Milestones of 1936

The road to war ...


20 January
King George V dies at Sandringham House, Norfolk. His eldest son, Prince Edward, Prince of Wales succeeds as King Edward VIII.

21 January
King Edward VIII breaks royal protocol by watching the proclamation of his own accession to the throne from a window of St. James's Palace, in the company of the still-married Wallis Simpson.

6 February-16 February
Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany

5 March
First test flight of the Supermarine Spitfire.

30 May 1936    
US writer Margaret Mitchell publishes her novel Gone with the Wind, which becomes one of the best-selling novels of the 20th century.

28 May 1936    
The English mathematician Alan Turing supplies the theoretical basis for digital computers by describing a machine, now known as the Turing machine, capable of universal rather than special-purpose problem solving. The paper was called ‘On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem’.

27 May
The RMS Queen Mary leaves Southampton on her maiden voyage to New York.

6 June
DNL, the Norwegian aviation company, registered its second Junkers, Ju-52, LN-DAF Najaden. After the Havørn Accident eleven days later, the airline purchased another Ju-52, LN-DAH Falken, used from Lufthansa.

17 July
The Army of Africa launches a coup d'état against the Second Spanish Republic, beginning the Spanish Civil War.

1 August-16 August
Summer Olympics in Berlin.

19 August
The first of the Moscow Trials begins in the Soviet Union.

26 August
Signing of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 which required the withdrawal of British troops, and Egypt was recognised as a sovereign state.

14 September
The parliamentary election takes place, the last one held before World War II and the German invasion of Norway.

By this time, Vidkun Quisling was becoming the ‘Norwegian Hitler’, due to his hardening anti-Semitic stance, although the Nasjønal Samling was beginning to lose votes.
 
5 October
Jarrow March – 207 miners march from Jarrow to London in a protest against unemployment and poverty.

11 October
Battle of Cable Street between Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and anti-fascist demonstrators.

19 October
H.R. Ekins, reporter for the New York World-Telegram, wins a race to travel around the world on commercial airline flights, beating out Dorothy Kilgallen of the New York Journal and Leo Kieran of the New York Times. The flight takes 18½ days.

25 October
The Rome-Berlin Axis is formed.

27 October
Wallis Simpson divorces Ernest Aldrich Simpson allowing her to marry Edward VIII.

2 November
BBC launches world’s first regular television service.

1 December
Hitler makes it mandatory that boys 10 to 18 join the Hitler Youth

11 December 1936       
Edward VIII abdicates as king of Great Britain and Northern Ireland following his refusal to give up the idea of marriage to the US divorcee Wallis Simpson.

12 December 1936       
The Duke of York, younger brother of Edward VIII, succeeds to the British throne as George VI, following Edward's abdication on 11 December.

18 December
Mistrusting Norwegian officials, Trosky leaves house arrest and escapes to Mexico

Other
The rejection of German films abroad, because of the high propaganda content, leads to a crisis in the German film industry.
Norsk Hydro opens its Herøya plant, supposedly just for the production of artificial fertiliser.