On this day: First man to survive heart transplant

On this day in 1967, Dr Christiaan Barnard examines his patient Louis Washkansky, the first man to survive a heart transplant. Picture: Getty

1557: Signing of the Common or Godly Band by the Earls of Argyll, Glencairn and Morton and others, the “Lords of the Congregation”, the first manifesto of the Reformation in Scotland.

1694: Triennial Bill became law in England, providing for new parliament to be elected every third year.

1808: Madrid surrendered to Napoleon Bonaparte’s French forces.

1836: Three people were killed at Great Corby, near Carlisle, in the first fatal railway derailment.

1909: King Edward VII dissolved parliament, and taxes on beer, spirits, tobacco and cars were lifted because no budget had been passed.

1944: The Home Guard “stood down” with a parade of 7,000 in Hyde Park, London.

1947: The audience cheered for 30 minutes when A Streetcar Named Desire, with Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski, opened on Broadway.

1958: Dutch businesses were nationalised in Indonesia.

1962: Refugees from Tristan da Cunha, who had been living in Britain since volcanic eruption made the South Atlantic island uninhabitable, rejected western society and voted to return home.

1967: Dr Christiaan Barnard of South Africa performed the world’s first human heart transplant operation. The recipient, 53-year-old Louis Washkansky, lived for 18 days.

1984: About 2,500 died and several thousand blinded after poisonous cyanide gas leaked from Union Carbide pesticide factory at Bhopal in central India.

1988: Edwina Currie said most of Britain’s egg production was affected by salmonella.

1990: Russian parliament voted to allow private ownership of land for the first time since the Bolshevik Revolution.

1991: American hostage Alan Steen freed in Beirut after nearly four years’ imprisonment.

1991: Ian and Kevin Maxwell resigned from the boards of their father’s companies as police investigated £600m missing from Mirror Group pension funds.

1992: Two IRA bombs exploded in Manchester. Sixty-four people were taken to hospital.

1995: Stephen Dorrell, the health secretary, said there was “no conceivable risk” of infection with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, BSE in humans, from eating beef.

BIRTHDAYS

Julianne Moore, actress, 54; Mike Gibson MBE, rugby player, 72; Jean-Luc Godard, film director, 84; Daryl Hannah, actress, 54; Ralph McTell, singer/guitarist, 70; Paul Nicholas, singer and actor, 69; Ozzy Osbourne, singer (Black Sabbath), 66; Craig Raine, poet, 70; Brendan Fraser, actor, 46; David Villa, World Cup-winning footballer, 33; Anna Chlumsky, actress, 34; Andy Grammer, singer-songwriter, 31; Michael Angarano, actor, 27; Eamonn Holmes, journalist and broadcaster, 55; Michael Essien, Ghanaian footballer, 32; Steven Culp, actor, 59; Daniel Bedingfield, singer-songwriter, 35; Sean Parker, co-founder of computer file-sharing service Napster, 35.

ANNIVERSARIES

Births: 1753 Samuel Crompton, inventor of spinning-mule; 1795 Sir Rowland Hill KCB, who introduced the postage stamp; 1857 Joseph Conrad, writer; 1875 Max Meldrum, Scottish painter; 1895 Anna Frued, psychoanalyst; 1952 Mel Smith, comedian,

Deaths: 1882 Archibald Campbell Tait, Edinburgh-born Archbishop of Canterbury; 1888 Carl Zeiss, lens-maker; 1894 Robert Louis Stevenson, author; 1919 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, French Impressionist painter;