Exxon Valdez had only recently departed the Valdez Marine Terminal when the captain, Joseph Hazelwood, left Third Mate Gregory Cousins in charge of steering the vessel while he retired to his quarters.

On the 23rd March 1540, Waltham Abbey in Essex became the last abbey to be dissolved by Henry VIII.

Put on for an audience of 200 invited attendees at the “Society for the Development of the National Industry”, the reaction to the moving black-and-white pictures caught the brothers by surprise.

On the 21st March 1556, Thomas Cranmer was executed for heresy.

By the start of the 17th century merchants from the Dutch Republic had begun to undertake voyages to the ‘Spice Islands’ of the Indian Ocean.

On the 19th March 1962, American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan released his eponymous debut album.

The industrial revolution, combined with the first of the Enclosure Acts, had seen the earnings of poor farmers plummet.

On the 17th March 1766, the first recorded St Patrick’s Day parade took place…in New York.

Anti-Semitic attacks spread across England and reached York in March 1190.

On the 15th March 44BCE, Roman dictator Julius Caesar was stabbed to death near to the Theatre of Pompey in Rome.

Gold records were originally presented to artists by their own label, primarily as a form of self-congratulatory publicity.

On the 13th March 1881, Tsar Alexander II of Russia was assassinated in a St Petersburg street by a member of the People’s Will revolutionary movement.

Andrew Watson’s father, Peter Miller Watson, was the manager of a sugar plantation in British Guiana while his mother was a local woman called Anna (or Hannah) Rose.

On the 11th March 1918 the first confirmed case of what was to become known as Spanish Flu was identified at Camp Funston in Fort Riley, a huge military facility in Kansas.