On this day

1477: William Caxton issued the first dated, printed book from his printing press in Westminster. It was Dictes Or Sayengis Of The Philosophres.

1626: St Peter’s in Rome was consecrated.

1910: There were more than 100 arrests when suffragettes tried to storm the House of Commons.

1916: The first battle of the Somme ended.

1926: George Bernard Shaw refused to accept the Nobel Prize money of £7,000 awarded to him a year earlier. He said: “I can forgive Nobel for inventing dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.” 1928: The first Mickey Mouse cartoon, Steamboat Willie, was shown.

1933: BBC Radio’s In Town Tonight was first broadcast.

1987: The worst fire in the history of the London Underground killed 31 people at King’s Cross.

1991: Beirut hostage Terry Waite and American Thomas Sutherland were released by their proIranian Islamic Jihad captors.

ON THIS DAY LAST YEAR: The death toll from the Northern California wildfire had climbed to 76, while nearly 1,300 people remained unaccounted for, it was reported.

Terry Waite returns to the UK in 1991 after being held hostage in Beirut, Lebanon, for 1,760 days