Written by:
Elizabeth Jones
- On the evening of December 16, 1773, colonists in America had an unusual tea party, which famously became known as the Boston Tea Party. To protest British taxation, the Sons of Liberty, some disguised as Native Americans, boarded British ships in port and dumped 342 chests of tea, sent by the British East India Company, into Boston Harbour.
- Alfred Nobel, Swedish inventor of dynamite and other explosives, made a will stipulating that most of his fortune should be placed in a fund whose interest would be used to give prizes “to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.” Five years after his death on December 10, 1901, the first prizes were awarded in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace. The prize winners for peace included Henry Dunant who founded the International Committee of the Red Cross.
- The Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed in 1921, ending the Irish War of Independence. Exactly one year later, Ireland officially became the Irish Free State.
- In 1944, women in Bermuda were able for the first time to vote in parochial elections. In the Sandys election on December 19, Mrs. J.S. Morrell was voted in as the first female member of a parish vestry.
- A new South Shore cottage colony, Ariel Sands, which belonged to the Dill family, was officially opened in Devonshire Parish in 1954. Enjoyed by many visitors and locals alike, sadly it eventually closed in January 2008, nearly 54 years later.
- Just before Christmas in 1955, the Hamilton Hotel, on the site of City Hall Car Park, was destroyed by fire.
- 1968 marked an important achievement in space exploration. American astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders aboard Apollo 8, the first crewed spacecraft to transcend Earth’s gravity, became the first humans to see and photograph the far side of the moon and an earthrise, photographed by Anders. Orbiting the moon ten times without landing, on Christmas Eve they read the first ten verses of the Book of Genesis in a live broadcast.
- December 28, 1969, Pan Am 747 was the first jumbo jet to fly from Bermuda to New York. Almost exactly 22 years later, Pan Am, then the largest carrier between Bermuda and New York, shut down forever, ending their air service between Bermuda and the US, which had started in 1937.
- In 1980 on the evening of December 8, English musician and former Beatle John Lennon was shot and killed in the archway of his residence in Manhattan, New York City by a deranged fan, Mark David Chapman. The title of Lennon’s last album Double Fantasy, released just three weeks before his killing, was inspired by a freesia he had seen in the Botanical Gardens during his summer visit to Bermuda.
- In 1989 the Cold War officially ended with the summit held between U.S. President George H.W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Malta.
- Bull’s Head, Bermuda’s first multi-storey carpark, was officially opened in 1995, just in time for Christmas.
- Almost exactly 22 years after Erskine “Buck” Burrows and Larry Tacklyn were hanged in December 1999, the House of Assembly passed the Capital and Corporate Punishment Act, thus abolishing the death penalty in Bermuda.
