June 7

Three days after the crusaders got in, Kerbogha, atabeg of Mosul, arrived with a coalition army and shut them inside the city they had just taken. Some of the leaders slipped over the walls by rope and fled.

The Fatimids of Egypt had taken Jerusalem from the Seljuks only the year before, and their governor Iftikhar al-Dawla had poisoned the wells outside. Timber from Genoese ships broken up at Jaffa built the siege towers.

Castile and Portugal split the world outside Europe along a meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands. Portugal had pushed the Pope's line west, and so later got Brazil. No one could measure longitude, so no one knew where the line ran.

Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds and Sheffield got their own MPs for the first time, and rotten boroughs lost theirs. The vote went to middle-class men of property; the workers who had marched at Peterloo were still left out.

He held a first-class ticket to Pretoria. A white passenger objected, and when Gandhi refused to move to the van compartment a constable pushed him off. He sat through the cold night in the waiting room: “It would be cowardice to run back to India without fulfilling my obligation.” He stayed and…

Officially bound for the Arctic by way of Cape Horn and the Bering Strait, to drift across the North Pole in the ice as Nansen had done. After Cook and Peary both claimed that Pole in 1909, Amundsen secretly turned south. Only a handful of men were told before Madeira.

On a third attempt the snow slope below the North Col broke away and swept nine porters over an ice cliff. Seven were killed: Thankay, Sangay, Temba, Lhakpa, Pasang Namgya and Pema, who were Sherpas, and Norbu, a Bhotia. Mallory blamed himself. They were the first recorded deaths on Everest.

American code-breakers had read enough of Japan’s naval code to know the target and the date. On the morning of 4 June dive bombers from Enterprise and Yorktown set three carriers ablaze in minutes, and a fourth that afternoon. Japan lost four fleet carriers; the Americans lost one.

187 women who sewed car-seat covers at Ford walked out when their work was graded less skilled than men’s. With car production stopped, Employment Secretary Barbara Castle brokered a rise to 92 per cent of the men’s rate. Her Equal Pay Act followed in 1970, in force from the end of 1975.

The first American woman to walk in space became the first woman at the bottom of the ocean, diving with Vescovo. Back on the ship she took a call from the crew of the International Space Station.