Also on this day

1953: North Sea flooding killed 300 in the UK and 1,800 in the Netherlands.

1956: AA Milne, author of Winnie the Pooh, right, dies.

1961: Nasa sends Ham the Chimp into outer space.

but within days he had revealed everything. He was so broken by his treatment that the signature on his confession is barely a scrawl.

Realising the game was up, Catesby fled but was cornered and killed by the King’s men. The other plotters were put on trial and convicted.

On January 31, Fawkes, Thomas Wintour, Ambrose Rookwood, and Robert Keyes were dragged from the Tower of London through the streets to the scaffold, opposite the very building they sought to destroy.

Fawkes asked for forgiveness as he climbed to the noose. He leapt from the ladder, breaking his neck and sparing himself the agony of being dismembered while still alive. His body was cut into pieces and sent to “the four corners of the kingdom” as a reminder of the price of treason.

The following year Parliament established November 5 as a day of public thanksgiving still celebrated today, with “guys” carried through the streets, bonfires lit and fireworks set off.

And thanks also to the adoption of Fawkes’s image as an icon of anarchy by 21st-century protesters, his legend endures.

Question: 3M began manufacturing what on this day in 1930?

Last week I asked: Which Roman Emperor, nicknamed “Little Boots”, was assassinated on January 24, AD41? CALIGULA