On this day

» 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.

» 1861: Albert Chevalier, composer and singer of cockney songs, including My Old Dutch and Knocked ‘Em In The Old Kent Road, was born in London.

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

» 1933: The first Nazi concentration camp was completed in Germany. It served as a prototype and model for the others that followed including Auschwitz.

» 1960: The Sharpeville massacre took place in the Transvaal, South Africa, when police fired on a demonstration against Pass Laws, killing 69 people.

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

» 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.