1736 – The death of Nicholas Hawksmoor, British architect. Sir Christopher Wren heard of Hawksmoor’s ‘early skill and genius’ for architecture and took him as his clerk, aged 18. Hawksmoor worked with Wren on projects including Chelsea Hospital, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Hampton Court Palace and Greenwich Hospital.

1940 – The United States agreed to give Britain and France access to all American warplanes for the war effort.

1949 – The film Hamlet, starring Laurence Olivier, won five Oscars. It was the first British film to win an academy award.

1957 – Six European nations signed the Treaty of Rome thus establishing the Common Market. They were Belgium, France, West Germany, Italy, Holland and Luxembourg.

1969 – John Lennon and new wife Yoko Ono staged their ‘Beds in Peace’ at the Amsterdam Hilton. It lasted until 31st March and each day they invited the world’s press into their hotel room, between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. It was Yoko’s idea to get over their peace message while on honeymoon. Although the press were expecting them to be having sex, the couple were sitting in bed, in John’s words ‘like angels’, talking about peace, with signs over their bed reading ‘Hair Peace’ and ‘Bed Peace’.

1975 – The National Front marched through London protesting against integration with Europe.

1980 – Robert Runcie was enthroned as the 102nd Archbishop of Canterbury.

1989 – For the first time, both the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race crews entered the event with women coxes. The race was won by Oxford.

1996 – The EU banned all British beef exports due to the risks of carrying “mad cow disease.”

1999 – The 13 year old singer Charlotte Church became the youngest artist to enter the American top 30 album chart.

2002 – The death of Kenneth Wolstenholme, football commentator for BBC television in the 1950s and 1960s. He is perhaps most noted for his commentary during the 1966 FIFA World Cup which included the famous phrase ‘Some people are on the pitch… they think it’s all over… it is now!’, as Geoff Hurst scored England’s fourth goal.

2005 – Ozzy Osbourne and his wife Sharon are forced to flee their Buckinghamshire mansion after a blaze broke out while they slept.

2014 – The death, aged 93, of Captain Raymond “Jerry” Roberts, the last surviving member of the small Bletchley Park team of cryptographers who broke the Nazis’ top-secret Lorenz code. Historians believe that the Bletchley Park codebreakers may have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, shortened the Second World War by between two and four years and that the outcome of the war itself would have been uncertain without the codebreakers’ work.

2018 – Qantas flight QF9 became the first to fly nonstop from Australia to the UK. The craft was a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner. There were 230 passengers on board for the 17 hour and 6-minute journey.