ON THIS DAY

■ ■1066: William the Conqueror, right, landed in Pevensey,

Sussex.

■ ■1399: The first British monarch to abdicate,

Richard II, was replaced by Bolingbroke to whom he had surrendered without a fight. Bolingbroke ascended as Henry IV.

■ ■1758: Horatio Nelson, hero of Trafalgar and Britain’s greatest sailor, was born at Burnham Thorpe, Norfolk.

■ ■1829: London’s first official police force was mobilised and its men nicknamed “Bobbies” or “Peelers” after Sir Robert Peel, the Home Secretary who founded it.

■ ■1899: Sir Billy Butlin, holiday camp pioneer, was born.

■ ■1930: George Bernard Shaw turned down a peerage.

■ ■1938: The Munich Pact, an agreement between Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy, was signed, under which the Sudetenland was surrendered to Nazi Germany.

■ ■1941: A Nazi death squad murdered 30,000 Russian Jews in Kiev.

■ ■1952: British and world waterspeed record holder John Cobb was killed on Loch Ness when his vessel Crusader disintegrated after hitting waves at 240mph.

■ ■1983: A Chorus Line broke the record as the longest-running Broadway show with its 3,389th performance since July 25, 1975.

■ ■ON THIS DAY LAST YEAR: Elon Musk unveiled a SpaceX spacecraft designed to carry a crew and cargo to the moon, Mars or anywhere else in the solar system and land back on Earth perpendicularly.

■ ■BIRTHDAYS: Jerry Lee Lewis, singer, 85; Ian McShane, actor, 78; Lech Walesa, former Polish president, 77; Patricia Hodge, actress, 74; Sebastian Coe, chairman of the London Organising Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games, former MP and athlete, 64; Mark Nicholas, broadcaster and former cricketer, 63; Brett Anderson, singer, 53; Luke and Matt Goss, singers (Bros), 52; Emily Lloyd, actress, 50; Mackenzie Crook, actor, 49.