1879 TAY BRIDGE DISASTER
On December 28, 1879, a violent storm that some witnesses described as a hurricane, caused the central portion of the Tay Bridge near Dundee, to collapse, just as a train was passing over it. Between 60 and 75 people were killed .
The disaster was commemorated in verse by the Victorian doggerel poet William McGonagall: “Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay! Alas! I am very sorry to say, That ninety lives have been taken away, On the last Sabbath day of 1879, Which will be remember’d for a very long time.”
1914 FIRST EVER AIR RAID ON BRITAIN
The first Christmas of the First World War saw a famous unofficial truce on the Western Front as soldiers from Germany and Britain lay down their weapons and fraternised with the “enemy”.
But on Christmas Eve a nasty present arrived from the sky as Britain experienced its first ever air raid. A German plane dropped a bomb on a garden close to Dover Castle, thought to have been the intended target.
The bomb shattered the windows of a nearby rectory and the gardener, a Mr Banks, was knocked to the ground and bruised.
Over the next four years more than 500 people were killed in air raids.
On Christmas Eve a nasty present arrived from the sky as Britain experienced its first ever air raid
1941 SURRENDER OF HONG KONG
There was bad news on the war front on Christmas Day 1941 as the British colony surrendered to the Japanese invaders.
The Japanese had begun their attack on December 8, just a few hours after Pearl Harbor, and after a spirited defence which lasted longer than many expected, the British Governor of Hong Kong finally surrendered the colony on Christmas Day afternoon.
Earlier that day, Japanese soldiers had entered a temporary hospital, murdering and raping inmates. Unsurprisingly Christmas 1941 became known as Black Christmas in Hong Kong.
1943 SINKING OF THE SCHARNHORST
Two years later, there was much better war news for Britain with the sinking on December 26 of the German battle cruiser Scharnhorst, the pride and joy of the German navy.
It had set sail from northern Norway to intercept Britain’s Arctic convoys which were carrying important supplies to the Soviet Union. But the British had laid a trap and the Scharnhorst was sunk by HMS Duke of York and other cruisers and destroyers in what became known as the battle of the North Cape.
“Scharnhorst’s loss was an enormous psychological blow to the German nation,” says historian Norman Fenton. “Equally important to the Allied war effort, the routes of the Murmansk convoys were now much more secure.”
1972 NICARAGUAN EARTHQUAKE
The Nicaraguan capital Managua was not the place to be at Christmas 40 years ago when the city was devastated by a two-hour earthquake on December 23 which killed between 5,000 and 10,000 people and destroyed around 90 per cent of the buildings.
“In a matter of hours Managua went from being the hippest and liveliest city in Central America to a smouldering ruin,” writes Nicaraguan-based journalist Tim Rogers.
The earthquake reached 6.5 on the Richter scale but did more damage because of the badly built high-rise buildings in the city. It was reported earlier this year that people are still being rehoused from the ruins of the 1972 quake – a Christmas which the Nicaraguans who survived will never forget.
1979 SOVIET TROOPS ROLL INTO AFGHANISTAN
On December 25, 1979, the world woke up to the startling news that Soviet troops had entered Afghanistan.
“It was decided to invade over the Christmas period when the West’s guard would be down and the Red Army would have a few days’ grace to do its work,” wrote Jeremy Isaacs and Taylor Downing in the book Cold War. The Soviets said their troops had entered at the request of the Afghan government but the move was sharply condemned by Western powers.
The decision to intervene proved a major miscalculation by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and was a turning point in the Cold War.
Soviet troops were bogged down in Afghanistan for nearly 10 years fighting Western-backed Islamic rebels and the campaign greatly weakened the Soviet economy.
This led to reforms in the Eighties which in turn led to the end of the communist system and the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself, which ironically took place on December 26, 1991, 12 years after the fateful invasion of Afghanistan.
1989 THE OVERTHROW OF NICOLAE CEAUSESCU
The autumn of 1989 had seen dramatic events in central and eastern Europe as long-established communist regimes fell from power.
These changes were on the whole peaceful but not in Romania. There, Nicolae Ceausescu, the dictatorial leader who had run the land since 1965, met a grisly end.
On December 21 he had given a speech from the balcony of the
presidential palace in Bucharest but was booed by the crowd and later forced to flee. Ceausescu and his wife were captured by the forces of the National Salvation Front and tried at a military tribunal.
They were quickly found guilty and shot dead on Christmas Day, with their bodies shown on Romanian television and the pictures broadcast around the world.
2004 INDIAN OCEAN TSUNAMI
Boxing Day 2004 saw one of the worst natural disasters in history as around 230,000 people in 14 countries lost their lives in the world’s worst ever tsunami. A further 10 million people were made homeless. According to the US Geological Survey, the earthquake under the Indian Ocean which generated the tsunami is estimated to have released the energy of 23,000 Hiroshima-type atom bombs.
The tsunami caused waves as high as 50ft in some places and although there was no tsunami warning system in the Indian Ocean, people who survived reported that shortly before the disaster struck they saw animals fleeing for higher ground. The heartbreaking scenes of devastation led to an enormous aid effort from countries across the world to help the survivors and to rebuild the destroyed infrastructure of the countries affected.