ON THIS DAY
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE JULY 7, 1964
PRINCeSS MARGAReT learned a new word last night when she and the earl of Snowdon attended the premiere of The Beatles’ first film, A Hard Day’s Night. The Mersey pop stars were lined up in the foyer of the London Pavilion when Lord Snowdon asked: ‘What is a grotty shirt?’ John Lennon said: ‘It means simply, grotesque — just a word we used to describe a shirt in the film.’
JULY 7, 1967
A DOCTOR who gives consultations to drug addicts in a cafe at London’s Baker Street Underground station is issuing them with prescriptions for heroin and cocaine. A Home Office official said last night: ‘It is not an offence to prescribe in a place other than a surgery.’
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
JeReMY KYLe, 52. The chat show host, whose daytime TV show often involves stormy relationship issues, has four children from his two wives, and was recently romantically linked with his children’s former nanny. MICHAeL HOWARD, 76. The former Conservative leader and home secretary, from South Wales, is known for Ann Widdecombe’s assertion that there was ‘something of the night about him’. In his youth, he was in a skiffle band and, when in government, he would play Beatles tunes loudly in his official car.
BORN ON THIS DAY
OTTO FReDeRICK ROHWeDDeR (18801960), who invented the bread- slicing machine. He had three jewellery shops which he sold to fund his invention. The first loaf of sliced bread (his machine also wrapped it) was sold in Missouri on July 7, 1928, Rohwedder’s 48th birthday. ANTON KARAS ( 19061985). He composed and played the soundtrack to the Orson Welles film, The Third Man, after its english director Carol Reed heard Karas playing the zither in a bar in his native Vienna. Reed insisted that Karas write the music for the movie, even though the musician had never written music before (at the time he was playing for tips). The haunting Harry Lime theme sold more than half a million copies within months of the film’s release — and set up Karas for life.
ON JULY 7...
IN 1930, Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died in his garden. IN 2005, 52 people were killed and 700 injured by a series of bombs in London.
WORD WIZARDRY NEW WORD OF THE DAY
Glunge: A style of fashion combining glamour with grunge GUESS THE DEFINITION Krobylos (coined 1850) A) A big toe B) The fleshy mass on the palm of the hand C) A tuft of hair on top of one’s head Answer below PHRASE EXPLAINED
As the crow flies: The shortest distance between two points, said to derive from the practice of sailors keeping crows on board ship because they were thought to take the most direct route to dry land.