1914 – Private John Parr became the first British man to be shot and killed during World War I. Official registers showed that he was 20 years old but, like many young soldiers, he had lied about his age and he was just 16.

1918 – World War I: The beginning of the Second Battle of the Somme. The battle formed the central part of the Allies’ advance to the Armistice of 11th November, which went into effect at 11 a.m. 1918. It marked a victory for the Allies and a complete defeat for Germany.

1930 – Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon, and sister of England’s Queen Elizabeth II, was born in Glamis Castle, Scotland.

1936 – The BBC made its first television broadcast from Alexandra Palace.

1939 – Civil Defence, to mitigate the effects of enemy attack, was started in Britain.

1969 – Donald and Doris Fisher opened the first Gap store in San Francisco, California. Men’s Levi’s jeans and record tapes were the only items for sale.

1973 – The coroner presiding over the Derry/Londonderry ‘Bloody Sunday’ inquest accused the British army of ‘sheer unadulterated murder’ after 13 were killed in a civil rights march on 30th January 1972.

1976 – Mary Langdon became Britain’s first female firefighter when she joined the East Sussex Brigade.

1988 – More flexible licensing laws allowed public houses to stay open 12 hours in the day, except on Sunday.

1990 – British conservationist George Adamson, whose work featured in the film Born Free, was murdered by bandits in Kenya.

1996 – The new Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in Southwark, London, opened with a production of Two Gentlemen of Verona.

2000 – The NHS revealed that missed appointments cost the organisation £18.5 million a year.

2001 – Channel Tunnel operator Eurotunnel began legal action to shut the Sangatte camp in France which was used by asylum seekers.

2015 – A 108-year-old message in a bottle washed up on a beach in Amrum, Germany.
The bottle was one of around 1,000 released in the UK as part of an experiment run by the Marine Biological Association of the UK.

2017 – Restoration work halted the chimes of Big Ben from noon, for four years of conservation work on the Elizabeth Tower. The Tower is 96 metres high and home to the bells that make up the Great Clock, the most photographed building in Britain. The Great Bell, popularly called Big Ben, weighs 13.7 tonnes and has struck every hour with almost unbroken service for 157 years. It is accompanied by four quarter bells, which weigh between 1 and 4 tonnes each and chime every 15 minutes.