ON THIS DAY DECEMBER 29

1170 Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, is murdered by four knights acting on orders from England’s King Henry II.

1851 The YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association) opens in Boston, Massachusetts.

1852 Emma Snodgrass is arrested in Boston for wearing pants.

1860 The launch of HMS Warrior, with her screw propeller, iron hull and iron armour, renders all previous warships obsolete.

1890 Members of the US 7th Cavalry massacres more than 200 Native American (Sioux) men, women and children at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota.

1895 Leander Starr Jameson crosses the border into Transvaal, leading 500 handpicked policemen of the Chartered Company on their way to Johannesburg to support an expected uprising by Uitlanders.

1921 The second day of the Rand Revolt, which followed a drop in the world price of gold. The miners’ strike began after the announcements of wage reductions on the coal and gold mines and the weakening of the colour bar to enable the promotion of black miners to skilled and supervisory positions. The revolt lasts until March of the following year when it is put down by “considerable military might” and the cost of 200 lives.

Prime Minister Jan Smuts’s actions to end the revolt caused a political backlash and the strengthening of the colour bar.

1923 The first private broadcasting station in South Africa is put up by the South African Railways in Johannesburg.

1926 Australia’s Victoria state cricket team scores 1 107 (which includes a triple century, a double century and two centuries) to beat New South Wales by an innings 656 runs.

1983 Commodore Dieter Gerhardt, former OC of the Simonstown naval base, and his wife, Ruth, are sentenced to life imprisonment and 10 years’ imprisonment respectively after being found guilty of high treason on charges of spying for the Soviet Union.

1998 Leaders of the Khmer Rouge apologise for the 1970s genocide in Cambodia that claimed more than one million lives.

2003 The last known speaker of Akkala

Sami dies, rendering the language, spoken in Russia’s remote Kola Peninsula, extinct.

2011 Samoa and Tokelau, in the Pacific, skip straight to December 31, missing out December 30 all together when the International Date Line is moved.

2013 Seven-time world Formula 1 motor racing champion Michael Schumacher is seriously injured while skiing in the French Alps. | THE HISTORIAN