NOW & THEN
18 NOVEMBER
1477: William Caxton issued the first dated, printed book from his printing press – The Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres – in Westminster.
1497: Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama reached the Cape of Good hope.
1626: St Peter’s Basilica in Rome consecrated by Pope Urban VIII.
1745: During the Jacobite Uprising, Bonnie Prince Charlie entered Carlisle on a white charger with 100 pipers, through streets lined with cheering Highlanders.
1852: The state funeral of the Duke of Wellington took place at St Paul’s Cathedral, London.
1902: Brooklyn toymaker Morris Michton named the teddy bear after US president Teddy Roosevelt.
1916: After more than 1 million killed or wounded in action, General Douglas Haig called off the First Battle of the Somme.
1918: Latvia declared independence from Russia.
1926: George Bernard Shaw refused to accept the Nobel prize money of £7,000 awarded to him in 1925. He said: “I can forgive Nobel for inventing dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel prize.”
1928: The first Mickey Mouse cartoon, Steamboat Willie, was shown.
1929: The Grand Banks Earthquake off the coast of Newfoundland at a magnitude of 7.2, caused shockwaves recorded as far away as Portugal, triggered a tsunami which killed 28 people and snapped 12 transatlantic telegraph cables.
1936: Germany and Italy recognised General Franco’s government in Spain.
1941: Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and his occupying forces left Ethiopia.
1968: Fire killed 22 workers in a three-storey upholstery factory in James Watt Street, Glasgow. They were trapped behind the steel-barred windows of the former bonded warehouse.
1978: Jonestown massacre occurred in Guyana, with a United States congressman and four other people killed as they tried to leave People’s Temple camp, and almost 900 cult members committed suicide on the order of their leader, the “Reverend” Jim Jones, by taking soft drink laced with cyanide.
1987: King’s Cross Underground station suffered devastating inferno with the loss of 30 lives.
The fire began on a wooden escalator.
1989: At least 800 people were left dead after a week of fighting in El Salvador and a third of San Salvador’s one million people were trapped without food or water during rebel siege.
1990: Chris Eubank beat Nigel Benn to become the WBO middleweight boxing champion.
1991: Last western hostages in Beirut, Terry Waite and Tom Sutherland, were freed. Waite washeldfor1,763days;sutherland, the man whose release he went to Lebanontonegotiate,hadbeenheld since 9 June, 1985.
1996: Dunblane campaigners vowed to fight on after the Conservative government defeated efforts to introduce a total ban on handguns.
2013: Twenty people were killed when a train collided with a minibus in Cairo.
Margaret Atwood, author, 80; William Douglas Cullen, Baron Cullen of Whitekirk, KT, Lord Justice-general of Scotland and Lord President of the Court of Session 2001-5, 84; Linda Evans, actress, 77; Bill Giles OBE, TV weatherman, 80; Brian Huggett MBE, golfer, 83; Baroness Jay of Paddington, Leader of the House of Lords 1998-2001, 80; Anthony “Ant” Mcpartlin OBE, actor and TV presenter, 45; Graham Parker, rock singer, 69; Elizabeth Perkins, actress, 59; Brenda Vaccaro, actress, 80; Kim Wilde, singer and gardener, 59; Owen Wilson, actor, 51; Peter Schmeichel MBE, former goalkeeper, 56.