1914 – Joseph Wilson Swan, British electric lamp inventor, died. Swan received a British patent for his device in 1878, about a year before the American, Thomas Edison.

1919 – Oil was struck at Britain’s first on-shore oilfield of three wells, at Hardstoft, near Tibshelf in Derbyshire.

1936 – Britain’s 80,733 tonne liner Queen Mary left Southampton on her maiden voyage to New York with more than 1800 passengers.

1941 – World War II: Royal Naval ships Dorsetshire, King George V and Rodney attacked and sank the German battleship Bismarck in the Atlantic after it had been damaged by torpedoes dropped by British aircraft from HMS Ark Royal.

1955 – Anthony Eden’s Conservatives won the general election with a clear majority, ending a five-year political stalemate.

1975 – The Dibbles Bridge coach crash occurred near Grassington in North Yorkshire. 33 people were killed; the highest ever death toll in a road accident in the United Kingdom. An inquest said that the accident was caused by the inability of the driver to negotiate the bend owing to deficient brakes on the coach.

1986 – Irish-born singer Bob Geldof was made an honorary Knight of the Realm by Queen Elizabeth II for his efforts to raise money for the starving of Africa.

1994 – Alexander Solzhenitsyn flew back to his native Russia after 20 years living in exile.

1998 – 18 year old Michael Owen became the youngest ever England international goalscorer with the only goal in a 1-0 friendly against Morocco in Casablanca.

2000 – Scottish farmers who accidentally planted genetically modified seeds said they would fight for compensation.

2000 – Paula Yates is awarded £400,000 in an out-of-court settlement from the late Michael Hutchence’s estate.

2008 – Hundreds of lorry drivers protested in London over the continuing rising cost of fuel and a two-mile line of lorries crawled along the M4 towards Cardiff.

2009 – Barcelona beat Manchester United, 2-0 to win the Champions League in Rome.

2014 – 34 year old Edward McKenzie-Green, former head of counter-fraud at Oxfam, was jailed for more than two years after using fake companies to defraud Oxfam of more than £64,000.