NOW & THEN
NOVEMBER 26
1688: French king Louis XIV declared war on the Netherlands.
1789: First national Thanksgiving Day in the United States. 1832: HMS Beagle, with Charles Darwin aboard, left Tahiti bound for New Zealand.
1857: First Australian parliament opened in Melbourne. 1859: The final weekly instalment of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities was published in the literary periodical All The Year Round, which was founded and owned by Dickens himself. 1901: Britain and Italy signed an agreement fixing the border between their colonies of Eritrea and Sudan.
1912: Ten people died as a severe south-westerly gale hit the west of Scotland. Troon suffered the worst flooding in its history, with four feet of water covering all streets in the vicinity of the Cross.
1914: HMS Bulwark blew up in Sheerness Harbour, Kent, killing 700.
1922: Howard Carter and the Earl of Carnarvon became the first men to see inside the tomb of Tutankhamen, near Luxor, since it was sealed 3,000 years before.
1940: Half a million Jews in Warsaw, Poland, were ordered by Nazi Germany to live within a walled ghetto.
1942: Soviet forces counterattacked at Stalingrad, ending the Second World War siege and forcing Germans to retreat. 1945 Brief Encounter, starring Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson, was released.
1949: India adopted the constitution as a federal republic within the British Commonwealth. 1966: The world’s first major tidal power station was opened at St Malo, France.
1969: The rock band Cream gave their farewell concert at the Royal Albert Hall, London. 1970: A Bolivian painter, disguised as a priest, tried to kill Pope Paul in Manila, Philippines, but the pontiff escaped injury. 1972: Race Relations Act came into force in Britain. Employers could no longer discriminate on grounds of colour.
1978: Muslim religious leaders and politicians seeking to topple Shah of Iran called general strike that virtually paralysed Iran. 1979: The International Olympic committee re-admitted China after 21 years.
1981: Shirley Williams became the first MP elected under SDP banner when she won the Crosby by-election.
1987: Typhoon in Philippines killed 270 people and damaged or destroyed 14,000 homes. 1992: The Queen agreed to pay income tax on her personal fortune, council tax on Balmoral and Sandringham and contribute more to the Royal Family budget.
2008: Woolworths, the high street retailer which had been trading since 1909, went into administration.
2008: Gunmen carried out a series of co-ordinated attacks across the Indian city of Mumbai (Bombay), killing almost 200 people and injuring around 300. 2012: Ten children were killed and 15 people injured when a Syrian government jet dropped a cluster bomb on a playground.