1982 Corporal punishment was banned in schools in the Republic of Ireland. 1969 Charles Bewley, lawyer and diplomat, first Irish minister to the Holy See (1929) and to Berlin (1933–9), from where he was recalled by de Valera, died. 1968 The image of South Vietnam’s police chief General Loan summarily executing a captured Viet Cong … Read more
1984 Ann Lovett (15) died while giving birth near a Marian grotto in Granard, Co. Longford. 1953 The Princess Victoria, an early roll-on–roll-off ferry, en route from Stranraer to Larne, sank in hurricane-force conditions off Belfast Lough, with the loss of 133 lives. It was Ireland’s worst peacetime maritime disaster. 1917 Germany announced unrestricted submarine … Read more
1820 Edward Bransfield from Ballinacurra, Middleton, Co. Cork, commander of the English merchant vessel Williams, made the first sighting of the mainland of Antarctica—Trinity Peninsula, the northernmost point of the continent. 1968 Vietnam War—the Tet Offensive. After declaring a truce over the seven-day Tet (lunar New Year) holiday, c. 70,000 Viet Cong troops launched surprise … Read more
1970 Gerard Sweetman (61), Fine Gael politician and Minister for Finance (1954–7), was killed in a car crash in County Kildare. 1939 W. B. Yeats, poet, died at Roquebrune, France. 1918 Lt.-Col. John McCrae (45), Canadian surgeon and poet, who composed In Flanders Field (05/1915), died of pneumonia in Boulogne. 1547 King Henry VIII (55) … Read more
1942 Six weeks after the US entered the Second World War, the first US soldiers came ashore at Belfast’s Dufferin Quay. By May 1942 some 37,000 US servicemen were stationed in Northern Ireland. 1871 Sir Arthur Philip Du Cros, pioneer of the pneumatic tyre industry who founded the multinational Dunlop Rubber Company (1901), born in … Read more