TODAY IN HISTORY
TODAY is Monday, January 11, the 11th day of 2021. There are 354 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:
1569 — The first lottery in England is drawn in St Paul’s Cathedral under the patronage of Queen Elizabeth I.
1846 — British troops occupy Ruapekapeka pa after it is abandoned by Hone Heke and Kawiti, bringing to an end the war in the Far North of New Zealand.
1851 — The Lyttelton Times begins
publication.
1856 — A folk hero of the area in North OtagoSouth Canterbury now bearing his name, sheep rustler James Mackenzie receives a free pardon due to flaws in his trial almost a year earlier when he was sentenced to five years’ hard labour.
1868 — Despite poor ground conditions, New Zealand’s first cricket match is played at the Basin Reserve, Wellington, between Wellington Volunteers and a team from HMS
Falcon.
1890 — The merchant ship SS Marlborough leaves Lyttelton, bound for London, with a cargo of wool and frozen meat but disappears with the loss of 30 lives; its sister ship SS Dunedin left for London two months later and disappeared without a trace also, with the loss of 34 lives.
1917 — A huge explosion occurs at the Kingsland munitions factory in Lyndhurst, New Jersey, in the US.
1920 — The French passenger ship
Afrique sinks near La Rochelle with the loss of 553 lives.
1922 — A 14yearold boy, Canadian Leonard Thompson, becomes the first person to have his diabetes successfully treated with insulin.
1935 — Aviator Amelia Earhart begins a trip from Honolulu to Oakland, California, on her way to becoming the first woman to fly solo across the Pacific Ocean.
1942 — Japan declares war on the Netherlands, on the same day that Japanese forces invade the Dutch East Indies.
1946 — Enver Hoxha, the secretary general of the Communist Party of Albania, declares the People’s Republic of Albania with himself as head of state.
1949 — The first ‘‘networked’’ television broadcasts take place as KDKATV in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, goes on the air connecting the east coast of the US to midwest programming.
1962 — An avalanche buries a village in the Peruvian Andes, and 3000 people are killed; while tied to its pier in the Russian town of Polyarny, the Soviet submarine B37 is destroyed when fire breaks out in its torpedo compartment.
1964 — US surgeongeneral Luther Terry issues the first government report saying smoking may be hazardous to one’s health.
1965 — The bodies of two 15yearold girls are found in sand at Sydney’s Wanda Beach; their deaths are still unsolved.
1973 — Air New Zealand takes delivery of its first widebodied jet, a DC10.
1977 — France sets off an international uproar by releasing Abu Daoud, a Palestinian suspected of involvement in the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
1981 — A threeman British team led by Sir Ranulph Fiennes completes the longest and fastest crossing of the Antarctic, reaching Scott Base after 75 days and 4022km.
1986 — L. Douglas Wilder becomes lieutenant governor of Virginia, making him the first AfricanAmerican to win a statewide election in Virginia; the Gateway Bridge, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia is officially opened.
1999 — Haiti’s President Rene Preval dissolves Parliament after a 22month impasse with no working government. He appoints a premier and a cabinet by decree.
2003 — Illinois Governor George Ryan commutes the death sentences of 167 prisoners on Illinois’ death row, based on the Jon Burge scandal.
2008 — Sir Edmund Hillary, explorer and the first person to climb Mt Everest, dies aged 88.
2012 — A gang of children, some as young as 6, are blamed for a spate of crimes, including vandalism, arson and theft, in the lower North Island town of Featherston.