6 December

1735 London: The first recorded appendectomy was performed at St George’s Hospital. I had one of those with anaesthetic unlike the chap portrayed.

1784 London: His Majesty’s Government authorised the transportation of convicts to Australia. Pitt the Younger was Prime Minister. With the loss of the American colonies transportation there was precluded. 60,000 had been transported to Georgia and Maryland. Now it the turn of Botany Bay.

1917 Halifax: a Norwegian tanker and a French munitions ship collided in the harbour and blew up in the Halifax Explosion that killed 2,000, injured another 9,000, left 25,000 homeless in the north Atlantic coast winter and flattened all of the port and much of the city. Meanwhile the long lists of the dead, wounded, and missing on the Western Front continued to come. The explosion provides the backdrop to Hugh MacLennan’s novel ‘Barometer Rising.’ Been there in January!

1921 The Anglo-Irish Treaty made Ireland a sovereign dominion. The conflict had begun with the Easter Rising on 1916 which was crushed, but led to the 1919 birth of the IRA and its campaign. This settlement did not stick and more conflict followed among the Irish and with the British.

1973 Gerald Ford was sworn in as Vice President, unelected, who went on to be an unelected President with a second unelected Vice President in Nelson Rockefeller. Unique in all three respects. He was born in Omaha.