ON THIS DAY
June 25, 2020
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE
JUNE 25, 1971 BRITAIN’S first regular delivery of milk in plastic throw-away bottles is being tried out in a town which already has an acute refuse disposal problem.
Clifford Dairies is delivering 5,000 plastic bottles every day at Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire. Housewives are told to throw them in the dustbin.
JUNE 25, 1980 THE KGB has got our pop music taped. The Soviet secret police say some pop songs contain coded messages and are broadcast by the BBC for Western spies.
The claim was made in a Russian newspaper. It accused the BBC of ‘taking to the trenches in the Cold War’. A BBC official replied: ‘These allegations are ridiculous and are typically heavy-handed attempts by the Russians to discredit the BBC.’
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
SHERIDAN SMITH, 39 (pictured). The awardwinning actress and singer from Lincolnshire started performing at six, joining her parents’ country singing act, The Daltons. She gave birth to a baby boy last month and lives in Kent with her fiance, Jamie Horn, and a menagerie of animals. She says she is ‘overwhelmed with love’ for her new son.
YANN MARTEL, 57. The Spanish-born Canadian novelist made his name with 2001’s Life Of Pi, which won the Man Booker Prize. It tells of a 16-year-old-boy adrift in the Pacific, accompanied by a hyena, zebra, orangutan and tiger. Two years before writing it, he was living on £4,000 a year and said: ‘I liked the lightness.’
BORN ON THIS DAY
EDDIE LARGE (1941-2020). The comedian, born Edward McGinnis in Glasgow, was half of Little And Large, alongside Syd Little. The duo met after Large heckled Little at a Manchester club in 1961. Large died in April after contracting Covid-19.
LOUIS MOUNTBATTEN (1900-1979). The 1st Earl Mountbatten (pictured) was a great-grandson of Queen Victoria and uncle to Prince Philip. Mountbatten agreed to an open marriage, according to his biographer, and said: ‘Edwina and I spent all our married lives getting into other people’s beds.’ He was killed on his boat by an IRA bomb.
ON JUNE 25…
IN 1947, The Diary Of A Young Girl (better known as The Diary Of Anne Frank) was published. IN 2009, Michael Jackson died, aged 50, of an overdose of a sedative prescribed to help him sleep.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION: halcyon (late 1300s)
A) pleasurable B) youthful C) calm; peaceful; tranquil
PHRASE EXPLAINED
To be for the high jump: meaning to be about to be severely punished; the phrase derives from an early 20th century military term meaning ‘to be put on trial before your commanding officer’; the image behind it is one of execution by hanging