ON THIS day
1307 Scottish king Robert the Bruce heavily defeats an English cavalry force at the battle of Loudoun Hill in Ayrshire.
1857 The Indian Mutiny erupts at Meerut city when soldiers rescue comrades jailed for refusing to use new rifle cartridges, reputedly greased by pig and cow fat. 1865 Union troops catch Confederate president Jefferson Davis near Irwinville, Georgia.
1899 The first wireless telegraph message in Australia is transmitted, by Overland Telegraph builder Charles Todd and his son-inlaw, physicist William Bragg, over 550m in Adelaide. 1900 Iron-hulled sailing cargo ship Sierra Nevada sinks the morning after running aground at Portsea, Victoria; 23 drown out of a crew of 28.
1933 Nazi youth groups gather on a square in Berlin to burn books by Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Bertolt Brecht, Albert Einstein, among authors branded “un-German’’.
1940 British prime minister Neville Chamberlain quits on the day Germany invades Belgium, Luxembourg and The Netherlands. Fellow Tory Winston Churchill takes charge the next day with Labour support.
1957 More than 1300 Hungarian refugees arrive in Melbourne on liner Fairsea. They have fled Hungary in the November revolution and most come via Austria or Denmark. They are taken on trains to Bonegilla camp. Australia promised to accept 10,000 Hungarian refugees.
1994 Nelson Mandela, whose efforts to end apartheid led to his imprisonment, becomes president of South Africa. 2000 The flame for the torch of Sydney’s Olympic Games is lit at the ruins of the Temple of Hera on Mount Olympus.
2007 Tony Blair (above) says he is stepping down as the British prime minister on June 27, after serving more than a decade.