NOW & THEN
31 MARCH
1652: Scottish Regalia saved from Cromwell by James Granger, minister at Kinneff, who concealed the crown, sceptre and sword in his church.
1889: The 985-foot high Eiffel Tower, costing £260,000, was officially opened. Designed by Gustave Eiffel, it had taken two years to erect.
1892: World’s first fingerprint bureau opened in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
1896: The first zip fastener was patented by Whitcomb L Judson of Chicago. A Swede, Gideon Sundback, refined the design by increasing the number of fastening elements from four per inch to ten and it was successfully marketed in 1913 as the Talon Slide Fastener.
1901: Daimler introduced the Mercedes car, built for Emile Jellinek, Austro-hungarian consul general in Nice, who named it after his daughter.
1921: Gordon Richards rode the first of his 4,870 winners, Gay Lord, at Leicester.
1939: Britain and France pledged to support Poland if it was invaded by Germany.
1948: United States Congress passed Marshall Aid Pact for European recovery.
1949: Newfoundland, with its dependency on Labrador, became the tenth province of Canada.
1953: John Christie was arrested for killing his wife and he confessed to the murders of six more women at 10 Rillington Place in Notting Hill, London. In a notorious miscarriage of justice, Timothy Evans had been hanged for killing his daughter in the same house and was charged with killing his wife, one of Christie’s victims.
11959: The Dalai Lama was granted political asylum by India.
1973: Red Rum won the Grand National Steeplechase in record time.
1986: Hampton Court Palace was severely damaged by fire.
1990: Up to 200,000 demonstrated in London against the poll tax. The protest march ended in riot, looting and arson in the West End with 341 arrested and 331 police injured.
1990: Oxford won the 136th Boat Race for the 14th time in 15 years.
1991: New National Health Service legislation, including the first hospital trusts, came into effect.
1991: More than 90 per cent of Georgia’s 3.4 million electorate voted for independence from the Soviet Union after boycotting, with five other republics, Gorbachev’s referendum on a new union treaty on 17 March.
1992: The Silence Of The Lambs swept the board at the Academy Awards, with Oscars for Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster.
1998: Netscape released the code base of its browser under an open-source licence agreement; the project was given the code name “Mozilla” and was eventually spun off into the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation.
2007: In Sydney, Australia, 2.2 million people took part in the first Earth Hour.
2014: A United Nations intergovernmental panel warned that “irreversible climate change” would fuel potential food shortages and natural disasters throughout the world.
BIRTHDAYS
Herb Alpert, American trumpet player, 87; Roger Black MBE, British athlete and broadcaster, 56; Richard Chamberlain, American actor, 88; Al Gore, United States vice-president 1993-2001, 74; Shirley Jones, American singer and actress, 88; Andrew Oldcorn, British golfer, 62; Rhea Perlman, American actress, 74; Volker Schlöndorff, German film director, 83; Lord Steel of Aikwood KBE, leader of the Liberal Party 1976-88, presiding officer, Scottish Parliament 1999-2003, MP 1965-97, 84; Christopher Walken, American actor, 79; Angus Young, Glasgowborn rock guitarist (AC/DC), 67.
ANNIVERSARIES
Births: 1844 Andrew Lang, Selkirk-born writer and folk-tale collector; 1926 John Fowles, author; 1931 Miller Barber, US golfer; 1959 Sharman Weir, musician, general manager, Citizens Theatre, Glasgow.
Deaths: 1631 John Donne, poet; 1837 John Constable, landscape painter; 1855 Charlotte Brontë, author; 1980 Jesse Owens, US athlete; 1994 Bill Travers, actor; 2002 Barry Took, writer and broadcaster; 2014 Bob Larbey, writer of sitcoms such as The Good Life; 2016 Ronnie Corbett CBE, Scottish actor and comic.