1936 – George V died and was succeeded by Edward VIII who abdicated 325 days later because of his insistence on marrying American divorcee Wallis Simpson. 

1958 – Members of the British and New Zealand teams attempting the first surface crossing of the Antarctic, met up at the South Pole.

1961 – Arthur M. Ramsay became the 100th Archbishop of Canterbury.

1967 – The Monkees TV show is shown for the first time in the UK.

1972 – The number of people out of work and claiming benefit in the UK exceeds 1 million for the first time since the 1930s.

1982 – While playing a concert in Des Moines, Iowa, Ozzy Osbourne bites the head off a bat thrown on stage thinking it’s a rubber toy. After the show he was rushed to hospital for rabies shots.

1986 – Mrs. Pauline Williams of Luton won her three year fight to prosecute the man who injected her drug addict son with a fatal painkiller. She was the first person to bring a private prosecution for manslaughter to a Crown Court trial.

1986 – France and Britain finally decided to undertake the Channel Tunnel project, promising that trains would run under the Channel by 1993. When it eventually opened, on 6th May 1994, it left Eurotunnel with debts of £925m a year later.

1987 – Police carry out a series of dawn raids in London. The Home Counties and the Midlands in their biggest operation so far to apprehend the ringleaders of organised fan violence in and around football stadiums. On the same day, church envoy Terry Waite was kidnapped in Beirut whilst attempting to win freedom for Western hostages.

1991 – The death of Alfred Wainwright, whose books for walkers did much to popularise the Lake District. His ashes are scattered on Haystacks, Cumbria and there is a memorial plaque in nearby Buttermere Church.

1997 – Three sisters, Phoebe, Faith and Alice Julian were among 17 girls who were the first to be admitted to the choir of York Minster ending a 400 year old tradition of men only.

1997 – Her Majesty’s Royal Yacht Britannia began her final voyage, to Hong Kong, before being decommissioned. She is now based in Edinburgh, as a visitor attraction.

2007 – A three-man team of Britons, using only skis and kites, completed a 1,093-mile trek to reach the ‘southern pole of inaccessibility’ for the first time since 1958 and for the first time ever without mechanical assistance.

2014 – Dr Michael Ramscar and a team of scientists suggested that the brains of older people only appear to slow down because they have so much information to compute, much like a full-up hard drive. “The brains of older people do not get weak. On the contrary, they simply know more.”

2015 – A six-day-old baby became Britain’s youngest organ donor when her kidneys were transplanted into a patient with renal failure, and liver cells were transfused into a second recipient.