ON THIS DAY

FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE

DECEMBER 3, 1941 If yOU buy cigarettes or tobacco to send as Christmas presents, you will be depriving other smokers of their supplies, the TobaccoController, Mr A.H. Maxwell, has warned. No extra supplies will be available as Christmas gifts, he said.

DECEMBER 3, 1965

CRIES of ‘shame’ greeted Mr William Hamilton (Lab, West fife) when he referred to Princess Margaret in the Commons yesterday as ‘this very expensive young lady’. He was asking the President of the Board of Trade how much her visit to the United States had cost his department.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

JULIANNE MOORE, 58. The Oscar-winning U.S. actress (right) took British citizenship in 2011 to honour her late mother, a social worker from Greenock. She once became so obsessive in her daily routine that she’d have to drink two cups of coffee at breakfast, leave her flat at precisely the same time, follow the same route and get to the kerb just as the ‘walk’ sign flashed at the traffic lights. EAMONN HOLMES, 59. The Belfast-born TV presenter is a teetotaller, but says: ‘Women don’t trust a man who doesn’t drink, so occasionally I’ll stand at a party holding a shandy to compromise.’ Mocked in the past for his weight, in 2010 he received an apology from the BBC for comedian Jon Culshaw’s impressions of him that used the catchphrase ‘I was fierce hungry, so I was’ and featuring him eating a sofa.

BORN ON THIS DAY

MEL SMITH (1952-2013). The London-born actor, comedian and film director (right) was on the cusp of abandoning theatre to work in his parents’ betting shop before finding fame on Not The Nine O’Clock News and Alas Smith And Jones, alongside Griff Rhys Jones. They founded TV company TalkBack, which they sold in 2000 for £62 million. In the Nineties, suffering gout, he gave himself stomach ulcers by taking more than 50 Nurofen Plus a day. OCTAVIA HILL (1838-1912). The English social reformer was one of the three founders of the National Trust and coined the phrase ‘green belt’. Hill insisted that all her volunteer managers were women. She said: ‘Ladies must do it, for it is detailed work; it needs, moreover, persistent patience, gentleness, hope.’

ON DECEMBER 3…

IN 1947, Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire opened on Broadway starring Jessica Tandy and Marlon Brando. IN 1989, Soviet and U.S. presidents Mikhail Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush declared the Cold War over at a summit in Malta.

WORD WIZARDRY

GUESS THE DEFINITION: Kleptopredation A) Elevating something positive to an unprecedented level of excellence. B) The practice of making higher charges for services at times of higher demand. C) Eating prey that has just hunted, so that the predator eats the prey of its prey, too. Answer below

PHRASE EXPLAINED

No man is an island — meaning we all need help every now and then, no matter how capable we are; unlike islands, which are considered self-sufficient.

QUOTE FOR TODAY

SOMEONE said that God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December. J.M. Barrie, writer (1860-1937)

JOKE OF THE DAY

DID you know Neil Diamond was called Neil Coal? Until the pressure got to him. Guess The Definition answer: C. Compiled by ETAN SMALLMAN and ADAM JACOT DE BOINOD