ON THIS DAY
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE
JUNE 25, 1941 A WOMAN teacher who said Hitler was a better man that Churchill was sentenced to five years’ penal servitude at Herts Assizes. Elsie Sarah Constance Orrin, 48, made the claim to two soldiers in a public-house, one of whom informed the authorities. JUNE 25, 1968 COMEdIAN Tony Hancock, 44, was found dead in bed at a friend’s flat in the fashionable Sydney suburb of Bellevue Hill today. Police took away a bottle of tablets found at the flat. Four days ago, Hancock’s second wife was granted a decree in the London divorce Court because of cruelty and adultery.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
ERIC CARLE, 89. The American author and illustrator is best known for The Very Hungry Caterpillar, which has sold more than 40 million copies, and is read an average of nine times a year by every primary school child in Britain. Carle says his philosophy of writing for children is: ‘You have a 35,000-word idea and you reduce it to 35.’ RICkY GERVAIS, 57. The Reading-born co- creator of sitcoms The Office and Extras, said if he had not been a comedian, he would have become an academic. Named by Time magazine as one of the world’s 100 most influential people, he was in a band, Seona dancing, in the 1980s. One of their singles reached number 117 in the Uk, but made Gervais a star in the Philippines.
BORN ON THIS DAY
GEORGE MICHAEL (1963-2016). The singer-songwriter from London, born Georgios kyriacos Panayiotou, sold more than 100 million albums as frontman of Wham! and a solo star. After his death, countless stories of his secret philanthropy emerged, including handing a barmaid a £5,000 tip ‘because she was a student nurse in debt’. GEORGE ORWELL (1903-1950). The 1984 and Animal Farm author, born Eric Blair, wrote an essay in 1946 with 11 rules on how to make a cup of tea. Orwell was expelled from school for sending a birthday greeting attached to a dead rat to the town surveyor. He introduced the term Big Brother to the Oxford English dictionary.
ON JUNE 25…
IN 1876 600 men of the U.S. cavalry died in an hour during Custer’s Last Stand at the Battle Of The Little Big Horn.
IN 1951 The first commercial colour TV show was transmitted by CBS to 40,000 people in America.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION dactylomancy (coined 1613) A) divination by picking a passage of poetry at random B) divination using arrows C) divination by means of a ring Answer below
PHRASE EXPLAINED
to have a bee in one’s bonnet
— meaning to be preoccupied with something; it comes from the inevitable concentration of the mind at having a stinging bee trapped under one’s bonnet or hat
QUOTE FOR TODAY
I hAvE always imagined Paradise as a kind of library Jorge Luis Borges, Argentinian writer (1899-1986)
JOKE OF THE DAY
WHAT did the lion say to the skeleton? I’d like to get to gnaw you better! Guess The Definition answer: C