On This Day: Oil tanker Torrey Canyon was shipwrecked off the Cornish coast and spilled 120,000 tons of oil

March 18: The oil tanker Torrey Canyon ran on to rocks in between Cornwall and the Scilly Isles causing 120,000 tons of crude oil to gush into the sea.

The Liberian-registered ship, seen here in this Pathe clip from 1967, struck the Seven Stones reef.

The mostly Italian crew boarded lifeboats and made their way to safety in Penzance, watched by crowds of onlookers.

To help disperse the oil, a flotilla of boats were sent out spray detergent on it and to try to float the ship off the reef.

The narrator on the clip says: "Then the drama took a fatal turn. An engine room explosion blew a hole through the deck."

The explosion killed the captain of the Dutch salvage mission - but the clean-up operation continued.

The narrator continues: "In home waters no oil menace on anything like this scale has ever occurred."

The ship had departed from Kuwait and was heading for Wales but it struck Pollard's Rock off the Cornish coast after the Italian captain attempted a short cut. He was blamed for the disaster.

Oil leaked along 120miles of Cornish coast and 50 miles of French coast, killing more than 20,000 sea birds and huge numbers of marine life.

Ten days after the accident the Fleet Air Arm bombed the wreck continuously for two days, dropping 42 bombs onto the ship in an effort to sink it. Although the operation was a success the Navy was criticised as a quarter of the bombs spectacularly missed the stationary target.

After the bombing the Royal Air Force dropped petrol on the affected region to burn off the oil.

Nineteen days after the disaster, oil drifted onto the coast of western Guernsey. The oil was removed and dumped into a quarry - and remains there to this day.

The disaster is widely regarded as the world's first major marine oil spill and ecological disaster. It remains Britain's worst oil spill.