ON THIS DAY

• 1648: The Treaty of Westphalia was signed, ending the Thirty Years’ War.

• 1857: The first football club, Sheffield FC, was formed by a group of Harrow old boys meeting in Sheffield.

• 1882: Actress Dame Sybil Thorndike was born in Gainsborough, Lincs.

• 1924: A letter purporting to be from Grigori Zinoviev of the USSR calling for socialists to start a revolution was leaked to the British press on the eve of a general election. The letter, later denounced as a forgery, helped give the Tories a huge victory.

• 1931: Al Capone’s gangster career ended when he was sentenced to 11 years for tax evasion. He was released in 1939 and died in 1947.

• 1945: The United Nations Charter came into force.

• 1948: FranzLehar, Hungarian composer of operettas including The Merry Widow, died in Vienna aged 78.

• 1964: Northern Rhodesia became the Republic of Zambia.

• 1969: Richard Burton bought his wife, Elizabeth Taylor, a 69.42 carat diamond, costing more than a million dollars.

• 1989: US television preacher Jim Bakker was given a 45-year jail sentence and fined $500,000 for swindling his followers of millions of dollars.

• ON THIS DAY LAST YEAR:

An escalator accident in the Rome metropolitan system injured about 20 people, mostly Russian football fans.

• BIRTHDAYS: Bill Wyman, ex-Rolling Stone bassist, 83; Kevin Kline, actor, 71; Sarah Greene, TV presenter, 61; Jonathan Davies, rugby commentator, 57.