Happy Anniversary: Desperate Dan and Charlie Chaplin make their debuts

SEVEN notable days in the coming week, with the anniversaries that other diaries fail to reach.

29 November

1929: US Admiral Richard Byrd and his pilot Bernt Balchen become the first to fly over the South Pole.

1945: Yugoslavia becomes a Communist republic.

30 November

Feast day of St Andrew, patron saint of Scotland and Russia, who died around 60AD and whose head was given to the Pope by Thomas Palaeologus in 1461.

Birthday of John Bunyan (1628), Jonathan Swift (1667) and Mark Twain (as Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835).

1872: England draw 0-0 with Scotland in the first international football match.

1913: Charles Chaplin makes screen debut in the Mack Sennett comedy Making a Living.

1935: Non-belief in Nazism becomes grounds for divorce in Germany.

1955: Floodlights used for the first time at Wembley Stadium.

1 December

1635: Samuel Pepys marries Elizabeth St Michel.

1919: Lady Astor becomes the first woman MP to take her seat at Westminster. She was not, however, the first woman to be elected (as we mistakenly reported last week), having been preceded by Constance Georgina Markiewicz, who never took her seat.

1952: George Jorgenson, formerly of the US armed forces, becomes the first person to have a sex-change operation.

1953: First edition of Playboy is published, with Marilyn Monroe as centrefold.

1966: First special Christmas stamps issued by the Post Office.

2 December

1929: Twenty-two public telephone boxes, the first in Britain, come into operation.

1942: The world's first nuclear chain reaction is produced at Chicago University.

3 December

Feast Day of St Birinus, a 7th- century bishop of Dorchester, who had planned to evangelise the Midlands, but who stayed among the West Saxons because he found them so pagan.

1910: Neon lighting is first displayed, at the Paris Motor Show.

1920: Rudyard Kipling receives pounds 2 damages for unauthorised use of a quotation from his poem If in a medical advertisement.

1961: Henri Matisse's painting Le Bateau is put the right way up after hanging upside-down for 46 days without anyone noticing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

4 December

Feast Day of virgin-martyr St Barbara, who, according to legend, was shut in a tower by her father Dioscorus so no man should see her; but princes still sought her hand in marriage. She became a Christian while her father was away, and lived as a hermit.

1154: Nicholas Breakspear becomes Adrian IV, the only English Pope.

1921: 'Fatty' Arbuckle, silent film comedian, is found not guilty of rape and manslaughter.

1934: UK rail fares cut to a penny a mile.

1937: First appearance of Desperate Dan in the Dandy comic.

1961: Contraceptive pills become available on the NHS.

1988: Lorin Maazel conducts all nine Beethoven symphonies in a single day.

5 December

1697: First Sunday service in the rebuilt St Paul's Cathedral.

1766: James Christie holds his first auction in London.

1839: Postage ceases to be dependent on distance. A standard rate of 4d for each half-ounce is instituted.

1933: End of prohibition in US.

1958: The Queen calls the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, making the first direct-dialled trunk call.