AD73: 1,000 Jews committed suicide at the mountain fortress of Massada. After holding off a Roman siege for two years they decided to end it all. When the Romans entered the redoubt they found only bodies and two women who had hidden with their children in a cistern.

1471: The Yorkists defeated the Lancastrians at the battle of Barnet.

1865: US President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theatre by the half-English actor John Wilkes Booth. This seemed pretty reasonable to many people, because Mr L. had just presided over a war that killed hundreds of thousands of his fellow countrymen, all because he didn't recognise the democratic right of the Confederate States to leave the Union. The event sparked as many conspiracy theories as the later killing of JFK in Dallas. Certainly, secretary of war Stanton knew more than he was letting on. 1904: Actor Sir John Gielgud was born,

1912: Film stunt man Fred Law jumped off Brooklyn Bridge to double for Perils of Pauline actress Pearl White. Earlier he jumped by parachute off the Statue of Liberty, and when World War One broke out, he taught parachuting to the crews of observation balloons.

1929: The Monaco Grand Prix was first run. It was won at an average 49mph by a Mr Williams. It's said you have to change gear about 1,600 times during the winding race.

1931: The Highway Code was first published by the Ministry of Transport.

1944: The ammunition ship Fort Stikine blew up in Bombay docks. Thousands were killed or injured, ships were sunk and houses destroyed in one of the worst explosions ever seen before the atom bomb.

1983: The first cordless phone went on sale in Britain.