Now & Then
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14 MARCH
Close season for trout ends. 1885: At the first night of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado at the Savoy Theatre, London, the Japanese Ambassador presented a petition to have it banned for racism. It ran for two years.
1891: First submarine telephone lines laid across the English Channel.
1915: The German cruiser Dresden was sunk.
1917: German army began retreat to Hindenburg Line.
1930: The Channel Tunnel Committee in London gave approval for the building of a tunnel between Britain and France. 1945: The heaviest bomb of the war, Grand Slam, weighing 22,000lb, was dropped by the RAF on Bielefeld railway viaduct.
1961: New English Bible published in two phases (New Testament on this day, Old Testament on 16 March, 1970).
1962: Eric Lubbock captured Orpington for Liberals in a sensational by-election, turning Tory majority of 14,760 into Liberal majority of 7,855.
1964: Jack Ruby was found guilty of killing Lee Harvey Oswald, alleged assassin of President Kennedy, and was sentenced to death. He died of a blood clot in 1967.
1984: Gerry Adams, head of Sinn Fein, was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt in central Belfast.
1987: At least 12 people were killed in an escalated Communist insurgency in the Philippines. 1988: Iran and Iraq unleashed missiles on each other’s capitals as the so-called “war of the cities” erupted.
1989: Israeli foreign minister Moshe Arens accused the Palestine Liberation Organisation of the worst atrocities since the Second World War.
1990: Fire caused extensive damage to a plant in Raabta, Libya, which the United States charged was producing chemical weapons. 1991: The Birmingham Six were freed after wrongfully serving 16 years in jail for 1974 Birmingham pub bombings.
1992: Eleven people died when a helicopter transferring workers from Shell Cormorant Alpha platform to nearby accommodation floatel, the Safe Supporter, crashed in the North Sea.
1993: More than 70 people were killed as hurricanes, blizzards and floods left a trail of destruction along America’s Atlantic coast. 1994: Government rejected IRA demands for talks on Northern Ireland, saying there would be no negotiations until violence stopped.
1995: Norman Thagard became the first American astronaut to ride to space on board a Russian launch vehicle.
1998: An earthquake measuring 6.9 on the Richter scale hit southeastern Iran.
2006: Members of the Chadian military failed in a coup d’état attempt.
2008: A series of riots, protests and demonstrations erupted in Lhasa and elsewhere in Tibet. 2011: Figures revealed that the number of women given prison sentences in Scotland had almost doubled in the past decade.
2012: Perth became Scotland’s seventh city after winning a UK competition marking the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.
BIRTHDAYS
Pam Ayres MBE, poet, 77; Jamie Bell, actor, 38; Liz Burnley CBE, Chief Guide, Girlguiding UK (2006-11), 65; Sir Michael Caine CBE, British actor, 91; Jasper Carrott OBE, British comedian, 79; Sir Bob Charles CBE, golfer, 88; Billy Crystal, US actor, 76; Quincy Jones, composer, arranger and bandleader, 91; Tessa Sanderson CBE, British athlete, 68; Francine Stock, British broadcaster, 66; Rita Tushingham, British actress, 82; Chris Klein, actor, 45
ANNIVERSARIES
Births: 1868 Maxim Gorky, Russian author; 1879 Albert Einstein, physicist; 1914 Bill Owen, actor; 1918 John Mccallum CBE, actor; 1925 John Wain, novelist and poet; 1947 Peter Skellern, British singer.
Deaths: 1883 Karl Marx, German radical leader; 1975 Susan Hayward, actress; 1976 Busby Berkeley, creator of film extravaganzas; 1986 Sir Huw Wheldon, broadcaster; 2014 Tony Benn, MP; 2016 Sir Peter Maxwell Davies CBE, composer; 2018 Stephen Hawking, physicist; 2018 Jim Bowen, comic.