NOW & THEN
3 DECEMBER
1557: Signing of the Common or Godly Band by the Earls of Argyll, Glencairn and Morton and others, the “Lords of the Congregation”, the first manifesto of the Reformation in Scotland.
1808: Madrid surrendered to Napoleon Bonaparte’s French forces.
1828: Andrew Jackson was elected as the seventh US president.
1836: Three people were killed at Great Corby, near Carlisle, in the first fatal railway derailment. 1906: Her Majesty’s Theatre in Aberdeen opened.
1909: King Edward VII dissolved Parliament, and taxes on beer, spirits, tobacco and cars were lifted because no budget had been passed.
1926: Crime novelist Agatha Christie mysteriously disappeared for 11 days.
1931: Alka Seltzer went on sale for the first time.
1944: The Home Guard “stood down” with a parade of 7,000 in Hyde Park, London.
1947: The audience cheered for 30 minutes when A Streetcar Named Desire, with Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski, opened on Broadway.
1948: Don Bradman scored his last century – 123 in his final innings – when more than 94,000 people turned up to watch his testimonial match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. 1958: Dutch businesses were nationalised in Indonesia. 1962: Refugees from Tristan da Cunha, who had been living in Britain since volcanic eruption made the South Atlantic island uninhabitable, rejected western society and voted to return home.
1965: The Beatles began their last UK tour with a concert at the Odeon cinema, Glasgow.
1965: USSR launched its lunar space probe, Luna 8. It crashed upon landing on the moon. 1967: Dr Christiaan Barnard of South Africa performed the world’s first human heart transplant operation. The recipient, 53-year-old Louis Washkansky, lived for 18 days.
1971: India invaded West Pakistan, sparking the Indo-pakistan War, which lasted for 14 days. 1979: Eleven fans were trampled to death during a Who concert in Cincinnati.
1984: About 2,500 were reported dead and several thousand blinded after poisonous cyanide gas leaked from the Union Car
bide pesticide factory at Bhopal in central India.
1988: Edwina Currie said on television that most of Britain’s egg production was affected by salmonella.
1989: US president George Bush and Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev declared that the Cold War was over.
1990: Russian parliament voted to allow private ownership of land.
1991: Alan Steen, an American hostage, was freed in Beirut after nearly four years’ imprisonment. 1992: Two IRA bombs exploded in Manchester. Sixty-four people were taken to hospital.
1995: Stephen Dorrell, the health secretary, said there was “no conceivable risk” of people being infected with Creutzfeldtjakob disease, the human form of BSE, from eating beef.
BIRTHDAYS
Jenna Dewan, actress, 42; Mike Gibson MBE, rugby player, 80; Daryl Hannah, actress, 62; Franz Klammer, skier, 69; Ralph Mctell, singer/guitarist, 78; Christian Benteke, Belgian footballer, 32; Paul Nicholas, singer and actor, 78; Ozzy Osbourne, singer (Black Sabbath), 74; Craig Raine, poet, 78; Brendan Fraser, actor, 54; David Villa, World Cup-winning footballer, 41; Anna Chlumsky, actress, 42; Andy Grammer, singer-songwriter, 39; Natalia, Belgian singer, 42; Eamonn Holmes OBE, broadcaster, 63; Katarina Witt, Olympic and world champion figure skater, 57; Steven Culp, actor, 67.
ANNIVERSARIES
Births: 1795 Sir Rowland Hill KCB, social reformer who introduced the postage stamp; 1820 Thomas Beecham, inventor of Beecham’s pills; 1857 Joseph Conrad, writer; 1875 Max Meldrum, Scottish painter; 1884 Rajendra Prasad, first president of India.
Deaths: 1882 Archibald Campbell Tait, Edinburgh-born Archbishop of Canterbury; 1894 Robert Louis Stevenson, author; 1919 Pierre-auguste Renoir, French Impressionist painter; 1991 Alex Graham, Scottish cartoonist, creator of Fred Basset.