ON THIS DAY
January 19, 2024
FROM THE ARCHIVE JANUARY 19, 2008
FORMER jockey Richard Dunwoody yesterday became the first person to reach the South Pole via the route which thwarted Irish explorer Ernest Shackleton. Ninety-four years after Kildare’s Shackleton had attempted the crossing, the Belfast-born Dunwoody and American Doug Stoup conquered the Pole. Dunwoody, the only jockey of his generation to win the Aintree National, Cheltenham Gold Cup and Champion Hurdle, said: ‘To finally arrive at the Pole is indescribable and my greatest achievement.’
JANUARY 19, 2013
THE lights were dimmed in Glasgow’s East End yesterday as the great football city shuddered with news of the sudden passing of a Celtic legend, ‘The Iron Man’ Sean Fallon. At 90, the oldest Republic of Ireland international, capped eight times between 1950 and 1955, died after a brief illness, just days after being interviewed by RTÉ’s Tommie Gorman for a Nationwide programme to be aired next month. ‘He was the same Sean, in great form, surrounded by his grandchildren and still nipping out for a smoke when he could,’ recalled Gorman.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
DENNIS TAYLOR, 75. When the Northern Irish snooker star, famed for glasses that looked upside down, beat Steve Davis 18-17 on the last black of the 1985 World Championship final, it was watched by 18.5 million. Taylor said of the game: ‘Memories you never forget.’
DOLLY PARTON, 78. The country star from Tennessee, right, has sold more than 100 million records and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2022. Elvis wanted to record her song I Will Always Love You, but Parton rejected the request after his manager demanded half the publishing rights – a wise decision. Whitney Houston’s 1992 recording of it became the best-selling single of all time by a female artist.
BORN ON THIS DAY
MIKE REID (1940-2007) The comedian and actor was best known for his role as Frank Butcher in EastEnders and for the children’s TV show Runaround from 1975 to 1981. Early in his career he was a stunt double for Roger Moore in The Saint – but was fired after joking about the star’s thinning hair.
PAUL CÉZANNE (1839-1906). The French Post-Impressionist painter, the ‘founding father of modern art’, was such an obsessive that he would spend hours on a single line. He inspired Matisse, Picasso and Monet. The latter called him the ‘greatest of us all’. In 2022, a Cézanne landscape sold for a record $138 million.
ON JANUARY 19 . . .
IN 1993, production begins on Toy Story (right), Pixar Studios’ first feature-length film. IN 1983, Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie is arrested in Bolivia.
WORD WIZARDRY GUESS THE DEFINITION Maffick (coined 1900)
A) To celebrate publicly and extravagantly. B) Religious figure at prayer. C) An unlicensed public house.
Answer below.
PHRASE EXPLAINED
To put a sock in it: originating in 1919, a request for someone to stop talking. The suggestion was that putting a sock in whatever was causing the noise, such as a gramophone horn, would lessen it.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
‘I must quit marrying men who feel inferior to me. Somewhere there must be a man who could be my husband and not feel inferior. I need a superior inferior man.’
Hedy Lamarr, Austro-Hungarian-born US actress and inventor (1914-2000)
JOKE OF THE DAY
ON WHAT does bread write its lists? Toast-it notes.
Guess The Definition answer: A.