ON THIS DAY SEPTEMBER 18

1714 Georg Ludwig of Hanover arrives in England to take up the throne as King George I.

1793 The cornerstone of the US Capitol is laid by George Washington.

1809 London’s Royal Opera House opens. 1812 After destroying more than threequarters of the city, the Great Fire of Moscow dies down.

1864 Explorer John Speke, 37, the first white man to reach the source of the Nile, kills himself in a shooting accident.

1899 The first British troops leave Bombay for South Africa to fight the Boers.

1906 A typhoon hits Hong Kong and kills about 10 000 people.

1914 South African troops land in German South West Africa.

1939 Lord Haw-Haw makes his first Nazi propaganda broadcast. The American-born, Anglo-Irish Fascist politician (real name William Joyce) would later hang for it.

1944 The submarine HMS Tradewind torpedoes a Japanese freighter, Jun’yō Maru, killing 5 600 slave labourers and Allied POWs. 1961 UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld is killed in a plane crash while trying to broker a peace deal in the DRC’s Katanga region. 1974 Hurricane Fifi slams into Honduras, killing 5 000 people.

1977 Voyager I, launched that same year, takes the first distant photograph of the Earth and the moon together. It and its sister, Voyager II, are destined – perhaps eternally – Nasa says, to wander the Milky Way.

1992 More than 70 000 mourners gather in King William’s Town to pay their respects to the victims of the Bisho Massacre.

1998 Gang member Kevin Williams dies in the regional court in Stellenbosch when his throat is cut while the court is in session.

2009 The 57-year run of the soap opera

The Guiding Light ends as its final episode is broadcast.

2015 The government of Uttar Pradesh, India, confirms that 2.3 million people applied for 238 menial office jobs.

2018 The Constitutional Court legalises cannabis use by adults in private places.

| THE HISTORIAN