8th April

[chenrezig]

1093 The new Winchester Cathedral in Hampshire was dedicated. The Grade 1 listed cathedral is one of the largest cathedrals in England, with the longest nave and overall length of any Gothic cathedral in Europe.

1838 The day before his 32nd birthday, Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s 236 ft steamship Great Western sailed from Bristol on her maiden voyage to New York. The journey took 15 days, half the time of the fastest sailing ship. She became the first steamship to make regular Atlantic crossings.

1886 William Ewart Gladstone introduced the first Irish Home Rule Bill into the House of Commons. The Bill, like his Irish Land Act of 1870, was very much the work of Gladstone, who excluded both the Irish MPs and his own ministers from participation in the drafting.

1889 Adrian Boult, English conductor was born.

1904 Britain and France settled their foreign affairs differences with a newly negotiated 'Entente Cordiale'. Britain recognised the Suez Canal Convention and surrendered its claim to Madagascar.

1908 King Edward VII appointed Liberal politician Herbert Asquith as Prime Minister following the death of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman.

1919 The birth of Ian (Douglas) Smith, Rhodesian Prime Minister who advocated white supremacy and unilaterally declared independence (UDI) from Britain in 1965. After the transfer of power to the black majority in 1979, he was elected a member of parliament in the government of Robert Mugabe.

1925 The Australian Government and the British Colonial Office offered low interest loans to encourage Britons to borrow the money to emigrate to Australia.

1946 The League of Nations held its last meeting in Geneva before dissolution. It was replaced by the United Nations (UN).

1953 ritish colonial authorities in Kenya sentenced Jomo Kenyatta to seven years' imprisonment. He allegedly organized the extremist Mau Mau in their violence against white settlers and the colonial government.

1968 BOAC Flight 712 bound for Sydney caught fire shortly after take off from London Heathrow Airport. As a result of her heroic actions in the accident which claimed her life, Barbara Jane Harrison, a British air stewardess, was awarded a posthumous George Cross, the only GC awarded to a woman in peacetime.

1990 British golfer Nick Faldo won his second successive US Masters after a play-off.

1995 British-born Nicholas Ingram was executed in the electric chair in the US after two appeals to the US Supreme Court were turned down. He had been on death row since 1983 for murdering J C Sawyer and injuring his wife, Eunice Sawyer, during a robbery.

1997 he results of the first ultrasonic scan of the front of the Titanic revealed a series of six short slits as the principal damage to the ship after it struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic in 1912.

2012 35 year old Trenton Oldfield was charged over an incident which led to the 158th University Boat Race being halted halfway through. He swam in front of the boats, protesting about university elitism and narrowly avoided being hit by the oars of the Oxford crew.

2013 The death of former Prime Minister Baroness Thatcher, aged 87. She was Conservative prime minister from 1979 to 1990 and to date, the only woman to have held the role.

2014 The start of the first state visit by an Irish head of state (President Michael D Higgins). A state banquet at Windsor Castle was also attended by former IRA commander Martin McGuinness.

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[Rosalind]

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