IT HAPPENED TODAY
1724:
Highwayman Jack Sheppard (above) was hanged in front of 200,000 people at Tyburn.
1824:
Explorers Hamilton Hume and William H Hovell discovered Australia’s Murray River.
1869:
The formal opening of the Suez Canal took place. It had taken 10 years to make the 100-mile canal devised by Ferdinand de Lesseps.
1896:
Oswald Mosley, English Fascist leader, was born.
1920:
The Bolsheviks defeated the White Russians in the Crimea, ending Russia’s Civil War.
1937:
MPs voted in favour of air raid shelters being erected in towns and cities. Winston Churchill insisted they were ‘’indispensable’’. Labour opposed this, fearing it would mean a big rise in rates.
1959:
The Sound Of Music, a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, opened on Broadway.
Clark Gable, the ‘’King of Hollywood’’ died after shooting the final scenes of The Misfits opposite Marilyn Monroe. He won an Oscar for Best Actor for It Happened One Night and was nominated for leading roles in Mutiny on the Bounty and for his best-known role as Rhett Butler (above) in the epic Civil War drama Gone with the Wind.
1989:
A pillar of South African apartheid crumbled when beach access restrictions were removed by president FW de Klerk.
ON THIS DAY LAST YEAR:
Theresa May refused to say whether talks took place over a peerage for Ukip’s Nigel Farage.
BIRTHDAYS:
Willie Carson, former jockey, 75; Marg Helgenberger, actress, 59; Frank Bruno, former boxer, 56; Steve Bould, coach and former footballer, 55; Diana Krall, singer and pianist, 53; Paul Scholes, former footballer, 43; Danny Wallace, actor, filmmaker and writer, 41; Maggie Gyllenhaal, (above) actress, 40.