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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

1968 In what became known as the ‘rivers of blood’ speech, Enoch Powell MP strongly criticised mass immigration, especially Commonwealth immigration to the UK, and the then proposed Race Relations Act.
1954 Michael Manning (25), a carter from Groody, Limerick city, was hanged in Mountjoy Jail for the murder of an elderly nurse. He was the last person to be judicially executed in the Republic of Ireland. The last judicial execution in Northern Ireland took place seven years later, in December 1961, when Robert McGladdery (26) from Newry was hanged for the murder of a local woman.
1912 Abraham ‘Bram’ Stoker (65), author, notably of Dracula (1897), died.
1954 Michael Manning (25), a carter from Limerick, was hanged in Mountjoy prison for the murder of an elderly nurse. He was the last man to be judicially executed in the Republic of Ireland.