On this day: Naval yacht Iolair sinks off Western Isles
Ne’erday
National days of Cuba, Sudan and Haiti.
45BC: The Julian calendar took effect.
1502: Portuguese navigators discovered Rio de Janeiro.
1610: German astronomer Simon Marius first discovered Jupiter’s moons but did not report it. Galileo did so on 1 July.
1651: Charles II was crowned King of Scots at Scone. It was the last coronation in Scotland.
1660: Thomas Fairfax’s New Model Army occupied York.
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Hide Ad1700: Protestant western Europe, with the exception of England, began using the Gregorian calendar.
1760: Carron Ironworks near Falkirk was started by Roebuck & Garbett of Birmingham and Cadell of Cockenzie. The small naval guns known as carronades were among the company’s products.
1783: Glasgow Chamber of Commerce was founded, the first in Britain.
1801: The Irish parliament voted to join the Kingdom of Great Britain . thus forming the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
1804: Haiti gained independence from France.
1818: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, was published anonymously by small London publishing house Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor and Jones.
1833: Britain proclaimed sovereignty over the Falklands.
1863: American president Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation declaring slaves free.
1904: The first motor vehicle registration number in Britain, A1, was secured for his Napier car by Earl Russell.
1909: Thousands of Britons over 70 went to post offices to draw their first weekly pension of five shillings (25p).
1913: Film censorship came into operation in UK.
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Hide Ad1919: Britain’s worst peacetime naval disaster this century happened when the naval yacht Iolaire, carrying 260 Lewis men returning from war service, and 24 crew, struck a reef on approach to Stornoway Harbour at 2am. Within 20 yards of the shore, 205 died as the overloaded vessel foundered.
1923: Most of the Scottish railways merged into the LMS and LNER. The Caledonian Railway followed suit later in the year.
1947: Britain’s coal industry nationalised.
1951: Steel industry nationalised.
1958: The European Economic Community came into being, the Treaty of Rome having been signed on 25 November, 1957, by the Six.
1959: Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba.
1961: Birth control pill was first used in Britain.
1970: The age of majority in Britain was cut from 21 to 18.
1973: Britain, Ireland and Denmark became EEC members.
1995: Frederick West, awaiting trial for 12 murders in and near Gloucester, hanged himself in his prison cell in Birmingham.
2011: Estonia officially adopted the euro currency and became the 17th eurozone country.
ANNIVERSARIES
Births: 1449 Lorenzo de’ Medici, ruler of Florence; 1735 Paul Revere, US patriot; 11854 Sir James Frazer, Glasgow-born anthropologist; 1879 EM Forster, novelist; 1919 JD Salinger, author; 1928 Iain Crichton Smith, Glasgow-born poet.
Deaths: 1766 James Stuart, the “Old Pretender”; 1944 Sir Edwin Lutyens, architect; 1996 Hamish Imlach, folk singer; 1998 Helen Wills Moody, Wimbledon champion;2009 Helen Suzman DBE, politician; 2015 Donna Douglas, actress (Elly May Clampett in the Beverly Hillbillies).