Nick Maxwell

1819 Birth of Gustave Courbet, French painter—notably of A Burial at Ornans (1850–1)—and pioneer of nineteenth-century realism. 1967 Spencer Treacy (67), acclaimed Hollywood actor who won consecutive Academy Awards for Best Actor in Captains Courageous (1937) and Boy’s Town (1938), in which he played the role of Roscommon-born Father Edward J. Flanagan who founded the famous … Read more

1997 The Labour Party, led by Tony Blair, won the British general election by a landslide, ending eighteen years of Conservative rule. 1943 Sir Basil Brooke became prime minister of Northern Ireland in succession to John Miller Andrews.

1908 Luke Livingstone Macassey (c. 65), civil engineer and barrister, died. Macassey is remembered as Belfast’s ‘water hero’, the visionary engineer who brought a reliable supply of clean water to a city whose population had risen from 22,000 in 1807 to 270,000 in 1890 and in so doing probably saved more lives—from typhoid and cholera—than … Read more