NOW & THEN
17 NOVEMBER
1278: 680 Jews were detained in the Tower of London – 293 of them subsequently hanged – for counterfeiting coins.
1292: John Bailliol became King of Scots.
1307: William Tell is reputed to have shot the apple off his son’s head.
1558: Elizabeth I ascended to the English throne following the death of her half-sister, “Bloody Mary”.
1603: Explorer and writer Sir Walter Raleigh went on trial for treason.
1855: David Livingstone became the first European to see the Victoria Falls on the Zambezi river.
1882: The Royal Astronomer witnessed an unidentified flying object from the Greenwich Royal Observatory. It was described as “a strange celestial visitor – a circular object glowing green”. 1869: The Suez Canal, linking the Mediterranean with the Red Sea, was opened.
1883: Golfer Willie Fernie scored 158 at Musselburgh Links to win the Open Championship.
1913: First vessels passed through the Panama Canal. More than 25,000 lives were lost during the construction.
1914: It was announced that income tax was to be doubled in the United Kingdom to finance the war against Germany.
1922: Siberia voted for union with the USSR on the same day that Britain elected its first Communist MP – JT Walton-newbold, standing for Motherwell. 1954: General Gamal Abdel Nasser became head of state in Egypt after the fall of president Muhammad Naguib.
1959: Prestwick and Renfrew airports became the first to offer duty-free goods in Britain. London Heathrow followed soon afterwards.
1964: Britain said it would ban arms exports to South Africa. 1970: Russia’s Luna 17 landed on the Sea of Rains on the Moon and released the first Moonwalker vehicle.
1970: The Sun pictured its first Page Three girl, Stephanie Rahn. 1993: The Republic of Ireland became the only team from the British Isles to qualify for football’s World Cup Finals in the United States.
1996: Russian space probe Mars 96 crash-landed in the Pacific after its booster rockets failed soon after take-off.
1996: The first fossils of 2.5 million-year-old Australopithecus Garhi, a human ancestor, were found in Bouri, Middle Awash, Ethiopia.
2003: Britney Spears, aged 21, became the youngest singer to get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
2008: Pirates seized a Saudiowned oil tanker in the Indian Ocean off the Kenyan coast. The vessel was carrying two million barrels – more than a quarter of Saudi Arabia’s daily output. 2010: More than 100 homes were evacuated in Cornwall as heavy rain and gale-force winds caused widespread flooding and travel disruption.
2014: The church of England adopted legislation enabling the appointment of female bishops. 2019: The first case of the deadly coronavirus, which became a global pandemic, was identified in the Hubei province of China.