A look back at events in history on May 28 with Mike Badham.

1660: George the First was born. He was the Elector of Hanover when, at 55, he was brought to England to be king and thus keep the Catholic Stuarts out. He was fond of fat women. He never learned English, and German became the court language. Even as recently as this century, Edward VII spoke with a foreign accent.

1738: Joseph Ignace Guillotin was born in France. He was the physician who gave his name to the humane but messy guillotine. It became famous during the French Revolution, and was still in use in this century.

1759: England's youngest prime minister was born. William Pitt went to Cambridge at 14 and entered parliament at 21.

1849: Anne Bronte died at 29, the youngest of the three novelist sisters of Haworth. 1874: Gilbert K. Chesterton, writer and critic, was born. He wrote the Father Brown detective stories and such fantasies as The Man Who Was Thursday.

1898: The Shroud of Turin was photographed in the cathedral there. When developed, the negative showed a human figure - the "photograph" of Christ. Although prized as a religious relic, it has been dated by scientists as much later than its ostensible 33AD. Controversy still surrounds the shroud.

1908: Ian Fleming was born in London. In his forties, he began to write the novels that made him a millionaire: the saga of the sex and gadget obsessed James Bond. His success, they say, surprised him.

1916: Actress Thora Hird was born. Long active in films (A Taste of Honey) she recently won a best-actress award for her TV performance in Alan Bennett's The Telegram.

1934: The first known surviving quintuplets, the five Dionne sisters, were born in Canada. Exploited by the family doctor, the children received world-wide publicity but little benefit.

1959: Abner Zwillman, 70, a former henchman of gangster Meyer Lansky was found hanging in his own basement. It could hardly have been suicide: his hands were tied and he was heavily bruised. The grim discovery bore out the old saying: "Gangsters never retire".

1972: The Duke of Windsor died in Paris after living abroad since he abdicated in 1936 as Edward VIII.

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