1900 – Britain’s first driving lessons were given, in London.

1922 – English explorers Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter discovered the Tomb of King Tutankhamen, in the Valley of the Kings near Luxor, Egypt. It had been undisturbed since 1337 BC.

1929 – Violinist Yehudi Menuhin made his London debut, aged 12.

1942 – The Battle of El Alamein ended with victory for the allies, after 12 days of conflict with Rommel’s ‘Africa Corps’.

1952 – Queen Elizabeth II opened her first Parliament.

1974 – Judith Ward was convicted of an army coach bombing on the M62 motorway in which 12 people died. She received a life term for each of those who died. Her conviction was quashed in 1992 when her lawyers argued that the trial jury should have been told of her history of mental illness.

1987 – Millionaire Peter de Savary bought Land’s End in Cornwall.

1994 – 400 years of shipbuilding came to an end at the Swan Hunter Shipyard, Tyneside, with the launch of the Royal Naval Frigate ‘Richmond’. The yard stood empty for a few years, before it was bought by Jaap Kroese, a Dutch millionaire.

2001 – The first Harry Potter film “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” is released introducing young stars Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson.

2011 – Seven people were killed and 51 injured in a 34-vehicle pile-up on the M5 in Somerset. The accident happened close to junction 25 northbound and led to a ‘massive fireball’ at the scene.

2011 – The magazine Woman’s Weekly celebrated its 100th anniversary with a special exact facsimile re-publication of the very first edition. The 4th November 1911 edition sold around 500,000 copies and reached its peak in 1950 when it regularly sold more than two million copies a week. Quote from the publishing director Sandy Gale – “The past one hundred years of Woman’s Weekly provides a unique record of the lives of women and social issues of the last century and it remains as resolutely and proudly relevant to its hundreds of thousands of readers today.”

2012 – Reg Dean (from Wirksworth in Derbyshire) who was Britain’s oldest man, celebrated his 110th birthday. He attributed his longevity to a ‘mysterious medicine’ given to him as a youth in India and to being ‘a lazy-bones’. He died on 5th January 2013, aged 110 years and 63 days.

2014 – Statistics from the 2011 census showed that Polish migrants had the highest employment rate of any nationality living in Britain, including the British. Results also showed that European migrants to the UK added £4.96bn more in taxes in the years to 2011 than they took out in public services.