NOW & THEN
19 JULY
1333: Battle of Halidon Hill at Berwick, in which Scots lost 600 men as they were crushed by Edward III of England and Edward Balliol.
1545: The Mary Rose, flagship of Henry VIII’S battle fleet, keeled over and sank in the Solent with the loss of 700 lives.
1553: Mary Tudor was proclaimed Queen, while 15-yearold Lady Jane Grey, a Protestant, was deposed after only nine days and sent to the Tower.
1588: “There’s plenty of time to finish this game and thrash the Spaniards too,” Sir Francis Drake was said to have commented on Plymouth Hoe as he played bowls while the Spanish Armada approached.
1821: Coronation of King George IV took place in Westminster Abbey.
1843: Brunel’s steamship SS Great Britain was launched, becoming the world’s largest ship and the first ocean-going vessel with an iron hull or screw propeller.
1939: Dr Roy P Scholz became the first surgeon to use fibreglass sutures.
1940: Adolf Hitler ordered Great Britain to surrender.
1941: British prime minister Winston Churchill launched his “V for Victory” campaign during the Second World War.
1956: US and Britain informed Egypt they could not participate in financing the Aswan Dam project.
1969: Apollo 11 went into moon orbit.
1983: People searching a clay pit in Surrey discovered fossils of a previously unknown species of carnivorous dinosaur.
1984: Lynn Rippelmeyer became the first woman to captain a Boeing 747 aircraft on a transatlantic flight.
1992: John Smith became leader of the Labour party.
1987: Nick Faldo won the first of his three Open Championship titles at Muirfield with a score of 279.
1990: National Union of Mineworkers sued Arthur Scargill over missing Soviet money given during miners’ strike of 1984-85.
1995: The Prince of Wales gave up flying, despite being cleared of blame for crashing an aircraft he was piloting as it landed on Islay.
2001: The novelist and former MP, Lord Archer, was jailed for four years at the Old Bailey for perverting the course of justice and committing perjury during his 1987 libel trial against the Daily Star, which had accused him of sleeping with a prostitute.
2001: Michael Brunet discovered the skull of Sahelanthropus tchadensis, thought to be the oldest known species in the human family tree, in Djurab desert, Chad. It lived 6-7 million years ago.
2002: A public inquiry ruled that GP Harold Shipman, serving life for murdering 15 patients, altogether killed 215 patients in Hyde, near Manchester, and that he might have been responsible for 45 other deaths.
2011: News Corp founder Rupert Murdoch, his son, James, and the firm’s former chief executive, Rebekah Brooks, faced questions from MPS over the phone-hacking scandal that had led the 80-year-old media baron to shut down the News of the World.