1556: Thomas Cranmer, first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury, was condemned as a heretic under Catholic queen Mary I and burned at the stake in Oxford.

1685: Composer Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach, Germany. He sired 20 children yet still found time to compose 300 cantatas, two oratorios, the St John and St Matthew Passions and Mass in B minor.

1862: Albert Chevalier, composer and singer of cockney songs, including My Old Dutch and Knocked 'Em In The Old Kent Road, was born in London.

1867: Florenz Ziegfeld, producer of the Ziegfeld Follies, was born in Chicago.

1918: The last major German offensive of the First World War began on the Somme.

1933 The first Parliament of Nazi Germany, with Hitler as Chancellor, was proclaimed at the Garrison Church in Potsdam.

1946 Aneurin Bevan announced Labour Government proposals for a National Health Service.

1958 The London Planetarium opened.

1960 The Sharpeville Massacre took place in the Transvaal, South Africa, when police fired on a demonstration against Pass Laws, killing about 70 people.

1963 Alcatraz, the notorious maximum security prison in San Francisco Bay, was closed.

1972 Six people died and 146 were injured in an explosion in a major shopping street in Belfast.

1978 Absolute white rule ended in Rhodesia as the country's first three black government ministers were sworn in.

1985 Riot police shot dead 17 black people at South Africa's Langa township on the 25th anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre.

1991 The poll tax was ditched as Environment Secretary Michael Heseltine unveiled a new property tax to replace it.

1993 The IRA claimed responsibility for two bomb attacks in Warrington which killed a four-year-old child.

1995 Police raided the Tokyo headquarters of the Aum Shinrikyo religious sect after Sarin nerve gas was released on five trains in the Tokyo underground system.

ON THIS DAY LAST YEAR: The US launched its "shock and awe" bombing campaign with a massive attack on Baghdad. Hundreds of cruise missiles and precision guided bombs poured out of the night sky into the Iraqi capital.