Torrey Canyon 29 March

In 1967 bombing raids began on the stranded oil tanker the ‘Torrey Canyon’. The RAF and the Royal Navy dropped 62,000lbs of bombs, 5,200 gallons of petrol, 11 rockets and large quantities of napalm onto the ship. Despite direct hits, and a towering inferno of flames and smoke as the oil slick began to burn, the tanker refused to sink. The mission was called off for the day when particularly high spring tides put out the flames. A disappointed statement from the Home Office said "We have been informed officially that the fire in the wreckage of the Torrey Canyon is out. We cannot say at this stage what the next step will be." Bombing continued into the next day before the Torrey Canyon finally sank. The oil slick was finally dispersed by favourable weather, but not before 70 miles of Cornish beaches were seriously contaminated and tens of thousands of seabirds killed. The environmental disaster was made far worse by the heavy use of detergent to disperse the slick. A report into the effect on the marine environment found that the detergent killed far more marine life than the oil.
Also, in 1971, Charles Manson and three members of his hippy cult were sentenced to death in Los Angeles. They had been found guilty of the August 1969 murders of seven people and one unborn child.
Finally, in 1912, Robert Falcon Scott wrote his final entry in his diary: ‘We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far. It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more.’ Their bodies were left beneath a cairn of ice and a cross of skis and are still there, buried beneath the snow and ice.