Now & Then
18 MARCH
1291: Pope Gregory X issued a bull awarding clerical tithes of Scotland to Edward I of England for crusade. 1689: The Earl of Leven was commissioned to raise a regiment of 800 in Border country to hold Edinburgh against Jacobites. It became The King’s Own Scottish Borderers.
1834: The Tolpuddle Martyrs, who set up a society to stop the decline of agricultural wages, were sentenced to seven years’ transportation to Tasmania. Public outcry had them released after two years.
1891: The opening of the Londonparis telephone system with communication between the Prince of Wales and President Carnot. The service did not become public until 1 April.
1902: Enrico Caruso shouted ten operatic arias into a horn in a room in Hotel de Milano to make the first successful song recording. He was the only person able to produce enough volume to disguise the crackles.
1922: Mahatma Gandhi was sentenced to six years in prison in India for civil disobedience.
1925: Madame Tussauds London wax museum burned down.
1930: The dwarf planet Pluto was discovered by the astronomer Clyde Tombaugh.
1931: World’s first electric razor was manufactured by American firm Schick Inc.
1958: The last debutantes were presented to the Queen at Buckingham Palace.
1965: Aleksei Leonov left a Soviet spacecraft to make first space walk, lasting ten minutes.
1967: The oil tanker Torrey Canyon was wrecked on Pollard Rock between Isles of Scilly and Land’s End, spilling 120,000 gallons of crude into the sea.
1991: A Commons motion by 100 MPS urged the Queen to dismiss the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Lane, over the Birmingham Six affair. 1992: South Africa’s referendum on power-sharing with black people resulted in a landslide Yes vote.
1992: Pat Clinton became the sixth Scot to hold a world boxing title when he dethroned the Mexican Isidro Perez for the World Boxing Organisation flyweight crown. 1994: Bosnia’s Muslim and Croat leaders signed accord to create a federation.
2002: MPS voted 386-175 to ban hunting with dogs in England and Wales. Alternative proposals to maintain the status quo and a licensing system were defeated. 2003: 139 Labour MPS rebelled in a Commons vote on war with Iraq and voted against the Labour government, the biggest act of defiance in British political history. 2003: Sign language was recognised as an official British language.
2009: Unemployment in the UK rose above two million for the first time since 1997.
2009: Josef Fritzl, the Austrian accused of imprisoning his daughter and fathering seven children with her, changed his plea to guilty on all charges. Fritzl admitted a string of offences, including rape, incest, murder and enslavement. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.
2009: Natasha Richardson, the stage and screen actress and daughter of Vanessa Redgrave, died at the age of 45 following a head injury sustained when she fell during a skiing lesson in Canada.