NOW & THEN
25 MARCH
1306: Robert de Brus, Earl of Carrick and Lord of Annandale, was crowned King of Scots at Scone by the Countess of Buchan.
1807: Slave trade in Britain abolished.
1810: The Commercial Bank of Scotland was officially founded in Edinburgh by John Pitcairn, Lord Cockburn and others.
1815: Austria, Britain, Prussia and Russia formed a new alliance against Napoleon Bonaparte to maintain established order in Europe.
1821: Greek patriots began to revolt against domination of the Ottoman Empire, an uprising that lasted 12 years and won Greek independence.
1843: The 1,300ft Thames tunnel, linking Wapping with Rotherhithe, was formally opened.
1876: First Scotland versus Wales football international was played in Glasgow: Scotland won 4-0.
1897: The Scottish Trades Union Congress was founded.
1936: The United States, Britain and France signed the London Naval Convention.
1940: The Mosquito, Britain’s two-seater fighter bomber, made its maiden flight.
1949: Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet won five Oscars – the first British film to win an Academy award.
1957: Belgium, France, West Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands signed the Treaty of Rome and established the European Economic Community.
1980: Doctor Robert Runcie enthroned as the 102nd Archbishop of Canterbury.
1982: Former Labour deputy leader Roy Jenkins took the traditional Conservative seat at Glasgow Hillhead for the SDP in a sensational by-election victory.
1989: Heads of Egypt, Jordan and Palestine Liberation Organisation met to coordinate Middle East peace strategy.
1989: The Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race had two women as coxes for the first time in its 135 years. Oxford won.
1992: Aldershot Football Club collapsed with debts of £1.2 million – the first Football League club to fold during a season since Accrington Stanley in 1962.
1993: The Warrington IRA bomb atrocity claimed a second young victim when 12-year-old Tim Parry died in hospital.
1993: Barbara Harmer, 39, became civil aviation’s first woman supersonic pilot when she flew as first officer on the Concorde.
1994: Five members of a British Army climbing expedition, missing for four weeks in the jungles of Borneo, were found alive.
1996: The European Union’s Veterinarian Committee banned the export of British beef and its by-products as a result of mad cow disease.
2002: Halle Berry made Oscars history when she became the first black woman to win the Best Actress award.
2010: Sherlock, a Collie crossbreed, who lived to be Scotland’s oldest dog, died at the age of 21.
2020: Buckingham Palace announced that Prince Charles, the Duke of Rothesay, had tested positive for coronavirus at a hospital in Aberdeen and was self-isolating atbalmoral.
BIRTHDAYS
Bonnie Bedelia, US actress,
74; Melanie Blatt, pop singer (All Saints), 47; Sir Humphrey Burton CBE, British writer and broadcaster, 91; Marcia Cross, US actress (Desperate Housewives), 60; Robert Fox, British theatre, film and TV producer, 70; Paul Michael Glaser, US actor (Starsky and Hutch) 79; John Jeffrey, Scottish rugby player and broadcaster, 63; Sir Elton John CBE, singer and songwriter, 75; Barry Kyle, British theatre director, 75; Richard O’brien, British actor, television presenter and writer (Rocky Horror Show), 80; Sarah Jessica Parker, US actress (Sex and the City), 57.
ANNIVERSARIES
Births: 1881 Béla Bartók, composer; 1906 AJP Taylor, historian and broadcaster; 1908 Sir David Lean, film director; 1914 Denis Peploe, artist; 1915 Dorothy Squires, singer; 1942 Aretha Franklin, US soul singer. Deaths: 1902 Major-general Sir Hector Macdonald, crofter’s son who joined Gordon Highlanders and became known as “Fighting Mac” for his war exploits; 1904 Frédéric Mistral, poet; 1918 Claude Debussy, composer; 1937 John Drinkwater, poet and playwright; 2002 Kenneth Wolstenholme, football commentator.