On this day: Tony Blair elected leader of Labour party in 1994

Tony and Cherie Blair in 1994. Picture: Steve Eason/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

21 July

National day of Belgium.

230: St Pontianus began his reign as Pope.

365: An earthquake with its epicentre at Crete, was followed by a a tsunami around the eastern Mediterranean that is believed to have destroyed Alexandria.

1542: Pope Paul III established the Inquisition in Rome.

1831: Belgium gained independence from Netherlands; Leopold I became king.

1861: Bull Run, the first major battle of the American Civil War, ended with victory for the south.

1873: Jesse James and James Younger’s gang carried our their first train robbery at Adair, Iowa.

1919: Anthony Fokker established airplane factories in Hamburg and Amsterdam.

1919: A dirigible crashed through the skylight of a Chicago bank, killing 13 people.

1940: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were annexed by Soviet Union.

1951: The Dalai Lama returned to Tibet.

1960: Francis Chichester docked in New York in Gypsy Moth II, setting a new record of 40 days for a solo Atlantic crossing.

1968: Jan Janssen became the first Dutchman to win the Tour de France.

1969: Neil Armstrong became the first man to step on to the moon.

1972: Two passenger trains collided head-on in Seville, Spain, with the loss of 76 lives.

1978: President Hugo Banzer of Bolivia fled during a military soup led by General Juan Pereda. He returned to power in 1997.

1989: Mike Tyson knocked out Carl williams after only 93 seconds to retain his world heavyweight crown.

1989: Comedian Ken Dodd walked free after 23-day trial in which he was cleared of defrauding the Inland Revenue.

1994: Tony Blair became the youngest man to be elected leader of the Labour Party. He promised “new politics to take us into a new millennium”.

1995: American golfer Arnold Palmer paid an emotional farewell to St Andrews, 35 years after playing his first Open at the Old Course.

2001: At the conclusion of a fireworks display on Okura Beach in Akashi, Japan, 11 people were killed and more than 120 injured when a pedestrian footbridge became overcrowded and people leaving the event fell down in a domino effect.

2005: Four terrorist bombings, occurring exactly two weeks after the similar 7 July bombings, targeted London’s public transport system. All four bombs failed to detonate and all four suspected suicide bombers were captured and later convicted and imprisoned for long terms.

2007: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final book in the series by JK Rowling, was published.

2008: Bosnian-Serb war criminal Radovan Karadzic was arrested in Serbia and indicted by a United Nations tribunal.

2010: In parts of Scotland, a month’s worth of rain fell in just ten hours, causing flooding in 100 homes and businesses in Perth.