Take a look back at this month in history.
- On the Ides of March (March 15, 44 BC) a group of Roman senators, led by Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus, assassinated Julius Caesar at the Senate House in the Theatre of Pompey in ancient Rome. They believed Caesar was becoming too powerful and too tyrannical.
- The Boston massacre, during which British soldiers killed five colonists while wounding several others, happened March 5, 1770, and led to the American Revolution, which began in 1775.
- The Gazette reported March 20, 1838, “We have been informed that a reading room is about to be established in the town of Hamilton. This is the thing we have long desired to see in operation.” (The Bermuda National Library was founded in 1839 through the encouragement of Governor William Reid and was located in what is now the Cabinet Building. He donated most of its initial 276 volumes.)
- In March 1825 a Portsmouth (a town in England) paper reported that “the Royal Oak, 74, was to be brought to Bermuda and be fitted as a receiving hulk. She was to be stationed at the naval arsenal Bermuda receiving the crews of ships as maybe undergoing refit at that port.” The ship was later broken up in Bermuda in 1851.
- On March 27, 1838 the Gazette reported, “We have been shown the Machine for the Manufacture of Arrow -Root. The machinery is simple in construction and economical in operation in the two grand principles of labour and water.” Arrowroot was an important Bermuda crop for many years with an arrowroot factory being located where the Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art is now.
- Alexander Graham Bell, a Scottish-born inventor, scientist and engineer was awarded the first US patent for the telephone on March 7, 1876.
- Albert Einstein was born March 14, 1879. He would become famous for his theory of relativity and for his formula E = mc2. In 1921 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics.
- March 10, 1886, the first dog show held by Crufts was held in London.
- March 5, 1936: The British Spitfire, an iconic fighter plane much used in World War II, made its first test flight from Eastleigh aerodrome, Hampshire, UK.
- An airmail service from the US to Bermuda officially began in March 1938.
- Bermuda’s Royal Naval Dockyard, informally known as “Little England,” was officially closed March 31,1951 with the occasion being marked by the lowering of the White Ensign flag flown on British Royal Navy ships.
- In March 1961 President John F. Kennedy established the Peace Corps, a program that sends American volunteers to work in developing countries.
- In March 1962, the House of Assembly approved Bermuda’s first building code. The same month the City of Hamilton made 13 streets, including Reid Street, one way only in order to facilitate traffic flow.
- The Concorde, a supersonic passenger aircraft capable of flying at twice the speed of sound, made its first test flight March 2, 1969.
- In March 1978 the Secretariat was renamed the Cabinet Building. During the same month, Tony Brannon founded Disco 40, Bermuda’s first disco.
- March 24, Bermuda felt the effects of an earthquake centred 230 miles southwest of the island. It registered 5.8 on the Richter scale.
- President Ronald Reagan was shot and wounded by John Hinckley Jr. in Washington, D.C. on March 30.
- The Bermuda National Gallery officially opened in March 1992.
