NOW & THEN
1488: Battle of Sauchieburn between James III and the confederate nobles supporting his son. The king was murdered in his flight.
1509: Henry VIII married the Spanish Princess Catherine of Aragon, the first of his six wives.
1727: George II was proclaimed king of Great Britain.
1900: Edward VII’S (then Prince of Wales) first car – a chocolate, black and red 6bhp Daimler – was delivered to the Royal stables at Ascot Heath House. In 1930, George V gave the car back to Daimler, who presented it to Queen Elizabeth in 1968.
1913: Norwegian parliament granted universal suffrage to women.
1930: The liner Empress of Britain was launched by the Prince of Wales at Clydebank.
1936: Leslie Mitchell became the BBC’S first television announcer.
1940: Princess Juliana of the Netherlands arrived in Canada as an exile during the Second World War.
1952: Len Hutton became first professional cricketer to captain England.
1955: Eighty-two spectators were killed when a car skidded off the track at Le Mans 24-hour car race.
1963: Greek premier Constantine Caramanlis resigned in protest at King Paul’s state visit to Britain.
1975: The first oil was pumped ashore from the North Sea fields.
1981: Natwest Tower opened in London – at the time, the tallest building in Europe.
1982: The QE2 returned to Southampton from the Falklands with survivors from three destroyed British warships.
1988: Syrian-backed dissidents battled with loyalists of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat at two devastated refugee camps in west Beirut.
1990: Israeli Knesset approved new government formed by prime minister Yitzhak Shamir.
1990: It was reported that divorce was costing Britain £4 million a day in legal and welfare payments; 150,000 divorces a year was the highest in Europe, and by the age of 16, almost one in every three children were not living with both natural parents.
1995: Gavin Hastings played his 61st and last match for Scotland, in a 48-30 World Cup quarterfinal defeat by New Zealand in Pretoria. He was captain 20 times.
2001: Timothy Mcveigh was executed by lethal injection six years after he blew up the Alfred P Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children.
2001: Tony Blair sacked 20 ministers in a ruthless reshuffle after his general election victory.
2002: Antonio Meucci was acknowledged as the first inventor of the telephone by the United States Congress.
2004: Cassini-huygens probe made its closest fly-by of the Saturn moon Phoebe.
2008: Canadian premier Stephen Harper made a historic official apology to Canada’s First Nations in regard to a residential school abuse in which children were isolated from their homes, families and cultures for a century.