Now & Then
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28 AUGUST
1413: Bull of Pope Benedict XIII (of Avignon) ratifying the founding of St Andrews University.
1833: Parliament banned slavery throughout British Empire.
1850: The Channel telegraph cable was completed between Dover and Cap Gris Nez.
1850: Wagner’s opera Lohengrin was first performed and the conductor was the composer, Franz Liszt. It contains the Bridal Chorus, better known as Here Comes The Bride.
1879: British troops captured Cetywayo in the Zulu War.
1895: RL Thomas, secretary and treasurer of Kinetoscope Co of New Jersey, became the first film actor, playing the part of the Queen in The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots. A dummy was also used for the first time – for the beheading. 1917: The Order of the British Empire (OBE), and the Companion of Honour (CH), were awarded for the first time.
1928: All-party Congress at Lucknow, India, voted for dominion status within the British Empire. 1931: Ramsay Macdonald was ousted as Labour leader after joining the national government. He was succeeded by Arthur Henderson.
1933: The BBC made the first broadcast appeal on behalf of the police, for Stanley Hobday, wanted for murder. He was captured near Carlisle and hanged at Winson Green Prison, Birmingham on 29 December.
1963: Black civil rights leader Martin Luther King made his famous “I have a dream…” speech to a rally of 200,000 people in Washington.
1967: Britain’s hippie movement held its great Festival of the Flower Children at Woburn Abbey, Buckinghamshire.
1989: Police said masked Sikh gunmen raided a passenger train in India’s Punjab State and massacred at least 22 Hindu passengers. 1992: All 82 people aboard an Aeroflot airliner died in a crash north-east of Moscow.
1995: More than 30 people were killed when Bosnian Serbs shelled the centre of Sarajevo, hitting market shoppers.
1996: The 15-year marriage of Charles and Diana, the Prince and Princess of Wales, was formally ended when they were granted a decree absolute in London. 2003: An electricity blackout cut off power to around 500,000 people living in south east England and brought 60 per cent of London’s underground rail network to a halt.
2007: Two companies who owned the Stockline plastics factory in Maryhill, Glasgow, in which nine people died in an explosion in 2004, were fined £400,000. Relatives of the dead and 33 injured said the fine was an “insult”. 2008: Hundreds of people were left stranded and up to 60,000 lost bookings after the collapse of the low-cost transatlantic airline Zoom.
2019: Prime Minister Boris Johnson took the extraordinary step of seeking permission from the Queen to prorogue parliament for five weeks, a move which was later ruled unlawful by the Supreme Court.
2023: Luis Rubiales, the Spanish FA president, vowed to fight on after being suspended, and nearly all women's team coaching staff denounced his ‘unacceptable attitude’.
◆ BIRTHDAYS
Kim Appleby, singer, 63; Jack Black, US actor, 55; Billy Boyd, Scottish actor, 56; Imogen Cooper CBE, British concert pianist, 75; Hugh Cornwell, British singer, 75; David Fincher, Us film director, 62; Jamie Osborne, jockey, 57; Jason Priestley, Canadian actor, 55; Leann Rimes, singer and Voice judge, 42; Emma Samms MBE, British actress, 64; Shania Twain, country music singer, 59; Kezia Dugdale, leader of Scottish Labour Party 2015-2017, 43.
◆ ANNIVERSARIES
Births: 1899 Charles Boyer, actor; 1906 Sir John Betjeman, Poet Laureate 1972-84; 1913 Lord Cudlipp, journalist; 1916 Mel Ferrer, US actor; 1921 Dan Stephen, Aberdeen-born artist; 1930 Ben Gazzara, US actor; 1930 Windsor Davies, British actor.
Deaths: 1958 Ernest Lawrence, physicist; 1967 Charles Darrow, inventor of Monopoly; 1972 Prince William of Gloucester (air race crash); 1987 John Huston, film director; 1990 Patience Strong, writer; 2001 Sir Reo Stakis, hotelier; 2006 Ed Benedict, animator (notably The Flintstones.