NOW & THEN
19 APRIL
1587: Sir Francis Drake’s fleet sacked Cadiz in Spain. He called the action “singeing the King of Spain’s beard”.
1689: Followers of the Covenanter Richard Cameron, who had assembled at Edinburgh to guard the Revolution Convention of Estates, formed into a regiment under the Earl of Angus. The Cameronians were disbanded in 1968.
1775: The Battle of Lexington, the opening engagement in the War of American Independence, took place near Boston.
1783: United States Congress announced end of War of American Independence.
1794: Britain, by Treaty of The Hague, subsidised 60,000 Prussian and Dutch troops in coalition against France.
1843: The gas meter was patented by Carl Ludwig Farwig.
1921: Government of Ireland Act went into effect.
1943: About 60,000 poorly-armed Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto put up fierce resistance when attacked by a strong Nazi force with orders to wipe them out. A month later, the Nazi general in charge reported that the city’s Jewish quarter “no longer existed”.
1951: Miss Sweden won the first Miss World Contest, held at the Lyceum Ballroom in London.
1956: Prince Rainier of Monaco married film actress Grace Kelly. She was the first American to wed a reigning monarch.
1956: Diver Commander Lionel “Buster” Crabbe disappeared in Portsmouth Harbour while investigating the hull of a Russian cruiser which had brought the Soviet leaders Nikolai Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev to Britain. His headless body was washed up 14 months later.
1964: Coalition government in Laos was deposed by right-wing military group.
1971: Soviets launched the first space station, Salyut.
1982: Salisbury, capital of Zimbabwe, was renamed Harare.
1990: In Nicaragua, representatives of Contras, outgoing Sandinista government and incoming government of Violeta Barrios Chamorro, agreed on a ceasefire.
1990: The government won a Commons majority of 97 for its bill to give full British citizenship to up to 225,000 Hong Kong Chinese.
1991: First of 5,000 British troops left for Incirlik, Turkey, to help set up Kurdish “safe havens” in northern Iraq for
600,000 refugees.
1993: At least 85 people died when the 51-day Waco cult siege in Texas ended in tragedy as a giant ball of flame engulfed the compound.
1994: South Africa was pulled back from the edge of disaster when Zulu Chief Buthelezi called off his boycott of the country’s first all-race elections.
1995: A bomb at a federal government building in Oklahoma killed 168 people
2005: Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, 78, of Germany, was elected successor to Pope John Paul II, taking the name Benedict XVI.
2009: Scottish scientists revealed they had discovered genetic “brakes” which could stop or slow down diseases such as MS and cancer.
2010: Research suggested sunbeds were as addictive as drugs.