1912 – The British built Titanic luxury ocean liner that had collided earlier with an iceberg about 400 miles from Newfoundland sank at 2:20 a.m. More than 1,500 people drowned or froze to death in the icy waters. Most of the 700 survivors were women and children. As the ship sank, the band played music to calm the passengers and all the musicians went down with the ship. They were recognized for their heroism and bandleader Wallace Hartley aged 33, from Colne in Lancashire, is commemorated in a memorial in the town’s centre.

1925 – Author James Barrie donated his copyright fee for the story of Peter Pan to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London.

1941 – The Belfast Blitz, during which two-hundred bombers of the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) attacked Belfast in Northern Ireland, killing one thousand people.

1942 – The people of the British colony of Malta were awarded the George Cross in recognition of their heroic war time struggle against enemy attack.

1945 – British troops entered the Belsan concentration camp after negotiating a truce with the German commandant. Soldiers found piles of dead and rotting corpses and thousands of sick and starving prisoners. Freddie Gilroy, a former miner and 23 year old soldier from County Durham was one of the first allied troops to enter Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The oversized Freddie Gilroy and the Belsen Stragglers statue at Scarborough ‘represents ordinary people pulled out of ordinary lives because of war’.

1953 – Reis Leming, a 22-year-old US airman stationed in Britain was presented with the George Medal. He had rescued 27 people in East Anglia during winter floods. The award was the first given to a foreigner during peacetime.

1964 – Footballer George Best made his debut for Northern Ireland against Wales.

1984 – Tommy Cooper, English comedian, collapsed and died from a heart attack in front of millions of television viewers, midway through his act on the London Weekend Television variety show Live From Her Majesty’s. A statue of Cooper was unveiled in his birthplace of Caerphilly, Wales, in 2008 by fellow entertainer Sir Anthony Hopkins.

1989 – Britain’s worst football disaster at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield. 96 football fans were crushed to death shortly after the start of the FA Cup semi-final match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. Most of those killed were from Liverpool. Fresh inquests into the 96 deaths began in Warrington on Monday, 31st March 2014. On 26th April 2016 the jury of 9 reached a verdict that vindicated the bereaved families who had fought for 27 years against South Yorkshire police claims that misbehaving supporters caused the disaster. It was the longest inquest in British legal history.

2000 – A white farmer in Zimbabwe became the first white farmer to be killed in land confrontations involving President Robert Mugabe’s ruling party.

2010 – All flights in and out of the UK and several other European countries were suspended as ash from a volcanic eruption in Iceland moved south. The cloud triggered the UK’s worst airspace restriction in living memory and brought much of Europe to a standstill.

2013 – The death of music conductor Sir Colin Davis, aged 85. He made his debut with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1959 and was its longest serving principal conductor.