ON THIS DAY

JANUARY 31

1606 Guy Fawkes is executed for trying to blow up England’s king and its parliament.

1849 David Draper, prospector and geologist, is born in Cape Town. He discovered underground water at Zuurbekom in 1898, thus alleviating frequent water shortages in Johannesburg.

1851 American Gail Borden announces the invention of condensed milk – much loved by troepies in the army.

1901 Boer generals Smuts and Liebenberg capture Modderfontein, Transvaal.

1915 Germany is the first country to make large-scale use of poison gas in warfare.

1919 The bloody Battle of George Square takes place in Glasgow, Scotland, during a campaign by workers for a 40-hour week rather than a 47-hour week.

1929 The Soviet Union exiles Leon Trotsky to Turkey.

1930 3M begins marketing Scotch Tape. 1943 German Field-Marshal Friedrich Paulus surrenders to the Soviets at Stalingrad, ending one of World War II’s fiercest battles.

1945 About 3 000 inmates from the Stutthof concentration camp are forcibly marched into the Baltic Sea and executed so they can’t be liberated.

1968 Nauru gains independence from Australia and becomes the smallest republic and third-smallest state in the world, behind only Vatican City and Monaco.

1971 Apollo 14 astronauts Alan Shepard, Stuart Roosa and Edgar Mitchell, aboard a Saturn V, lift off for the Fra Mauro Highlands on the Moon with a South African flag.

1983 A new law in UK requires drivers and front-seat passengers to wear seatbelts.

1985 President PW Botha offers to free Nelson Mandela if he renounces violence.

1996 An explosives-filled truck rams the gates of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka in Colombo, killing 86 people and injuring 1 400.

2000 Family GP Harold Shipman is jailed for life for murdering 15 of his patients, making him Britain’s most prolific convicted serial killer.

2012 The Toyota Corolla is recognised as the best-selling car of all time, having sales of more than 37.5 million units.

2015 Lydia Ko, at 17, becomes the youngest person in golf history to be ranked No 1 in the world.

2019 Colonisation of the America’s in the late 1500s killed so many people it cooled the planet and led to a “Little

Ice Age”, according to a scientific report published in Quaternary Science Reviews.