Now & Then
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30 JANUARY
1647: Scots handed over King Charles I to parliamentary forces. 1790: The first purpose-built lifeboat, The Original, launched at South Shields on the River Tyne. 1840: Emperor of China forbade all trade with Britain.
1857: The naval uniform for ratings in the Royal Navy was authorised. 1889: Crown Prince Archduke Rudolf of Austria and his lover, Baroness Marie Vetsera, 17, were found dead at the royal hunting lodge near Vienna. It was never properly determined whether it was a double suicide or murder. 1902: Britain signed a treaty with Japan providing for the independence of China and Korea. 1933: Adolf Hitler was appointed German chancellor by president Paul von Hindenburg.
1957: United Nations called on South Africa to reconsider its apartheid policy.
1965: State funeral of Sir Winston Churchill.
1972: Bloody Sunday in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, when 13 protest marchers were killed by British paratroopers. 1972: Pakistan left the British Commonwealth.
1979: White Rhodesians approved a new constitution to give blacks eventual control of the nation. 1986: President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines pledged to relinquish power peacefully if he lost to Corazon Aquino in the election due on 7 February.
1989: United States closed its embassy in the besieged Afghan capital of Kabul.
1989: Temperatures in Alaska plummeted to 80ºf below zero and many residents were so cold they were forced to leave the area. 1990: Weightlifter Ricky Chaplin of Wales was stripped of his Commonwealth Games gold medal after a positive drugs test.
1990: Communist Party lost majority in Czechoslovak parliament, which it dominated for four decades.
1990: Nineteen seamen were lost when the freighter Flag Theofano sank in the English Channel.
1991: American and Iraqi troops clashed in the first ground battle of the Gulf war at Khafji, as Iraqi tanks probed the Kuwait-saudi border. 1992: Estate agent Stephanie Slater was released after being held captive for eight days by a kidnapper. A £175,000 ransom was paid.
1996: Islanders on Eigg called on their landlord, German artist Marlin Eckhard Maruma, to fulfil his promise to invest £15 million in the island or get out.
1997: Les Woodcock, a Bradford University professor, who took 23 years to work out an equation, admitted it was “no use whatsoever”. He discovered that a hexagonal close-packed lattice is less stable than a crystal-face, centred cubic lattice.
2000: Off the coast of Ivory Coast, Kenya Airways Flight 431 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, killing 169. 2011: Scottish tennis player Andy Murray lost his third grand slam final, this one in Australia in straight sets to Novak Djokovic.
2020: The World Health Organisation declared a global emergency after the outbreak of coronavirus in the Wuhan province of China, which by then, had infected more than 10,000 people nationally, claimed more than 200 lives and spread to 18 other countries.
BIRTHDAYS
Vanessa Redgrave CBE, British actress, 87; Christian Bale, British actor, 50; Phil Collins, British rock singer and writer, drummer and actor, 73; Olivia Colman CBE, British actress, 50; Stu Francis, British comedian, 76; Gene Hackman, US actor, 94; Mitch Murray, British songwriter (Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde), 84; Boris Spassky, Sovietfrench chess grandmaster, 87; Abdullah II, King of Jordan, 62; Derek White, Scottish rugby player, 66; Curtis Strange, golfer, 69.
ANNIVERSARIES
Births: 1882 Franklin D Roosevelt, 32nd US President; 1913 Percy Thrower, TV gardener; 1928 Hal Prince, US musicals producer; 1946 Baron Mackay of Drumadoon, QC, Senator of the College of Justice in Scotland, Lord Advocate 1995-7. Deaths: 1606 Guy Fawkes plotters; 1649 Charles I; 1948 Mahatma Gandhi, Indian religious leader; 1948 Orville Wright, flight pioneer; 1982 Stanley Holloway, actor; 1999 Mick Mcgahey, Scottish miners’ leader; 2011 John Barry OBE, film composer; Geraldine Mcewan, British actress; 2016 Frank Finlay CBE, actor, 89.