1858 – Fingerprints were first used as a means of identification by William Herschel, who later established a fingerprint register. 

1865 – A crowd of 100,000 watched the last public execution in Scotland when Dr Edward Pritchard was hanged for poisoning his wife and mother-in-law.

1866 – Beatrix Potter, English author and illustrator was born. She was inspired to write her story ‘The Tailor of Gloucester’ after visiting the tailor’s shop at Number 9, College Court, Gloucester. When she died in 1943 she left her house to the National Trust, conditionally that it be kept exactly as she left it.

1914 – Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, exactly one month after Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie had been shot dead by a Bosnian Serb nationalist. Europe went from peaceful prosperity to the start of a world war that would bring down four empires and cost millions of lives, ranking it among the deadliest conflicts in human history.

1935 – The birth of Simon Dee, pirate radio disc jockey for Radio Caroline and later television interviewer and BBC radio disc jockey. He hosted a twice-weekly BBC TV chat show, Dee Time in the late 1960s. He was sacked by London Weekend Television in 1970 and his career never recovered. He died in August 2009.

1943 – The worst British bombing raid on Hamburg so far during World War II virtually set the city on fire. In just 43 minutes, 2,326 tons of bombs killed 42,000 German civilians.

1948 – The Metropolitan Police Flying Squad foiled a bullion robbery in what became known as the ‘Battle of London Airport’ an operation that brought them to national prominence. The name Flying Squad was coined in 1920 by a Daily Mail journalist called Crook!

1959 – Postcodes were introduced in Britain. The first postcodes were introduced on a trial basis in Norwich in 1959 with the first three characters of the code (‘NOR’) representing the name of the city, and the last three characters a particular street. Larger firms and businesses received their own individual codes.

1972 – Thousands of British dockers began an official strike to safeguard jobs.

1987 – 23 year old British golfer Laura Davis won the U.S. Women’s Open, becoming the first British woman ever to win the event.

1988 – The MP for Yeovil, Paddy Ashdown, was elected the first leader of the new Social and Liberal Democrat Party.

2005 – The IRA formally ordered an end to its armed campaign and said it would pursue exclusively peaceful means.

2008 – Amy Winehouse is rushed to hospital after she starts to have fits at her home in Camden following a reaction to medication prescribed to wean her off hard drugs. On the same day, Weston-super-Mare Grand Pier burns down for the second time in 80 years.

2019 – Meghan Markle became the first-ever guest editor for UK Vogue. Working on the September 2019 issue, Markle created a cover for Vogue that included the faces of fifteen women she admired. Some of the people included Jane Fonda and Greta Thunberg.