ON THIS DAY
August 27, 2018
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE AUGUST 27, 1940
A SMALL force of German bombers gave London a six-hours raid alarm ending early today. West End theatre-goers danced on the stage as they waited for the ‘all clear’ in the raid, which caught them before the shows had finished. Vic Oliver, the comedian sonin-law of Winston Churchill, told the London Hippodrome audience that since the raid was still on, there would be an informal concert. Only a handful of people left. AUGUST 27, 1965 FOUR hidden TV cameras have halved the crime rate in Soho, one of Britain’s blackest areas for crime. Cameras are now likely to be installed elsewhere in London and in the rest of the country. Police have been operating the Soho cameras for only six weeks, but if their success continues, 3,000 to 4,000 crimes will be wiped out every year in the area.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
BARBARA BACH, 71. The U. S . actress played Bond girl Anya Amasova in The Spy Who Loved Me, but later said that 007 is ‘a chauvinist pig’. As the wife of Sir Ringo Starr (right), she is now Lady Starkey. They married in 1981 after meeting on the set of the film Caveman. Starr admitted that, early in their relationship, his drinking was so severe that staff told him he ‘had trashed the house so badly they thought there had been burglars, and trashed Barbara so badly they thought she was dead’. The couple are now teetotal. TOM FORD, 57. The U.S. fashion designer, the former creative boss of Gucci, has more recently turned his hand to film-making, directing Colin Firth in A Single Man, which Ford described as ‘my midlife crisis on the screen’. Ford says his guilty pleasure is reality show The Only Way Is Essex. For a newspaper interview in London in 2010, he insisted that it be conducted while both he and the journalist were totally naked.
BORN ON THIS DAY
LyNDON BAINES JOHNSON ( 1908- 1973). The 36th U.S. president took the oath of office on Air Force One just hours after JFK’s assassination in November 1963. An imposing 6ft 4in tall, LBJ (right) liked to scare his friends by taking them for a ride in his amphibious car, pretending to lose control, driving into a lake and shouting ‘the brakes don’t work!’ while laughing hysterically.
ON AUGUST 27…
IN 1896, the world’s shortest war ever recorded started and finished when Britain defeated Zanzibar after 38 minutes. IN 1955, the first edition of the Guinness Book Of Records was published.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION: Yarely (1600s) A) Carefully. B) Without thought, headlong. C) Briskly, promptly. Answer below. PHRASE EXPLAINED
Cock a snook — refers to a derisive gesture involving putting one’s thumb to one’s nose and extending the fingers. In this phrase, coined in 1791, ‘ cock’ means to stick out defiantly as in the erect neck of a crowing cockerel, while ‘ snook’ is thought to be a variant of ‘snout’.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
QUALITY means doing it right when no one is looking. Henry Ford, U.S. industrialist (1863-1947)
JOKE OF THE DAY
My FRIEND called me a ‘pendant’ the other day. I said: ‘I hate to correct you…’ Guess The Definition answer: C.