NOW & THEN
MAY 14
1610: François Ravaillac, a fanatic, assassinated France’s King Henry IV, who was succeeded by Louis XIII, aged nine, with Maria de Medici, the Queen Mother, as Regent.
1660: Charles II was proclaimed restored king at Edinburgh. 1754: The Society of St Andrews Golfers was constituted, and became (in 1834) the Royal and Ancient Golf Club. 1791: British under Lord Cornwallis overthrew Tippoo of Mysore at Seringapatam in India. 1796: Edward Jenner made his first vaccination against smallpox, and laid the foundation for modern immunology.
1912: The Royal Flying Corps was established.
1921: The British Legion was founded in London by Earl Haig. It became the Royal British Legion in 1971.
1940: Anthony Eden, Secretary of State for War, broadcast an appeal to all men between 17 and 60 who could hold a rifle to enrol as Local Defence Volunteers (later called Home Guard) to oppose landings in Britain by German parachute troops. Some 400,000 joined in the first week. 1948: British mandate in Palestine ended, and an independent Jewish state of Israel was established with Chaim Weizmann as president and David Ben-gurion as premier; Arab Legion of Transjordan invaded Palestine and entered Jerusalem.
1951: New law removed Coloured (mixed race) people from voting registers in South Africa. 1973: America’s Skylab I was launched, returning to Earth on 11 July, 1979, after 34,981 orbits, where it disintegrated on impact with the atmosphere.
1977: Soviet newspaper Pravda warned the West that any aid to China eventually would be used to start world conflict.
1988: Iraqi warplanes attacked and set ablaze five ships at an offshore oil-loading terminal belonging to Iran.
1989: Archaeologists and actors protested as bulldozers prepared to cover the remains of the Rose Theatre, London, where Shakespeare’s first plays were said to have been performed.
1990: Gordon Wilson quit as leader of Scottish National Party. 1990: Tens of thousands marched in Paris in protest against desecration of 34 Jewish graves in southern France. 1991: Mao Tse-tung’s widow, Jiang Qing, Gang of Four member, committed suicide in Peking. Chinese kept her death a secret until 4 June.
1992: Police investigated largescale thefts from a Bank of England depot where worn-out bank notes are destroyed.
2005: The former USS America, a decommissioned supercarrier of the United States Navy, was deliberately sunk in the Atlantic Ocean after four weeks of livefire exercises. She was the largest ship ever to be disposed of as a target in a military exercise. 2010: Labour MP Stephen Timms was stabbed in the stomach while holding a constituency surgery in east London.
2014: An Iron Age village and a host of ancient artefacts, including tools and jewellery dating back 9,000 years, were discovered during the construction of the A75 Dunragit bypass in Wigtownshire.