To renew a subscription please login first

May 05

Published in On this Day listing

1821 Napoleon Bonaparte (51), outstanding military leader and emperor of the French (1804–14), died from cancer as a prisoner of the British on the island of St Helena.
1980 The Iranian Embassy siege in London ended after five days when the SAS stormed the building, killing all but one of the six members of an Arab terrorist group who had taken 26 people, mainly embassy staff, hostage.
1916 Major John MacBride (47) executed.
1966 In Britain the ‘Moors murders’ trial ended with the sentencing of Ian Brady and his accomplice Myra Hindley to terms of life imprisonment.
1808 Sarah Curran, aged 26, youngest daughter of the lawyer John Philpot Curran (1750–1817) and lover of Robert Emmet, died in Hythe, Kent, from tuberculosis.
1879 Isaac Butt, barrister, writer and politician who founded the Home Rule movement (1870), died.
1818 Karl Marx, German philosopher, author notably of the pamphlet The Communist Manifesto (1848) and the three-volume Das Capital (1867), born in Trier, south-west Germany.

On this Day

1931 Chuck Feeney, businessman and philanthropist who gave away his fortune of $8 billion over a 38-year period, including $1.3b to projects in the Republic of Ireland and $570m to projects in Northern Ireland, born to Irish-American parents in New Jersey.
1971 C.B. (Cyril Bentham) Falls, military correspondent of The Times (1939–53), historian and author notably of The history of the 36th (Ulster) Division (1922), based on his own experiences, died.
1970 St Enda’s, Rathfarnham, the bilingual school founded by Patrick Pearse in 1908, was presented to the nation as a Patrick Pearse Museum.
1918 A general strike against conscription, organised by the Labour movement and supported by Sinn Féin, the IPP and the Catholic hierarchy, paralysed the country.
1616 William Shakespeare (52), dramatist and poet, died.
1014 The Battle of Clontarf, near Dublin. Brian Boru, claimant to the high kingship of Ireland, and his Munster forces defeated an army of Leinster Norse, supported by their kinsmen from Northumbria, the Isle of Man and the Orkneys.