Now & Then
31 AUGUST
Traditional date for return of the dove to Noah’s Ark with an olive leaf.
1422: Henry VI of England acceded to the throne at the age of nine months.
1538: Pope Paul II excommunicated King Henry VIII of England.
1751: British troops, under Sir Robert Clive, occupied Arcot, India. 1836: HMS Beagle, with Charles Darwin aboard, anchored in Postage Praia, Cape Verde Islands. 1887: Thomas Edison patented the kinetoscope to produce moving pictures.
1888: The first victim of Jack the Ripper, Mary “Polly” Nichols, a prostitute, was found dead in Whitechapel, London.
1897: General Kitchener’s forces occupied Berber, north of Khartoum.
1900: Coca-cola went on sale in Britain.
1907: Britain, Russia and France formed the Triple Alliance.
1908: WG Grace retired from firstclass cricket at the age of 60. He scored 54,896 runs (126 centuries), took 2,879 wickets and held 871 catches over 43 years.
1924: Paavo Nurmi of Finland set a new world record time of 30:06.2 for the 10,000 metres.
1957: Malaysia (formerly Malaya) gained independence from Britain. 1962: Chris Bonington and Ian Clough became the first Britons to conquer the north face of the Eiger. 1962: Trinidad & Tobago gained independence from Britain.
1976: George Harrison was found guilty of “subconscious plagiarism” after lifting the melody from the Chiffons’ He’s So Fine for his first solo recording, My Sweet Lord in 1971. He was ordered to pay £1,599,987.
1980: The Solidarity trade union movement was recognised by the Polish government as the Gdansk Agreement was signed.
1984: Pinklon Thomas beat Tim Witherspoon to win the WBC heavyweight title in Las Vegas. 1990: Baton-wielding French riot police clashed with farmers demonstrating against imported British meat.
1990: President FW de Klerk announced that membership of South Africa’s National Party was to be open to all races. 1990: East and West Germany signed a unification treaty, joining their legal and political systems. 1993: HMS Mercury, the Royal Navy’s communications establishment, was decommissioned.
1994: Peace in Northern Ireland moved a step closer as the IRA announced a “complete cessation of military operations”.
1994: World chess champion Gary Kasparov was defeated by a computer.
1997: Diana, Princess of Wales, 36, and Dodi Fayed, died in a highspeed car crash in Paris.
2006: Stolen on 22 August, 2004, Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream was recovered by Norwegian police.
2011: The town of Wootton Bassett held a special service to mark the end of military repatriations there. Since 2007 the bodies of 345 service personnel had passed through the Wiltshire town.
2023: A computer model suggested humanity was almost wiped out 900,000 years ago with just 1,280 breeding individuals left.