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.
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