanding Egyptian hieroglyphs – was found in the Egyptian village of Rosetta by French Captain Pierre-françois Bouchard during Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign.
1840: Great Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia signed the Quadruple Alliance.
1850: John Wisden bowled all ten wickets while playing for South against North at Lord’s.
1857: The Massacre of Cawnpore, in which 197 British women and children were murdered during the Indian Mutiny.
1869: Margarine was patented in France
1889: New National Portrait Gallery for Scotland opened in Edinburgh.
1893: Matabele staged an uprising against the rule of British South Africa Company.
1912: National Insurance or social payment, devised by Lloyd George, began.
1939: Clara Adams became the first woman to complete a round-the-world flight.
1948: United Nations Security Council ordered truce in Palestine.
1965: US Mariner-4 sent back the first close-up pictures of Mars.
1972: Lee Trevino scored 278 at Muirfield to win the Open Championship.
1974: Archbishop/president Makarios of Cyprus fled during a military coup.
1975: America’s Apollo and Soviet Union’s Soyuz spacecraft blasted into orbit for rendezvous in space.
1987: Boy George was banned from appearing on British television shows, deemed to be a “bad influence”.
1992: Pope John Paul II was hospitalised to have a tumour removed.
1994: Hundreds of thousands of Hutu fled to Zaire to escape genocide in Rwanda.
2002: Anti-terrorism Court of Pakistan handed down the death sentence to British-born Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh and life terms to three others suspected of murdering American Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
2009: A 7.9 magnitude earthquake centred 160 miles west of Invercargill, New Zealand, triggered a small tsunami.
2012: Thirty-nine pilgrims died in a bus crash in Parasi, Nepal.
2020: Having been closed for almost four months during the lockdown caused by the coronavirus, pubs and restaurants in Scotland were allowed to reopen.