TODAY IN HISTORY
TODAY is Saturday, January 9, the ninth day of 2021. There are 356 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:
1868 — The Clutha A&P Society holds its first
show.
1874 — The Auckland Racing Club is formed following the amalgamation of the Auckland Jockey Club and the Auckland Turf
Club.
1875 — George Phipps, the Second Marquess of Normanby, assumes office as New Zealand’s governor. Despite a tense relationship between the marquess and his ministers, he holds the post for a little over four years.
1901 — Police armed with search warrants launch dawn raids in Balclutha in an attempt to stamp out slygrogging.
1902 — Legislation is introduced in New York to outlaw flirting in public.
1923 — Katherine Mansfield, New Zealand shortstory writer (The Garden Party), dies of tuberculosis, aged 34.
1927 — A fire at the Laurier Palace movie theatre in Montreal, Canada, results in the deaths of 78 children.
1932 — Unemployed workers riot in Dunedin after being refused relief for their families by the hospital board. The rioters are appeased when a number of private individuals arrange for the donation and supply of around 800 food parcels.
1941 — The Avro Lancaster bomber aircraft is flown for the first time.
1951 — The United Nations headquarters open in New York.
1972 — Fire destroys the liner RMS Queen Elizabeth in waters off Hong Kong.
1980 — New Zealand gets its first ATM, at ANZ’s Lambton Quay, Wellington branch.
1998 — Northern Ireland Secretary Mo Mowlam visits Maze Prison to make a facetoface appeal for peace to Protestant militants.
2001 — Some British schools begin handing out the morningafter pill to pupils, setting off a debate over parental rights as the government tries to curb an alarming rate of teenage pregnancy.
2015 — A mass poisoning at a funeral in Mozambique involving beer contaminated with
Burkholderia gladioli leaves 75 dead and over 230 people ill; the perpetrators of the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris two days earlier are both killed after a hostage situation. A second hostage situation in relation to the Charlie Hebdo shooting occurs at a Jewish market in Vincennes.