NOW & THEN
28 MARCH
1642: The Scots Guards were commissioned.
1800: Act of Union with Britain passed in Ireland’s parliament.
1801: Peace of Florence between France and Naples, whereby British vessels were excluded from Neapolitan ports.
1854: Britain declared (Crimean) war on Russia.
1898: First German naval bill, introduced by Alfred von Tirpitz, began Germany’s naval expansion.
1910: The first seaplane, designed by Henri Fabre of France, had its maiden flight near Marseilles.
1913: The first Morris Oxford left factory at Cowley.
1917: The Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps was founded in Britain.
1920: Douglas Elton Ullman married Gladys Smith in America – the wedding was kept secret until after the ceremony, as they were better known as Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.
1930: Constantinople changed its name to Istanbul, and Angora to Ankara.
1939: Madrid’s surrender to General Francisco Franco ended Spanish Civil War.
1957: Britain released Archbishop Makarios, who was free to travel except to Cyprus.
1960: Nineteen Glasgow firemen and salvage workers died when walls of Cheapside whisky bond blew out soon after they started fighting a blaze which later spread to a tobacco warehouse, an ice cream factory and Harland & Wolff ’s engine works.
1964: Radio Caroline began transmissions from a ship in the North Sea.
1967: United Nations secretarygeneral U Thant proposed general truce in Vietnam, followed by peace talks, and the United States said it would go along.
1974: Mounting civil unrest virtually paralysed foundering government of Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie.
1977: Breakfast TV in Britain started as an experiment on Yorkshire TV.
1979: Radiation leak at Three Mile Island nuclear station, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, United States. The atomic core began to melt down.
1991: Patricia Scotland, 35, was appointed Britain’s first black woman Queen’s Counsel.
1991: Tens of thousands of Muscovites defied a ban on demonstrations by rallying in support of Boris Yeltsin, president Mikhail Gorbachev’s chief rival.
1995: Tom Hanks won Best Actor Oscar for Forrest Gump, thereby becoming the first actor since Spencer Tracy in 1937-38 to win in successive years.
2003: A British soldier was killed in a “friendly fire” incident in Iraq when the tank he was in was attacked by American jets.
2006: One million union members, students, and unemployed took to the streets in France in protest at the government’s proposed First Employment Contract law.
2010: Chinese car-maker Geely signed a deal to buy Volvo from American car giant Ford for £1.2 billion.
BIRTHDAYS
Rosemary Ashe, British soprano, 66; Chris Barrie, British actor, 59; Sir Richard Eyre CBE, British theatre director, 76; Lady Gaga, US singer/songwriter, 33; Nasser Hussein OBE, former England cricket captain, 51; Lord Kinnock, leader of the Labour Party 1983-92, 77; Mario Vargas Llosa, Peruvian-spanish novelist and politician, 83; Mike Newell, British film director, 77; Sir Michael Parkinson CBE, broadcaster, 84; Sir Richard Stilgoe OBE, British entertainer and lyricist, 76; Lacey Turner, British actress, 31; Dianne Wiest, US actress, 71
ANNIVERSARIES
Births: 1515 St Teresa of Avila; 1483 Raphael, painter; 1902 Dame Flora Robson, actress; 1921 Sir Dirk Bogarde, actor and author.
Deaths: 1868 Earl of Cardigan, leader of disastrous cavalry charge in Crimean War; 1881 Modest Mussorgsky, composer; 1941 Virginia Woolf, writer (suicide); 1943 Sergei Rakhmaninov, composer and piano virtuoso; 1969 Dwight D Eisenhower (Ike), army commander and 34th United States president; 1985 Marc Chagall, painter; 1994 Eugène Ionesco, playwright; 2004 Sir Peter Ustinov, actor, dramatist and film director; 2012 2013 Richard Griffiths OBE, actor; 2017 Ronald Hines, actor.