NOW & THEN
3 APRIL
1721: Robert Walpole became Britain’s first prime minister, an office he held until 1742.
1882: Jesse James, American outlaw and robber, was murdered, shot in the back while adjusting a picture on his cabin wall. The killer was his cousin, Robert Ford.
1902: Tarmacadam was patented by Edgar Hooley.
1913: Emmeline Pankhurst, suffragette, was found guilty of inciting supporters to place explosives at the London residence of David Lloyd George. She was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment.
1921: Coal rationing was imposed in Britain.
1922: Josef Stalin appointed as general secretary of the Communist Party in Russia.
1930: Ras Tafari became Emperor Haile Selassie of Abyssinia (Ethiopia). He ruled for 44 years.
1933: Two British aeroplanes became the first to fly over Mount Everest.
1947: Bupa, the private medical company, was founded.
1949: Armistice with Israel was concluded by Arab nations.
1978: The first regular BBC radio broadcasts of proceedings in Parliament began.
1982: Dick Saunders, 48, became the oldest winner of the Grand National, riding Grittar.
1982: Commons held emergency Saturday session on Falklands crisis as United Nations Security Council voted 10-1 for resolution demanding withdrawal of Argentine forces, who took island of South Georgia the same day.
1987: Moors murderer Myra Hindley finally confessed to the 1964 killings of two other children with Ian Brady. Brady, and Hindley abducted, sexually abused, tortured, and murdered five children between July 1963 and October 1965
1992: Actor-pop star Jason Donovan was awarded £200,000 libel damages over magazine article which wrongly suggested he was gay.
1993: Grand National was declared void for the first time in its history after two false starts when the starting tape failed to rise properly.
1993: American and Russian presidents Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin began their first summit meeting, in Vancouver.
1995: High Court in Edinburgh banned BBC from screening a Panorama interview with John Major in Scotland in the runup to the local elections after protests from the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats.
2000: Microsoft was ruled to have violated US anti-trust laws by keeping “an oppressive thumb” on its competitors.
2004: Islamic terrorists involved in the 11 March, 2004, Madrid attacks were trapped by the police in their apartment and killed themselves.
2010: Apple sold more than 300,000 of its latest product, the ipad tablet computer, on its launch day in the US.
2013: More than 50 people died in floods from record-breaking rainfall in La Plata and Buenos Aires, Argentina.
2014: UK government announced plans for cigarettes to be sold in non-branded packaging. Alec Baldwin, US actor, 61; William Gaunt, British actor, 82; Leona Lewis, British singer-songwriter, 34; Jonathan Lynn, director, actor and co-writer of Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, 76; Eddie Murphy, US actor and comedian, 58; David Hyde Pierce, actor, 60
ANNIVERSARIES
Births: 1367 King Henry IV; 1783 Washington Irving, author of Rip Van Winkle; 1893 Leslie Howard, film actor; 1924 Marlon Brando, film actor; 1925 Tony Benn, MP 1950-60 and 1963-2001, and Cabinet minister; 1926 Virgil Grissom, astronaut; 1930 Helmut Kohl, German chancellor 198298; 1945 Gary Sprake, football goalkeeper.
Deaths: 1682 Bartolome Murillo, artist; 1862 Sir James Clark Ross, Arctic explorer; 1882 Jesse James, American outlaw and robber (murdered); 1897 Johannes Brahms, composer and pianist; 1901 Richard D’oyly Carte, theatrical impresario, promoter of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas; 1949 Basil Harwood, composer; 1950 Kurt Weill, composer; 1982 Warren Oates, actor; 1986 Sir Peter Pears, tenor; 1991 Graham Greene, novelist; 1999 Lionel Bart, composer and lyricist; 2009 Eva Evdokimova, prima ballerina.