ON THIS DAY
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE October 24, 1966
AIR hostess Jainna Rossi was handing out sweets before take-off when a ‘pregnant’ woman took one from her tray — and a tiny hand shot out of her skirt to grab another. Miss Rossi dropped the tray and exclaimed: ‘I think we have an extra passenger!’
Then, from under the woman’s skirt, out popped a three-year-old child. Two other toddlers came out from under other ‘pregnant’ women’s skirts, shrieking: ‘He’s got sweets. We want sweets.’ Eventually, the plane left Rome for Tripoli with 23 paying passengers instead of the original 20.
October 24, 1967
FIGHTING broke out in a West End cinema last night during the screening of How I Won The War, starring Beatle John Lennon (right). The anti-war film had been running for ten minutes at the London Pavilion, when hecklers shouted, ‘Stop this Communist filth’ and. ‘True British people should walk out’. Stink bombs were thrown. An ejected heckler said: ‘This film is an insult to British soldiers, especially at the anniversary of El Alamein.’
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
BARONESS (Doreen) Lawrence, 65. The mother of murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence was named the most powerful woman in the UK by a BBC Woman’s Hour panel in 2014. The founder of the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust, she was one of those selected to carry the Olympic flag into the London 2012 opening ceremony. She chose Eric Clapton’s Tears In Heaven as her last track on Desert Island Discs, a song sung by Stephen’s cousin Karina Levy at a 2003 memorial service for him. ROMAN ABRAMOVICH, 51. The Russian oligarch (right), owner of Chelsea Football Club, was adopted by his uncle after both his parents died before he was four. The father-of-seven started selling plastic ducks from a Moscow flat, but made his fortune in oil and gas. He is now worth more than £7 billion, but when he was courting third wife Dasha Zhukova he bought her a gift costing just £1,900 — 100 acres of the moon. The couple have now separated.
ON OCTOBER 24…
IN 1975, 90 per cent of women in Iceland took ‘a day off’, refusing to go to work, cook for their husbands or look after their children, to protest against gender inequality.
IN 2003, Concorde’s final commercial flight landed at Heathrow, 27 years after the first.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION Dretch (coined circa 900) A) A dirty, wretched slob B) Wool taken from a dead sheep C) Both to trouble in sleep and to be troubled in sleep. Answer below
PHRASE EXPLAINED
The buck stops here: Meaning this is where ultimate responsibility lies, it is thought to derive from the poker table, where a buckhorn knife was put before whichever player was next to deal; the phrase was popularised by U.S. President Harry S. Truman, who had it written on his desk to remind him of his responsibility.