Now & Then
◆ 24 APRIL
1558: Mary, Queen of Scots married the Dauphin of France. She was 16.
1567: First printed book ever published in Gaelic, translated from English by Bishop John Carswell of the Isles, was Forms of Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Catechism of the Christian Faith.
1633: Privy Council gave a warrant to Sir John Hepburn to raise a regiment of 1,200 men to fight in the French service. The corps ultimately became the First Regiment of Foot, The Royal Scots. 1792: La Marseillaise was composed by Claude Rouget de l’isle, a captain of engineers, after he had been asked by the Mayor of Strasbourg to provide a patriotic song in exchange for a bottle of wine.
1900: The Daily Express was first published.
1916: Republican insurrection known as the Easter Rising occurred in Dublin on Easter Monday.
1963: Princess Anne was chief bridesmaid at the wedding of Princess Alexandra to Angus Ogilvy.
1967: Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov was killed when parachute straps of his spacecraft became tangled during landing. 1970: After a national referendum, Gambia became a republic within the Commonwealth, having been a British colony since 1843.
1986: A pre-dawn bomb blast damaged British Airways office and other stores in Lumley Street, off Oxford Street, London.
1990: United States space shuttle Discovery launched with a giant Hubble telescope on board.
1992: Former Conservative MP Chris Patten was named governor of Hong Kong.
1993: An IRA bomb devastated a huge area of the City of London. One man was killed.
1995: The government agreed to the first face-to-face meeting for more than 20 years between a minister and Sinn Fein to discuss peace in Northern Ireland.
1996: Lord Cameron ruled that doctors could withdraw artificial feeding from Janet Johnston, to allow her a “peaceful and dignified” death, the first right-to-die decision in Scotland.
2004: The United States lifted economic sanctions imposed on Libya 18 years previously, as a reward for its cooperation in eliminating weapons of mass destruction.
2005: Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was inaugurated as the 265th Pope of the Roman Catholic Church, taking the name Pope Benedict XVI.
2005: Snuppy, the world’s first cloned dog, was born in South Korea.
2006: King Gyanendra of Nepal gave into the demands of protesters and restored the parliament that he dissolved in 2002.
2010: Yazoo City, in the American state of Mississippi, was struck by a tornado, which killed ten people. 2011: More than 470 inmates at a prison in southern Afghanistan escaped through a tunnel hundreds of metres long and dug from outside the jail.
2014: The BBC suspended its membership of the CBI over the business organisation’s registration as a support of the No campaign in the Scottish independence debate.