ON THIS DAY

1701: Yale College in the United States received its charter.

■■1804: Hobart, Tasmania, was founded.

■■1888: The 555ft white marble Washington Monument, designed by Robert Mills, was opened.

■■1905: Sarah Bernhardt had the accident which was to blight her career. Playing Floria in Tosca, she had to jump from a parapet. Stagehands forgot the mattresses for her to land on, and she fell heavily on her right knee. Her leg was later amputated.

■■1940: Beatle John Lennon was born during an air raid in Liverpool. ■■1962: Uganda became independent.

■■1967: Revolutionary leader Che Guevara was captured in Bolivia and shot.

■■1974: German businessman Oskar Schindler, credited with saving 1,200 Jews from the Holocaust, died at the age of 66. ■■1990: Hundreds of Chinese people queued to buy Big Macs when McDonald’s opened its first restaurant in Shenzhen.

■■2009: US president Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”. ■■ON THIS DAY LAST YEAR: Sir Paul McCartney marked what would have been the 80th birthday of his late Beatles bandmate John Lennon, by sharing a black and white photograph of the pair together.

BIRTHDAYS: The Duke of Kent, 86; Brian Blessed, actor, 85; John Pilger, investigative journalist and film-maker, 82; Steve Ovett, former athlete, 66; David Cameron, Former Prime Minister/leader of the Conservative Party, 55; PJ Harvey, rock singer, 52; Sean Lennon, singer, 46; Mark Viduka, former footballer, 46; Nicky Byrne, pop star (Westlife), 43; Chris O’Dowd, actor, 42.