On this day

1800: The Irish parliament passed the Act of Union with England.

1854: The Crimean War began after the United Kingdom and France declared war on Russia.

1868: The 7th Earl of Cardigan, who led the Charge of the Light Brigade to disaster at Balaclava in the Crimean War, died. He is now best remembered for the woollen garment named after him.

1890: Paul Whiteman, American jazz bandleader, was born in Denver, Colorado.

1920: Douglas Elton Ullman wed Gladys Smith in Hollywood. The couple were better known as screen stars Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford and their marriage was described as “Hollywood’s first royal wedding”. 1930: Turkey’s capital city Constantinople changed its name to Istanbul. 1939: Madrid surrendered to Franco to end the Spanish Civil War.

1964: The pirate station Radio Caroline began transmitting from a ship in the North Sea.

1965: Nearly 25,000 people joined Dr Martin Luther King on the steps of the state capitol of Montgomery, Alabama, to highlight black grievances. 1979: There was a radiation leak alert at Three Mile Island nuclear station, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, when the atomic core began to melt down.

1991: A jury returned a verdict of accidental death at the end of an inquest into the deaths of 95 Liverpool football fans who died in the Hillsborough stadium disaster in Sheffield in 1989. In December 2012, the High Court quashed the original verdicts and ordered fresh inquests.

ON THIS DAY LAST YEAR: The Climate Change Committee (CCC), said the UK was “strikingly unprepared” for the impacts of the climate crisis.