Now & Then
◆ 5 JANUARY
Twelfth Night or Auld Yule 1719: Britain, Hanover, Saxonypoland and Austria signed an antiprussia/russia pact.
1781: A British naval expedition led by Benedict Arnold burned Richmond, Virginia.
1797: James Hetherington wore the world’s first top hat. He was arrested and fined £50 for appearing “on the public highway wearing upon his head a tall structure of shining luster and calculated to disturb timid people”. 1809: The Treaty of Dardanelles was concluded between Britain and the Ottoman Empire, concluding the Anglo-turkish War. 1895: Discovery of X-rays was announced by German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen.
1895: French captain Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of treason and publicly stripped of his rank. He was later exonerated.
1919: Germany’s National Socialist Party (Nazi) was formed, initially as the German Farmers Party.
1926: First widows’ pensions paid out at post offices.
1930: Outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow met.
1933: Construction of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge began.
1941: Amy Johnson, aviator and first woman to fly solo from Britain to Australia in 1930, mysteriously lost in crash in the Thames estuary on a routine flight.
1969: USSR’S Venera 5 spacecraft was launched and made the first successful landing on a planet (Venus).
1971: The first one-day international took place between Australia and England at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, Australia won by five wickets. 1971: Former world boxing champion Sonny Liston was found dead by his wife Geraldine in mysterious circumstances. He had been dead for approximately six days and his death has never been explained.
1981: The hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, who killed 13 women, ended when a long-distance lorry driver, Peter Sutcliffe, was charged with murder. He was jailed for life for the murders and died in 2020.
1986: Arab nations threw support behind Libya in event of attack by United States or Israel in retaliation for terrorist attacks on two airports. 1987: Students in China burned hundreds of copies of the newspaper Peking Daily in protest against the government publication’s harsh criticism of student demonstrations.
1990: An American container ship and a Panamanian tanker collided off the Texas coast, causing the container ship to leak fuel oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
1991: Thirteen people died as winds of up to 100mph battered Britain. Power cuts to thousands of homes occurred and flood alerts were issued in north Wales.
1993: The Liberian-registered tanker Braer, with engine out of action, was driven ashore in a storm at Quendale Bay, Shetland, after her crew had been rescued. Over the next few days, her cargo of 84,000 gallons of Norwegian crude leaked from her tanks, but the potential consequences of the world’s biggest oil spill were alleviated by the force of the waves which broke her up.
1998: Thousands of callers jammed telephone lines set up to sell tickets to visit the grave of Diana, Princess of Wales.