Now & Then
◆ 15 JUNE
1215: King John put the Royal seal on Magna Carta at Runnymede, near Windsor.
1567: Earl of Bothwell, defeated at Battle of Carberry Hill, escaped to Norway, but Mary Queen of Scots was taken captive.
1744: Admiral George Anson returned to Spithead in the Centurion, after circumnavigating the globe in three years and nine months.
1846: The 49th parallel was established as the border between Canada and the United States. 1860: Florence Nightingale started her School for Nurses at St Thomas’s Hospital, London.
1910: Captain Scott set out on his second and fatal expedition to the South Pole.
1919: John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown completed the first non-stop transatlantic flight, from Newfoundland to County Galway, in a Vickers Vimy in just over 16 hours.
1936: The Wellington bomber made its maiden flight.
1939: Sixty-three men died when French submarine Phoenix sank off Indochina.
1945: Family allowance payments were introduced in Britain – 5/– (25p) a week for the second child and subsequent children.
1951: England’s Lake District was made into a national park.
1952: Anne Frank’s diary was published, eight years after she went into a concentration camp to die. Her father was the only family member to survive the war.
1969: Georges Pompidou became president of France.
1977: Spain had its first general election since 1936, resulting in victory for Democratic Centre Party.
1982: Falklands Task Force leader, Major-general Jeremy Moore, arrived at Port Stanley and accepted formal Argentine surrender.
1989: European elections saw major losses for Conservatives and 2.3 million votes for Green Party. 1990: In Donetsk, USSR, miners called for a mass exit from the Communist Party, claiming it no longer represented their interests. 1991: Half a million people were evacuated from the area around Mount Pinatubo, a volcano in the Philippines, which for six days had been spewing out rocks and clouds of gas, threatening three towns. 1992: The government announced the Royal Navy would scrap all its nuclear weapons except for Trident.
1994: A 24-hour strike, over a pay offer from Railtrack, brought most of Britain’s rail network to a standstill.
1995: Former Liverpool and Rangers manager Graeme Souness was awarded £750,000 libel damages over a newspaper article in which his ex-wife called him “tight-fisted” and a “dirty rat”. 1996: More than 200 people were injured when an IRA bomb wrecked the centre of Manchester, packed with Saturday shoppers.
2002: Near-earth asteroid 2002 MN missed the planet by 75,000 miles, about one-third of the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
2010: The Saville Inquiry into the Bloody Sunday shootings concluded that British paratroopers opened fire on unarmed civilians as they tended the wounded on 30 January 1972. The 14 people who were killed were exonerated in the report.
◆ BIRTHDAYS
James Belushi, US actor, 70; Alan Brazil, Scottish international footballer, 65; Jake Busey, actor, 53; Simon Callow CBE, British actor, 75; Courteney Cox, actress, 60; Nadine Coyle, singer (Girls Aloud), 39; Ice Cube, rap singer and actor, 55; Neil Patrick Harris, actor, 51; Noddy Holder MBE, British pop singer (Slade), 78; Helen Hunt, American actress, 61; Justin Leonard, American golfer, 52; Henry Mcleish, first minister 2000-1, MP 1987-2001, 76
◆ ANNIVERSARIES
Births: 1843 Edvard Grieg, Norwegian composer; 1907 James Robertson-justice, actor; 1911 Rev W Awdry, creator of Thomas the Tank Engine; 1913 Right-reverend Trevor Huddleston, anti-apartheid campaigner; 1922 Ronald King Murray, Lord Murray, Scottish Labour politician and judge; 1925 Richard Baker OBE, British broadcaster; 1946 Demis Roussos, singer.
Deaths: 1993 James Hunt, racing driver; 1996 Ella Fitzgerald, jazz singer; 2018 Leslie Grantham, British actor; 2023 Glenda Jackson CBE, British actress and MP.