3 FEBRUARY
1660: General George Monck led his army into London.
1730: The first stock exchange quotations were published in the Daily Advertiser, London.
1807: British forces under
Sir Samuel Auchmuty took Montevideo.
1830: Greece was declared independent under protection of France, Russia and Britain at London conference.
1848: Britain’s Sir Harry Smith annexed country between Orange and Vaal Rivers in South Africa.
1877: Chopsticks, the novelty piano piece, was registered at the British Museum. It was arranged as a duet and solo for piano by Arthur de Lull (a pseudonym for Euphemia Allen, the music publisher’s sister who wrote it when she was 16).
1916: Parliamentary buildings in Ottawa were destroyed by fire.
1917: The United States and Germany broke off diplomatic relations.
1919: The first meeting of the League of Nations was held in Paris, with American president Woodrow Wilson as chairman.
1935: The jingle “We are the Ovaltineys, little girls and boys” was first sung on radio. Listeners were invited to join the Ovaltiney Club (with badge and rule book) and a coded message was given out each week. Harry Hemsley and his imaginary family formed the nucleus of the series.
1945: United States forces recaptured Manila in Philippines from Japanese.
1945: Berlin was bombed by more than 1,000 Allied aircraft in a daylight raid.
1960: Harold Macmillan, speaking to the South African parliament in Cape Town, made the historic statement: “The wind of change is blowing through this continent, and whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.”
1966: The first “soft” landing on the Moon was made by unmanned Soviet Luna IX, which began sending signals back to Earth.
1973: Fighting in Vietnam came to a virtual halt after formal ceasefire went into effect.
1982: Kodak marketed first disc film and camera.
1991: A government report on climate changes announced that Britain could face allyear hosepipe bans in the 21st century with drought being a permanent fact of life. Allied aircraft claimed complete air and sea supremacy over Iraq in the Gulf War.
1993: The government made a U-turn on defence cuts, reprieving four historic regiments.
1993: The Netherlands parliament backed plans to allow euthanasia under controlled conditions.
1994: The Crown Office decided not to prosecute alleged war criminals living in Scotland.
1998: Twenty skiers died in the Italian Dolomites when a Nato jet cut through the wires of their cable-car.
2007: A Baghdad market bombing killed more than 130 people and injured a further 339.
2009: A Royal Navy nuclear submarine was involved in a collision with a French nuclear sub in the middle of the Atlantic.