On this day: Radio Caroline began broadcasting

On this day in 1964 the Radio Caroline began broadcasting from a ship in the North Sea. Pictur: Getty

1642: The Scots Guards were commissioned.

1800: Act of Union with Britain passed in Ireland’s parliament.

1801: Peace of Florence between France and Naples, whereby British vessels were excluded from Neapolitan ports.

1898: First German naval bill, introduced by Alfred von Tirpitz, began Germany’s naval expansion.

1910: The first seaplane, designed by Henri Fabre of France, had its maiden flight near Marseilles.

1912: Women’s Enfranchisement Bill was defeated by 14 votes on its second reading.

1913: The first Morris Oxford left factory at Cowley.

1917: The Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps was founded in Britain.

1920: Douglas Elton Ullman married Gladys Smith in America – the wedding was kept secret until after the ceremony, as they were better known as Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.

1930: Constantinople changed its name to Istanbul, and Angora to Ankara.

1938: Japan installed puppet government of Chinese Republic in Nanking.

1939: Madrid’s surrender to General Francisco Franco ended Spanish Civil War.

1960: Nineteen Glasgow firemen and salvage workers died when walls of Cheapside whisky bond blew out soon after they started fighting a blaze which later spread to a tobacco warehouse, an ice cream factory and Harland & Wolff’s engine works.

1964: Radio Caroline began transmissions from a ship in the North Sea.

1970: Amsar sect supporters of Imam El Mahdi rebelled in Sudan.

1974: Mounting civil unrest virtually paralysed foundering government of Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie.

1977: Breakfast TV in Britain started as an experiment on Yorkshire TV.

1979: Radiation leak at Three Mile Island nuclear station, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, United States. The atomic core began to melt down.

1989: Syrian gunners and Christian army units duelled with artillery and rockets in and around Beirut.

1989: In the USSR’s first democratic party elections, many Communist candidates chosen by the government were ousted.

1990: Five people were arrested in British-American operation at Heathrow, to stop export of 40 nuclear trigger devices for Iraq.

1991: Patricia Scotland, 35, was appointed Britain’s first black woman Queen’s Counsel.

1991: Tens of thousands of Muscovites defied a ban on demonstrations by rallying in support of Boris Yeltsin, president Mikhail Gorbachev’s chief rival.

1995: Tom Hanks won Best Actor Oscar for Forrest Gump, thereby becoming the first actor since Spencer Tracy in 1937-38 to win in successive years.

2003: A British soldier was killed in a “friendly fire” incident in Iraq when the tank he was in was attacked by American jets.

2006: One million union members, students, and unemployed took to the streets in France in protest at the government’s proposed First Employment Contract law.

2010: Chinese car-maker Geely signed a deal to buy Volvo from car giant Ford for £1.2 bn.

BIRTHDAYS

Laurie Brett, Scottish actress, 46; Rosemary Ashe, soprano, 62; Chris Barrie, actor, 55; Sir Richard Eyre CBE, theatre, film and television director, 72; Lady Gaga (born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta), singer/songwriter, 29; Baron Hennessy of Nympsfield, historian, 68; Nasser Hussein OBE, former England cricket captain, 47; Lord Kinnock, leader of the Labour Party 1983-92, 73; Mike Newell, film director, 73; Sir Michael Prkinson CBE, broadcaster, 80; Julia Stiles, actress, 34; Sir Richard Stilgoe OBE, entertainer and lyricist, 72; Lacey Turner, actress, 27; Dianne Wiest, actress, 67.

ANNIVERSARIES

Births: 1515 St Teresa of Avila; 1483 Raphael, painter; 1660 King George I; 1820 Sir William Howard Russell, war correspondent; 1868 Maxim Gorky, novelist; 1891 Paul Whiteman, bandleader; 1893 Alfred Lunt, actor; 1902 Dame Flora Robson, actress; 1921 Sir Dirk Bogarde, actor and author.

Deaths: 1868 Earl of Cardigan, leader of disastrous cavalry charge in Crimean War; 1881 Modest Mussorgsky, composer; 1941 Virginia Woolf, writer; 1943 Sergei Rakhmaninov, composer and piano virtuoso; 1969 Dwight D Eisenhower (Ike), army commander and 34th United States president; 1974 Dorothy Fields, lyricist; 1977 Eric Shipton, mountaineer who made five assaults on Everest; 1985 Marc Chagall, painter; 1994 Eugène Ionesco, playwright; 2000 Anthony Powell, author; 2002 Billy Wilder, film director; 2004 Sir Peter Ustinov, actor, dramatist and film director; 2012 Earl Scruggs, pioneering banjo player; 2012 John Arden, British playwright; 2013 Richard Griffiths OBE, actor.