ON DECEMBER 1...

In 1955, black seamstress Rosa Parks was arrested by police in Montgomery, Alabama, after refusing to give up her seat on the bus to a white person.

In 1976, Bill Grundy interviewed the Sex Pistols on Thames TV’s Today programme. Full of expletives and well before the watershed, it ended Grundy’s career — but made the Pistols a household name.

In 1990, tunnels dug under the English Channel met, as planned, in the middle. Europe and the UK were linked together for the first time since the Ice Age. The first man through was a British construction worker called Graham Fagg from Dover.