On this day: Kintyre Chinook crash pilots exonerated by Lords

Two pilots posthumously found guilty of gross negligence were cleared by a special Lords committee. Picture: PA

1782: Spanish forces captured Minorca, in the Balearic Islands off Spain, from the British.

1792: Tippoo of Mysore, India, was defeated in war with British, and Hyderabad ceded half of Mysore to British. He resumed hostilities in 1798-99.

1811: The Prince of Wales became Prince Regent on the established chronic porphyria of ‘Mad King’ George III.

1818: United States signed treaties of friendship with Denmark and Portugal.

1850: Frank S Baldwin patented the first adding machine. It was 20 inches high and weighed 8lb.

1920: Royal Air Force College at Cranwell opened and had its first intake of apprentices.

1922: First issue of Reader’s Digest published, in New York.

1924: The BBC “pips” or time signals from Greenwich Observatory were heard for the first time.

1931: Captain Malcolm Campbell, driving Bluebird, set world land speed record of 245mph at Daytona Beach. He was first man to exceed 200mph.

1936: Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times premiered in America.

1961: The Sunday Telegraph began publication.

1967: The Musicians’ Union banned the Rolling Stones’s Let’s Spend The Night Together from the Eamonn Andrews television show.

1971: Astronauts from US Apollo 14 landed on the Moon.

1976: Almost 23,000 lives lost in Guatemala earthquake.

1982: Laker Airlines, created by former British pilot Sir Freddie Laker to cut prices and make air travel more accessible, collapsed with debts of £270million.

1983: Klaus Barbie, Nazi war criminal, was flown to France to face charges.

1989: Sky Television, headed by Rupert Murdoch, launched the first four of its six planned channels.

1991: Iraq suspended fuel sales to its citizens.

1994: A controversial last-minute penalty gave England a 15-14 win over Scotland in the Calcutta Cup match at Murrayfield.

1996: United States president Bill Clinton was ordered to testify at the trial of Susan McDougal, one of his partners in the failed Whitewater Arkansas land deal.

1997: The so-called Big Three banks in Switzerland announced the creation of a $71 million fund to aid Holocaust survivors and their families.

2000: Russian forces massacred at least 60 civilians in the Novye Aldi suburb of Grozny, Chechnya.

2002: Two pilots found guilty of “gross negligence” by the Ministry of Defence after the 1994 Mull of Kintyre Chinook helicopter crash, in which 29 people died, were cleared by a specially constituted House of Lords committee.

2004: Twenty-three Chinese people drowned when a group of 35 cockle-pickers were trapped by rising tides in Morecambe Bay, England. Twenty-one bodies were recovered.

2008: A major tornado outbreak across the Southern United States left 57 dead, the most since the 1985 outbreak that killed 88.

ANNIVERSARIES:

Births: 1788 Sir Robert Peel, three times prime minister, and founder of Conservative Party; 1799 John Lindley, botanist; 1840 John Boyd Dunlop, Scottish veterinary surgeon and patentee of pneumatic tyre; 1914 William Burroughs, writer;

Deaths: 1867 Henry Crabb Robinson, diarist and lawyer; 1881 Thomas Carlyle, essayist and historian; 1941 Andrew “Banjo” Paterson, Australian journalist who adapted Waltzing Matilda from a traditional ditty; 1946 George Arliss, stage and film actor.