1980 Five adults and five children died in a fire at the Central Hotel, Bundoran, Co. Donegal.
1969 Bulmer Hobson, leading member of the Irish Volunteers and IRB prior to the Easter Rising, died.
1966 The Chinese Communist Party central committee endorsed Chairman Mao Zedong’s ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’, which was to claim the lives of between 1.5m and 2m people.
1958 Brendan Bracken, County Tipperary-born publisher, Conservative Party MP, parliamentary private secretary to Winston Churchill 1939–40, died.
1918 The Battle of Amiens began, marking the beginning of the Hundred Days (Allied) Offensive that led to the end of the First World War.
1914 The Endurance, commanded by Sir Ernest Shackleton, set off on its celebrated expedition to the Antarctic.
1910 Harry Ferguson flew a distance of three miles at Dundrum Bay, Newcastle, Co. Down, winning him a prize of £100. In December the previous year he had flown some 130 yards at Hillsborough, Co. Down, becoming the first man to build and fly his own plane in Ireland.
1923 The Civic Guard, established in February of the previous year, was reconstituted and renamed An Garda Síochána.
1953 The Chester Beatty Library and Museum, housing the collections of mining magnate Sir Alfred Chester Beatty, opened. The present museum, in the grounds of Dublin Castle, opened in 2000 and was named European Museum of the Year in 2002.
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Personal Histories
Personal Histories is an initiative by History Ireland,
which aims to capture the individual histories of Irish
people both in Ireland and around the world. It is hoped
to build an extensive database reflecting Irish lives,
giving them a chance to be heard, remembered and to
add their voice to the historical record.
Click Here to go to the Personal Histories page
1820 Sir William Howard Russell, one of the first modern war correspondents, whose coverage included the Crimean War and the American Civil War, born in Tallaght, Dublin.
1969 Death of Dwight D. ‘Ike’ Eisenhower (78), American army general, supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe during the Second World War and 34th (Republican) president of the United States (1953–61).
1979 The worst-ever accident in the US nuclear power industry began when a pressure valve in a reactor at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania failed to close.
1957 Jack Butler Yeats (85), painter and younger brother of W.B. Yeats, died.
1972 Eight people, seven of them young girls, died when fire destroyed the offices of Noyek’s timber merchants in Parnell Street, Dublin.
1820 William Howard Russell, the first modern war correspondent, renowned for his reports on the mismanagement of the Crimean War for The Times (London), born at Lily Vale, Tallaght, Co. Dublin.
1760 Dublin-born Margaret (Peg) Woffington, renowned beauty and leading actress on the London stage for almost two decades, died.
1973 Irish naval service vessels apprehended the Claudia, a Cypriot coaster, off County Waterford. Six men, including Joe Cahill, were arrested for conspiracy to import arms.