Events: In 1455 the Yorkists won the first Battle of St Albans, taking the Lancastrian King Henry VI prisoner; in 1897 the Prince of Wales opened the Blackwall Tunnel under the Thames in London; in 1906 Wilbur and Orville Wright received US patent 821,393 for their “flying machines”; in 1972 Ceylon adopted a new constitution, and changed its name to Sri Lanka; in 1972 Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev signed the first strategic arms limitation treaty (Salt I); in 1973 Nixon admitted ordering aides to restrict the Watergate investigation on the ground of national security.

Births: John Kyrle, landowning philanthropist, Dymock, Gloucestershire, 1637; William Sturgeon, inventor of the first practical electromagnet, Whittington, Lancashire, 1783; Richard Wagner, composer, Leipzig, Germany, 1813; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, Edinburgh, 1859; Daniel François Malan, Prime Minister of South Africa, 1948-54, whose Government established the apartheid laws, Cape Colony, 1874; Sir Ernest Oppenheimer, mining industrialist, born in Friedberg, Germany, 1880; Giacomo Matteotti, Italian socialist leader who was to be assassinated by Fascists, born in Fratta Polesine, Italy, 1885; Laurence Olivier (Baron Olivier), actor and first director of the National Theatre, Dorking, Surrey, 1907.

Deaths: Constantine I (the Great), Roman Emperor 312-337, who made Christianity the official religion of the empire, Nicomedia (Izmit, Turkey), 337; Alessandro Manzoni, poet and novelist who wrote I Promessi Sposi (1827), Milan, 1873; Victor Hugo, poet, dramatist and novelist who wrote Les Misérables (1862), Paris, 1885; Sir John French (1st Earl of Ypres), C-in-C of the British Expeditionary Force in France 1914-15, Deal, Kent, 1925; Lady Augusta Gregory, dramatist and founder of the Irish Literary Theatre, Coole, County Galway, 1932; Ernst Toller, German dramatist and expressionist poet, New York, 1939; Cecil Day-Lewis, Poet Laureate 1968-72 and, under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake, writer of detective stories, Hadley Wood, Hertfordshire, 1972; Elizabeth David, ground-breaking cookery writer, London, 1992; Alfred Hershey, geneticist who in 1969 shared a Nobel prize in 1969 with Max Delbrück and Salvador Luria for discoveries concerning the replication mechanism and the genetic structure of viruses, Syosset, New York State, 1997.