Now & Then
◆
16 FEBRUARY
1659: Nicholas Vanacker wrote the first cheque, for £10, to have been drawn on a British bank.
1871: Franco-prussian War ended in defeat for France.
1918: Dover was bombarded by a German submarine.
1932: Fianna Fáil party, headed by Eamon de Valera, won Irish general election.
1937: The word nylon was adopted by du Pont chemists for the textile fibre. Within a year the first nylon stockings were on sale.
1940: A boarding party from HMS Cossack rescued more than 300 British prisoners from the Altmark, a German naval auxiliary ship in Norwegian waters. The prisoners had all been taken from ships sunk by the Graf Spee.
1949: Chaim Weizmann was sworn in at Jerusalem as first president of the state of Israel.
1959: Fidel Castro became prime minister of Cuba after overthrowing the Batista regime. 1962: Anti-government riots broke out in Georgetown, British Guiana. 1963: The Beatles went to No 1 in the pop charts for the first time with Please Please Me.
1965: A government report was published, based on the research of Doctor Beeching, with plans to cut the British Rail network by half. 1976: A pile of bricks – depicted as a work of art – provoked criticism when it went on show at London’s Tate Gallery.
1977: Anglican Archbishop of Uganda and two government ministers were arrested in an alleged plot to overthrow Ugandan president Idi Amin.
1978: Leon Spinks beat Muhammad Ali to win the world heavyweight boxing championship in Las Vegas.
1990: Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, went into hiding against possible attempts by Muslims to carry out Ayatollah Khomeini’s order to kill him.
1990: Royal Navy wives marched through Plymouth and Portsmouth to oppose a Ministry of Defence decision to allow Wrens to go to sea.
1991: Terrorists working for drug traffickers claimed responsibility for car bomb explosion that killed 22 and injured 140 in Medellin, Colombia.
1994: A radical shake-up of the Scottish court system proposed “voluntary” fines for thousands of minor criminal offences.
1995: The government announced that Shell UK had been given permission to dump its Brent Spar North Sea oil platform in the midatlantic. There were immediate protests at the decision.
1996: Rescue workers battled to prevent an environmental disaster off the Welsh coast after oil tanker Sea Empress ran aground on its way into Milford Haven.
1999: Across Europe, Kurdish rebels took over embassies and held hostages after Turkey arrested one of their rebel leaders, Abdullah Ocalan.
2005: The Kyoto Protocol came into force, following its ratification by Russia.
2006: The last Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) – made famous around the world by the US TV sitcom M*A*S*H – was decommissioned by the United States Army.
2011: Research by psychologists at Edinburgh Napier University revealed that the use of social network site Facebook can be the cause of stress.
BIRTHDAYS
Paul Bailey, British novelist, 87; Sir Anthony Dowell CBE, British ballet dancer, 81; Christopher Eccleston, actor, 60; David Griffiths MBE, British painter, 85; Baron Peter Hain MP 1991-2015, 74; Amanda Holden, British actress and TV personality, 53; Stephen Mcallister, Paisleyborn golfer, 62; John Mcenroe, US tennis champion, 65; Valentino Rossi, world motorcycling champion, 45; Ice T, rapper and actor, 66; Andy Taylor, British rock musician (Duran Duran), 63.
ANNIVERSARIES
Births: 1922 Sir Geraint Evans, operatic baritone; 1926 John Schlesinger, film director; 1934 Tom Gallacher, Scottish author and playwright; 1935 Sonny Bono, singer, songwriter and politician; Iain Banks, Scottish novelist; 1937 Peter Hobday, British radio presenter.
Deaths: 1992 Angela Carter, novelist; 2007 Sheridan Morley, author, and critic; 2011 Alfred Burke, British actor; 2016 Harper Lee, novelist (notably To Kill a Mockingbird); 2020 Harry Gregg, OBE, footballer (“Busby Babe” and survivor of Munich disaster).