ON THIS DAY

OCTOBER 11

1138 An earthquake in Aleppo, Syria, kills 230 000 people.

1521 Pope Leo X titles England’s King Henry VIII “Defender of the Faith”. Yet in less than 10 years, Henry would dump Catholicism because of the papacy’s refusal to annul his marriage, and instead set up his own church – the Church of England (Anglicans), with himself as the head.

1634 The Burchardi Flood strikes the North Sea coast of Europe, overrunning dykes and drowning up to 15 000 people.

1649 After a 10-day siege, Oliver Cromwell’s English troops storm and sack Wexford, Ireland, killing more than 2 000 Irish troops and 1 500 civilians.

1737 An earthquake kills 300 000 and destroys half of Calcutta, India.

1886 Standard Bank starts business in a tent in Ferreirasdorp, on the Witwatersrand.

1887 A Miles patents the lift.

1890 The first 100-yard dash in under 10 seconds is run by John Owen in 9.8 sec in Washington, DC.

1899 War is officially declared between Britain and the Boers, with the empire expecting an easy victory. It was not to be so.

1915 Despite international protest, Edith Cavell, an English nurse in Belgium, is executed for helping Allied prisoners escape.

1939 Theoretical physicist Albert Einstein tells US President Roosevelt of the possibilities of an atomic bomb.

1945 Chinese civil war begins between Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists and Mao Zedong’s Communist Party.

1963 The UN General Assembly calls on South Africa to abandon the “Rivonia trial” and release all political prisoners.

1968 Nasa launches Apollo 7, the first successful manned Apollo mission.

1972 A race riot on the US Navy aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk, off Vietnam, involving more than 200 sailors, injures 50.

1984 An Aeroflot Tupolev Tu-154 crashes on landing in Omsk, Russia, killing 178 people.

1985 US President Ronald Reagan bans the import of Krugerrands to the US.

1986 Mother Teresa escapes unhurt from a plane crash in Tanzania, which kills six.

2000 Former Proteas captain Hansie Cronje banned from cricket for life because of match-fixing.

2012 Mo Yan, a Chinese hallucinatory realist writer, wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.

2018 The world’s new longest flight flies from Singapore to Newark, New Jersey, in 17 hours and 52 mins.