1938 – David Dimbleby, TV journalist and commentator was born.

1949 – The glove puppet Sooty, with Harry Corbett, made his first appearance on BBC TV.

1958 – The State Opening of Parliament was televised for the first time.

1959 – The first use of a car phone, with a call from Cheshire to London. A mere twenty five people had paid the astronomical sum of £200 each for one of the phones.

1962 – The opening of Britain’s first urban motorway – the M62 (now M60) around Manchester.

1971 – Prospero became the first British satellite to have been launched successfully by a British rocket.

1974 – Sports Minister Denis Howell’s wife and young son survived a bomb attack on their car. The attack was thought to be the work of the Provisional IRA and the first on a serving minister during the current IRA campaign.

1979 – Chairman Hua Kuo-Feng, the first Chinese leader to visit Britain, was welcomed at Heathrow by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. (Additional note – Margaret Thatcher was born at this former grocer’s shop in Grantham Lincolnshire.

2000 – Ulster Unionist Party leader David Trimble narrowly won party support to keep a Northern Ireland power sharing government alive.

2011 – Commonwealth leaders pledged to amend legislation dating back to the 17th century to allow daughters of the monarch to take precedence over younger sons in the line of succession.

2011 – Vincent Tabak, a 33 year old Dutch engineer with an obsession for violent sex and pornography, was found guilty of strangling landscape architect Joanna Yeates for sexual thrills. Her body was found, covered with leaves on Christmas morning 2010. The police initially suspected and arrested Christopher Jefferies, Yeates’ landlord, who lived in a flat in the same building. The nature of press reporting on aspects of the case led to ‘substantial, undisclosed libel damages’ from eight newspapers being awarded to Mr. Jefferies.

2014 – 105 year old Sir Nicholas Winton, who saved 669 children, most of them Jews, from the Nazis was awarded the Czech Republic’s highest state honour, the Order of the White Lion. He was aged 29 when he arranged trains to take the children out of occupied Czechoslovakia and for foster families to meet them in London.

2014 – Tesco’s Aberystwyth store made a blunder on a Welsh sign which was supposed to advertise ‘free money’ from the supermarket’s cashpoint. The sign read “codiad am ddim”, meaning free erections when it should read “arian am ddim” which means free money.