On This Day - 5th October
1796 Spain declared war on Britain in the Napoleonic Wars.
1895 The first individual time trial for racing cyclists was held on a 50 mile course north of London.
1917 Sir Arthur Lee donated Chequers in Buckinghamshire to the nation as a permanent country retreat for British Prime Ministers.
1927 At its conference in Blackpool, the Labour Party voted to nationalise the coal industry.
1930 The British airship R101 crashed at the edge of a wood near Beauvais in France en route to India on its maiden voyage, killing 48 of the 54 passengers, including the British Air Minister Lord Thompson who may well have contributed to the disaster. He brought luggage on board equivalent to the weight of about 24 people, and the crash of the 777 foot craft was thought to be a result of overloading.
1933 Gordon Richards, English champion jockey, rode his 12th consecutive win in 3 days.
1936 The start of the 'Jarrow March' - around 200 unemployed shipyard workers
from Jarrow in north east England began walking to London to protest about
the lack of jobs. The protestors arrived on 31st October. This Bronze sculpture. The Spirit of Jarrow by Graham Ibbeson (see 
picture) was unveiled in Jarrow Town Centre in 2001 as a memorial to the 1936 Jarrow March. Only men participated in the historic march, apart from Jarrow's female MP, Ellen Wilkinson.
1958 Cliff Richard & The Shadows played their first gig together (Victoria Hall, Hanley).
1962 In Britain, an emerging pop group, 'The Beatles' released their first hit record 'Love Me Do'.
1962 Dr. No, the first James Bond film, was released. Based on the 1958 Ian Fleming novel of the same name it starred Sean Connery as the secret agent 007. The film was produced with a low budget, the first of a successful series of 22 Bond films. A 23rd - 'Skyfall', with Daniel Craig as James Bond was premiered in London on 23rd October 2012, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the series.
1967 For the first time in Britain, a court in Brighton accepted a 'majority verdict' from a jury instead of the usual 'unanimous verdict' required previously.
1968 Police baton charged civil rights demonstrators in Derry, Northern Ireland – considered to mark the beginning of The Troubles in Northern Ireland.
1969 The first episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus aired on BBC. In all, 45 episodes were created over four series, from 1969 to 1974, plus two episodes for German TV. The series' theme song was the first segment of John Philip Sousa's The Liberty Bell, chosen because it was in the public domain and was free to use without charge.
1974 IRA bombs killed 5 and injured 65 in two public houses in Guildford, Surrey, England.
1975 The birth, in Reading, Berkshire of Kate Winslet, English actress and the youngest person to accrue six Academy Award nominations. She achieved worldwide recognition for her leading role in Titanic (1997), the highest grossing film at the time.
1984 Police and Customs in Essex seized Britain's biggest ever haul of cannabis made in a single raid, (4.3 tons), with an estimated street value of almost £11 million.
1984 Leonard Rossiter, actor, (Rising Damp, and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin) died at the age of 57 from a heart attack.
1999 The Ladbroke Grove rail crash in West London, (also known as the Paddington train crash) killed 31 people and injured more than 520 when two trains collided after one driver passed signals that were showing red.
2015 The government imposed a new law in England, which required that all supermarkets (or large businesses employing 250 or more full-time equivalent employees in total) must levy a charge of 5p per 'single-use' plastic carrier bag used by customers, including plastic bags used for deliveries.