NOW & THEN
NOVEMBER 18
1477: William Caxton issued the first dated, printed book from his printing press – The Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres – in Westminster.
1497: Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama reached the Cape of Good hope.
1626: St Peter’s Basilica in Rome consecrated by Pope Urban VIII.
1745: During the Jacobite Uprising, Bonnie Prince Charlie entered Carlisle on a white charger with 100 pipers, through streets lined with cheering Highlanders.
1852: The state funeral of the Duke of Wellington took place at St Paul’s Cathedral, London.
1902: Toymaker Morris Michton named the teddy bear after US president Teddy Roosevelt.
1916: After more than 1 million killed or wounded in action, General Douglas Haig called off the First Battle of the Somme.
1918: Latvia declared independence from Russia.
1926: George Bernard Shaw refused to accept the Nobel prize money of £7,000 awarded to him in 1925. He said: “I can forgive Nobel for inventing dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel prize.”
1928: The first Mickey Mouse cartoon, Steamboat Willie, was shown.
1929: The Grand Banks Earthquake, with its epicentre just off the coast of Newfoundland and a magnitude of 7.2, caused shock waves that were recorded as far away as Portugal, triggered a tsunami which killed 28 people and snapped 12 transatlantic telegraph cables..
1941: British troops launched an attack in the West African desert.
1941: Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and his occupying forces left Ethiopia.
1968: Fire killed 22 workers in a three-storey upholstery factory in James Watt Street, Glasgow. They were trapped behind the steel-barred windows of the former bonded warehouse.
1978: Jonestown massacre occurred in Guyana, with a US congressman and four other people killed as they tried to leave People’s Temple camp, and almost 900 cult members committed suicide on the order of their leader, the “Reverend” Jim Jones, by taking soft drink laced with cyanide.
1987: King’s Cross Underground station suffered a devastating inferno with the loss of 30 lives.
The fire began on a wooden escalator.
1987: US congressional report on Iran-contra affair was published. It blamed president Ronald Reagan for ignorance.
1989: At least 800 people were left dead after a week of fighting in El Salvador and a third of San Salvador’s one million people were trapped without food or water during the rebel siege.
1990: Chris Eubank beat Nigel Benn to become the WBO middleweight boxing champion.
1991: The last western hostages in Beirut, Terry Waite and Tom Sutherland, were set free. 1996: Dunblane campaigners vowed to fight on after government defeated efforts to introduce a total ban on handguns.
2013: Twenty people were killed when a train collided with a minibus in Cairo.