NOW & THEN
15 JUNE
1215: King John put the Royal seal on Magna Carta at Runnymede, near Windsor.
1567: Earl of Bothwell, defeated at Battle of Carberry Hill, escaped to Norway, but Mary Queen of Scots was taken captive.
1846: The 49th parallel was established as the border between Canada and the United States.
1855: Stamp duty on newspapers was abolished.
1860: Florence Nightingale started her School for Nurses at St Thomas’s Hospital, London.
1910: Captain Scott set out on his second and fatal expedition to the South Pole.
1919: John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown completed the first non-stop transatlantic flight from Newfoundland to County Galway in a Vickers Vimy in just over 16 hours.
1936: The Wellington bomber made its maiden flight.
1939: Sixty-three men died when French submarine Phoenix sank off Indochina.
1945: Family allowance payments were introduced in Britain – 5/– (25p) a week for the second child and subsequent children.
1951: England’s Lake District was made into a national park.
1952: Anne Frank’s diary was published, eight years after she went into a concentration camp to die. Her father was the only member of her family to survive the war.
1969: Georges Pompidou became president of France.
1977: Spain had its first general election since 1936, resulting in victory for Democratic Centre Party.
1982: Falklands Task Force leader, Major-general Jeremy Moore arrived at Port Stanley and accepted formal Argentine surrender.
1990: In Donetsk, USSR, miners called for a mass exit from the Communist Party, claiming it no longer represented their interests.
1991: Half a million people were evacuated from the area around Mount Pinatubo, a volcano in the Philippines, which for six days had been spewing out rocks and clouds of gas, threatening three towns.
1992: The government announced the Royal Navy would scrap all its nuclear weapons except for Trident.
1994: A 24-hour strike, over a pay offer from Railtrack, brought most of Britain’s rail network to a standstill.
1995: Former Liverpool and Rangers manager Graeme Souness was awarded £750,000 libel damages over a newspaper article in which his ex-wife called him “tight-fisted”.
1996: More than 200 people were injured when an IRA bomb wrecked the centre of Manchester, packed with Saturday shoppers.
2002: Near-earth asteroid 2002 MN missed the Earth by 75,000 miles, about one-third of the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
2010: The long-awaited Saville Inquiry into the Bloody Sunday shootings concluded that British paratroopers opened fire on unarmed civilians as they tended the wounded on 30 January 1972. The 14 people who were killed were exonerated.
BIRTHDAYS
James Belushi, American actor, 67; Jake Busey, actor, 50; Simon Callow CBE, British actor, 72; Michael Laudrup, footballer,
57; Courteney Cox, actress,
57; Nadine Coyle, singer (Girls Aloud), 36; Ice Cube, rap singer and actor, 52; Julie Hagerty, American actress, 66; Neil Patrick Harris, actor, producer, comedian, TV host, 48; Noddy Holder MBE, British pop singer (Slade), 75; Helen Hunt, American actress, 58; Justin Leonard, American golfer, 49; Henry Mcleish, first minister 2000-1, MP 1987-2001, 73; Professor Paul Patterson, British composer, 74; Leah Remini, American actress, 51
ANNIVERSARIES
Births: 1843 Edvard Grieg, Norwegian composer; 1907 James Robertson-justice, British actor; 1911 Reverend W Awdry, creator of Thomas the Tank Engine; 1925 Richard Baker OBE, British broadcaster; 1946 Demis Roussos, Greek singer.
Deaths: 1993 James Hunt,, British racing driver; 1996 Sir Fitzroy Maclean, diplomat, soldier, politician and writer; 1996 Ella Fitzgerald, jazz singer; 2014 Casey Kasem, American actor and radio host; 2018 Leslie Grantham, British actor; 2019 Franco Zeffirelli KBE, Italian filmmaker