NOW & THEN
15 JULY
St Swithin’s Day AD862: When St Swithin, Saxon Bishop of Winchester, died, he asked to be buried outside where rain could fall on his grave. Some 108 years later on the same day, when devoted monks decided to move the body from the “vile and unworthy grave”, a sudden deluge drenched the funeral party and it rained for nearly seven weeks.
1099: Jerusalem was captured by the Crusaders.
1381: John Ball, a leader of the Peasants’ Revolt, was hung, drawn and quartered in the presence of Richard II.
1783: The first steamboat, Pyroscaphe, was given its initial run on River Saône in France.
1798: Marseillaise became the French national anthem.
1799: The Rosetta Stone was found in the Egyptian village of Rosetta by French Captain Pierre-françois Bouchard during Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign.
1815: Napoleon surrendered to Captain Frederick Maitland of HMS Bellerophon following his earlier defeat at Waterloo.
1840: Great Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia signed the Quadruple Alliance.
1850: John Wisden bowled all ten wickets while playing for South against North at Lord’s.
1856: Natal was formed as a British colony.
1869: Margarine was patented in France
1889: New National Portrait Gallery for Scotland was opened in Edinburgh.
1893: Matabele staged uprising against rule of British South Africa Company.
1912: National Insurance or social payment, devised by David Lloyd George, began.
1937: The concentration camp at Buchenwald was opened.
1939: Clara Adams became the first woman to complete a round-the-world flight.
1948: Alcoholics Anonymous was established in London, 13 years after starting in the US.
1948: UN Security Council ordered truce in Palestine.
1965: US Mariner-4 sent back first close-up pictures of Mars.
1972: Lee Trevino scored 278 at Muirfield to win the Open Championship.
1974: Archbishop/president Makarios of Cyprus fled during a military coup.
1975: America’s Apollo and Soviet Union’s Soyuz spacecraft 2 National Insurance, the brainchild of David Lloyd George, was introduced on this day in 1912 blasted into orbit for rendezvous in space.
1987: Boy George was banned from appearing on British television shows, deemed to be a “bad influence”.
1992: Pope John Paul II was hospitalised to have a tumour removed.
1994: Hundreds of thousands of Hutu fled to Zaire to escape genocide in Rwanda.
2002: Anti-terrorism Court of Pakistan handed down the death sentence to British-born Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh and life terms to three others suspected of murdering Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
2009: A 7.9 magnitude earthquake centred 160 miles west of Invercargill, New Zealand, triggered a small tsunami.
2012: Thirty-nine pilgrims died in a bus crash in Parasi, Nepal.
BIRTHDAYS
Julian Bream CBE, guitarist and lutenist, 87; Dame Carmen Callil DBE, founder of Virago Press, 82; Derek Griffiths MBE, actor, 74; Trevor Horn CBE, songwriter, 71; David Miliband, former Labour Cabinet minister, 55; Brigitte Nielsen, actress, 57; Linda Ronstadt, rock singer, 74; Forest Whitaker, actor, 59; Diane Kruger, actress, 44; Jill Halfpenny, actress, 45; Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, president of United Arab Emirates and racehorse owner, 71
ANNIVERSARIES
Births: 1606 Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, artist; 1858 Emmeline Pankhurst, suffragette; 1865 Lord Northcliffe, newspaper proprietor and pioneer of mass circulation journalism; 1919 Iris Murdoch, author; 1931 Clive Cussler, novelist and marine archaeologist; 1935 Ken Kercheval, actor (Dallas). Deaths: 1976 Paul Gallico, novelist; 1987 Alfie Bass, actor; 1989 Laurie Cunningham, footballer; 1990 Margaret Lockwood, actress; 1997 Gianni Versace, designer; 1999 Earl of Dalhousie, governor-general of Rhodesia and Nyasaland; 2011 Googie Withers, actress; 2012 Celeste Holm, actress; 2017 Martin Landau, American actor.