On this day in history

[vic mcclymont]

On the 1st of May 1707, the treaty merging Scotland and England came into force, creating the Kingdom of Great Britain.
Vic

[Captain Kong]

ON THE 1ST OF MAY 1961, IN BOLTON. 19 killed.

Bolton`s very first Night Club, the `Top Story Club`, named so as it was on the fifth floor of an old wooden warehouse. entrance up five flights of wooden stairs.
Manager was a friend, Billy Bohannon.
My old school mate, Ted, and I were the first members.
Then we went back to sea, on the KENT , tanker, were were homeward bound and got the newspapers on board in Port Said. head lines all about the fire and the 19 dead, they were all our friends. sad to read about it.

If we had been home on leave we would have been in it and probably died.
When we got home, we saw Billy, who survived with 20% burns.
He told us that the Manchester Mafia wanted to take over the club, Billy refused, so a small time crook around town, Pedro, was hired to set fire to the club, People were trapped upstairs, only one wooden stairs. all on firie, Some jumped from the windows, 80 feet into the River Croal which flowed alongside the building. some hit the stone bank and were killed, some bodies floated a mile downstream.
Some hid behind the bar and were suffocated by smoke.only a few survived with bad injuries.
Then a couple of days later, Pedro was run over in the road by a big American car and back and forth a few times until he was dead, Dead men tell no tales. No one was charged with it all.
When Billy was better he was scared, so we took him to Liverpool and to the Cunard office, he got a Stewards job on the Queen Mary to keep him out of the way.
Many years later I met him again , he had a hotel in Blackpool and he died in November 2013.

RiP to the 19 friends.who were murdered that night.

[happy daze john in oz]

On the 3rd of May some 39 years ago we arrived here in Oz top stay.
Never regretted it.

[Keith at Tregenna]

As the 3rd of May has been mentioned, another to remember:

On 7 May 1915 Lusitania was lost, mention only here for on this
day in history. A tribute and remembrance post was updated earlier.

K.

[Keith at Tregenna]

Another:

On this day the General Strike of 1926 began.

The strike was called by the TUC for one minute to midnight on 3rd May 1926. For the previous two days, a million coal miners had been locked out of their mines over a pay dispute which would have resulted in their wages being decreased by 13% and their working hours increased from seven to eight hours. In solidarity, large numbers from other industries stayed off work, and on the first full day of action there were over 1.5 million people on strike. The transport network was crippled, roads became choked with cars, printing presses ground to a virtual halt and food deliveries were held up. Workers from the docks, gas, electricity, building, iron and steel industries all dropped down tools. Police charged rioting strikers with batons and fights broke out, while in Northumberland the Flying Scotsman train was derailed. The Roman Catholic Church spoke out against the strike, declaring it "a sin".
The government reacted aggressively, the armed forces being quickly moved to escort food lorries. Volunteers got some buses and trains running, thousands of special policemen were recruited and a warship was sent to Newcastle. The government tried to exert greater control over the media by producing its own newspaper, the British Gazette, edited by Winston Churchill. They used the fledgling BBC to reinforce its message, with Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, appealing to the people in a series of personal radio broadcasts to the nation.
The TUC had been involved in secret talks with the mine owners and after nine days called the strike off without a single concession being made to the miners' cause. Taken by surprise, the miners struggled on alone, but by the end of November most had drifted back to work.