August 08
Published in On this Day listing- 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.
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