ON THIS DAY

MAY 25

1768: Captain Cook set off on his first voyage, to explore the Antipodes.

1935: American athlete Jesse Owens set six world records within 45 minutes at Ann Arbor in Michigan.

1951: British diplomats Burgess and Maclean were first reported missing – they had defected to Moscow.

1967: Celtic became the first British football club to win the European Cup when they beat Inter Milan 2-1 in Lisbon.

1986: Bob Geldof’s Race Against Time had 30 million people worldwide runningforSportAidtoraisemoneyforthe starving in Africa.

MAY 26

673: The Venerable Bede, English historian and scholar, was born in Jarrow. 1805: Napoleon was crowned King of Italy in Milan Cathedral.

1865: The Confederate Army surrendered, ending the American Civil War. 1868: Irish terrorist Michael Barrett was hanged outside Newgate Prison – the last public execution in England.

1969: John Lennon and Yoko Ono began a ‘bed-in’ for world peace in a Montreal hotel.

MAY 27

1679: The Habeas Corpus Act, stating that nobody could be held in prison without trial, was passed.

1703: Tsar Peter the Great founded St Petersburg and proclaimed it the new capital of Russia.

1837: James “Wild Bill” Hickok, US frontiersman, was born in Troy Grove, Illinois.

1900: Belgium became the first country to elect a government by proportional representation.

1937: The 4,200ft Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, was opened.

MAY 28

1742: The first indoor swimming pool in England opened in London. The entrance fee was one guinea.

1842: The first public library was opened, in Frederick Street, Salford.

1907: The first Isle of Man motorcycle TT race was held.

1951: The first Goon Show was broadcastbytheBBC.

1967: Francis Chichester arrived back at Plymouth after sailing round the world single-handed in Gipsy Moth IV.

1987: Mathias Rust, a 19-year-old West German, flew his small aircraft through Soviet air space from Helsinki to Moscow, landing in Red Square.

MAY 29

1942: Bing Crosby recorded the world’s top-selling disc, White Christmas, for the soundtrack of the film Holiday Inn.

1953: Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay became the first two climbers to reach the summit of Everest. The news broke on Coronation Day, June 2.

1985: 39 football fans were killed when a wall collapsed during crowd violence at Heysel Stadium, Brussels, before the Liverpool v Juventus European Cup Final.