On this day

1556: Thomas Cranmer, first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury, was condemned as a heretic under England’s Catholic Queen Mary I and burned at the stake in Oxford.

1685: Composer Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach, Germany. He sired 20 children yet still found time to compose 300 cantatas, two oratorios, the St John and St Matthew Passions and Mass in B minor. 1861: Albert Chevalier, composer and singer of Cockney songs, was born in London. 1918: The last major German offensive of World War I began on the Somme.

1933: The first Nazi concentration campwas completed in Germany. It served as amodel for the others that followed including Auschwitz.

1960: The Sharpeville massacre took place in the Transvaal, South Africa, when police fired on a demonstration against pass laws, killing 69 people. 1963: Alcatraz, the notorious maximum-security prison in San Francisco Bay, was closed.

1985: Riot police shot dead 17 black people at South Africa’s Langa township on the 25th anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre. 1991: The poll tax was ditched by Environment Secretary Michael Heseltine. 1993: The IRA claimed responsibility for two bomb attacks in Warrington which killed a four-year-old.

ON THIS DAY LAST YEAR: Hatton Garden mastermind Brian “The Guv’nor” Reader was sentenced to six years and three months in jail for his role in the £14million jewellery raid.