1922 – George Leigh Mallory and two British climbers reached a height of 25,800 feet on Mount Everest without the aid of oxygen; the highest point ever achieved. Two years later, this same month, Mallory made another attempt with Andrew Irvine. Less than 1,000 feet from the summit, they were trapped by bad weather and were never seen alive again. (His body was eventually found on 3rd May 1999). 

1923 – Harry Houdini broke free from a straitjacket while hanging upside down 40 feet in New York City, US.

1980 – Billy Butlin, English holiday camp entrepreneur, died. He opened his first Butlins camp at Skegness on 11th April 1936. It was officially opened by Amy Johnson, the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia.

1986 – Derek Hatton, the controversial deputy leader of Liverpool Council, was expelled from the Labour Party for belonging to the left wing militant faction.

1989 – Members of Parliament voted to allow television cameras to broadcast proceedings in the House of Commons.

1995 – Two business colleagues from Sussex shared a record (at the time) National Lottery jackpot of more than £22m.

1997 – Law lords ruled that the former Home Secretary Michael Howard acted illegally when he raised the minimum sentence imposed on Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, the killers of two year old James Bulger in February 1993. James’s mutilated body was found on a railway line two-and-a-half miles away from where he had disappeared, two days previously.

1997 – Queen Elizabeth II reopened the Globe Theatre in London. The new theatre was approximately 750 feet (230 m) from the site of Shakespeare’s original theatre, built in 1599.

2003 – Film star Gregory Peck dies of pneumonia aged 87.

2012 – An Australian coroner’s report rules that a dingo was responsible for the death of baby Azaria Chamberlain in 1980. The case had received worldwide coverage at the time with parents Lindy and Michael Chamberlain wrongly convicted of murder.

2013 – Mumford & Sons bassist Ted Dwane was rushed into hospital to have an operation to remove a blood clot on his brain.

2015 – Al-Qaeda’s second-in-command Nasser al-Wuhayshi (Osama Bin Laden’s former private secretary) is killed in a US air strike in Yemen.

2016 – A gunman claiming allegiance to Islamic State opens fire at gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killing 49 and injuring 53 – the worst mass shooting in the US at the time.