ON THIS DAY
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE
OCTOBER 9, 1942 CARRIER-PIGEONS brought the first operation messages received at HQ in England while the Dieppe raid was in progress, it was revealed last night. The officer in command of a unit of the Army Pigeon Service stated that secret tests in the use of carrier-pigeons are now being conducted.
OCTOBER 9, 1967
PRINCE Charles, Cambridge’s first Prince of Wales freshman for 100 years, made quite an entrance when he arrived at Trinity College yesterday. The waiting crowd roared with laughter, when instead of arriving in the royal car, the 19-year-old Prince bobbed out of a red Mini.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
BRIAN BLESSED, 81. The Yorkshire-born actor, who has starred in Z-Cars and Flash Gordon, once delivered a baby under a tree and survived a plane crash in Venezuela. He is the oldest man in history to reach the magnetic North Pole on foot, having punched a polar bear en route, and has tried to climb Mount Everest three times. SHARON OSBOuRNE, 65. The X Factor judge (pictured) has lived ‘50 lives in 50 years’, a nod to her chaotic upbringing with her music manager father Don Arden (the ‘Al Capone of pop’) and roller coaster marriage to singer Ozzy Osbourne. Of her cosmetic surgery, she once said the pain of a facelift was like ‘spending the night with an axe murderer’.
BORN ON THIS DAY
ROD TEMPERTON (1949-2016). The singer-songwriter from Cleethorpes, Lincs, was a member of disco group Heatwave, for which he penned songs including Boogie Nights and Always And Forever. But his biggest hits were the title tracks for Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall and Thriller albums, the latter being best- selling record of all time in the u.S., selling 32 million copies. TONY BOOTH (1931-2017). The Liverpoolborn actor starred in Coronation Street and Till Death us Do Part — as Alf Garnett’s ‘Scouse git’ son-in-law, a character that was changed from Cockney to Liverpudlian after Booth was given the role. The father of Cherie Blair, his crises included a battle with alcoholism, bankruptcy and accidentally setting himself on fire.
ON OCTOBER 9…
IN 1967, Marxist revolutionary Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara was gunned down in Bolivia while trying to incite revolution.
IN 2006, North Korea declared it had completed its first nuclear weapons test.
IN 2012, 14-year-old education activist Malala Yousafzai (pictured) was shot in the head by the Taliban boarding a school bus in Pakistan.
GUESS THE DEFINITION Agerasia (coined 1706)
A) The act of cutting a sucking leech. B) A disease in which the sufferer mimics everything said or done by another. C) Looking younger than one really is. Answer below
PHRASE EXPLAINED
A legend in their own lifetime — refers to one who is respected and famous while still alive. It comes from a description of Florence Nightingale in Lytton Strachey’s book Eminent Victorians, published in 1918.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
Surprises are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable. Jane Austen, English novelist (1775-1817)
JOKE OF THE DAY
I HAVE an inferiority complex . . . but it’s not a very good one. Guess The Definition Answer: C.