Now & Then
◆ 28 MARCH
1642: The Scots Guards were commissioned.
1800: Act of Union with Britain passed in Ireland’s parliament. 1801: Peace of Florence between France and Naples, whereby British vessels were excluded from Neapolitan ports.
1854: Britain declared (Crimean) war on Russia.
1910: The first seaplane, designed by Henri Fabre of France, had its maiden flight near Marseilles. 1912: Women’s Enfranchisement Bill was defeated by 14 votes on its second reading.
1913: The first Morris Oxford left the factory at Cowley.
1917: The Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps was founded in Britain. 1920: Douglas Elton Ullman married Gladys Smith in America – the wedding was kept secret until after the ceremony, as they were better known as Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.
1930: Constantinople changed its name to Istanbul, and Angora to Ankara.
1938: Japan installed a puppet government of the Chinese Republic in Nanking.
1939: Madrid’s surrender to General Francisco Franco ended the Spanish Civil War.
1960: Nineteen Glasgow firemen and salvage workers died when walls of Cheapside whisky blew out soon after they started fighting a blaze which later spread to a tobacco warehouse, an ice cream factory and Harland & Wolff engine works.
1964: Radio Caroline began transmissions from a ship in the North Sea.
1967: United Nations secretarygeneral U Thant proposed a general truce in Vietnam, followed by peace talks, and the United States said it would go along. 1977: Breakfast TV in Britain started as an experiment on Yorkshire TV.
1979: Radiation leak at Three Mile Island nuclear station, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, United States. The atomic core began to melt down.
1989: Syrian gunners and Christian army units duelled with artillery and rockets in and around Beirut.
1989: In the USSR’S first democratic party elections, many Communist candidates chosen by the government were ousted. 1990: Five people were arrested in a British-american operation at Heathrow, to stop export of 40 nuclear trigger devices for Iraq. 1991: Patricia Scotland, 35, was appointed Britain’s first black woman Queen’s Counsel.
1991: Tens of thousands of Muscovites defied a ban on demonstrations by rallying in support of Boris Yeltsin, president Mikhail Gorbachev’s chief rival. 1995: Tom Hanks won Best Actor Oscar for Forrest Gump, becoming the first actor since Spencer Tracy in 1937-38 to win in successive years.
2003: A British soldier was killed in a “friendly fire” incident in Iraq when the tank he was in was attacked by American jets.
2005: The 2005 Sumatran earthquake rocked Indonesia. At magnitude 8.7 it was the second strongest earthquake since 1965. 2006: One million union members, students, and unemployed took to the streets in France in protest at the government’s proposed First Employment Contract law.
◆ BIRTHDAYS
Rosemary Ashe, British soprano, 71; Laurie Brett, Scottish actress, 55; Sir Richard Eyre CBE, British theatre, film and television director, 81; Lady Gaga (born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta), American singer/songwriter, 38; Nasser Hussain OBE, former England cricket captain, 56; Lord Kinnock, leader of the Labour Party 1983-92, ; Mike Newell, British film director, 82; Sjulia Stiles, American actress, 43; Sir Richard Stilgoe OBE, British entertainer and lyricist, 81.
◆ ANNIVERSARIES
Births: 1515 St Teresa of Avila; 1483 Raphael, painter; 1660 King George I; 1820 Sir William Howard Russell, war correspondent; 1868 Maxim Gorky, novelist; 1921 Sir Dirk Bogarde, actor and author. Deaths: 1941 Virginia Woolf, writer (suicide); 1969 Dwight D Eisenhower (Ike), army commander and 34th United States president; 1985 Marc Chagall, painter; 1994 Eugène Ionesco, playwright; 2000 Anthony Powell, author (A Dance to the Music of Time); 2002 Billy Wilder, film director; 2004 Sir Peter Ustinov, actor, dramatist and film director.