ON THIS DAY

JANUARY 6

1066 Following the death of Edward the Confessor, the Witan meets to confirm Harold Godwinson as the new king of England; Harold is crowned the same day, sparking a succession crisis that eventually leads to the Norman conquest of England.

1412 Joan of Arc is born in France. After a series of mystic visitations by saints, she inspires French troops to break the British siege at Orleans and win several important victories during the Hundred Years’ War between France and Britain. Captured, she is sold to the British, who try her for heresy and burn her at the stake. In 1920, the Roman Catholic Church canonises her as a saint.

1838 Alfred Vail and colleagues demonstrate a telegraph system using dots and dashes – it is the forerunner of the universal Morse Code.

1842 About 4 500 British and Indian troops leave Kabul (present-day Afghanistan), but are massacred by tribesmen before reaching India.

1900 Having already besieged the fortress at Ladysmith, Boer forces attack it, but are driven back with heavy losses by British defenders.

1907 Maria Montessori opens her first school and day-care centre for workingclass children in Rome, Italy. Her methods of teaching are implemented worldwide and survive to this day.

1929 Mother Teresa arrives in Calcutta to begin her work among India’s poorest.

1933 After walking into a trap set for another criminal, Clyde Barrow – one half of the infamous Bonnie & Clyde duo – kills Tarrant County Deputy Sheriff Malcolm Davis.

1958 The Bollingen Prize for poetry is awarded to the matchless EE Cummings –one of the greatest lyric poets of the English language, and who is unsurpassed in his modernist, free-form poetry. Much of his work has idiosyncratic syntax and uses lower case spellings for poetic expression.

1995 Joe Slovo, the communist intellectual widely credited with being one of the masterminds of South Africa’s national reconciliation, dies of cancer.

1995 A chemical fire in a block of flats in Manila, Philippines, leads to discovery of plans for Project Bojinka, a mass terrorist attack.

2000 The last Pyrenean ibex is found dead after being crushed by a tree.

2017 Five die and six people are injured in a mass shooting at an airport in Florida, US.

2019 About 40 people are killed in a gold mine collapse in northern Afghanistan.