ON THIS DAY, MAY 19

1499 Catherine of Aragon, 12, is married by proxy to Arthur, Prince of Wales, 13.

1536 The Queen of England, Anne Boleyn, and second wife of Henry VIII, is beheaded.

1743 French physicist Jean-Pierre Christin develops the now-widely used centigrade temperature scale.

1887 Britain’s Natal governor, Sir Arthur Havelock annexes Zululand.

1890 Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh is born. 1943 Royal Air Force bombers successfully attack dams in the German Ruhr Valley using innovative ball-shaped bouncing bombs that skipped along the water and exploded against the dam walls. The dams provided drinking water for 4 million people and 75% of the electrical power for local industry.

1953 The nuclear bomb ‘Dirty Harry’ explodes over Nevada, leaving a heavy coating of radioactive dust on valleys and towns downwind in Nevada, Arizona and Utah, and wreaking a terrible toll on many families, as the cancer rate starts to increase. (It was one of 100 tests above ground, that, despite official denials, turned swathes of the desert radioactive, and raised the question: how much should you trust your government?

Shot downwind a year later, near the town of St George where the fallout was reportedly heavy, the film The Conqueror allegedly killed its star, John Wayne, leading lady Susan Hayward, director Dick Powell and dozens of others – of the 220 film crew members, 91 (41.36% of the crew) developed cancer during their lifetime, while 46 (20.91%) died from it. Claudia Peterson, a ‘Downwinder’ activist and resident, who lost many relatives, had an epiphany when visiting families in Kazakhstan where the USSR did its testing: ‘I was afraid of these people my whole childhood and then discovered they weren’t monsters. It was our governments that were killing us’.)

1962 Marilyn Monroe’s rendition of Happy Birthday steals the limelight at a party for US President John F Kennedy.

1998 Voortrekkerhoogte is renamed Thaba Tshwane.

2018 Britain’s royal rebels, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle marry in Windsor, watched by 1.9 billion people. | THE HISTORIAN