On this day: Ayrton Senna wins fourth successive Grand Prix

On this day in 1991, in Monte Carlo, Ayrton Senna won his fourth successive Grand Prix. Picture: Getty

Events, birthdays and anniversaries on 12 May.

1536: Sir Francis Weston, Mark Smeaton and other alleged paramours of Queen Anne Boleyn went on trial for treason.

1608: Protestant Union of German princes opposing Catholic bloc was formed at Anhausen.

1679: Reverend James Kirkwood, the father of public libraries in Scotland, became minister of Minto.

1725: The Black Watch was commissioned under General Wade as the Independent Companies to police the Highlands.

1780: Charlestown fell to the British during the American Revolutionary War.

1915: Forces of South Africa’s Louis Botha occupied Windhoek, capital of German Southwest Africa.

1926: The General Strike in Britain ended after nine days.

1926: Josef Pilsudski staged coup in Poland.

1932: The kidnapped baby son of aviator Charles Lindbergh was found dead.

1935: Alcoholics Anonymous was founded by William Wilson in Ohio.

1937: The Coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth took place in Westminster Abbey.

1942: Russians opened Kharkov offensive.

1949: The USSR lifted its blockade of Berlin after 11 months. It had cost the Allies £200million to fly in food and essential supplies.

1951: The first H-bomb test on Eniwetok Atoll in the mid-Pacific proved it was possible to destroy a city more than 100 times the size of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

1969: The voting age in Britain was lowered to 18.

1982: The QE2 sailed to join the Falklands Task Force.

1988: World Health Organisation said more than 34,000 Aids cases had been reported worldwide.

1990: At a Baltic summit, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania revived a 1934 political alliance, hoping a united front would crack Soviet resistance to the republics’ attempts to break away from the Soviet Union.

1990: A 1,000-tonne oil slick leaked from the Liberian tanker Rose Bay, which was in collision with a trawler in the Channel.

1991: In Monte Carlo, Ayrton Senna won his fourth successive Grand Prix.

1992: The Queen made a historic first speech to the European parliament in Strasbourg.

2003: Clare Short, the international development secretary, quit the Cabinet and accused the prime minister, Tony Blair, of endangering Labour’s achievements through his “obsessive” pursuit of a place in history.

2009: A rare blue diamond sold for a record 10.5million Swiss francs (£6.2million) at auction in Geneva. It weighed 7.03 carats, was smaller than a penny piece, and was one of only a handful of blue diamonds in existence.