June 27: 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.
1693: The first magazine for women ‘The Ladies Mercury’ is published.
1778: Liberty Bell peals again for American freedom
The Liberty Bell is returned to Philadelphia after spending a year hidden under the floorboards of the Zion Reformed Church in Allentown, Pennsylvania. It was taken there as a precautionary measure when the city was threatened by the British a year before. The 2 080lb (943kg) bell has a circumference of 12ft (3.6m) and was originally commissioned for the state house of the British province of Pennsylvania. It was cast by Thomas Lester’s London foundry and bears the Biblical inscription ‘Proclaim Liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.’ It was rung on July 8, 1776, to proclaim the Declaration of Independence, and has been a symbol of American Independence ever since.
1816: Death of Samuel, 1st Viscount Hood, British admiral whose military successes included defeating the French off Dominica in 1782 and capturing Toulon in the French Revolutionary Wars.
1900: The Central Line comes into service between Shepherd’s Bush and Bank as part of the London Underground.
1939: Pan-American Airlines operates the first scheduled transatlantic air service, a 19-seater flying boat.
1954: The first nuclear power station is opened at Obninsk in the Soviet Union.
1957: Malcolm Lowry, English novelist and poet, dies in Sussex aged 48. His best-known novel was ‘Under the Volcano’. A restless man who had alcohol problems, Lowry travelled widely and finally settled near Vancouver with his second wife.
1971: The Fillmore East in New York, the rock club every rock star wanted to play, closes its doors forever.
1974: Death of bluesman ‘Lightnin’ Slim’.
1976: Six Palestinians hijack an Air France Airbus from Athens and forces it to fly to Entebbe in Uganda.
1988: Intrepid British mountain climbers Dave Hurst and Alan Matthews become the first blind climbers to reach the summit of Mont Blanc in Switzerland, Europe’s highest mountain at 15 781ft (4 810m).
1989: Vietnamese ‘boat people’ keep arriving
Another wave of refugee boats from Vietnam hits Hong Kong whose closed refugee camps were already bulging with 45 000 ‘boat people’. They were fleeing poverty and even caged in one of Hong Kong’s crowded sordid camps, they had hope, believing they were bound for California. But there was talk of sending them back to Vietnam. Hong Kong complained that the western nations’ low refugee quotas meant that Hong Kong had to do more than its fair share to help, with scant resources. In fact, Hong Kong was wealthy and had hundreds of square miles of rural land, but it did not want refugees competing for its people’s jobs, homes and school places. Yet still the Vietnamese kept coming, despite the fact that the overcrowded camps were rife with disease, violence and riots.
1990: Hubble trouble
The Hubble space telescope – launched in April to claims from NASA that it would revolutionise the understanding of the universe – was fatally flawed. It was designed to see light that had been travelling through space for 15 billion years – time close to the ‘Big Bang’. But NASA officials admitted that the Hubble’s light-gathering system, said to be ‘the most precise ever built’, has a wrongly-shaped mirror, which will prevent it from functioning any better than ground-based telescopes. Although scientists claimed the fault could be rectified, nothing could be done before 1993. The Hubble cost $2 billion and was calculated to cost at least $8 billion more during its decade-long lifetime in space.
1990: Queen Mum’s 90 glorious years
London offered a custom-made birthday parade to the Queen Mother to celebrate her ninetieth birthday. She arrived at Horseguards Parade in an open landau accompanied by Princess Margaret and the Prince of Wales. From there she watched an hour-long spectacular involving all the regiments of which she was colonel-in-chief and contingents from about 300 organisations with which she was involved. The turnout included the ‘Black Watch’ and the ‘Toronto Scottish’, ‘Fellows of the Royal Society’ and members of the ‘Mothers Union’. A 500-strong choir sang ‘Underneath the Arches’ and ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’.
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