November 15, 2021 ON THIS DAY

FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE NOVEMBER 15, 1969

THE three astronauts of Apollo 12 are on their way to the Moon’s Ocean of Storms tonight. They left behind them a major storm raging round Nasa’s decision to launch the Moonshot in a rain squall. Charles ‘Pete’ Conrad, the 39-year-old commander of the mission, told earth he was certain the Moonship was struck by lightning during lift-off.

NOVEMBER 15, 1996

PRINCE CHARLES was celebrating his 48th birthday last night with a party on an Indian theme at Highgrove, his Gloucestershire mansion, surrounded by 40 of his favourite friends — and, at his side, his mistress Camilla Parker Bowles, who organised the theatrical extravaganza.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

JONNY LEE MILLER, 49. The london-born star of Trainspotting played a modern-day version of Sherlock Holmes in TV series elementary and will portray John Major in Netflix series The Crown. He was the first of Angelina Jolie’s three actor husbands (pictured) — he was 23 and she 20 when they married in 1996 after meeting on the set of film Hackers, but they divorced three years later. He is the grandson of Bernard lee, who played M in 11 James Bond films.

SHAILENE WOODLEY, 30. The U.S. actress has been on screen since appearing in TV adverts aged five. She played George Clooney’s daughter in the Oscar-winning The descendants before starring in the divergent action trilogy, during which she became friends with her ‘guardian angel’ Kate Winslet, without whom, she says, ‘I wouldn’t be able to cope emotionally with the extreme waves this industry can bring’.

BORN ON THIS DAY

CLAUS VON STAUFFENBERG (1907-1944). The 36-year-old German army officer attempted to assassinate Hitler at the heavily guarded Wolf’s lair, the Fuhrer’s secret headquarters on the eastern Front, in July 1944. He planted a bomb in a briefcase before leaving the meeting room, but Hitler was shielded from the blast by a heavy oak table. Stauffenberg was arrested in Berlin and shot, while some 200 plotters were tortured and executed.

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE (1887-1986). The U.S. artist made her name with her giant paintings of flowers, becoming the first woman to receive a retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. O’Keeffe said: ‘I’ve been terrified every moment of my life and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.’

ON NOVEMBER 15 . . .

IN 1923, Germany introduced the Rentenmark, to counter hyperinflation. IN 2002, Moors murderer Myra Hindley died, aged 60.

WORD WIZARDRY

GUESS THE DEFINITION: Crocket (1300s) A) Carved ornament. B) A dead tree. C) To dig up weeds. Answer below.

PHRASE EXPLAINED To trump up a charge: Meaning to concoct false evidence; it comes from the French tromper, meaning ‘to deceive’.

QUOTE FOR TODAY

there is a natural opposition among men to anything they have not thought of themselves. Sir Barnes Wallis, English inventor of the bouncing bomb (1887-1979)

JOKE OF THE DAY

WHAT happens when you drop a duck egg? It quacks. Guess the definition answer: A.

Compiled by ETAN SMALLMAN and ADAM JACOT DE BOINOD