ON THIS DAY
September 14, 2018
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE
SEPTEMBER 14, 1945 THE best fur coats in the world — including sables, minks, ermines, Persian lambs and ocelots — will be available to British women after the Board of Trade gave furriers permission to import them now the war is over. ‘This will make London the heart of the fur world,’ an official of a big fur company said last night. SEPTEMBER 14, 1959 RuSSIA’S 860lb instrument- packed Lunik II rocket landed on the Moon last night — only 84 seconds behind schedule. It crash-landed at two miles a second while relaying back information up to the very end. Foreign Secretary Mr Selwyn Lloyd said: ‘I don’t think many people are terribly interested in it.’
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
AMAnDA BARRIE, 83. The actress from Lancashire played Cleopatra in Carry On Cleo (right) and Alma Sedgewick on and off for 20 years in Coronation Street. She said earlier this year that she had gone on Celebrity Big Brother to pay for her future care home bills. Barrie came out as bisexual at 67 and married a woman at 79. Their wedding was held at Drury Lane Theatre in London. BEn COHEn, 40. The ex-England rugby star made headlines of a racier kind after he appeared on Strictly Come Dancing in 2013 and later waltzed off with dancer Kristina Rihanoff, nicknamed ‘the Siberian Siren’. Cohen and estranged wife Abby — the mother of his twin daughters — divorced in 2016 after 13 years of marriage. He and Kristina now have a two-year-old daughter, Milena.
BORN ON THIS DAY
ALExAnDER VOn HuMBOLDT (17691859). The German polymath, who coined the term ‘the cosmos’, has been described as ‘a sort of 19th-century David Attenborough’. He has more places and creatures named after him than anyone else, including rivers, towns, mountains, a glacier, an ocean current, penguins, monkeys, an orchid, a squid and a ‘sea’ on the Moon. AMy WInEHOuSE (19832011). The London-born singer-songwriter, who as a child dreamed of becoming a roller- skating waitress, was a huge fan of Frank Sinatra and named her debut album after the crooner. But she felt the studio had interfered with it and said: ‘I’ve never heard the album from start to finish. I don’t have it in my house.’
ON SEPTEMBER 14…
IN 1741, composer George Frideric Handel completed his Messiah oratorio, 23 days after he had started it. IN 1962, actors Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis divorced after a decade of marriage.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION: Turdoid (1823) A) Relating to a thrush. B) A tendon. C) A stomach ache. Answer below
PHRASE EXPLAINED
To add insult to injury: Meaning to harm by word or deed someone who has already suffered an injustice. It derives from the Roman Phaedrus’s fable in 25BC of the fly who said to the bald man: ‘you who have wished to revenge, even with death, the prick of a tiny insect, see what you have done to yourself to add insult to injury?’
QUOTE FOR TODAY
To ERR is human, but it feels divine. Mae West, film star (1883-1980)
JOKE OF THE DAY
I’M writing a musical about puns. It’s a play on words. Guess The Definition answer: A