Now & Then
◆ 25 JANUARY
Burns Night.
1533: King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn were secretly married by the Bishop of Lichfield – they went on to became the parents of the future Queen Elizabeth I of England.
1554: The city of Sao Paulo, Brazil was founded.
1759: Poet Robert Burns was born in Alloway.
1817: First issue of The Scotsman was published by its founders, Charles Maclaren, William Ritchie and John Macdiarmid.
1858: Mendelssohn’s Wedding March was first played at the wedding of Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Victoria, to the crown prince of Prussia.
1881: Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell formed the Oriental Telephone Company. 1919: League of Nations was founded. Its first meeting was held a year later.
1924: The opening ceremony of the first Winter Olympics took place at Chamonix in Switzerland. 1939: Boxer Joe Louis retained his world heavyweight title when he knocked out John Henry Lewis in the first round at Madison Square Garden, New York.
1955: Scientists at Columbia University developed an atomic clock accurate to within one second in 300 years.
1968: Great Train Robber Charles Wilson captured in Montreal three years after escaping from Winson Green Prison.
1971: Idi Amin became president of Uganda, leading a military coup which deposed Milton Obote while he was absent abroad.
1971: Charles Manson and others were found guilty of multiple murders in the US.
1981: The Gang of Four – Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen and William Rodgers – announced the Limehouse Declaration, which called for a classless crusade for social justice. They were expelled from the Labour Party for forming a Council for Social Democracy.
1990: Forty-six people died in the worst storms in southern Britain since the hurricane of October, 1987. Gusts of up to 110 mph caused road and rail chaos.
1991: Saddam Hussein unleashed environmental disaster when he ordered the release of millions of gallons of crude oil into the sea from a Kuwaiti storage plant. 1995: Government ministers ordered a rethink of plans to axe most of the Anglo-scottish night trains.
2004: Opportunity rover landed on the surface of Mars.
2008: Scottish & Newcastle, Britain’s biggest brewer and maker of Newcastle Brown Ale, was taken over by Carlsberg and Heineken for £7.8 billion.
2011: Revolution began in Egypt, with a series of street demonstrations, marches, rallies, acts of civil disobedience, riots, labour strikes and violent clashes in Cairo, Alexandria, and throughout other cities in the country.
2012: First Minister Alex Salmond set out the question he intended to ask voters in a referendum on Scottish independence. He said Scots would be asked: “Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country?” in a ballot he said would be held in 2014. 2013: Fifty people were killed and 90 injured during a prison riot in Barquisimeto, Venezuela.
◆ BIRTHDAYS
Alicia Keys, singer, 43; Sir Tom Arnold, Conservative MP, 77; Emma Freud OBE, broadcaster and script editor, 62; David Ginola, footballer, actor and model, 57; Christine Lakin, actress (The Goldbergs), 45; Sir Paul Nurse, Nobel laureate biologist, former president of the Royal Society, 75; Tom Paulin, poet, academic, broadcaster and critic, 75; Robinho (born Robson de Souza), Brazilian footballer, 40; Princess Charlene of Monaco, former Olympic swimmer, 46.
◆ ANNIVERSARIES
Births: 1759 Robert Burns; 1841 John Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher, admiral of the British fleet and First Sea Lord; 1874 W Somerset Maugham, novelist; 1882 Virginia Woolf, novelist; 1931 Dean Jones, actor; 1933 Corazon Aquino, president of the Philippines 19861992; 1938 Etta James, US singer. Deaths: 1855 Dorothy Wordsworth, writer; 1947 Al Capone, gangster; 1965 Jack Hylton, British bandleader; 1990 Ava Gardner, actress; 2015 Demis Roussos, singer; 2017 Sir John Hurt CBE, British actor; 2017 Mary Tyler Moore, actress.