NOW & THEN
NOVEMBER 12
1094: King Duncan II of Scotland was killed at the Battle of Monthechin.
1603: Sir Walter Raleigh went on trial in Winchester for high treason.
1660: John Bunyan, author of A Pilgrim’s Progress, was jailed for preaching without a licence.
1793: The first mayor of Paris, Jean Sylvain Bailly, was guillotined.
1847: Bathgate-born Sir James Young Simpson was first to use chloroform as an anaesthetic.
1859: Jules Leotard, who designed the garment named after him, performed the first trapeze circus act.
1867: First political party conference held by Conservatives at Freemason’s Tavern, Great Queen Street, London.
1869: Edinburgh University admitted women to the study of medicine, the first college in Britain to do so.
1902: Enrico Caruso, the Italian tenor, recorded On With The Motley. It became the first record to reach one million sales.
1912: The remains of Captain Robert Scott, EA Wilson and HR Bowers, who died on their journey from the South Pole, were discovered.
1918: The Republic of Austria was declared, thus ending the Habsburg dynasty.
1927: Leon Trotsky expelled from Communist Party in Russia, and Joseph Stalin became undisputed ruler.
1927: The first veteran car rally from London to Brighton took place, with 51 entries.
1927: The first automatic telephone service came into operation, in London.
1928: The New Oxford Theatre, the first cinema outside the US to show talking pictures, opened in Manchester.
1933: Nazis dominated German elections.
1937: Japanese troops occupied Chinese city of Shanghai.
1941: Soviet troops halted Germans at outskirts of Moscow.
1942: Tobruk fell to the Allies.
1944: RAF bombers sank the German battleship Tirpitz at Tromso Fjord, Norway.
1951: Come Dancing was first transmitted on BBC television.
1956: An iceberg bigger than Belgium found in South Pacific.
1965: Ferdinand Marcos was elected the tenth president of the Philippines.
1069: Author Alexander Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Writer ’ Union.
1982: Yuri Andropov succeeded Brezhnev as Soviet leader.
1987: Van Gogh’s Irises sold for a world record £30.2 million.
1990: Cullen report on Piper Alpha disaster (6 July, 1988) criticised Occidental oil company and Department of Energy over death of 167 workers.
1990: Crown prince Akihido was formally installed as emperor Akihido of Japan.
1996: 350 people died when a Saudi Airlines Boeing 747 and a Kazakh Airlines Ilyshin 76 collided in mid-air over India.
2001: In New York City, American Airlines Flight 587, an Airbus A300 en route to the Dominican Republic, crashed minutes after take-off from JFK, killing all 260 on board and five on the ground.
2010: Holiday company Pontin’s called in the administrators.