ON THIS DAY
IT’S DAY 149 OF 2015
ARTIST Edwin Landseer’s four bronze lions have lain at the foot of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square for 149 years. It took him nine years from receiving the £ 17,000 commission (worth £1.7 million today), to installing all four, which are not identical — each has a different face and mane. HAMPDEN Park in Glasgow was once the world’s largest stadium. It held more than
149,000 spectators for a Scotland v England match in 1937, the European record for an international. Its capacity is now 52,000.
THERE ARE 217 DAYS LEFT
THE Duke of Edinburgh, 94, carried out 217 royal engagements last year in the UK. Prince William, the Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry clocked up 198 between them. IN THE Steven King novel The Shining, the family stay in Room 217. But for the movie version, the hotel where it was filmed, The Timberline Lodge, feared guests would be afraid to stay in 217, so it was changed to the non-existent 237. As it turns out, Room 217 is now its most requested room. IN TENNIS, the Davis Cup began in 1900 when a Harvard student Dwight Davis bought a trophy made of 217oz of sterling silver and invited male players from Britain to play against the U.S. America won the first tournament, and Britain has won only ten since — including last year’s.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
KYLIE MINOGUE, 48, the Aussie singing star (pictured). Her ancestors included Dinah Riddiford, hanged at 69 at Gloucester jail in 1816 for burglary — the oldest woman to be executed in Britain in the past two centuries. CAREY MULLIGAN, 31, the London-born actress best known for An Education and Suffragette. When she married Marcus Mumford, of folk rockers Mumford & Sons, in a Somerset barn in 2012, her soon-tobe father-in-law, John, a vicar, officiated. DAVID BADDIEL, 52. The New York-born British comedian and co-lyricist of England football anthem Three Lions was, in 2006, flattered to have been voted the World’s Sixth Sexiest Jew — until he found out Alan Sugar had taken fifth place.
BORN ON THIS DAY
IAN FLEMING (1908-1964), the Londonborn former naval intelligence officer and creator of James Bond. In World War II, he ran a real Operation Goldeneye, conducting limited sabotage and monitoring neutral Spain in case it sided with the Nazis. MAEVE BINCHY (1939-2012), the Irish novelist whose books included Circle Of Friends and Heart And Soul. She was once a history teacher at a girls’ school and said her 6ft 1in height meant she was able to ‘swoop up and down the class and terrify the children’.
ON MAY 28...
IN 1849, novelist Anne Bronte died of tuberculosis aged 29 while on holiday in Scarborough, North Yorkshire.
IN 1959, Miss Able and Miss Baker ( pictured), two Nasa monkeys, became the first animals ever to return alive from a space mission.
IN 1982, Pope John Paul II began the first visit to the UK by a reigning Pope by kissing the tarmac at Gatwick.
IN 1987, 19-year- old Mathias Rust took a Cessna aircraft from an airfield near his home in Hamburg and flew over the Iron Curtain, landing in Red Square on a ‘peace mission’. He was jailed for four years, but sent home in 1988.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
A WOMAN knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea. Honore de Balzac (1799-1850)
JOKE OF THE DAY
WHAT’S the easiest way to get rid of street performers? Go for the juggler.