The Birdman of Alcatraz was no bird-brain.
The original Fifa World Cup trophy is stolen for the last time, scandal mars a presidency and the storied Birdman of Alcatraz is locked up on the island. These are some of the things that have happened on December 19. For more, read on....
1783 William Pitt the Younger becomes the youngest British Prime Minister at age 24.
1900 British General and Secretary of War Horatio Kitchener offers protection to all Boers who surrender and asks the Dutch community of Pretoria to convey this offer. Leaders in the field refuse to surrender.
1941 Limpet mines heavily damage the British battleships HMS Valiant and HMS Queen Elizabeth in Egypt’s Alexandria harbour.
1941 Adolf Hitler takes complete command of German Army.
1942 The brilliantly minded Robert Stroud, aka the Birdman of Alcatraz, is transferred to Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary. A convicted murderer, author and respected ornithologist, he is said to have been ‘possibly the best-known example of self-improvement and rehabilitation’.
1942 General Dan Pienaar is killed when his aircraft crashes into Lake Victoria at Kisumu, Kenya, while returning to South Africa. The suburbs Danville (in Pretoria) and Dan Pienaar (in Bloemfontein) are named after him.
1946 War breaks out in French Indochina, after Ho Chi Minh, having already seen off the Japanese with help from the US, attacks the French, who want to reclaim their colony. A 30-year conflict begins and sees the French ousted, and eventually the US, and it ends with a Communist political victory.
1983 The original Fifa World Cup trophy, the Jules Rimet Trophy, is stolen, for the second time, from the headquarters of the Brazilian Football Confederation in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Never recovered, it is widely believed to have been melted down and sold.
1998 US President Bill Clinton is impeached, becoming the country’s second president (after Andrew Johnson) to be impeached. They were both acquitted by the Senate, like Donald Trump in 2020.
2009 Former Welsh and Lions captain Gareth Thomas is the first international rugby player to reveal that he is gay.
2016 48 people die after drinking bath lotion in Irkutsk, Siberia, thinking it contains alcohol.
2018 Drones flying over Gatwick airport in London, England, cause delays and cancellations for 800 flights and 110 000 people. | The Historian