1896 – The Daimler Motor Company (Coventry) was registered as the first British car manufacturer. 

1907 – Alfred Wainwright, whose books for walkers did much to popularise the Lake District, was born, in Blackburn, Lancashire. In 1952, he began the task of walking every fell in Lakeland and recording his walks with pen and ink drawings. It took him 13 years to climb the 214 fells, travelling on foot or by public transport from his Kendal home, as he never learnt to drive.

1912 – Captain Robert Falcon Scott reached the South Pole, only to find that the Norwegian Roald Amundsen had beaten him by one month.

1945 – The Nazis began the evacuation of the Auschwitz concentration camp as Soviet forces closed in. Nearly one and a half thousand British prisoners of war were sent to the Auschwitz death camps.

1968 – The motor manufacturer British Leyland was formed; from the merger of British Motor Holdings Ltd. and Leyland Motor Corp. Ltd.

1983 – The BBC’s new Breakfast Time programme goes on air for the first time with hosts Frank Bough and Selina Scott.

1986 – The Royal yacht Britannia evacuated Britons and other foreign nationals from Aden during their civil war.

1991 – Operation Desert Storm begins as Gulf War Allies send hundreds of planes on bombing raids into Iraq. Iraq fires eight Scud missiles on Israel. On the same day, Harald V becomes King of Norway on the death of his father, Olav V.

1994 – An earthquake measuring 6.6 on the Richter scale devastates LA. The earthquake was felt as far south as San Diego 200km away and as far north as Las Vegas, 440km to the north east.

2008 – British Airways Flight 38 crash landed just short of London Heathrow Airport with no fatalities. It was the first complete hull loss of a Boeing 777, the world’s largest twin jet aircraft.

2011 – Liverpool’s Ryan Babel becomes the first footballer to be fined for comments made on Twitter. He was fined £10,000 for posting a doctored picture of referee Howard Webb wearing a Manchester United shirt.

2014 – Cambridge City Council said that apostrophes on new street signs would be abolished, a decision that was condemned by language traditionalists. The naming policy also banned street names which would be “difficult to pronounce or awkward to spell” and any that “could give offence” or would “encourage defacing of nameplates”. After an intervention by cabinet minister Eric Pickles, local people in Cambridge started to edit street signs, adding apostrophes if they were necessary.