ON THIS DAY
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE
OCTOBER 7, 1940
THREE thousand people of Bethnal Green took cover last night 65 ft below ground in the incompleted extension of the Central London tube line after Minister of Home Security Herbert Morrison ordered it to be opened as a shelter. Family parties were bedding down with a picnic air: mothers were cutting sandwiches while fathers poured out the tea.
OCTOBER 7, 1991
A TEARFUL Elizabeth Taylor, wearing a gown in three shades of yellow, said ‘I do’ for the eighth [and final] time today. On a carpet of flowers at Michael Jackson’s California ranch, she wed former building site worker Larry Fortensky, who at 39 is 20 years her junior. Quipped Jackson: ‘You should be able to do this in your sleep, Elizabeth.’
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
ALISON BALSOM, 41. The classical trumpet soloist, nicknamed ‘the trumpet crumpet’, was the first British woman to win artist of the year at the Gramophone Classical Music Awards, and headlined the Last Night of the Proms in 2009. She once turned up to the Classic Brit Awards wearing more than £1 million-worth of diamonds. SIMON COWELL, 60. The London-born creator of The X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent chose a mirror as his luxury on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs ‘because I’d miss me’. Cowell, reckoned to be worth £385 million, started out as a runner at Elstree Studios and polished Jack Nicholson’s axe for his scenes in the film The Shining.
BORN ON THIS DAY
SIR HAROLD KROTO (1939-2016). The chemist from Cambridgeshire jointly won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his discovery of fullerenes — new forms of carbon where the atoms are arranged in the form of a ball. He was turned down for a £100,000 grant for further research into fullerenes just hours before being told he had won the Nobel. AL MARTINO (1927-2009). The American crooner and actor secured his place in the Guinness Book Of Records in 1952 with the first No1 record in the UK singles chart, Here In My Heart, which hogged the top spot for nine weeks. He had been persuaded to take up singing by family friend Mario Lanza, the operatic tenor.
ON OCTOBER 7…
IN 1959, the far side of the Moon was photographed for the first time, by Russia’s Luna 3 spacecraft.
IN 2003, The Terminator star Arnold Schwarzenegger received the nickname The Governator when he was elected governor of California.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION: peristeronic (c 1855) A) circumventing B) concerned with pigeons C) of a stomach ache Answer below
PHRASE EXPLAINED
Blot on the landscape: referring to something that detracts from the aesthetic value of something thus ruining an otherwise pleasant view; an early use of the phrase was by T.E. Lawrence in 1938.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
WOMEN have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size Virginia Woolf, English novelist (1882-1941)
JOKE OF THE DAY
WHAT do you call a sleeping T-Rex? A dinosnore.
GUESS The Definition answer: B.