Reuters historical calendar - March 6

London, Mar 5 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on March 6 since 1900: 1900 - Gottlieb Daimler, the German engineer who improved the internal combustion engine and made the first motorcycle, died.

1930 - Pre-packaged frozen food produced by the company set up by Clarence Birdseye went on sale for the first time in Springfield, Massachusetts.

1953 - Georgy Malenkov succeeded Joseph Stalin as premier and first secretary of the Soviet Communist Party.

1957 - Ghana became independent.

1964 - King Constantine II of Greece acceded to the throne after the death of his father, Paul I.

1973 - Pearl Buck, American author of ''The Good Earth'' and winner of the 1938 Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938, died 1983 - Donald Maclean, former British diplomat and Soviet spy, died in Moscow.

1987 - The roll-on roll-off ferry Herald of Free Enterprise capsized on its way out of Zeebrugge harbour in Belgium, drowning 193 people.

1997 - Michael Manley, former prime minister of Jamaica, died.

1999 - The last Khmer Rouge guerrilla leader still at large, Ta Mok, was arrested close to northern Cambodia's border with Thailand.

2001 - An explosion ripped through a primary school in a village in Jiangxi province, China, killing 41 people.

2003 - A Boeing 737-200 belonging to the state-owned national airline Air Algerie crashed after take-off from Tamanrasset airport killing 102 passengers and crew.

2004 - Frances Dee, widow of the Western movie hero Joel McCrea and one of the last stars from Hollywood's Golden Age, died aged 94. Dee co-starred with the likes of Gary Cooper, Bette Davis, Frederic March, Katharine Hepburn and John Wayne.

2005 - Nobel physics laureate Hans Bethe, who fled Nazi Germany and became a key figure in the development of the first atomic bomb, died at his home in Ithaca, New York aged 98.

2005 - Gladys Marin, the long-time head of Chile's small communist party and a leader in the fight against a 1973-1990 military dictatorship, died aged 63.

REUTERS PG PC1152