On this day

» 1778: British forces take St Lucia in the West Indies from the French.

» 1831: Nat Turner, the leader of a bloody slave revolt in Southampton County, Virginia, was hanged in Jerusalem, the county seat.

» 1880: Australian outlaw Ned Kelly was hanged outside Melbourne Jail.

» 1887: Construction of the Manchester Ship Canal started at Eastham.

» 1918: The Armistice was signed between the Allies and Germany in a railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne to end the First World War.

» 1920: King George V unveiled the Cenotaph in Whitehall.

» 1925: The BBC broadcast its first radio play, The White Chateau by Reginald Berkeley.

» 1940: Willys-Overland launched the Jeep (so-called from the initials GP, for general purpose car).

» 1946: Stevenage was designated the first new town in Britain.

» 1952: The first video recorder was demonstrated in Beverly Hills, California, by inventors John Mullin and Wayne Johnson.

» 1965: Ian Smith’s all-white Rhodesia government unilaterally declared independence from Britain.

» 1987: Van Gogh’s Irises fetched £29.3 million at Sotheby’s in New York.

» ON THIS DAY LAST YEAR: A new species of dinosaur with an unusually large nose was identified by a retired GP who spent lockdown rummaging through boxes of hundreds of old bones.