5th March

[chenrezig]

1133 The birth of King Henry II, who was to become the first Plantagenet king of England.

1461 Wars of the Roses: Lancastrian King Henry VI was deposed by his Yorkist cousin, who then became King Edward IV.

1824 The First Anglo-Burmese War: The British officially declared war on Burma.

1850 Robert Stephenson's Britannia bridge, linking Bangor, Wales to the Isle of Anglesey, was opened. Unable to use an arch design because the Admiralty would not allow the strait to be closed to the passage of sailing ships, Stephenson conceived the idea of using a pair of completely enclosed iron tubes, rectangular in section, supported in the centre by a pier built on Britannia Rock. The bridge was destroyed by fire on 23rd May 1970. The reconstructed bridge, opened in 1980, was also tubular, but an arched design.

1857 James Townsend Saward, alias ‘Jim the Penman’, the most notorious forger of his age, was convicted of forging cheques. Saward was a respected solicitor with chambers in the Temple. He and his accomplices were sentenced to transportation to Australia.

1900 The British Government was offered peace proposals to end the Boer War, but rejected them.

1936 The British fighter plane Spitfire made its first test flight from Eastleigh, Southampton, powered by a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. It was designed by Reginald Mitchell and was the fighter plane that helped to win the Battle of Britain. Mitchell died in 1937 without ever knowing how successful his aircraft would become. The Spitfire was first put into service with the Royal Air Force in 1938 and they remained in active service (as photo reconnaissance planes) with the Royal Air Force until 1954.

1943 The first flight of the Gloster Meteor jet aircraft. It was the first British jet fighter and the Allies' first operational jet. The Meteor's development was heavily reliant on its ground-breaking turbojet engines, developed by Sir Frank Whittle.

1946 Prime Minister Winston Churchill coined the phrase 'The Iron Curtain' as the divide between Eastern and Western Europe.

1948 The birth of Elaine Paige, singer and actress. Her debut was in the 1968 production of Hair. She played Eva Perón in the first production of Evita in 1978 which won her the Laurence Olivier Award for Performance of the Year in a Musical.

1966 BOAC Flight 911 (Speedbird 911), a round-the-world flight operated by British Overseas Airways Corporation disintegrated and crashed on Mount Fuji, Japan, killing all 113 passengers and 11 crew members. It was the third fatal passenger airline accident in Tokyo in a month.

2001 PC Alison Armitage (aged 29) became the first female officer in the Greater Manchester Police force to be killed in the line of duty since it was formed in 1974.

2002 Prime Minister Tony Blair was urged by 39 MPs not to back military action in Iraq.

2014 Birmingham city council announced the sell-off of four of its hugely popular venues, including the National Exhibition Centre (NEC.

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