FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE

APRIL 10, 1951

IT wAS dull and wet in westminster yesterday afternoon. Four policemen stood damply outside the Houses of Parliament thinking of tea as Mrs Irene Lovelock — founder of the British Housewives’ League — took her ration book and identity card from her handbag, placed them in a deep frying-pan and set fire to them, before delivering a few well-chosen words about ration books. ‘An outworn and unjust system,’ she called them. The penalty for destroying a ration book is up to two years’ imprisonment.

APRIL 10, 1963

BALLET dancer Rudolf Nureyev ( right) was branded ‘a traitor to Soviet art and his country’ by the Russian newspaper Izvestia. In a bitter attack on the 24-year- old dancer — the first mention of him since he defected to the west in 1961 — the paper added that he is ‘degenerating as a dancer and has reached an extreme stage of moral decay’.