NOW & THEN
28 MARCH
1642: The Scots Guards were commissioned.
1800: Act of Union with Britain passed in Ireland’s parliament.
1854: Britain declared (Crimean) war on Russia.
1910: The first seaplane, designed by Henri Fabre of France, had its maiden flight near Marseilles.
1912: Women’s Enfranchisement Bill was defeated by 14 votes on its second reading.
1917: The Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps was founded in Britain.
1920: Douglas Elton Ullman married Gladys Smith in America – the wedding was kept secret until after the ceremony, as they were better known as Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.
1930: Constantinople changed its name to Istanbul, and Angora to Ankara.
1938: Japan installed a puppet government of the Chinese Republic in Nanking.
1939: Madrid’s surrender to General Francisco Franco ended the Spanish Civil War.
1957: Britain released Archbishop Makarios, who was free to travel except to Cyprus.
1960: Nineteen Glasgow firemen and salvage workers died when walls of Cheapside whisky blew out soon after they started fighting a blaze which later spread to a tobacco warehouse, an ice cream factory and Harland & Wolff engine works.
1962: Syrian army revolt failed.
1964: Radio Caroline began transmissions from a ship in the North Sea.
1967: United Nations secretarygeneral U Thant proposed a general truce in Vietnam, followed by peace talks, and the United States said it would go along.
1974: Mounting civil unrest virtually paralysed the founding government of Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie.
1977: Breakfast TV in Britain started as an experiment on Yorkshire TV.
1979: Radiation leak at Three Mile Island nuclear station, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, United States. The atomic core began to melt down.
1989: Syrian gunners and Christian army units duelled with artillery and rockets in and around Beirut.
1989: In the USSR’S first democratic party elections, many Communist candidates chosen by the government were ousted.
1990: Five people were arrested in a British-american operation at Heathrow, to stop export of 40 nuclear trigger devices for Iraq.
1991: Patricia Scotland, 35, was appointed Britain’s first black woman Queen’s Counsel.
1991: Tens of thousands of Muscovites defied a ban on demonstrations by rallying in support of Boris Yeltsin, president Mikhail Gorbachev’s chief rival.
1995: Tom Hanks won Best Actor Oscar for Forrest Gump, becoming the first actor since Spencer Tracy in 1937-38 to win in successive years.
2003: A British soldier was killed in a “friendly fire” incident in Iraq when the tank he was in was attacked by American jets.
2005: An earthquake rocked Indonesia. At magnitude 8.7 it was the second strongest earthquake since 1965.
BIRTHDAYS
Rosemary Ashe, British soprano, 69; Chris Barrie, British actor, 62; Sir Richard Eyre CBE, British director, 79; Lady Gaga, US singer/songwriter, 36; Baron Hennessy of Nympsfield, British historian, 75; Nasser Hussain OBE, former England cricket captain, 54; Lord Kinnock, leader of the Labour Party 198392, 80; Mario Vargas Llosa, Peruvian-spanish novelist and politician, 86; Mike Newell, British film director, 80; Sir Michael Parkinson CBE, broadcaster, 87; Sir Richard Stilgoe OBE, British entertainer, 79; Lacey Turner, British actress, 34; Dianne Wiest, US actress, 74.
ANNIVERSARIES
Births: 1868 Maxim Gorky, novelist; 1891 Paul Whiteman, US bandleader; 1893 Alfred Lunt, actor; 1902 Dame Flora Robson, actress; 1921 Sir Dirk Bogarde, actor and author.
Deaths: 1969 Dwight D Eisenhower (Ike), army commander and 34th United States president; 1974 Dorothy Fields, lyricist; 2000 Anthony Powell, author; 2002 Billy Wilder, film director; 2004 Sir Peter Ustinov, actor, dramatist and film director; 2013 Richard Griffiths OBE, actor; 2017 Ronald Hines, British actor.