On this day: Kristallnacht in Germany

Crowds stormed Checkpoint Charlie in 1989 after the East German government said it would open the Iron Curtain border. Picture: Getty

9 November

1769: The first Co-operative Society in Britain was founded by weavers of Fenwick in Ayrshire.

1847: Doctor James Young Simpson delivered Wilhemina Carstairs in Edinburgh, the first child to be born with the aid of anaesthesia.

1859: Flogging was banned in the British Army.

1888: Jack the Ripper’s fifth and final victim, Mary Jane Kelly, was found dead in her room in London.

1918: Kaiser abdicated and fled to Holland.

1922: Nazi SS was officially founded in Germany.

1937: Japanese troops took Shanghai.

1938: Kristallnacht in Germany, when Nazis burned 267 synagogues and destroyed thousands of Jewish homes and businesses.

1950: Ice blocks reputed to be the size of dinner plates fell out of the Devon sky – a shower of frozen meteors weighing up to 15oz each. One of them beheaded a sheep.

1956: The rising in Hungary was crushed.

1960: John F Kennedy, at 43, was elected the youngest United States president.

1962: United States completed emergency airlift of arms and ammunition to India in that nation’s border war with China.

1963: Coal mine explosion at Umuta, Japan, killed 452 miners and injured 450.

1965: The biggest power cut in United States history blacked out sections of New York and nine other states. There was a significant increase in births nine months later.

1965: Act abolishing capital punishment in UK came into effect.

1979: A computer fault led to a full-scale nuclear alert in the United States.

1989: The East German government announced the opening of the Iron Curtain border, including the Berlin Wall. Crowds stormed Checkpoint Charlie.

1990: Mary Robinson, a 46-year-old lawyer, became the first woman president of the Republic of Ireland.

1994: The £180 million Health Care International Hospital in Clydebank went into receivership five months after opening, with the loss of £30 million of taxpayers’ money.

2010: The anti-tobacco group ASH Scotland released a report which revealed that smoking cost the country £1.1 billion a year.

BIRTHDAYS

Bill Martin, Scottish songwriter, 75; Karen Dotrice, British actress, 58; John Doyle, Scottish theatre director, 61; David Duval, American golfer, 42; Lou Ferrigno, American actor, 62; Sir Ronald Harwood CBE, South African playwright and novelist, 79; Nick Lachey, American singer, 40; Roger McGough CBE, British poet, 76; Marina Warner CBE, British cultural historian, critic and novelist, 67; Viscount Weir, chairman, Weir Group 1983-99, 80; Tom Weiskopf, golfer, 71.

ANNIVERSARIES

Births: 1818 Ivan Turgenev, Russian novelist and dramatist; 1841 King Edward VII; 1913 Hedy Lamarr, American film actress; 1926 Hugh Leonard, playwright; 1934 Carl Sagan, American physicist and astronomer; 1961 Jill Dando, television presenter.

Deaths: 1937 James Ramsay MacDonald, prime minister; 1951 Sigmund Romberg, Hungarian-born composer; 1953 Dylan Thomas, poet and author; 1970 Charles de Gaulle, former French president; 2001 Dorothy Dunnett, novelist and painter; 2012 William “Bill” Tarmey, actor (Coronation Street’s Jack Duckworth).