ON THIS DAY
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE
MARCH 19, 1970 SMOKING will cost Britain 150,000 working days of manpower this year. It will cause 75,000 deaths, and 45,000 men will be incapacitated through bronchitis, caused mainly by cigarette smoking. Sir george godber, chief medical officer at the Department of Health and Social Security, warned: ‘We haven’t yet reaped the full harvest of cigarette smoking.’ MARCH 19, 1971 THE Rolling Stones have spent nearly £700 on advertisements to urge fans not to buy their latest record album, Stone Age. The group complain in the adverts that the record was below their usual standard and issued without their knowledge. The album comes from Decca, the recording company, from which the Stones parted last July.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
GLENN CLOSE, 74. The Hollywood actress, star of Fatal Attraction and 101 Dalmatians, got her big break at 35 in The World According To garp, in which she played Robin Williams’s mother — even though she was only four years older. Close has been nominated for eight Oscars, but never won. RUTH POINTER, 75. The u.S. singer is the eldest of the hugely successful band The Pointer Sisters. They had hits with I’m So Excited and Jump (For My Love), to which Hugh grant’s prime minister mimed in the film Love Actually. Ruth said when she sang on Automatic, her voice was so low that ‘everybody thought it was Stevie Wonder’.
BORN ON THIS DAY
TOMMY COOPER (19211984). The 6ft 4in comedian and magician from Caerphilly died after collapsing during the variety TV show Live From Her Majesty’s. A master of the one-liner, he collected more than a million jokes, catalogued in alphabetised files, from ‘absent-minded’ to ‘zoo’. He quipped: ‘My wife and I were married in a toilet; it was a marriage of convenience.’ One of his fezzes is in the V&A museum. DR WILLIAM FRANKLAND (1912-2020). The immunologist from Sussex created the pollen count. The ‘grandfather of allergy’ said: ‘I’ve come close to death so many times — from the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, three-and-a-half years spent as a Japanese PoW, to experiencing anaphylaxis following a tropical insect bite.’ He died, aged 108, of Covid-19 on April 2.
ON MARCH 19 . . .
IN 1979, Richard Beckinsale, star of sitcom Porridge, died aged 31 from a heart attack. IN 2020, the emergency Coronavirus Bill was introduced in the House of Commons.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION: Crape (c1795) A) A bald head. B) To dye one’s moustache. C) Black mourning fabric. Answer below.
PHRASE EXPLAINED Hawks and doves:
Refers to the differences in politics and military campaigns between hawkish hardliners and conciliatory doves. Now used to describe the two wings of the Tory Party in Britain, the hawk-dove divide became a popular way to describe the split in u.S. politics over the Vietnam War.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
Nagging is the repetition of unpalatable truths. Edith Summerskill, Labour politician (1901-1980)
JOKE OF THE DAY
I ASKED an astronomer if he’d like to try our vegetarian pizza. He said he’d prefer something meteor. Guess The Definition answer: C.