1910 – American born Doctor Hawley Crippen was convicted at the Old Bailey Central Criminal Court in London of poisoning his wife Cora. Crippen was hanged on November 23rd at Pentonville prison.

1930 – The BBC Symphony Orchestra played their first concert, conducted by Sir Adrian Boult at the Queen’s Hall, London.

1963 – A BAC One-Eleven prototype airliner flown by test pilot Mike Lithgow, crashed during stall testing with the loss of all on board. Lithgow became the holder of the World Absolute Air Speed Record in 1953 flying a Supermarine Swift.

1966 – A Russian KGB master spy, George Blake, escaped from Wormwood Scrubs in London where he was serving a 40 year sentence for spying against the British Government.

1969 – Paul McCartney publicly declared he’s not dead. Rumors broke out that the Beatles star had died in a car crash in 1966 and that he was replaced with a lookalike. He denied these rumors in an interview with BBC.

1972 – Gordon Banks, England’s star goalkeeper, damaged his eyes in a car crash.

1974 – A bomb exploded in a London restaurant near to where opposition leader Edward Heath was dining. Three members of staff were injured.

1975 – The ‘Guildford Four’ were sentenced to life imprisonment after being found guilty of planting IRA bombs in pubs in Guildford and Woolwich. Fifteen years later they had their convictions quashed by the Court of Appeal, following an extensive inquiry into the original police investigation.

1983 – The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) held its biggest ever protest against nuclear missiles in London, with an estimated one million people taking part.

1986 – The world’s youngest heart transplant patient, a two-and-a-half-month-old baby from north west London, was given the heart of a five-day-old Belgian boy by Professor Magdi Yacoub at Harefield Hospital, Middlesex.

2001 – Towns and villages in Cambridgeshire and Essex were on flood alert as forecasters predicted more torrential downpours following what experts said were the worst floods in 20 years.

2009 – Microsoft released the Windows 7 operating system.

2013 – Former BBC broadcaster Stuart Hall was stripped of his OBE by the Queen after he was jailed for a series of sexual assaults on young girls. In June, Hall, aged 83, admitted 14 counts against girls aged from nine to 17 between 1967 and 1985. The Queen directed that the honour should be “cancelled and annulled” and his name be “erased” from the register.