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February 3

Published in On this Day listing

1922 John Butler Yeats (83), painter and father of W.B. Yeats and Jack B. Yeats, died.
1919 Éamon de Valera and two other prisoners escaped from Lincoln prison in a break arranged by Michael Collins and Harry Boland.
1963 Brinsley MacNamara (real name John Weldon), writer, notably of The valley of the squinting windows (1918), a study of a rural community and the power of gossip, died.
1919 Harry Boland and Michael Collins rescued Eamon de Valera from Lincoln jail, after smuggling keys hidden in cakes into the prison.
1911 Robert Tressell (the nom-de-plume of Dublin-born Robert Noonan), author of The ragged trousered philanthropists, first published in 1914, died in the Royal Liverpool Infirmary Workhouse.
1468 Johannes Gutenberg, German inventor of the printing press (1439), widely regarded as the most important invention of the second millennium, died.
1973 In the North a wave of murders by the UDA/UFF, including those of three Catholic schoolboys in West Belfast, led to the internment of loyalists for the first time in 50 years.

On this Day

1820 Edward Bransfield from Ballinacurra, Middleton, Co. Cork, commander of the English merchant vessel Williams, made the first sighting of the mainland of Antarctica—Trinity Peninsula, the northernmost point of the continent.
1968 Vietnam War—the Tet Offensive. After declaring a truce over the seven-day Tet (lunar New Year) holiday, c. 70,000 Viet Cong troops launched surprise attacks on US and South Vietnam forces throughout South Vietnam.
1948 Mahatma Ghandi (78), India’s prophet of non-violence, was assassinated in his own garden in New Delhi by the Hindu extremist Nathuran Vinayak Godse.
1864 The National Gallery of Ireland in Merrion Square, Dublin, financed by William Dargan from a testimonial of £5,000 he received in acknowledgement of his services to the Dublin Exhibition (1853), was formally opened.
1661 Oliver Cromwell, former lord protector of England, was formally executed, more than two years after his death.
1933 Adolph Hitler was appointed German chancellor by President von Hindenburg.