ON THIS DAY

■■868: St Edmund, Saxon king of East Anglia, was martyred by the Vikings, who tied him to a tree, shot at him with arrows, then beheaded him. He was enshrined at Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk.

■■1789: New Jersey became the first state to ratify the Bill of Rights.

■■1818: Simon Bolivar declared Venezuela independent of Spain.

■■1906: Charles Rolls and Henry Royce collaborated to form the car company, Rolls-Royce Ltd. On the same day in 1931, the company bought Bentley Motors.

■■1944: After five years of blackout, the lights were switched on again in Piccadilly, Strand and Fleet Street.

■■1945: The Nuremberg War Crimes trial of Nazis, including Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, and Joachim von Ribbentrop, began. It lasted 218 days.

■■1947: Princess Elizabeth married Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, above. It was the most glamorous royal occasion since before the war and the BBC covered it in 42 different languages.

■■1951: Snowdonia in Wales was designated a National Park.

■■1975: General Franco, dictator of Spain for 36 years, died aged 82.

■■1979: Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, was stripped of his knighthood after being exposed as the Fourth Man in the Burgess, Maclean and Philby spy scandal.

■■ON THIS DAY LAST YEAR: More than three million people had so far been scammed in some way since the coronavirus pandemic started, a bank reported.

BIRTHDAYS: Veronica Hamel, actress, 78; Joe Walsh, rock musician (The Eagles), 74; Bo Derek, actress, 65; Sean Young, actress, 62; Callie Thorne, actress, 52; Joshua Gomez, actor, 46; Kimberley Walsh, singer (Girls Aloud), 40; Justin Hoyte, footballer, 37.

The recycled paper content of UK newspapers in 2016 was 62.8%