NOW & THEN
30 OCTOBER
1470: Henry VI returned to the English throne after the Earl of Warwick beat Yorkists in battle. 1485: King Henry VII was crowned at Westminster Abbey. 1534: The English parliament passed the Act of Supremacy, which made Henry VIII head of the Church of England.
1580: Sir Francis Drake arrived at Plymouth in the Golden Hind after his circumnavigation of the world.
1739: Great Britain declared war on Spain.
1817: Simon Bolivar organised an independent government in Venezuela.
1866: Outlaw Jesse James and his gang robbed a bank in Lexington, Missouri, of $2,000. 1873: PT Barnum’s circus, the “Greatest Show on Earth”, made its debut in New York.
1899: The Boers defeated Lt General White’s army at the Battle of Ladysmith.
1905: Aspirin pain reliever first went on sale in Britain.
1914: Battle of Ypres began in Belgium between Allies and Germans.
1918: Czechoslovakia proclaimed an independent republic.
1922: Fascist march on Rome of Benito Mussolini’s black-shirted army. Their arrival gained him the dictatorship of Italy. On 30 October, 1934, Mussolini ordered all six-year-olds to join up for pre-army training.
1925: John Logie Baird, from his attic workshop in London, produced the first moving image on his television screen.
1932: Violence broke out at a rally of the unemployed in Trafalgar Square, London.
1938: Orson Welles’s radio version of HG Wells’s The War Of The Worlds on American radio caused widespread panic. 1944: The 152nd Brigade of the Scottish Highland Infantry liberated Waalwijk in the Netherlands during the Second World War. 1974: Muhammad Ali knocked out George Foreman in eighth round in Zaire to regain world heavyweight title.
1975: “Yorkshire Ripper” Peter Sutcliffe killed his first victim, Wilma Mccann.
1987: IRA arms ship, The Eksund, was intercepted by French police en voyage from Libya, with 150-tonne cargo worth £3.7m.
1990: Tunnelling crews under the English Channel linked up for the first time when French
workers drilled a two-inch pilot hole through to the British side of a service tunnel.
1992: A car bomb exploded yards from Downing Street after IRA gunmen kidnapped a taxi driver and forced him to drive with the device to Whitehall. No one was injured.
1994: The Most Rev Thomas Winning, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Glasgow, was made a cardinal.
1995: Quebec sovereigntists lost a referendum for a mandate to negotiate independence from Canada.
2009: The UK government’s chief adviser on drugs was forced to resign after he claimed ecstasy and LSD were less harmful than alcohol.
2012: The Walt Disney company bought Lucasfilm Ltd and its rights for Star Wars and Indiana Jones for $4.05 billion.
BIRTHDAYS
Sir Richard Alston CBE, choreographer, 73; Harry Hamlin, actor, 70; Sir Ian Mcgeechan OBE, former Scotland rugby player and coach, 75; Courtney Walsh, Jamaican cricketer,
59; Grace Slick, rock singer (Jefferson Airplane), 82; Gavin Rossdale, singer and guitarist, 56; Bob Wilson OBE, Scottish footballer and broadcaster, 80; Henry Winkler OBE, actor, 76; Matthew Morrison, US actor, 43; Vanessa White, singersongwriter (The Saturdays), 32; Nastia Liukin, Olympic all-round individual gymnastic champion, 32; Otis Williams, singer (The Temptations), 80
ANNIVERSARIES
Births: 1893 Charles Atlas, bodybuilder; 1896 Ruth Gordon, actress and playwright; 1911 Ruth Hussey, actress; 1914 Anna Wing MBE, actress; 1932 Louis Malle, film director and producer; 1935 Michael Winner, film director, producer, restaurant critic. Deaths: 1959 Jim Mollison, Scottish aviator; 1979 Sir Barnes Wallis CBE, inventor of the bouncing bomb; 1995 Brian Easdale, composer; 2007 Robert Goulet, actor; 2009 Claude Levistrauss, anthropologist; 2017 Mary Reveley, racehorse trainer; 2017 Frank Doran, MP.