ON THIS DAY
September 11, 2019
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE
SEPTEMBER 11, 1961
A YOUNG East German couple swam 400 yards in the dark early today, pushing their sleeping baby in a plastic bath, to escape to the West. Dieter Rothe, 22, and his wife, Erika, 21, chose 3am for their desperate bid for freedom across the closely guarded Glienicke Lake. Dieter said: ‘Suddenly the baby started to cry. We stifled the sound with a cloth and my wife gave her sleeping tablets.’ They were taken to a refugee camp and will be flown to West Germany.
SEPTEMBER 11, 1963
TWENTY cabbies have started a fares war with a girl driver. Last night, 19-year-old Miss Sheila Jarman, of Newark, Nottinghamshire, said: ‘They are trying to poach my fares. But I am determined to carry on.’ The drivers refuse to line up with her at the taxi rank at Newark. One driver said: ‘Taxi driving is a man’s job.’
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
JULIE COVINGTON, 73. The English actress and singer (right) was the first person to sing Evita’s Don’t Cry For Me Argentina, in a 1976 concept album of the musical, and played the first Janet in The Rocky Horror Show. She turned down the role of Evita on the stage because ‘I am a feminist’ and Peron was ‘a fascist — and I feel I have to put those feminist feelings into my work’. BRIAN PERKINS, 76. The New Zealand-born BBC announcer, dubbed the ‘voice of Radio 4’, was voted as having the third most attractive voice on British airwaves before he stepped down in 2003. He briefly returned to his home country in the 1960s to play double bass for the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.
BORN ON THIS DAY
ALVAR LIDELL (1908-1981). The Londonborn radio announcer notified Britain of Edward VIII’s abdication and introduced Neville Chamberlain for the declaration of war with Germany. He began his career at the BBC at a time when announcers wore evening dress to deliver the news and later criticised his successors for their ‘self-important, opinionated, argumentative mediocrity’. His broadcasts always began: ‘This is the news, and this is Alvar Lidell reading it.’ JESSICA MITFORD (19171996). One of the famous Mitford sisters, the journalist and writer (right) was nicknamed ‘the red sheep of the family’ for her Communist sympathies. After she wrote an exposé on the funeral trade, one firm took revenge by making a cheap coffin they called the ‘Jessica Mitford Casket’.
ON SEPTEMBER 11…
IN 1275, the church on top of Glastonbury Tor was destroyed in an earthquake. IN 1997, 74 per cent of Scottish voters backed a devolved parliament in a referendum.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION: Troat (17th century)
A) A small rock cavity. B) A bare tree. C) The sound of a deer. Answer below
PHRASE EXPLAINED
Blood, sweat and tears: Requiring exhaustive effort; from Winston Churchill’s first speech to MPs as prime minister in 1940 in which he said: ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.’
QUOTE FOR TODAY
DYING is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.
W. Somerset Maugham, English novelist (1874-1965)
JOKE OF THE DAY
WHAT do you say to comfort an English teacher? They’re, there, their. Guess The Definition answer: C.