1982 – The flagship of the British task force to the Falklands, HMS Hermes, arrived back in Portsmouth. Thousands crowded the dockside to see the 1,700 on board disembark 108 days after she had left for her historic mission.

1982 - An IRA terrorist bomb in Hyde Park, London, killed 3 members of the Blues and Royals during the Changing of the Guard ceremony. Two hours later 8 bandsmen were killed by an IRA bomb planted at the bandstand in Regent’s Park.

1941 - Winston Churchill introduced his ‘V for Victory” campaign which rapidly spread through Europe. The BBC took the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which matched the dot-dot-dot-dash Morse code for the letter V, and played it before news bulletins.

1970 – Radio 1 DJ Kenny Everett was sacked after he joked on air that the wife of the conservative transport minister Mary Peyton had ‘crammed a fiver into the examiner’s hand’, when taking her driving test.

1981 - The Humber Estuary Bridge was officially opened by the Queen. For 16 years after its construction it was the world’s longest single-span structure.

1945 – The world’s first nuclear explosion occurred, when a plutonium implosion device was tested at a site located 210 miles south of Los Alamos, New Mexico.

1858 - The birth, in Moss Side Manchester, of Emmeline Pankhurst, the English suffragette who led the fight for women’s suffrage in Britain, often by violent means.

2014 - The Rt. Rev. Libby Lane became the first female Church of England bishop, when she was consecrated Bishop of Stockport in a ceremony at York Minster.

1985 - Two simultaneous ‘Live Aid’ concerts, one in London (Wembley Stadium) and one in Philadelphia, raised over £50 million for famine victims in Africa. Prince Charles and Princess Diana officially opened Live Aid.