ON THIS DAY, JUNE 2
455 Vandals enter Rome and spend two weeks plundering the city.
1875 Alexander Graham Bell makes the first sound transmission.
1879 A 1 000-strong search party finds the body of the Prince Imperial of France, Louis Napoleon, who was killed by Zulu warriors the day before.
1897 Randlord Barney Barnato and his family sail from Cape Town for Southampton. He is lost overboard near the
island of Madeira.
1902 When the signing of the Treaty of Vereeniging (surrender to the British after the Anglo-Boer War) is reported to the paralysed President Steyn of the Orange Free State, he is devastated and says: “Had I not wife and children, death would have been welcome.”
1910 Charles Rolls, a co-founder of RollsRoyce, becomes the first man to make a non-stop double crossing of the English
Channel by plane.
1919 Anarchists simultaneously set off bombs in eight separate US cities.
1935 The SA cricket team beats England for the first time at Lords.
1944 US Flying Fortress bombers start longrange missions from North Africa to Russia, bombing targets along the way, refuelling and rearming at US bases in the USSR, before returning.
1953 Queen Elizabeth II of the British
Empire, including SA, is crowned in Westminster Abbey. It is the first major international event to be televised.
1962 Police intervene many times in fights between Chilean and Italian players in one of the most violent games in football history.
1964 The Palestine Liberation Organisation is formed.
1969 The Australian aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne slices a US destroyer in half, killing 74 sailors, off Vietnam.
1979 Pope John Paul II becomes the first pope to visit a Communist country. It is his first trip back to Poland in 59 years.
2012 Former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak is jailed for life for his role in the killing of demonstrators in 2011.
2015 Fifa president Sepp Blatter quits, days after his re-election, amid a bribery scandal.
2015 100 volunteers in Bhutan set a world record for tree planting – 49 672 in 1 hour. | THE HISTORIAN