NOW & THEN
AUGUST 20
1158: St Ronald, Earl of Orkney, was killed. He was canonised in 1192.
1745: Bonnie Prince Charlie reached Blair Castle.
1866: US president Andrew Johnson formally declared the Civil War to be over.
1882: Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture premiered in Moscow. 1897: Ronald Ross, first Scot to win a Nobel prize (1902), dissected an anopheles mosquito and discovered the link with malaria.
1913: Adolphe Pegoud baled out from a Bleriot aeroplane 700 feet above Buc in France. He was the first parachutist to jump from an aircraft.
1918: British offensive on Western Front opened in the First World War.
1940: Leon Trotsky, exiled Russian revolutionary, was hit on the head with an ice pick at his home near Mexico City. He died 26 hours later, and his killer was sentenced to 20 years in jail. 1940: Winston Churchill made his famous tribute to the RAF in the House of Commons, when he said: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
1944: British and US forces destroyed the German 7th Army at Falaise-argentan Gap.
1956: Calder Hall in Cumbria, the world’s first large-scale atomic power station, began generating.
1966: The Beatles were pelted with rotten fruit during a concert at Memphis after John Lennon said the group was more popular than Jesus.
1978: A stewardess killed and nine others injured when gunmen opened fire on an Israeli El Al Airlines crew bus in Mayfair, London.
1979: The East Coast mainline rail route between Scotland and England was reopened after the completion of the Penmanshiel Diversion – a realignment of the railway following the collapse of the Penmanshiel Tunnel, in which two people were killed. 1989: Fifty-one people partying on the Thames pleasure cruiser Marchioness drowned when it was hit by a dredger in central London.
1989: Said Aouita of Morocco set a new world record of 7:29.45 for the 3,000 metres.
1993: Britain’s Colin Jackson set a new world record of 12.91 seconds for the 110-metre hurdles. 1993: Mother Teresa was hospitalised with malaria.
1994: There were calls for an urgent investigation by the Lord Advocate into a third drugsrelated death in three months at a “rave” at the Hangar 13 nightspot in Ayr.
1998: The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Quebec could not secede from Canada with the federal government’s approval.
2008: 153 people were killed when a Spanish airliner bound for the Canary Islands crashed on take-off in Madrid. There were only 19 survivors in Spain’s most deadly air disaster in more than 20 years.
2009: The Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset Ali al-megrahi, left Scotland, bound for Libya, after being freed from prison on compassionate grounds.
2012: South Africa became the top ranked Test cricket nation after defeating England.
BIRTHDAYS
Amy Adams, US actress, 48; Ronnie Browne, folk singer (The Corries) and painter,
85; Finlay Calder OBE, former Scotland rugby captain, 65; Jamie Cullum, singer, 43; John Emburey, cricketer and coach, 70; Tom Mangold, broadcaster, 88; Joe Pasquale, comedian and television presenter, 61; Robert Plant CBE, British rock singer (Led Zeppelin), 74; Simon Shepherd, actor, 66; David Walliams OBE, comedian, actor and TV presenter, 51; Andrew Garfield, actor, 39; Don King, boxing promoter, 91; Joan Allen, actress, 66; Svetlana Omelchenko, cosmonaut, 71
ANNIVERSARIES
Births: 1907 Alan Reed, actor (Fred Flintstone); 1918 Jacqueline Susann, novelist; 1923 Jim Reeves (“Gentleman Jim”) country and pop music singer-songwriter; 1937 Jim Bowen, comedian and TV game show host; 1942 Isaac Hayes, singer-songwriter; 1949 Phil Lynott, singer and musician (Thin Lizzy). Deaths: 1969 Dudley D Watkins, cartoonist (The Broons, Oor Wullie and Desperate Dan); 2012 Phyllis Diller, actress and comedienne; 2016 Lord (Brian) Rix of Whitehall; 2017 Jerry Lewis, American film comedian.