May 12: On this day in world history …. briefly
Interesting historic snippets and facts taken from the book ‘On This Day’ first published in 1992 by Octopus Publishing Group Ltd, London.
1870: Canada purchases the Red River Colony (Manitoba) from the Hudson Bay Company.
1884: Bohemian composer Bedrich Smetana dies in an asylum for the insane.
1916: The leaders of the Easter Rising in Ireland are all executed. General Sir John Maxwell announced that James Connolly, last of the seven Republican Brotherhood leaders who proclaimed an Irish Republic on Easter Monday, was shot. He had been wounded and taken on a stretcher to face the firing squad. General Maxwell refused to give up the body of writer Patrick Pearse, the rebel leader, for a Catholic burial, saying he did not want to create a martyr. Trouble had been mounting since the new Home Rule Bill was passed four years earlier. However, the rebellion was swiftly suppressed.
1926: Britain’s Trades Union Council calls off the General Strike that brought the nation to a virtual halt for nine days. A bare skeleton of essential services kept the country going after public transport, rail, ports, post, supplies and industry as a whole simply stopped on May 4. Police barricaded vital centres and there were armoured cars on city streets as the army escorted convoys of emergency supplies. The middle classes, from students to City men and their wives, volunteered at the official Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies to drive lorries or sort mail. Meanwhile the miners’ strike continued with the sympathy of the TUC.
1932: The kidnapped baby son of aviator Charles Lindbergh is found dead.
1935: Alcoholics Anonymous is founded in Akron, Ohio, by William Wilson.
1937: The coronation in London of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth is broadcast live worldwide by the BBC.
1943: The Axis powers in North Africa surrender.
1949: The Soviet Union calls off its blockade of Berlin after more than a year. Cheering crowds in the four-power city met the first food convoy to arrive by road from the West. The former capital was entirely surrounded by Russian-occupied Germany. Russians had closed the roads, stopped trains and banned food imports from the Soviet sector in protest at the Western Allies’ plans to create an independent republic in West Germany. Britain and America beat the blockade with a round-the-clock airlift, with up to 200 flights a day ferrying food and supplies to the city. Moscow agreed to lift the siege following negotiations at the United Nations.
1957: Death of Erich von Stroheim, German-born actor and director.
1963: Bob Dylan refuses to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show on the grounds that the show was ‘too square’.
1969: The minimum voting age in Britain is lowered from 21 to 18.
1971: Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger marries a beauty from Nicaragua, Bianca Perez Morena de Macias, in a Roman Catholic ceremony at St Tropez in the south of France. Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and Eric Clapton were among the guests. Jagger met Bianca after a Rolling Stones concert in Paris six months earlier. The Stones moved to France as tax exiles.
1991: The first multi-party election since 1959 is held in Nepal.
2000: India’s population hits one billion. The news that India’s one-billionth citizen was officially announced on this day. In a ceremony at the Safdarjung Hospital, the baby girl was presented to the media, one Astha Arora. India’s government used the occasion to highlight the problems of an expanding population. With ever-increasing poverty, diminishing natural resources, illiteracy and unemployment, the government was trying to encourage smaller families. The United Nations warned that India may face problems with food and water shortages if the population rise did not slow. The increasing population has hampered all India’s attempts at progress.
2003: A triple suicide bomb attack in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, kills 34 people.
Birthdays:
Edward Lear 1812: English artist and poet who wrote the Book of Nonsense for the grandchildren of his patron, the Earl of Digby.
Florence Nightingale 1820: English nurse whose experiences in the Crimean War led her to become a hospital reformer.
Danté Gabriel Rossetti 1828: English poet, painter and co-founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Burt Bacharach 1929: American composer whose collaboration with Hal David produced hits such as ‘Walk On By’ and ‘What’s New Pussycat’.
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