Now & Then
19 JANUARY
1547: Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, was executed in the Tower of London as a traitor.
1649: Trial of King Charles I began. 1885: Seventy-six British and around 1,000 Mahdists were killed in the Battle of Abu Klea, Sudan, between the British Desert Column and Mahdist forces.
1903: A new bicycle race, the Tour de France, was announced.
1911: The floor collapsed as John Philip Sousa was conducting his Stars And Stripes Forever at Merthyr Tydfil, Wales. He emerged, dusty, from seven feet below the stage and announced: “We will now continue…”
1915: First casualties sustained in an air raid on Britain, when bombs were dropped on Great Yarmouth in Norfolk by the German L3 Zeppelin.
1915: The neon tube sign was patented by George Claude.
1917: Sixty-nine died when the Venesta munitions works in Silvertown, Essex, which had been manufacturing explosives for Britain’s First World War effort, blew up in an explosion that was heard in Wiltshire.
1918: Bolsheviks dissolved the Russian Constitutional Assembly in Petrograd.
1935: “Jockey shorts” came into being when Coopers Inc. sold the world’s first men’s briefs at a shop in Chicago.
1937: Debut of 18-year-old ballerina Margot Fonteyn in Giselle at Sadler’s Wells, London.
1966: Indira Gandhi became prime minister of India, following in the footsteps of her father, Jawaharlal Nehru.
1975: Britain and Irish Republican Army announced first direct negotiations since start of terrorist activity in Northern Ireland five years earlier.
1977: Snow fell in Florida – the only recorded occurrence in history. 1978: The last Volkswagen Beetle made in Germany left the VW plant in Emden (production would continue in Latin America until 2003).
1989: Margaret Thatcher, in a farewell letter to the retiring United States president Ronald Reagan, wrote: “You have been a great president, one of the greatest, because you have stood for all that is best in America.”
1995: The Pope beatified (the penultimate step towards sainthood) Australian nun Mary Mackillop, who was born in Melbourne in 1842 to a couple from the Scottish Highlands, and died in 1909.
1996: There was criticism of the Serious Fraud Squad after Robert Maxwell’s sons Kevin and Ian were cleared at the Old Bailey of conspiring to defraud pension funds in their father’s media empire after he drowned.
2005: Elections were held to replace Yasser Arafat as head of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. He was succeeded by Rawhi Fattouh.
2009: The share price of Royal Bank of Scotland plunged 66 per cent as the once proud institution fell further into the mire. The bank lost its position as Scotland’s biggest company.
2009: Former chancellor Ken Clarke expressed “delight” at rejoining the Conservative Party’s front bench team, as shadow business secretary.
2013: Lance Armstrong admitted to doping in all seven of his Tour de France victories.