ON THIS DAY
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE
MARCH 5, 1943
Gun flashes from Wednesday night’s barrage caused the london Tube shelter disaster in which 173 people — including 62 children — were crushed to death. The flashes startled a woman carrying a baby, who fell on the stairs. In seconds it was a mass of bodies.
MARCH 5, 1985
EGYPTIAN brothers, Mohamed, ali and Salah al-Fayed are favourites to buy the Harrods and House of Fraser department stores group with a £615 million takeover bid. Backed by the Fraser board, they already own 29.9 per cent of the group.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
EVA MENDES, 50. The u. S. actress, star of Hitch and Training Day, is the partner of Ryan Gosling. She has said that she wears ‘feminine’ clothes as ‘sweatpants are the number one cause of divorce in america’. EDDY GRANT, 76. The Guyana-born British singer-songwriter had hits with Baby, Come Back and Gimme Hope Jo’anna, an anti-apartheid song that also led to a big pay cheque when yoghurt firm yoplait ran ads featuring the parody Gimme yop Me Mama.
BORN ON THIS DAY
VIRGINIA CHRISTINE (1920-1996). The u.S. actress starred in Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner and Judgment at nuremberg, but is best known for Folgers coffee ads, which she appeared in for 21 years. Her home town, Stanton in Iowa, made a water tower look like a coffee pot in her honour.
DEAN STOCKWELL (19362021). The american former child star appeared opposite katharine Hepburn in long Day’s Journey Into night and Gregory Peck in Gentleman’s agreement, for which director Elia kazan taught him to cry by thinking of a puppy dying.
He won a Golden Globe for that film and Tv’s Quantum leap (pictured).
ON MARCH 5 . . .
IN 1960, alberto korda’s famous photo of argentine Marxist revolutionary Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara was taken.
IN 1963, u.S. toymaker arthur ‘Spud’ Melin patented the Hula Hoop.
WORD WIZARDRY GUESS THE DEFINITION: Fleshment (coined 1605)
a) Herb that brings back lost love. B) Excitement from a first success. C) Gradual curing of a disease.
answer below.
PHRASE EXPLAINED
To add insult to injury: to harm someone who has suffered injustice. From Phaedrus’s fable of the fly, which tells a man who swats at the fly and hits himself on the head: ‘ you who have wished to revenge… the prick of a tiny insect, see what you’ve done to yourself to add insult to injury.’
QUOTE FOR TODAY
If we choose freedom, then we must be prepared to perish along with it.
Karl Popper, Austrian philosopher (1902-1994)
JOKE OF THE DAY
WHAT grade did the ballerina get at university? a 2:2.
Guess The Definition answer: B. Compiled by ETAN SMALLMAN and ADAM JACOT DE BOINOD