1939 – The first scheduled airline service of Boeing 314 flying boats was operated by Pan Am between Newfoundland and Southampton.

1944 – After 21 days of bloody fighting through the Normandy countryside, Allied forces took Cherbourg in France.

1957 – A report by the Medical Research Council found the link between smoking and lung cancer was one of ‘direct cause and effect’.

1963 – The US President John F Kennedy visited his ancestral homeland in County Wexford, Ireland. During his stay he made much of Ireland’s subjugation and religious persecution by the British.

1967 – Barclays Bank (Enfield branch) opened Britain’s first cash dispenser.

1968 – Maggie Wright, playing Helen of Troy in the Royal Shakespeare Company production in London, became the first actress in Britain to appear nude on the ‘legitimate’ stage.

1971 – England’s first national Scrabble Championship was held in London. The winner was teacher Stephen Haskell.

1988 – Dave Hurst and Alan Matthews, both from England, became the first blind climbers to reach the summit of Europe’s highest mountain, Mont Blanc – 15,781 feet high.

2009 – The Pontcysyllte Aqueduct was inscribed as a World Heritage Site. The aqueduct carries the Llangollen Canal over the valley of the River Dee in Wrexham in north east Wales. It is the longest and highest aqueduct in Britain.

2012 – ‘The Belfast Handshake’, the first historic encounter between the Queen and the former IRA commander, Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness, who went on to become Northern Ireland’s deputy first minister. (Prince Philip’s uncle, Lord Mountbatten, the Queen’s second cousin, was assassinated by the IRA who blew up his fishing boat in County Sligo in 1979.)

2014 – Staff at Dartmoor prison had offered sun cream to inmates who had managed to climb on to a rooftop during sunny weather the previous week, the Ministry of Justice confirmed. They said that the offer of sun cream was a standard procedure, as part of the jail’s ‘duty of care’ that was in line with health and safety rules.

2014 – The mummified body of Anne Leitrim, who was in her 70s, was discovered in her flat in Bournemouth, where she had lain undiscovered for six years. Her remains were finally found when bailiffs visited the property to collect unpaid debts.