Randlord falls overboard; Queen Elizabeth II crowned; brutally violent football match; Covid behind things like George Floyd’s murder; and jury decision in Amber Heard/Johnny Depp defamation case
455 The Vandals enter Rome and spend two weeks plundering the city.
1875 Alexander Graham Bell makes the first sound transmission.
1879 A 1 000-strong search party finds the body of the Prince Imperial of France, Louis Napoleon, who was killed by Zulu warriors in Zululand during the Anglo-Zulu war.
1897 Randlord Barney Barnato and his family sail from Cape Town for Southampton. He is lost overboard near the island of Madeira.
1902 When the signing of the Treaty of Vereeniging (and Britain’s victory in the Anglo-Boer War) is reported to the paralysed President Steyn of the Orange Free State, he is devastated and says: “Had I not wife and children, death would have been welcome.”
1910 Charles Rolls, co-founder of Rolls-Royce, becomes the first to make a non-stop double crossing of the English Channel by plane.
1919 Anarchists simultaneously set off bombs in eight US cities.
1935 The SA cricket team beats England for the first time at Lords.
1944 US Flying Fortress bombers start long-range missions from North Africa to Russia, bombing targets along the way, refuelling and rearming in the USSR, before returning.
1953 Queen Elizabeth II is crowned in Westminster Abbey. It is the first major international event to be televised.
1962 Police intervene many times in fights between Chilean and Italian players in one of the most violent games in football history.
1969 The Australian aircraft carrier, HMAS Melbourne slices a US destroyer in half, killing 74 sailors, off Vietnam.
1979 Pope John Paul II becomes the first pontiff to visit a Communist country when he returns to his homeland, Poland after 59 years.
2012 Former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak is jailed for life for his role in the killing of demonstrators in 2011.
2020 UN human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet says the Covid pandemic is exposing “endemic inequalities” around the world, and cites the death of the unarmed George Floyd, who was killed by US police on May 25, and higher death toll for ethnic minorities.
2022 Queen Elizabeth II, Britain’s longest-serving royal, marks her Platinum Jubilee (70 years on the throne) with four days of celebrations starting with a military parade at Buckingham Palace.
2022 The jury in defamation case brought by actor Johnny Depp against ex-wife Amber Heard awards Depp $15 million in damages and compensation and Heard $2 million in damages in Fairfax, Virginia.