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May
May 10, 2006 7:25:31 GMT 10
Post by LLady on May 10, 2006 7:25:31 GMT 10
May 12
May 12 563 Community of Iona founded by Colum Cille (St Columba) from Ireland.
May 12 1725 The Black Watch regiment was commissioned under General Wade to police the Highlands.
May 12 1937 Coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth took place at Westminster Abbey.
On 12 May 1994, Labour leader, John Smith, died. The death stunned the nation. His funeral was held in Edinburgh a few days later and he was buried on the ancient holy island of Iona off the coast of Argyll. Politicians of all parties mourned in what was seen as a significant loss to the whole country, and people of all classes grieved for a man who came to be known as a lost leader. John Smith was widely respected for his honesty and integrity. In an age when trust in politicians was diminishing, he was seen as a plain man, sincere in his humanity. He was also one of the shrewdest and most able politicians the twentieth century had seen. A popular, convivial, figure too, he has been much missed in the years that followed. On 12 May 1999 the Scottish Parliament reconvened with Dr Winifred M Ewing MSP as acting Presiding Officer. Her first words to the Parliament were - "The Scottish Parliament which adjourned on the 25th of March in the year 1707 is hereby reconvened."
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May
May 11, 2006 6:37:56 GMT 10
Post by LLady on May 11, 2006 6:37:56 GMT 10
May 13
On this day in 1568 at the Battle of Langside, Mary, Queen of Scots, was finally defeated in her attempt to regain the throne from her son, James VI, and his supporters. Mary fled to England and was imprisoned until her execution in 1587. The 18m (58 feet) tall Langside Battlefield Memorial (1887-8, Alexander Skirving) marks the site of Glasgow`s most important military encounter. On 13 May 1685 James Kirk was executed near Dumfries as a Covenanter refusing to swear the oath, one of the last of the wave of deaths of the "Killing Times".
May 13 1995 Alison Hargreave, a 33-year-old mother of two from Spean Bridge became the first woman to climb Mount Everest solo and without oxygen. She died three years later while descending K2, the world's second-highest mountain.
May 13 1999 Donald Dewar elected as First Minister of the new Scottish Parliament.
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May
May 16, 2006 6:31:10 GMT 10
Post by LLady on May 16, 2006 6:31:10 GMT 10
May 14
On this day in 1752 Colin Campbell, the Red Fox, was killed in the Appin Murder at Ballachulish. Colin Campbell, landowner and government official, also known as The Red Fox, left his estate at Glenure with a group of soldiers, riding north through Appin to collect taxes. It has been claimed that his mission included the eviction of members of the Jacobite Stewarts, to be replaced by members of the government-loyal Campbell Clan. At Ballachuilish, a cairn marks the spot where Campbell was shot dead with a musket. Though the hapless James Stewart was hanged as a scapegoat for the crime, the true identity of the murderer remained a mystery for 250 years. However, in 2001 a descendant of the Stewarts of Appin, 89-year-old Anda Penman, identified young Donald Stewart of Ballachulish as the real killer, having allegedly kept a secret that was passed on by word of mouth through generations of her family. Today in 1754 golf was formalised at St Andrews with the foundation of the St Andrews Society of Golfers. Twenty-two ‘Noblemen and Gentlemen’ contributed to a silver club to be played for annually over the Links of St Andrews. The first winner was Baillie William Landale, a St Andrews merchant, who became Captain for the year. The competition was initially open to all golfers, as had been that of the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers in 1744, whose rules the St Andrews golfers used almost without change. Thus began the foremost club in both Scottish golf history and world golf in general.
May 14 1771 Industrialist and social reformer Robert Owen born.
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May
May 16, 2006 6:34:25 GMT 10
Post by LLady on May 16, 2006 6:34:25 GMT 10
May 15
May 15 1567 Mary, Queen of Scots, married Earl of Bothwell at 4am.
May 15 1800 King George III escaped two assassination attempts in one day. In Hyde Park, London, a bullet intended for him hit a man standing alongside. Later, at the Drury Lane Theatre, two bullets missed him and hit the wooden panel behind him. His assailant was found to be insane.
May 15 1887 Poet and critic Edwin Muir born.
On this day in 1903 Sir William MacTaggart, Scottish painter, was born. Best known for his landscapes, MacTaggart served as President of the Royal Scottish Academy between 1959-69. He carried on the family's artistic tradition as he was the grandson of the landscape painter, William MacTaggart. Today in 2001 Bobby Murdoch, Scottish footballer, died. Murdoch was a key figure in Celtic's European Cup-winning side of 1967, dubbed the "Lisbon Lions". They were the first British club to win the trophy. His other honours with Celtic included 8 league medals, 4 Scottish Cup winners' medals and 5 League Cup winners' medals. He played for Scotland internationally and also played and coached at English club Middlesbrough.
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May
May 16, 2006 6:37:44 GMT 10
Post by LLady on May 16, 2006 6:37:44 GMT 10
May 16
May 16 1568 Mary Queen of Scots sailed from Port Mary across the Solway Firth to exile in England.
May 16 1763 Biographer James Boswell met Samuel Johnson for the first time.
May 16 1791 James Boswell's "Life of Johnson" published.
On this day in 1805 Sir Alexander Burnes, Scottish explorer and public official, was born. A noted explorer of Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, and southern Russia, he was author of 'Map of Central Asia' and 'Travels into Bokhara.' As an army officer in India, he studied Asian languages, and in 1832 he left Lahore in Afghan dress and travelled by way of Peshawar and Kabul across the Hindu Kush to Balkh; and from there, by Bukhara, Asterabad, and Tehran, to Bushire. In 1839 he was appointed political resident at Kabul, where he was assassinated two years later. Today in 1935 Hector Munro Macdonald, Scottish mathematician, died. Macdonald worked on electric waves and solved difficult problems regarding diffraction of these waves by summing series of Bessel functions. He corrected his 1903 solution to the problem of a perfectly conducting sphere embedded in an infinite homogeneous dielectric in 1904 after a subtle error was pointed out by Poincaré.
May 16 1975 Local Government (Scotland) Act (1974) came into force and the 33 counties and four city councils were replaced by nine regional, 53 district and three islands councils.
May 16 1990 British Steel announced the closure of the hot strip mill at Ravenscraig with the loss of 770 jobs.
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May
May 16, 2006 6:41:02 GMT 10
Post by LLady on May 16, 2006 6:41:02 GMT 10
May 17
May 17 1532 King James V established paid judges to sit as the Court of Session, the highest civil court in Scotland.
On this day in 1810 Robert Tannahill drowned himself in a Paisley canal. A compassionate poet, he explored themes of love, friendship and empathy, and often used his surroundings as inspiration, taking long walks in the country around his home. The folly of war affected him deeply, and he often wrote about soldiers. He was prone to bouts of melancholy - when his 1810 manuscript was rejected by an Edinburgh publisher, he "consigned to the flames" as many of his writings as he could. His body was found in a side tunnel of the Candren Burn.
On 17 May 1870 David Octavius Hill, pioneering Scottish photographer, died. Born in 1802, Hill is often credited with being the first person to use photography as an aid to painting. Together with Robert Adamson he produced more than 1,500 photo-portraits of Scotland's great and good. A founding member of the Royal Scottish Academy, he served as its Secretary for nearly 50 years.
May 17 1938 The Marquess of Bute sold half of the city of Cardiff for £20 million, at that time the biggest-ever British property deal.
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May
May 19, 2006 6:05:17 GMT 10
Post by LLady on May 19, 2006 6:05:17 GMT 10
May 18
On this day in 1843 the Free Church of Scotland was founded by dissenting members of the Church of Scotland. The new Church became a powerful force in Scotland during the 19th Century, but was reunited with the Church of Scotland in 1929 after the main cause of dissention, the right to appoint ministers to parishes, was removed. The Free Church still exists in a minor form in the Highlands and Islands, organised by those who opposed the reunification.
May 18 1939 Cosmo cinema in Rose Street, Glasgow opened its doors for the first time. Now thr Glasgow Fil Theatre it is now the oldest active cinema in the city.
Today in 1960 Spanish football side, Real Madrid, won the European Cup for the fifth time, defeating Eintracht Frankfurt 7-3 at Hampden Park, Glasgow. Undoubtedly one of the greatest football matches ever seen in Scotland, the ecstatic crowd of 130,000 witnessed a spectacular display of footballing finesse. Hampden's gate receipts of £55,000 logged a then British record, and the estimated 70m television viewers around Europe were at that time by far the largest audience for a live BBC outside broadcast. The European Cup had been in existence only five years - and with this legendary performance, Real won the trophy, incredibly, for the fifth consecutive time.
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May
May 19, 2006 6:07:28 GMT 10
Post by LLady on May 19, 2006 6:07:28 GMT 10
May 19
On this day in 1795 James Boswell, diarist and biographer of Dr Samuel Johnson, died. James Boswell's name is rarely heard separately from that of Dr Samuel Johnson whose biography he wrote, and with whom he travelled through the west of Scotland in a journey famously recorded in his published journal. It was only in the mid-twentieth century, when many of his writings were re-discovered and published in full, that the extent of Boswell's talent came to be appreciated. As a perceptive and witty recorder of the social life of the later part of the eighteenth century, he had few rivals.
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May
May 19, 2006 6:10:37 GMT 10
Post by LLady on May 19, 2006 6:10:37 GMT 10
May 20
On 20 May 685 the battle of Nechtansmere, in present-day Angus, was fought. The battle was a decisive victory for the Picts, under their king Brude MacBile, over Ecgfirth, King of Northumbria, an Angle kingdom. This battle reversed the Northumbrian gains of the past century and the Angles were forced back beyond the Forth.
May 20 1303 France and England make peace, releasing forces to attack Scotland.
On this day in 1685 the Earl of Argyll sailed from Holland to Campbeltown with 300 men in an attempted uprising. After its failure he was executed. The rebellion was designed to place Charles II's illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, on the throne. The failure of this revolt led to a close bond between the Stewart monarchy and the enemies of the Campbells in the Highlands, which was to become more apparent in the subsequent Jacobite uprisings.
May 20 1747 Edinburgh-born James Lind began a controlled experiment which demonstrated that citrus fruits could prevent scurvy, a disease contracted by sailors on long voyages. The lime juice which eventually became standard issue to British sailors gave rise to the term "limey" as a name for British overseas.
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May
May 19, 2006 6:12:38 GMT 10
Post by LLady on May 19, 2006 6:12:38 GMT 10
May 21
On 21 May 1650 James Graham, Marquess of Montrose, the chief Royalist military commander in Scotland, died. Graham had originally been one of the nobles to draw up the National Covenant in 1638, however he became concerned about the opposite extreme, a Protestant oligarchy led by Archibald Campbell, the 8th Earl of Argyll, who imprisoned Graham in 1640. Graham therefore sided with the King against the Covenanting Army under Argyll, which was allied to the English army under Oliver Cromwell. Graham showed himself to be a remarkable tactician, winning six successive battles at Tippermuir, Aberdeen, Inverlochy, Auldearn, Alford and Kilsyth, before being defeated by David Leslie at Philiphaugh. He escaped to continental Europe. Shocked at the execution of Charles I, he returned to avenge the old King and support the young King Charles II, but his small force was defeated at Carbisdale. He was betrayed by MacLeod of Assynt, captured, hung, quartered and his head impaled on a stake at the Mercat Cross on Edinburgh's Royal Mile. He was reburied in St. Giles Kirk some eleven years after this terrible execution and his grave was marked in 1888 with a monument by Robert Rowand Anderson.
May 21 1916 Clocks and watches went forward for one hour as the Daylight Savings Act brought in "British Summer Time" for the first time.
May 21 1983 TSB Bank Scotland (now Lloyds TSB Scotland) formed.
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May
May 23, 2006 3:11:05 GMT 10
Post by LLady on May 23, 2006 3:11:05 GMT 10
May 22
May 22 1611 King James VI introduced the title "baronet" for the first time. This is the lowest hereditary titled order.
Today in 1859 saw the birth of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in Edinburgh. Conan Doyle invented the great fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, and is said to have based the relationship between Holmes and his sidekick, Dr Watson, on Plato's Socrates and his disciples, Cervantes' Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and James Boswell's conversations with Dr Samuel Johnson. In later life Conan Doyle became a vocal supporter of spiritualism, writing many books on the subject.
On this day in 1915, 227 people are killed and 246 more are injured in a rail crash at Quintinshill, near Gretna Green. The accident happened when a troop train carrying almost 500 soldiers of the Royal Scots en route to Gallipoli crashed into a stationary goods train. The express train from London subsequently ran straight into the wreckage. The Royal Scots suffered the vast majority of casualties, with 215 killed, as fire ripped through the wooden train, helped by the gas lamps used for lighting. The crash accounted for 42 per cent of the battalion's casualties for the entire war and it remains Britain's worst rail disaster. On 22nd May, 1968 the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland voted in favour of women ministers. After many years of discussion the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland voted by a large majority to admit women to the ministry. Later in the year, four women were accepted as candidates for the ministry by the Presbyteries of Edinburgh, Irvine, and Kilmarnock.
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May
May 23, 2006 6:25:46 GMT 10
Post by LLady on May 23, 2006 6:25:46 GMT 10
May 23
On this day in 1701 Captain William Kidd, the notorious Scottish pirate, died. Born, probably in Dundee, around the year 1645, Kidd became one of the best known pirates of his age. Commissioned by King William III to attack pirates in the Indian Ocean, but secretly allowed to attack French merchantmen, Kidd was disowned by the establishment at his trial. Kidd was hanged on Execution Dock, in London's docklands on the banks of The Thames. Kidd became a legendary figure, largely because nobody ever discovered what had happened to the rest of his treasure - if there really was any more to be found. Its value multiplied as time went by and treasure hunters have searched for his loot from the Americas to the South China Sea, but so far in vain. On 23 May 1718 William Hunter, the Scottish physician and obstetrician, died. Hunter made several important studies of the pregnant human uterus. His work, 'The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus, Established in Figures', is considered an anatomical classic, and Hunter is considered the founder of the modern science of gynaecology. On his death he bequeathed his large collection of manuscripts to Glasgow University, which formed the original collection of the Hunterian Museum.
May 23 1867 Archibald Alison, historian, died.
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