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July 17

Published in On this Day listing

1935 George William Russell, poet, editor, artist and mystic, known as ‘AE’, died.

1936 The Spanish Civil War began with an attemptedcoup d’état by General Franco’s colonial army of Africa.

1918 The Russian imperial family—Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra and their five children—were assassinated by their Bolshevik guards in a cellar in the city of Yekaterinburg on the edge of the Urals.
The RMS Carpathia, famous for rescuing over 700 survivors from the Titanic (1912), was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine off the Irish coast as she sailed from Liverpool, bound for Boston. Her 57 passengers were rescued but five crewmen were killed.

1917 With anti-German sentiment reaching fever pitch in Britain, George V issued a proclamation changing the royal surname from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to the more patriotic-sounding ‘Windsor’.

On this Day

2011 The last British troops pulled out of South Armagh. During the period 1970–97, the IRA killed 165 members of the British security forces in the area.
1870 (Robert) Erskine Childers, Sinn Féin politician and author of The riddle of the sands (1903), born in London but raised at the maternal home, Glendalough House, Co. Wicklow, along with his cousin, Robert Childers Barton (1881–1975)
1970 The Catholic hierarchy lifted the ban on Catholics attending Trinity College, Dublin.
1919 William Martin Murphy (75), founder of Independent Newspapers and leader of the Employers’ Federation during the lockout of 1913–14, died.
1970 The Irish Catholic hierarchy lifted its ban on Catholics attending Trinity College, Dublin.
1876 The Battle of Little Big Horn, Montana, USA. Of Custer’s 604-strong 7th Cavalry, some 128 were of Irish birth, representing 29 of the 32 counties. Half of the 215 men who died with him that day were Irish.