1951 – Trains ran on the Talyllyn Railway in Wales for the first time since preservation, making it the first railway in the world to be operated by volunteers. 

1957 – The lifting of restrictions on fuel consumption imposed during the Suez crisis.

1965 – The field at Runnymede, the site of the signing of the Magna Carta, was dedicated by the Queen as a memorial to the late John F Kennedy, US President.

1967 – The consecration of Liverpool’s Roman Catholic Cathedral (see picture). The architect, Frederick Gibberd, winner of a worldwide design competition was sued soon after its opening for £1.3 million on five counts, the two most serious being leaks in the aluminium roof and defects in the mosaic tiles, which had begun to come away from the concrete ribs.

2013 – Stuart Hazell, aged 37, was jailed for a minimum of 38 years after he was given a life sentence for murdering the 12 year old schoolgirl Tia Sharp. He denied killing the youngster and hiding her body in the loft of the home he shared with her grandmother. Tia’s family sat through days of shocking and graphic evidence at the Old Bailey before Hazel eventually changed his plea to guilty, in a dramatic turn of events.

2013 – The London offices of BP and Shell were raided by European regulators investigating allegations they had ‘colluded’ to rig oil prices for more than a decade.

2013 – Dan Brown released his fourth novel in the Da Vinci Code series, Inferno, an instant success.

2014 – Google added coast-to-coast public transport information for the whole of Great Britain to its Google Maps app. The data included departure times and routes for buses, ferries, trains and trams in England, Scotland and Wales.

2014 – Teenage cancer fundraiser Stephen Sutton died peacefully in his sleep. The 19-year-old, from Burntwood in Staffordshire, raised more than £3.2m for charity after news of his plight spread on social media. (By 7th April 2015 the figure had rsien to more than £4.5m.)