Now & Then
20 JANUARY
1265: England’s parliament met for the first time.
1356: Edward Balliol surrendered his claim to the Scottish throne to Edward III of England, in exchange for an English pension.
1805: London Docks opened. 1841: Hong Kong was ceded by China, in what was termed the “Unequal Treaties”, after the Opium Wars, and was first occupied by Britain.
1846: The Reverend Matthias Lloyd-thomas of Cwmbran, South Wales, officiated at his 3,000th funeral – the burial of his 95-yearold father. In his 61 years as a minister, he preached more than 10,000 sermons, although he was stone deaf.
1882: Coxon & Co, drapers, of Newcastle upon Tyne, became the first shop in Britain to be lit by incandescent electric light.
1892: The game of basketball, devised by a Canadian doctor, James Naismith, was first played at the YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts.
1910: Canberra officially became the capital of Australia.
1925: Soviet Union and Japan formed an alliance.
1936: King Edward VIII acceded to the throne on the death of King George V. He was to abdicate after 325 days, on 10 December, after causing a constitutional crisis by proposing marriage to divorcée Wallis Simpson.
1942: Adolf Eichmann and Reinhard Heydrich met to draw up plans for “the Final Solution”. 1942: Japan invaded Burma. 1944: The RAF, using 769 aircraft, dropped 2,300 tons of bombs on Berlin.
1945: Franklin D Roosevelt was sworn in for an unprecedented fourth term as US president.
1961: The inauguration of John F Kennedy, who became the youngest ever US president. 1964: British forces quelled mutinies of Tanganyika Rifles and troops in Uganda and Kenya.
1971: Four members of RAF Red Arrows aerobatics display team were killed in a mid-air collision. 1972: The number of people out of work and claiming unemployment benefit in the UK rose to more than 1 million.
1979: One million people marched in Tehran, in a show of support for exiled fundamentalist leader
Ayatollah Khomeini.
1980: President Jimmy Carter announced the US boycott of the Olympic Games in Moscow.
1987: Terry Waite, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s special envoy in the Middle East, was kidnapped while negotiating the release of western hostages in Beirut.
1990: Soviet troops stormed the Azerbaijani capital of Baku, leaving dozens dead and wounded, as president Mikhail Gorbachev defended the action on national television.
1991: In Moscow, hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens protested against a bloody crackdown on Lithuania and demanded the resignation of President Mikhail Gorbachev. 1991: Captured RAF pilots were paraded on Iraqi television.
1994: Official report into the Braer tanker disaster on the Shetland coast accused the captain of a serious dereliction of duty.
1998: American pop groups The Mamas & the Papas and The Eagles were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.