ON THIS DAY NOVEMBER 23

534BC Thespis of Icaria becomes the first recorded actor to portray a character onstage. It is from him that we get the word “Thespian”, meaning an actor or an actress, or something relating to drama and theatre. 1859 Notorious Wild West outlaw Billy the Kid is born in New York City (probably as Henry McCarty). He was a ruthless killer who escaped from jail and a sentence of hanging at age 21. Recaptured at Stinking Springs, New Mexico, he escaped. At Fort Sumner, on a July night in 1881, he reportedly asked, “Who’s there?” The response was two bullets through the heart from the smoking gun of a vengeful Sheriff Pat Garrett.

1892 Baron Pierre de Coubertin launches his plan for a modern Olympic Games.

1900 Major-General Smith-Dorrien, leaving only the church standing, razes Dullstroom to the ground during the Anglo-Boer War.

1882 The families who survived the Thirstland Trek and made it to Angola are naturalised as Portuguese subjects.

1921 US President Warren Harding signs the Willis Campell Act (anti-beer bill) forbidding doctors from prescribing beer or liquor for medicinal purposes.

1939 The British armed merchant cruiser HMS Rawalpindi is sunk by the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. 1942 Japan bombs Port Darwin, Australia, causing mass panic.

1942 Chinese steward Poon Lim begins a 133-day odyssey adrift in the south Atlantic after his ship was torpedoed by a U-boat. 1946 The French cruiser Suffren shells the Vietnamese city of Haiphong, killing 6 000. 1992 The first smartphone, the IBM Simon, is introduced at COMDEX in Las Vegas, Nevada. 1996 Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961 is hijacked, then crashes off the Comoros, killing 125. | THE HISTORIAN