Significant and interesting snippets of news with a South African angle, from this day in history.
1626 An earthquake in Naples, Italy, kills 10 000 people.
1858 Explorer John Hanning Speke, while searching for the source of the Nile, discovers and names Lake Victoria, the world’s largest tropical lake.
1870 The diggers on the diamond fields between the Vaal and the Harts Rivers proclaim Klipdrift a republic, with Stafford Parker as first (and only) president.
1930 Uruguay wins the first Fifa World Cup.
1935 The first Penguin book is published, starting the paperback revolution.
1945 Japanese submarine I-58 sinks the USS Indianapolis – which ferried the atomic bomb – killing 883 seamen. Most die during over four days; some by sharks, others by dehydration. The loss of the ship is a great embarrassment for the US Navy – it is the greatest loss of life at sea from a single ship in the history of the US Navy which only noticed that the ship was missing three days later. Court-martialed, Captain McVay, the ship’s commander, is unfairly vilified by some quarters and dies by his own hand. In 2000, Congress passes a resolution, signed by president Bill Clinton, that McVay’s record should state that “he is exonerated for the loss of Indianapolis”. It noted that, although several hundred ships of the US Navy were lost in combat during World War II, McVay was the only captain to be court-martialed for the sinking of his ship.
1947 Anton Lembede, teacher, lawyer, politician, and principal architect of Africanism in South Africa, dies in Johannesburg at the age of 33. He was the first president of the African National Congress Youth League. His ideas about Africanism are the basis of the PAC’s political philosophy.
1966 England beat West Germany to win the World Cup at Wembley after extra time. With one minute left in regulation time, West Germany's defender Wolgang Weber tied the score at 2-all to force overtime, but English forward Geoff Hurst scored twice in extra-time to give England its first World Cup title with a 4-2 victory. And we’ve never heard the end of it.
1969 An All Nippon Airways Boeing 727 and a Japanese Air Force F-86 fighter collide over Morioka, Japan, killing 162 people.
1975 US mobster Jimmy Hoffa disappears from the parking lot of a Detroit restaurant.
2018 British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt mistakenly calls his Chinese-born wife “Japanese” in a meeting with his Chinese counterpart in Beijing.