A look back at events in history on June 25 with Mike Badham

1646: The Cavalier stronghold of Oxford surrendered to the Roundheads, thus ending the English Civil War.

1803: The Australian Sydney Gazette reported that a man watched as a child drowned in a pond near his house. Later he found out it was one of his own children.

1867: Barbed wire was patented in the US. Soon vast tracts of the country were crisscrossed by the new invention as cattle barons carved up their territories. It later became a significanmt factor in the development of trench warfare: firstly in the American Civil War and later in World War On.

1876: General Custer made his last stand at the Little Big Horn. Foolishly attacking a vast horde of Indians with only 264 men, the man they called "Yellow Hair" was killed along with every one of his cavalrymen. 1903: George Orwell was born Eirc Blair in India. Educated at Eton, he joined the Burmese colonial police, but became disenchanted withh the British Empire. He looked on it as a vast money-making swindle. After spells as a tramp and hotel washer-up, he fought in the Spanish Civil War. Later he became a journalist and worked at the wartime BBC. In 1948 he wrote his most famous books: Animal Farm and 1984. Many of the latter's dire predictions have come to pass.

1940: German troops were issued with English phrasebooks in preparation for the invasion of Britain.

1942: General Claude (The Auk) Auchinleck took command of the Eigth Army in North Africa.

1945: The UN was created in San Francisco.1950: The Korean War began when North Korea attacked South Korea. Due to a mistake, the Russians were absent from the UN Security Council, and it voted to send troops. The Russians would have vetoed this. The war went on for three years and killed two million people.

1951: The first colour TV programmes went out in the US.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.