1776: The oldest of the classic horse races, the St Leger, was first run at Doncaster.
1842: Bramwell Bronte, brother of the Bronte sisters, died of drugs and drink. He was the model for the drunkard Hindley Earnshaw in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1847).
1852: The first hydrogen-filled airship, powered by a 3hp steam engine built by Henri Giffard, made its maiden flight at Versailles.
1853: The Northern Daily Times in Liverpool became the first provincial newspaper in England.
1896: American writer F Scott Fitzgerald was born. For most of his life he suffered from an oversecretion of insulin, and became a heavy drinker. He wrote the definitive 1920s novel The Great Gatsby in 1925.
1930: The first performance of Private Lives by Noel Coward took place at the new Phoenix Theatre, London.
1947: A trainload of 1,200 Muslim refugees fleeing to Pakistan were massacred by Sikhs at Amritsah in the Punjab.
1953: The Robe, the first film made in CinemaScope, was premiered in Hollywood.
1960: The first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Enterprise, was launched at Newport, Virginia.
1975: Everest was climbed by the south-west face for the first time by Douglas Haston and Doug Scott.
LAST YEAR: British teenager Matthew Scott, who was kidnapped by guerrillas in Colombia, escaped after 12 days in captivity.
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