NOW & THEN
15 OCTOBER
1520: King Henry VIII ordered bowling alleys to be installed at the Palace of Whitehall.
1582: Many Catholic countries changed over to the Gregorian calendar and skipped ten days.
1815: Napoleon Bonaparte arrived on the island of St Helena to begin his exile.
1827: Charles Darwin was admitted to Christ’s College, Cambridge.
1839: Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were betrothed. She proposed to him and confided to her diary: “It was a nervous thing to do, but Albert could not propose to the Queen of England. He would never have presumed to take such a liberty.”
1851: The Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace at London’s Hyde Park closed after five months.
1851: Gold was discovered in Melbourne, Australia.
1880: The building of Cologne Cathedral was completed, 633 years after it had begun.
1894: Alfred Dreyfus was arrested in France on treason charges.
1895: The first motor show in Britain was held at the Agricultural Showground, Tunbridge Wells.
1915: HMS Hawke was sunk off the east coast of Scotland by submarine action and more than 400 of her crew perished.
1917: Spy Mata Hari was executed by firing squad in Paris, having been found guilty of espionage for the Germans.
1924: US president Calvin Coolidge declared the Statue of Liberty a national monument.
1928: German dirigible Graf Zeppelin made first commercial flight across the Atlantic, landing at Lakehurst, New Jersey, US.
1928: The voting age for women was reduced from 30 to 21 in Britain, equal with men.
1937: The Ernest Hemingway novel To Have and Have Not was published.
1940: A 500lb bomb hit Broadcasting House, London, killing seven people. Bruce Belfrage was reading the news at the time, and paused for only a second before continuing.
1940: The Great Dictator, a satirical movie starring Charlie Chaplin, was released.
1945: Pierre Laval, French leader of Vichy government’s collaboration with the Germans, was executed for treason.
1962: King Olav V of Norway arrived in Edinburgh on first royal state visit to Scotland since the Union of the Crowns.
1987: Fiji’s governor-general resigned, ending decades of allegiance by the South Pacific island to the British crown.
1987: A hurricane killed 18, destroyed millions of trees and caused an estimated £300 million of damage to buildings, mainly in south-east England.
1990: Mikhail Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
1993: Nelson Mandela and South African president FW de Klerk were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to dismantle apartheid.
1995: There were fresh demands for boxing to be banned after Scottish bantamweight champion James Murray died in hospital from injuries he received in a British title fight in Glasgow two days earlier.
2012: Hilary Mantel won the Man Booker Prize for her novel Bring Up The Bodies.
BIRTHDAYS
Sarah, Duchess of York, 62; Craig Chalmers, Scottish rugby player, 53; Stephen Tompkinson, actor, 56; Dominic West, actor (The Wire), 52; Tito Jackson, singer, member of The Jackson 5, 68; Michael Caton-jones, Broxburn-born film director, 64; Tanya Roberts, actress (Charlie’s Angels), 66; Anthony Joshua OBE, world heavyweight champion boxer, 32; Michael Lewis, author and financial journalist, 61; William David Trimble, Baron Trimble, first minister of Northern Ireland 1998 to 2002, 77; Didier Deschamps, World Cup-winning player and manager, 53.
ANNIVERSARIES
Births: 1686 Allan Ramsay, poet; 1844 Friedrich Nietzsche, German philosopher and composer; 1880 Marie Stopes, Edinburghborn scientist and sex education reformer; 1881 Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE, author and playwright; 1920 Mario Puzo, author and screenwriter (The Godfather).
Deaths: 1674 Robert Herrick, poet; 1917 Mata Hari, exotic dancer and spy; 1964 Cole Porter, composer and lyricist; 1998 Iain Crichton Smith, poet 2008 Eddie Thompson OBE, chairman of Dundee United FC.