ON THIS DAY
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE
MAY 29, 1972 THE Duchess of Windsor will fly in the RAF plane bringing the body of the Duke back to England on Wednesday. She will stay at his side as the body of the man who ruled Britain for 325 days in 1936 is taken first to lie in State and then to a private burial near Windsor Castle. The Duke died at 2.25am yesterday at the Paris house where, just ten days before, he had been visited by the Queen. He was 77 and had been ill for some time with cancer of the throat.
MAY 29, 1995 CHRISTOPHER REEVE is in hospital with a suspected fractured spine after being thrown from a horse. The man who played Superman is said to be partly paralysed. There are fears that he will not walk again. His Hollywood publicist, Lisa Kastelere, told how Reeve, who has a passion for horses, was hurt while competing in a showjumping event in virginia.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
RUPERT EVERETT, 61. The Norfolk-born actor and director, star of Shakespeare In Love, was expelled from London’s Central School of Speech and Drama for ‘insubordination’. Everett (right) was friends with Madonna and sang backing vocals on her remake of American Pie (which he had persuaded her to record) but they fell out. He later called her a ‘whiny old barmaid’.
CHARLOTTE JOHNSON WAHL, 78. The Prime Minister has described his mother, a painter, as the ‘supreme authority’ of the Johnson clan. She gave up her Oxford degree aged 20 to marry Stanley Johnson and move with him to the u.S., but later returned to her studies as her college’s first married female undergraduate. Her daughter Rachel says she is little known ‘because she considers personal publicity incredibly vulgar and is horrified by the amount all the rest of us get’.
BORN ON THIS DAY
JOHN F. KENNEDY (19171963). The 35th u.S. president (right) had such poor health throughout his life that he received the last rites four times — in 1947, when he was diagnosed with Addison’s disease in England; in 1951, when he had a dangerously high fever in Japan; in 1954, when he fell into a coma after back surgery; and after his assassination, aged 46.
KATIE BOYLE (1926-2018). The actress and model, who grew up in an Italian palace, hosted the Eurovision Song Contest four times in the Sixties and Seventies. She was the face of Camay soap on Tv, telling viewers, ‘You’ll be a little lovelier each day, with Camay’ though she was allergic to it.
ON MAY 29...
IN 1953, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay conquered Mount Everest.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION: Peculate (c1740s)
A) To flatter. B) To mark with dots. C) To take dishonestly. Answer below.
PHRASE EXPLAINED
New-fangled: meaning modern, gimmicky and unnecessarily complicated; from the Old English ‘fangen’ for ‘taken or seized’.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
’Tis distance lends enchantment to the view. And robes the mountain in its azure hue.
Thomas Campbell, Glasgow-born poet (1777-1844)
JOKE OF THE DAY
WHY can’t you play cards in the jungle?
There are too many cheetahs.
Guess The Definition answer: C.