A look at events through history on April 16 with Mike Badham

1746: Bonnie Prince Charlie was beaten at the battle of Culloden by a mixed English and Scottish army.

1828: Slapdash Spanish painter Goya died. When on form, he could paint your portrait in two hours.

1844: Writer Anatole France - real name Jacques Thibault - was born. By dint of borrowing books and not returning them, and never lending any, he built up a good library. He got the Nobel Prize for literature in 1921. When he died, they found his brain weighed only 80 per cent of normal.

1867: American pioneer flyer Wilbur Wright was born. He was killed in a flying accident in 1912, the same year that on this day US pilot Harriet Quimby became the first woman to fly the Channel.

1889: Charlie Chaplin was born in South London. After his father drank himself to death, the family was destitute and Charlie had to make a living as a boy actor. He got into films after he went to America with Fred Karno's Mumming Birds before the First World War. By the 1920s his was the world's best-known face. He had a weakness for young girls - marrying four of them - and lost a paternity case although a blood test exonerated him. He never took US citizenship, and was knighted not long before his 1977 death. 1918: Arch-Goon Spike Milligan was born in India, son of a British soldier.

1921: Actor and playwright Peter Ustinov was born.

1926: The most popular freak in Ringling's Circus died in New York. Billed as the Missing Link, she was covered in hair and had a face like an ape. But she was much more intelligent, being fluent in seven languages.

1926: The first book-of-the-month club selection went out to members. It was The Loving Huntsman by Sylvia Townsend.

1941: London was bombed by 500 German planes.

1944: The RAF bombed Rumania for the first time from Italian bases.

1945: The RAF sank Germany's last pocket battleship, Lutzow, in the Baltic.

1954: The first British stock car race was held at Old Kent Road Stadium in London.

1972: US spacecraft Apollo 16 was launched.

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