On this day: James Earl Ray jailed for Martin Luthar King murder

On this day in 1969 James Earl Ray pleaded guilty to murdering civil rights leader Martin Luther King

1624: England declared war on Spain.

1801: First British Census began.

1814: Napoleon Bonaparte was forced to withdraw at Battle of Laon, France.

1863: Edward, Prince of Wales, married Alexandra of Denmark. The day before, Queen Victoria took Edward and his bride to Prince Albert’s mausoleum where she solemnly announced: “He gives you his blessing.”

1886: Cruft’s Dog Show, organised by Charles Cruft, general manager of a dog biscuit firm, moved to London. All 600 entries were terriers. The first show took place in Newcastle in 1859.

1893: French colonies of French Guinea and Ivory Coast were formally established.

1906: Bakerloo Line on London’s Underground opened.

1910: The first film made in Hollywood was released, DW Griffiths’s In Old California.

1915: The Battle of Neuve Chapelle began.

1935: Hitler renounced the Versailles Treaty of 1919 and ordered conscription in Germany.

1942: Rangoon, Burma, fell to Japanese forces.

1952: Soviet Union proposed four-power conference on unification and disarmament of Germany.

1961: Bradshaw Monthly Railway Guide was published for the last time. It had been in existence since 1839.

1969: James Earl Ray pleaded guilty to murdering American civil rights leader Martin Luther King and was jailed for 99 years.

1977: The rings of the planet Uranus were seen for the first time when it passed in front of a star.

1988: The Prince of Wales narrowly escaped death in an avalanche at Klosters, Switzerland. Major Hugh Lindsay, a former equerry to the Queen, was killed and Mrs Patty Palmer-Tomkinson was seriously injured.

1989: About 100,000 workers moved into Iraq’s war-battered southern port of Basra to hasten reconstruction of what once was called the “Venice of the East”.

1990: Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft was sentenced to death in Iraq as an alleged spy. He was executed five days later.

1991: 500,000 people rallied in Moscow in support of the Russian president, Boris Yeltsin.

1992: Norman Lamont, the chancellor, announced a new income tax band of 20p in the pound for the first £2,000 of taxable income.

1995: The Scottish Labour Party conference backed Tony Blair’s proposal to scrap Clause 4 on common ownership by a large majority.

2008: A Met Office expert claimed that Scotland would be hit by an increase in flash floods due to climate change.

2009: The Prince of Wales was accused of “exploiting people” with a detox product in his “Duchy” range by a leading academic who branded the product “a dangerous waste of money”.

2010: It was revealed that sales of Buckfast tonic wine had soared by 40 per cent in the past year in England due to youths copying the hard-drinking antics of Scottish teenagers.