ON THIS DAY
1906: Charles Rolls and Henry Royce collaborated to form the car company, Rolls-Royce Ltd. On the same day in 1931, the company bought Bentley Motors.
1944: After five years of blackout, the lights were switched on again in Piccadilly, Strand and Fleet Street.
1945: The Nuremberg War Crimes trial of Nazis, including Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, and Joachim von Ribbentrop, began. It lasted 218 days.
1947: Princess Elizabeth married Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten. It was the most glamorous royal occasion since before the war and the BBC covered it in 42 different languages.
1951: Snowdonia in Wales was designated a National Park.
1975: General Franco, above, dictator of Spain for 36 years, died aged 82.
1979: Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, was stripped of his knighthood after being exposed as the Fourth Man in the Burgess, Maclean and Philby spy scandal.
ON THIS DAY LAST YEAR: The Queen brought a splash of colour to an otherwise grey and rainy day on her 71st wedding anniversary, as she was shown how technology was shaping the future.
HE WAS the debonair star of some of Hollywood’s greatest films and for one glorious evening in a Sauchiehall Street cinema, Cary Grant held Glasgow film-lovers spellbound.
It was July 11, 1958 – the same day on which murderer Peter Manuel was hanged at Barlinnie Prison – and Grant was in town to publicise his latest movie, Indiscreet, in which he starred alongside Ingrid Bergman.
The Evening Times reported that he wandered around the aisles of the Regal Cinema, encouraging audience members to ask questions, which came thick and fast.
“I’m open to questions, anything you like to ask,” he said. “There must be something you want to know about the film industry?”
Grant said at one stage that he disliked being idle – “I tried it once for 18 months but I found it was more fun working” and said he had accepted the role in Indiscreet on faith, because it was Bergman’s first attempt at a comedy film.
He also touched on audience reactions to film comedies. “With a comedy you get the verdict the minute it goes on the screen. If people don’t laugh, it’s a flop for all time and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Thankfully, Grant said, he was “particularly happy” about Indiscreet because “though it was made entirely in Britain it has been breaking all house records in New York – something that very seldom happens to a
British film.”
Among the many photographs taken of Grant that day was one with him crouching to talk to two-year-old David Marshall, from Dunoon, who happened to be in town with his mother.
Cary Grant was born Archibald Alexander Leach on January 18, 1904 in Bristol. He left school at age 14, lying about his age and forging his father’s signature on a letter to join Bob Pender’s troupe of knockabout comedians.