NOW & THEN
16 SEPTEMBER
1400: Owain Glyndwr was declared Prince of Wales by his followers.
1620: The 101 Pilgrim Fathers set sail from Plymouth in the Mayflower, captained by Myles Standish.
1630: The Massachusetts village of Shawmut changed its name to Boston.
1652: Spanish troops occupied Dunkirk.
1701: James Francis Edward Stuart (“The Old Pretender”) became the Jacobite claimant to the thrones of Scotland and England.
1795: British forces captured Capetown, South Africa from the Dutch.
1847: The United Shakespeare Company bought the house in which Shakespeare was born at Stratford-upon-avon for £3,000, the first building in Britain to be bought for preservation.
1859: David Livingstone discovered Lake Nyasa.
1861: The Post Office Savings Bank was instituted in Britain.
1864: Tom Morris senior won the fifth Open Championship at Prestwick Golf Club with a score of 167.
1869: Tom Morris junior won the tenth Open Championshipat Prestwick Golf Club with a score of 157.
1945: Japan surrendered Hong Kong at end of World War II.
1946: Have a Go began on the Light Programme, with Wilfred Pickles and his wife as “Mabel at the table”. The show ran for more than 20 years.
1955: Uprising in Cordoba under General Eduardo Lonardi spread throughout Argentina.
1963: The name of Malaysia was adopted for the Federation of Malaya when joined by Singapore, North Borneo and Sarawak.
1966: Britain’s first Polaris submarine, Resolution, was launched.
1968: The two-tier postal system was introduced in Britain.
1976: Anwar Sadat was reelected as president of Egypt.
1981: The Liberals entered into an alliance with the Social Democratic Party, which had been formed on 26 March by a group of former Labour politicians.
1990: Iraq opened Kuwait’s borders and thousands of Kuwaitis attempted to flee.
1992: Black Wednesday on the money markets as Britain raised interest rates by 2 per cent, then another 3 per cent, then quit the
European Exchange Rate Mechanism. The interest rate rises were revoked later in the day.
1994: A six-year broadcasting ban on Sinn Fein, political wing of the IRA, was lifted.
1996: The Roman Catholic Bishop of Argyll, the Right Reverend Roderick Wright, resigned a week after disappearing with Kathleen Macphee, 40, a divorced mother of three. It was revealed later that he had a teenage son by another woman.
2010: Pope Benedict XVI arrived in Scotland for the start of his four-day visit to the UK. He was welcomed by the Queen at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, in Edinburgh. Later, he travelled to Glasgow where he celebrated an open-air mass in front of 70,000 people in Bellahouston Park.
2013: Twelve people were killed when a gunman opened fire at a naval yard in Washington DC.