NOW & THEN
1703: Russia’s Czar, Peter the Great, founded St Petersburg.
1713: Spain agreed to cede Gibraltar and Minorca to Britain.
1871: The first rugby international was played, Scotland defeating England in Edinburgh.
1914: The first citrated blood transfusion was given in a Brussels hospital. Citrate, introduced by a Belgian surgeon, A Hustin, enabled blood to be bottled without clotting.
1933: Japan announced it would leave League of Nations.
1942: British commandos made a dawn raid on the French port of St Nazaire, in which an old destroyer, the Campbeltown, full of explosives, rammed the main dock gate and put it out of action for the rest of the war.
1943: Aircraft carrier HMS Dasher blew up and sank off Arran, with the loss of more than 350 crew members. There were 149 survivors.
1945: The last of more than 1,000 V2 rockets that fell on Britain in the Second World War exploded at Orpington, Kent.
1958: Britain’s first civic theatre, the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, opened.
1958: Nikita Khrushchev became chairman of the USSR council of ministers.
1961: Britain’s first women traffic wardens went on duty in Leicester.
1964: Earthquake measuring 8.9 on the Richter scale struck Alaska, claiming 118 lives.
1966: World Cup trophy, stolen from Central Hall, Westminster, on 20 March, found under a hedge in London by a dog-walker.
1970: Earthquake struck western Turkey, killing 1,087 and leaving 90,000 homeless.
1976: South Africa withdrew its military forces from Angola.
1977: Two aircraft collided and exploded in fog at Los Rodeos Airport at Tenerife, Canary Islands, with 582 deaths.
1991: Commandos stormed a Singapore Airlines jet, killing four Pakistani hijackers who had threatened to set fire to the aircraft and its 120 passengers.
1992: Rosemary Aberdour – self-styled “Lady Aberdour” – was jailed for four years at the Old Bailey for stealing £2.7 million from a hospital charity.
1994: Twenty-eight people were killed as tornadoes swept across the US Deep South.
1994: The Eurofighter took its first flight in Germany.
1995: Mandela estranged South Africa’s President dismissed wife government. Winnie Nelson his from
1998: The Food and Drug Administration approved Viagra for use in male impotence.
2004: HMS Scylla, a decommissioned Leander class frigate, was sunk as an artificial reef off Cornwall.
2008: The first day of operations at Heathrow Airport’s new £4.3 billion Terminal 5 descended into farce when flights were cancelled due to problems including faulty lifts, broken escalators and the complete collapse of the baggage system.
2009: The rare 29-year-old whisky Port Ellen, from an abandoned distillery in Islay that has been closed for 26 years, won award for the world’s best single malt.