NEWS: Yuri Gagarin

Clips of Yuri Gagarin's visit to Manchester in 1961 following his successful attempt at becoming the first person to travel into space. Click here.

Born in the small village of Klushino, in Smolensk, Gugarin's roots were as humble as it gets. His father was a carpenter and his mother a dairy maid working on a collective farm. They lost their house in 1941 as the German army advanced through Russia and were forced to scrape out a living in a dugout in the garden.

When the Red Army liberated the village in 1944, Yuri finally went to school and decided he wanted to continue studying rather than stay in the countryside. But lacking the necessary years of schooling he couldn't enrol in an academic school, so he attended a vocational school in Lubertsy, attached to a steel works, and started training as a foundry man.

He joined the Saratov Aero Club where he spent his spare time and learned to fly light aircraft. Graduating age 20, he was recommended for the Orenburg Military Aviation School, joining the Soviet air force as a pilot in 1956.

Five years on, and as the face of the Soviet cosmonaught programme, Gagarin's life would change dramatically from the moment he ejected by parachute at a height of seven kilometres.

His space flight made him a national hero and worldwide celebrity. He travelled widely to promote the achievements of the Soviet Union and longed to fly again, but as a national hero was banned from further space flights.

He trained several other cosmonauts, and enrolled at the Zhukovsky Institute of Aeronautical Engineering in 1965, graduating with honours having designed a fixed-wing spacecraft similar to the US space shuttle.

In March 1968 while on a routine test flight in a MIG-15 Gagarin's plane crashed, killing him and his co-pilot outright. He was 34.