ON THIS DAY

• AD41: The mad Roman Emperor Caligula was assassinated.

• AD76: The Roman Emperor Hadrian was born. It was on his orders that Hadrian’s Wall was built in Britain “to separate the Romans from the Barbarians”.

• 1848: James Marshall discovered gold at Sutter’s sawmill in California to spark the great Gold Rush.

• 1916: Conscription was introduced in Britain.

• 1922: The first performance of William Walton’s Facade took place in the Sitwell family drawing room in Carlyle Square, London.

• 1965: Sir Winston Churchill died, aged 90. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, had died on the same date 70 years earlier.

• 1976: Margaret Thatcher was dubbed The Iron Lady in the

Soviet newspaper Red Star, after a speech about the Communist threat.

• 1986: Staff of The Sun and News of the World newspapers were told they were moving to London’s Docklands – the start of a press exodus from Fleet Street.

•1997: The arc hers celebrated its 12,000th episode. The Radio 4 series drew an average 4.5 million listeners each week.

• LAST YEAR: Thousands of students in Belgium skipped school for the third week in a row and more than 30,000 swamped the centre of Brussels to demand better protection of the world’s climate.

• BIRTHDAYS: Desmond Morris, zoologist and ethologist, 92; Bamber Gascoigne, writer and broadcaster, 85; Neil Diamond, singer, 79; Adrian Edmondson, actor, 63; Jools Holland, musician, 62; Vic Reeves, comedian, 61.