On this day: Gone With The Wind published

Vivien Leigh and co-star Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind. Margaret Mitchells beloved novel was published on this day in 1936. Picture: PA

Close season for killing of stags ends.

1837: An act of parliament abolished punishment by pillory.

1855: The stamp tax on British newspapers was abolished.

1859: Charles Blondin made the ﬁrst crossing of the Niagara Falls on a tightrope, 1,100ft long and 160ft above the falls.

1894: London’s Tower Bridge, designed by Sir Horace Jones and Sir J Wolfe Barry, was opened.

1908: A giant ﬁreball devastated Tunguska in Russia. The explosion disintegrated a valley the size of a large city, turning trees to powder, and burned the skin of witnesses 32 miles away.

1934: Hitler’s rival, Ernst Röhm, and hundreds of inﬂuential Nazis were murdered by the SS in the Night of the Long Knives.

1936: The German Zeppelin Hindenburg set out on its Atlantic crossing, reaching Lakehurst, New Jersey, on 2 July.

1936: Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind was published.

1937: The ﬁrst emergency telephone service in the world opened in London, using 999.

1940: Guernsey was occupied by German forces.

1957: The lion was stamped on British eggs for the ﬁrst time.

1960: Lionel Bart’s musical, Oliver!, based on Charles Dickens’s novel, opened in London. It ran for 2,618 performances.

1971: The 26th amendment to the United States constitution was ratiﬁed, lowering the voting age to 18.

1980: The sixpence ceased to be legal tender after midnight.

1991: Owing to rain, tennis was played on the middle Sunday of the Wimbledon championships for the ﬁrst time.

1992: Former prime minister Margaret Thatcher joined the House of Lords as Baroness Thatcher.

1994: Argentine football star Diego Maradona was banned from the World Cup after failing a drugs test.

1997: The UK transferred sovereignty over Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China.

2003: MPs voted for a complete ban on hunting in England and Wales.

2007: Britain was on its highest terror alert after a burning car was driven into the passenger terminal at Glasgow Airport, a day after the discovery of two car bombs in the West End of London.

2009: It was revealed the UK economy had contracted by 2.4 per cent in the ﬁrst quarter – a decline not exceeded in 51 years.

2011: Hundreds of thousands of public sector workers went on strike to protect their pensions.

BIRTHDAYS

Carole Baxter, head gardener television’s Beechgrove Garden, 53; Cheryl Cole, singer (Girls Aloud), 27; Stanley Clarke, jazz musician, 59; John Fortune, scriptwriter and actor, 71; Rupert Graves, actor, 47; Tony Hatch, composer, 71; Mollie Hunter, Longniddry-born writer, 88; James Loughran CBE, Glasgow-born conductor, 79; Jack McConnell, Scotland’s first minister 2002-7, 50; Andrew Murray, golfer, 54.

ANNIVERSARIES

1817: Sir Joseph Hooker, surgeon and plant collector; 1891 Sir Stanley Spencer, artist; 1891 Howard Hawks, film director; 1917 Lena Horne, American singer; 1918 Susan Hayward, actress.

Deaths: 1660 William Oughtred, mathematician and inventor of slide rule in 1622; 1685 Earl of Argyll (executed in Edinburgh); 1919 Lord Rayleigh, physicist, co-discoverer of the inert gas argon; 1973 Nancy Mitford, novelist and biographer.