In 1788 the penal colony at Botany Bay, New South Wales, was founded; in 1807 Pall Mall in London became the first street to be illuminated by gaslight; in 1885 a British relief force arrived at Khartoum, but General Gordon had died two days earlier; in 1896 the first speeding fine was handed out to a British motorist for exceeding 2mph in a built-up area; in 1986 the American space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after lift-off from Cape Canaveral, killing five men and two women.

BIRTHS: The writer Lady Charlotte Bury — daughter of the 5th Duke of Argyll and a lady-in-waiting to Princess Caroline — was born in the same year as Jane Austen but failed to attract the same admiration. The scandalous gossip she purveyed in her Diary of a Lady-in-Waiting and Memoirs of the Time of George IV aroused much indignation. “Read in the newspaper that Colburn gave Lady Charlotte Bury £1,000 for the wretched catchpenny trash . . . nobody could by possibility compile or compose anything more vile or despicable,” wrote the diarist Charles Greville. Bury was born in London on this day in 1775.

King Henry VII, reigned 1485-1509, born in Pembroke Castle, 1457; John Baskerville, typographer and printer, born in Worcester, 1706; Sir Henry Stanley, explorer and journalist, born in Denbigh, 1841; José Martí, revolutionary and poet, born in Havana, 1853; Colette, writer, born in St-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, France, 1873; Auguste Piccard, physicist, sea and stratosphere explorer, born in Basel, Switzerland. 1884; Jackson Pollock, painter, born in Cody, Wyoming, 1912.

DEATHS: The moody-looking rock-ballad singer Billy Fury, who was once asked for his autograph by the future Beatle John Lennon, died in London on this day in 1983. A life-sized bronze statue of the singer-songwriter, funded by members of his still-hyperactive fan club, the Sound of Fury, was unveiled at the Museum of Liverpool Life last year. It shows Fury at the height of his popularity in the early 1960s, when his cover version of the lugubrious Halfway to Paradise reached No 3 in the charts.

Charlemagne, Holy Roman Emperor 800-14, died in Aachen, Germany, 814; Henry VIII, reigned 1509-47, died in Greenwich, 1547; Sir Francis Drake, navigator and pirate, died off Panama, 1596; Sir Thomas Bodley, diplomat and founder of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, died in London, 1612; William Burke, body snatcher, executed in Edinburgh, 1829; Thomas Tredgold, engineer, died in London, 1829; William Butler Yeats, poet and dramatist (Nobel laureate 1923), died in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France, 1939.