This Day in History - 27th May

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

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

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

1852 The opening of Grimsby Royal Dock. Grisby once had the largest fishing fleet in the world. Albert, Prince Consort laid the first stone on 17th April 1849. During the Second World War, there were plans to demolish the 309ft (61m) high Dock Tower as it acted as a beacon for German Luftwaffe aircraft heading towards Liverpool.

1897 The birth of John Cockcroft, English physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1951 (with Ernest Walton) for splitting the atomic nucleus. They were instrumental in the development of nuclear power.

1914Joseph 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.

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

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

1941World 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.

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

1975The 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.

199818 year old Michael Owen became the youngest ever England international goalscorer with the only goal in a 1-0 friendly against Morocco in Casablanca.

2008Hundreds 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.

201434 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.