ON THIS DAY
July 3, 2020
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE
JULY 3, 1936 INCREASINGLY large numbers of men and women are discarding hats. Among women, the habit is more confined to younger people but, with men, the bald heads of age and the well-covered ones of youth vie with one another in being hatless. ‘There is a general belief,’ said a doctor yesterday, ‘that it is more healthy.’
JULY 3, 1997 PRINCE Charles has been accused of leaving Camilla Parker Bowles vulnerable by admitting their affair on television. Her family friend Charles Benson claims the Prince of Wales made ‘a stupid, crass mistake’ by confessing his adultery to Jonathan Dimbleby. He tells a television documentary: ‘It was a dirty thing to do.’
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
TRACEY EMIN, 57. The English artist (right) currently has an online White Cube exhibition of works produced under lockdown, called I Thrive On Solitude. She said it was no great loss that the pandemic has prevented her from spending her time at art fairs around the world because she has been banned from most of them anyway.
SHANE LYNCH, 44. The Dublin-born singer-songwriter was a fifth of boy band Boyzone. His sisters, twins Edele and Keavy, were in girl band B*Witched and his first wife, Easther Bennett, was the lead singer of Eternal. He walked out of Celebrity Love Island in 2006 after realising he wanted to be with his ‘one true love’ Sheena White, who he married in 2007. They split in April, with Lynch saying they were ‘at each other’s throats’ during lockdown.
BORN ON THIS DAY
POLY STYRENE (19572011). The Kent-born frontwoman of X-Ray Spex (real name Marianne Elliot-Said, right) trained in opera before becoming a punk. She was inspired to set up the band after watching the Sex Pistols on her 18th birthday, and placed an advert for ‘young punx who want to stick it together’. In the 1980s, she joined the Hare Krishnas and lived under the name Maharani in their Hertfordshire temple (from where Boy George once tried to break her out).
LORD (MICHAEL) MARTIN (1945-2018). The Glasgow-born son of a cleaner and merchant seaman was the first Roman Catholic Commons Speaker since the Reformation. He dispensed with the wig and swapped tights for trousers. Martin was teetotal, partly because of his father’s alcoholism.
ON JULY 3...
IN 1886, Karl Benz first tested his Benz Patent-Motorwagen, the first automobile with an internal combustion engine.
IN 2013, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, was ousted after a year by the military.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION: Lanuginose (c1690)
A) Morose. B) Covered with soft, short hair.
C) Slow-moving. Answer below.
PHRASE EXPLAINED: To cry all the way to the bank — to be happy due to the receipt of money, but sad about the cause; a catchphrase first used by Liberace in 1956 after critics slammed his performance.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
I’m a sausage machine, a perfect sausage machine.
Agatha Christie, crime novelist (1890-1976)
JOKE OF THE DAY
WHAT do you call a Frenchman in sandals? Philippe Philoppe.
Guess The Definition answer: B