1477: William Caxton issued the first dated, printed book from his printing press in Westminster - it was Dictes or Sayengis of The Philosophres.

1626: St Peter’s in Rome was consecrated.

1910: There were more than 100 arrests when suffragettes tried to storm the House of Commons.

1916: The first battle of the Somme ended.

1926: George Bernard Shaw refused to accept the Nobel Prize money of £7,000 awarded to him a year earlier. He said: “I can forgive Nobel for inventing dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.”

1928: The first Mickey Mouse cartoon, Steamboat Willie, was shown.

1933: BBC Radio’s In Town Tonight was first broadcast.

1987: The worst fire in the history of the London Underground killed 31 people at King’s Cross.

1991: Beirut hostage Terry Waite and American Thomas Sutherland were released by their pro-Iranian Islamic Jihad captors.

LAST YEAR: The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs was accused of “incompetence” after issuing the wrong year’s budget figures in a written ministerial statement.