Four years later, Kempton Bunton, a retired bus driver, claimed he had taken the painting as a protest against the BBC licence fee, but in 1969 his son confessed to the theft. The Second World War fighter ace died in 1998 aged 82, when he was murdered by an armed home intruder in 1959 Hawaii became the 50th US state, having become a US territory in 1898 in 1961 Francisco Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington was stolen from the National Gallery, London, the first theft from the gallery. Since 1987 Pooh, Eeyore, Piglet, Kanga and Tigger have been on display at New York Public Library in 1944 representatives from the UK, the US and the Soviet Union took the first step, with the Dumbarton Oaks Conversations, that led to the establishment of the United Nations in 1953 an 83,235ft-altitude record was set in a Douglas Skyrocket research aircraft by US Marine Corps pilot Major Marion E Carl. AA Milne, his father, based the Winnie-the-Pooh stories on his son’s childhood toys.

In 1921 Christopher Robin received an Alpha Farnell teddy bear, bought from Harrods department store, from his parents for his first birthday. Originally intended for use in gun barrels, the cast was eventually made into cutlery blades in 1940 Leon Trotsky, the Marxist revolutionary, was struck in the head with an ice axe in Mexico while in exile from the Soviet Union, and died the next day, aged 60 in 1940 Winston Churchill, the prime minister, praised Battle of Britain pilots in a speech to parliament, saying: “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few”. In 1897 the physician Sir Ronald Ross made the significant discovery of malaria parasites while dissecting a mosquito that had been fed four days previously on a malarious patient in 1913 (chromium) stainless steel was first cast in Sheffield.

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