ON THIS DAY
565 St Columba reports seeing a monster in the Scottish lake, Loch Ness, thus beginning an enduring myth.
1485 England’s King Richard III dies in the field at the Battle of Bosworth Field after defeat by Henry Tudor’s forces. It is the last battle in the Wars of the Roses, marking the end of the Plantagenets’ reign. Richard is also the last English monarch to die in battle.
1788 The British settlement in Sierra Leone is founded. Britain says it’s to provide a home in Africa for freed slaves and homeless Africans from England.
1848 The US annexes New Mexico. 1849 The first air raid in history takes place as Austria launches pilot-less balloons against Venice.
1851 The yacht America wins the Royal Yacht Squadron Cup, which is now the America’s Cup.
1864 The first Geneva Convention is adopted in Geneva “for the Amelioration of the condition of the wounded in armies in the field”.
1894 Mahatma Gandhi forms the Natal Indian Congress to fight discrimination against Indian traders.
1896 T Samuels scores South Africa’s first ever try and also the first points for the country against Great Britain.
1901 The Duke of Cornwall – the future King George V – lays the cornerstone of the St George’s Cathedral in Cape Town.
1952 The Ossewa-Brandwag, a republican-minded anti-war movement, disbands after 13 years.
1975 Prime Minister John Vorster opens the Orange-Fish River Tunnel, then the world’s longest continuous tunnel (80km).
1979 One of the key players in the 1978-79 Information Scandal (Infogate), civil servant Eschel Rhoodie, is extradited from France. He appears briefly in Pretoria’s Supreme Court charged with fraud and theft.
1980 Leaders of Port Elizabeth’s black secondary school children decide to end a four-month boycott of classes.
1990 Official estimates put the death toll at 503 people killed during the 10 previous days of violence in SA.
2018 The discovery of the bone of a 90 000-year-old hybrid human, half Neanderthal, half Denisova, and found in Siberia, is published in the journal Nature.