NOW & THEN
25 JULY
1797: At 2pm, during the battle of Santa Cruz, Admiral Nelson was wounded in the right arm by grapeshot. He had it amputated that afternoon.
1554: Mary I (Bloody Mary) married Philip II of Spain.
1830: France’s King Charles X issued ordinances controlling the press, dissolving legislative chambers and changing electoral system.
1865: James Barry died aged 70. On his death a post-mortem revealed that “the most skilful of physicians and the most wayward of men” was in fact a woman – and was, therefore, probably the first woman to qualify as a doctor in Britain. Jilted by a lover, Barry had joined the British Army and stayed for 52 years.
1878: China’s first diplomatic mission to United States arrived in Washington.
1907: Sir Robert Badenpowell’s experimental camp, to test the feasibility of Scouting, began when 20 boys of mixed backgrounds sailed over Poole Harbour to Brownsea Island for a holiday learning survival skills. Four days later, on 29 July, the Boy Scouts organisation was created.
1909: Louis Bleriot flew his three-cylinder monoplane across the English Channel from Calais to Dover in 36.5 minutes.
1959: The hovercraft, the SRN1, made its first English Channel crossing – from Dover to Calais – in a little more than two hours.
1971: Doctor Christiaan Barnard transplanted two lungs and heart into man in Cape Town, South Africa, and the operation was described as successful.
1987: The London Daily News closed down five months after it was started.
1989: Just 3.6 miles short of Dover, Gloria Pullan had to ditch Louis Bleriot’s historic plane in the Channel, while she was attempting to re-create his crossing in 1909.
1990: Crew of two and four oil workers were killed when helicopter hit crane on Brent Spar North Sea oil platform and plunged into the sea.
1991: European Court outlawed 1988 Merchant Shipping Act, designed to stop Spanish trawlers taking British fish stocks. Move prompted claims of loss of sovereignty to EC.
1994: Israel and Jordan ended their 46-year state of war when they signed a declaration in Washington.
1995: Four people were killed and 60 injured by a terrorist bomb on the Paris Metro.
2000: An Air France Concorde exploded in flames as it took off from Charles de Gaulle airport, near Paris, killing all 109 people on board, and four people in a hotel.
2007: GMTV admitted that ITV’S breakfast viewers who made phone calls costing £35 million over four years had had no chance of winning one of its phone-in competitions.
2007: Pratibha Patil was sworn in as India’s first woman president.
2012: At the start of the Olympics, the North Korean women’s football team walked off the pitch at Hampden Park after their images were shown on a screen beside a South Korean flag. The game eventually started an hour late.