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.
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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
2002 Alex Maskey (50) became the first Sinn Féin lord mayor of Belfast.
1981 It was reported that five men in California were suffering from a rare form of pneumonia that was found in patients with weakened immune systems—the first recognised cases of AIDS, which was to kill over 30 million worldwide.
1920 Cornelius Ryan, war correspondent and author, notably of the best-seller The longest day (1959), which became a film that set box-office records, born in Dublin.
2002 Former US President Bill Clinton opened a new £3 million peace centre named after him on the site of the 1987 Remembrance Sunday bombing in Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh.
1988 Robert Dudley Edwards, professor of modern Irish history at UCD (1945–79) and writer, notably of Church and state in Tudor Ireland (1935), died.
1968 Robert Kennedy (42), leading candidate for the Democratic Party nomination for the presidency, was mortally wounded by Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan at the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles. He died the following day.
1967 The Six-Day War began, in which Israel heavily defeated Egypt and her Arab allies, capturing the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the West Bank from Jordan and the Golan Heights from Syria.
1916 Kerry-born Horatio Herbert Kitchener, Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, secretary of state for war, lost his life, along with over 600 others, when HMS Hampshire struck a German mine and sank west of the Orkney Islands, Scotland.
1916 Lord Kitchener, Kerry-born field marshal, was lost at sea when HMS Edinburgh was struck by a mine off the Orkneys. Winston Churchill would have accompanied him in what was a war-boost trip to Russia had he not been dropped from the coalition cabinet the previous January owing to pressure from the Conservatives.
1868 James Connolly, socialist and revolutionary, born in Cowgate, Edinburgh, to Irish immigrant parents.