27th May

[chenrezig]

1153 Malcolm IV became King of Scotland. He was noted for his religious zeal and interest in knighthood and warfare. For much of his reign he was in poor health and died, unmarried, at the age of twenty-four.

1657 Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell refused parliament's offer of the title King of England.

1679 Britain passed the Habeas Corpus Act which made it illegal to hold anyone in prison without a trial.

1849 The Great Hall of Euston station in London was opened. It was the first inter-city railway station to be built in London.

1897 The birth of John Cockcroft, the English nuclear physicist who split the atom.

1914 Joseph Wilson Swan, British electric lamp inventor, died. Swan received a British patent for his device in 1878, about a year before the American, Thomas Edison.

1919 Oil was struck at Britain's first on-shore oilfield of three wells, at Hardstoft, near Tibshelf in Derbyshire.

1936 Britain's 80,733 tonne liner Queen Mary left Southampton on her maiden voyage to New York with more than 1800 passengers.

1941 World War II: Royal Naval ships Dorsetshire, King George V and Rodney attacked and sank the German battleship Bismarck in the Atlantic after it had been damaged by torpedoes dropped by British aircraft from HMS Ark Royal.

1955 Anthony Eden's Conservatives won the general election with a clear majority, ending a five-year political stalemate.

1975 The Dibbles Bridge coach crash occurred near Grassington in North Yorkshire. 33 people were killed; the highest ever death toll in a road accident in the United Kingdom. An inquest said that the accident was caused by the inability of the driver to negotiate the bend, owing to deficient brakes on the coach.

1986 Irish-born singer Bob Geldof was made an honorary Knight of the Realm by Queen Elizabeth II for his efforts to raise money for the starving of Africa.

1994 Alexander Solzhenitsyn flew back to his native Russia after 20 years living in exile.

1998 18 year old Michael Owen became the youngest ever England international goalscorer with the only goal in a 1-0 friendly against Morocco in Casablanca.

2000 Scottish farmers who accidentally planted genetically modified seeds said they would fight for compensation.

2008 Hundreds of lorry drivers protested in London over the continuing rising cost of fuel and a two-mile line of lorries crawled along the M4 towards Cardiff.

2014 34 year old Edward McKenzie-Green, former head of counter-fraud at Oxfam, was jailed for more than two years after using fake companies to defraud Oxfam of more than £64,000.

[annie]

tha22222

[wendy]

I never knew oliver Cromwell got so close to crown

[Rosalind]

go90 tha22222