HAPPY BIRTHDAY

DOROTHY HYMAN, 77. The sprinter from Yorkshire (pictured) was one of the fastest women in the world during the early Sixties, winning medals in the Olympics, Commonwealth and european championships. At 13, when she began training, the nearest track was eight miles away. She said: ‘After work, i’d eat, get the bus, train, get the bus home and go to bed.’ There is a stadium named after her in her home town of Cudworth. ALAN BeNNeTT, 84. The playwright and screenwriter from Leeds, son of a butcher, said he could recall ‘a time when i thought my only connection with the literary world would be that i’d once delivered meat to T.S. eliot’s mother-in-law’. Speaking of his past relationships with men and women, he has said he had had ‘something of both in my life’ but ‘not enough of either’.