On this day: Raith Rovers win Coca Cola Cup


27 November
1582: William Shakespeare, 18, married Anne Hathaway.
1703: More than 8,000 people died in 24 hours, and over 800 churches and 400 windmills were destroyed in a great storm. At least 300 vessels were lost at sea or smashed at their moorings, and the first Eddystone Lighthouse disappeared.
1879: French Chamber was moved from Versailles to Paris.
1914: The first two trained policewomen to be granted official status in Britain, Miss Mary Allen and Miss EF Harburn, reported for duty at Grantham, Lincolnshire.
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Hide Ad1919: Bulgaria signed First World War peace treaty which yielded territory to Greece and Yugoslavia.
1940: Germany annexed French province of Lorraine.
1948: Clement Attlee, the prime minister, appointed the Lynskey Tribunal to investigate charges of corruption against ministers and officials.
1961: Soviet Union proposed immediate ban on nuclear testing without international controls.
1962: Britain agreed to provide arms to India to resist Chinese aggression.
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Hide Ad1975: Ross McWhirter, co-editor with his twin brother of The Guinness Book Of Records, was killed by IRA gunmen at his London home.
1990: John Major, at 47 years old, became Britain’s youngest prime minister this century.
1991: A 15th century Bible fetched £1.1m at Christie’s – bought by a New York antiquarian bookseller.
1994: Raith Rovers caused a major football upset when they beat Celtic in a penalty shoot-out to win the Coca Cola Cup – their first major trophy.
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Hide Ad1995: The Appeal Court in London upheld the convictions of four men who took part in illegal share-fixing that helped Guinness win control of Distillers.
1996: A fifth person died in an E coli food poisoning outbreak linked to a butcher’s shop in Wishaw, Lanarkshire. Twenty people would die in the outbreak.
2001: Hours after being sworn in as Scotland’s first minister to succeed Henry McLeish, Jack McConnell sacked almost half of the Labour Cabinet. Four senior ministers were dismissed and another resigned.
2009: The world’s top golfer, Tiger Woods, suffered facial injuries after he suffered a car crash outside his Florida home. In the aftermath of the accident, revelations about Woods’s private life emerged.
BIRTHDAYS
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Hide AdAndrea Catherwood, television presenter and journalist, 46; John Alderton, actor, 73; Rodney Bewes, actor, 75; Charlie Burchill, Glasgow-born rock guitarist (Simple Minds), 54; Robin Givens, actress, 49; Viktoria Mullova, violinist, 54; Alec Newman, Glasgow-born actor and singer, 38; Alan Simpson OBE, scriptwriter and author, 84.
ANNIVERSARIES
Births: 1701 Anders Celsius, Swedish astronomer who created the centigrade temperature scale; 1758 Mary Robinson, actress and writer; 1874 Chaim Weizmann, first president of Israel; 1921 Alexander Dubcek, Czech statesman; 1925 Ernie Wise, comedian; 1942 Jimi Hendrix, singer, guitarist.
Deaths: 1811 Andrew Meikle, Dunbar-born millwright and inventor of the threshing machine; 1895 Alexandre Dumas (fils), playwright; 2000 Professor Sir Malcolm Bradbury, novelist, academic and critic; 2011 Gary Speed MBE, footballer and manager; 2011 Ken Russell, film maker.