1975 – The six-day Balcombe Street siege ended peacefully in London after four IRA gunmen freed their two hostages and gave themselves up to police.

1982 – 30,000 women formed a 9 mile human chain that encircled Greenham Common air base in Berkshire, in protest against the proposed siting of US Cruise missiles there.

1988 – Britain’s worst rail crash for 20 years killed 35 and injured 113 people when a packed express train ran into the back of a stationary commuter train near Clapham Junction.

1988 – The first satellite pictures were beamed to London’s betting shops to allow them to watch the races live from many race courses.

1992 – Princess Anne remarried and became Mrs. Timothy Laurence after a small family wedding in Scotland. She was previously married to Mark Phillips (1973).

2001 – Roy Whiting was found guilty of the abduction and murder of eight year old Sarah Payne, and sentenced to life in prison. The high profile case led to ‘Sarah’s Law’, by allowing controlled access to the Sex Offenders’ Register, so that parents with young children could know if a child sex-offender was living in their area.

2003 – Mick Jagger receives his knighthood from Prince Charles at Buckingham Palace.

2012 – Ofcom announced that Internet shopping was more popular in the UK than in any other major country, with an annual average spend of £1,083 a year, compared with the second highest (Australia) at £842.

2013 – Blockbuster, the DVD and games rental chain that went into administration in January, announced that all the remaining 91 UK stores, employing 808 people, would have to close by 16th December.

2013 – Daniel Severn, a 27 year old burglar who had 80 convictions for 32 court appearances was jailed for two years and four months. The court heard that Severn became trapped while trying to raid someone’s house and ended up with his head resting on the toilet for an hour and a half, with one foot trapped in the window that he had used to gain entry. When he had tried to call for help he dropped his phone in the bath. Severn was told “It would be funny if it were not such a serious offence.”

2013 – Doctors in Derby and Nottingham analysing the Ian Fleming novels showed that James Bond drank the equivalent of one and a half bottles of wine every day. They said that he was not the man to trust to deactivate a nuclear bomb and that his love of the bottle would have left him impotent and at death’s door. Excluding the 36 days that Bond was in prison, hospital or rehab, the spy downed 1,150 units of alcohol in 88 days, four times the recommended maximum intake for men in the UK.

2014 – A 20 year study of the Darwin Awards (named after the naturalist Charles Darwin) reviewed that the most foolish way people have died, found almost 90 per cent were ‘won’ by males.

2019 – Boris Johnson was elected as prime minister. It was the fourth poll in less than five years, after lawmakers approved his gamble to break the country’s crippling political deadlock and hold an election two weeks before Christmas.

2019 – The deepest point of land was identified. Underneath the Denman Glacier in East Antarctica, there is an ice-filled canyon 11,500 feet below sea level, making it the deepest point on earth to date.