On this day ...

OCTOBER 30

1751: Playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan (The Rivals, The School For Scandal) was born in Dublin.

1925: In his workshop in London, John Logie Baird achieved the first television pictures using a dummy’s head.

1944: Anne Frank, above, and her sister Margot were deported from Auschwitz to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they died from disease the following year, shortly before the end of the war.

1938: Orson Welles’s radio adaptation of HG Wells’s War Of The Worlds caused panic in the US by convincing many listeners that Martians had really landed.

1975: Prince Juan Carlos I of Spain becomes acting head of state, taking over for the country’s ailing dictator, General Francisco Franco.

1990: Crews at work on the Channel Tunnel met for the first time when French workers drilled a pilot hole through to the British side of a service tunnel.

1991: The Queen opened the Queen Elizabeth Bridge over the Thames at Dartford.

ON THIS DAY LAST YEAR: Millions of people living in dozens of British cities are inhaling air considered too dangerous to breathe by the World Health Organisation, a report revealed. BIRTHDAYS: Bob Wilson, broadcaster and former footballer, 77; Henry Winkler, actor, 73; Harry Hamlin, actor, 67; Juliet Stevenson, actress, 62; Diego Maradona, above, former footballer, 58; Courtney Walsh, former cricketer, 56; Vanessa White, singer (The Saturdays), 29.