NOW & THEN
MAY 16
1568: Mary Queen of Scots sailed from Port Mary across Solway Firth to begin her exile in England.
1770: Marie Antoinette married France’s King Louis XVI.
1888: Emile Berliner demonstrated the first gramophone in Philadelphia.
1908: Britain’s first diesel submarine, D1, was launched at Barrow.
1920: Joan of Arc was canonised.
1932: Japan’s premier, Tsuyoshi Inukai, assassinated in Tokyo.
1938: The Women’s Voluntary Services Association was formed by the Marchioness of Reading, as the WVS. The Royal tag was added in 1966.
1943: The Dambusters, using “skip” bombs invented by Dr Barnes Wallis, made their famous raid on the Moehne, Eder and Sorpe dams in the Ruhr.
1956: Jim Laker of Surrey took all ten Australian wickets for 88 runs at the Oval.
1969: The Russian spacecraft Venus 5 touched down on Venus to send back information about planet’s atmosphere.
1975: Local Government (Scotland) Act (1974) came into effect, replacing 430 local authorities with nine regional, 53 district and three islands councils.
1975: Mrs Junko Tabei, of Japan, climbed Mount Everest, the first woman to do so.
1976: Civil war in Lebanon reached new peak of violence with scores of people killed in fighting between Christians and Muslims in Beirut.
1979: Police in El Salvador sealed off capital after ten days of violence by anti-government terrorists took 44 lives.
1983: London police began fitting wheel clamps to illegally parked vehicles.
1989: The Guardian Angels began work as vigilantes on London Underground trains.
1989: Hundreds of thousands from all walks of life arrived in Peking, China, to support college students fasting for freedom in Tiananmen Square.
1990: British Steel announced decision to close the hot strip mill at Ravenscraig with the loss of 770 jobs.
1990: Pavarotti sang to an audience of 12,000 at a sell-out concert at the SECC, Glasgow.
1992: The United States won the yachting world’s premier competition, the America’s Cup.
1993: In referendum, Bosnian Serbs overwhelmingly rejected Vance-owen peace plan for the former Yugoslavia.
2003: In Casablanca, Morocco, 33 civilians were killed and more than 100 people injured in terrorist attacks.
2005: Kuwait permitted women’s suffrage in a 35-23 National Assembly vote.
2008: South African 400 metre runner Oscar Pistorius, whose lower legs were amputated as a child, was told by the IAAF he could compete against ablebodied athletes at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games using carbon-fibre blades.
2014: Thurso, the most northerly town on the Scottish mainland, was earmarked by conservationists as a haven for the great yellow bumblebee in a bid to save the species from extinction in the UK.