ON THIS DAY

1772: Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (The Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan) was born in Ottery St Mary, Devon. 1805: Lord Nelson, English naval hero, was killed at the Battle of Trafalgar – he died at the precise moment the Franco-Spanish fleet surrendered.

1833: Alfred Nobel, industrialist, inventor of dynamite and founder of the Nobel Prizes, was born in Stockholm.

1858: The Can-Can was first performed in Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld in Paris. 1918: The “Spanish flu” epidemic started in Britain, eventually killing approximately twice as many as died in the First World War.

1940: Geoffrey Boycott, above, Yorkshire and England cricketer, was born in Fitzwilliam, West Yorkshire.

1950: Chinese forces occupied Tibet.

1952: The President of the Kenya African Union, Jomo Kenyatta, was arrested following the declaration of a state of emergency in the British colony of Kenya.

1966: Disaster struck the small Welsh mining village of Aberfan when a colliery slag tip slid down the side of a hill and engulfed a row of houses, a farm and a school. Of the 144 people who died, 116 were children.