ON THIS DAY
June 29, 2017
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE JUNE 29, 1962
SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL last night sat up in bed at Monte Carlo’s Princess Grace Clinic and asked: ‘Please let me have some cold chicken and a cognac.’ His request came just eight hours after his broken leg was set, prompting doctors to praise his resilience as ‘positively Churchillian’. He was hurt in a fall at the Hotel de Paris.
JUNE 29, 1967
GERMAN girls were told today: ‘Don’t copy the Twiggy look — it could cripple you for life.’ Professor Rupprecht Bernbeck, head of a Hamburg hospital, said: ‘She has a hump back, exaggerated curvature of the spine and an under-developed rib cage.’ In London, Twiggy’s mother, Mrs Nell Hornby, said: ‘What a load of rubbish.’
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
AMANDA DONOHOE, 55. The British actress (right) starred in Castaway, The Madness Of King George, L.A. Law and Emmerdale. She became Adam Ant’s live-in lover at 16 and has said she does not believe in monogamy, ‘ but I do believe in one at a time’. In 1989, Donohoe moved to Hollywood but came back to the UK 12 years later saying it was a ‘lonely’ place and she didn’t want to die there. MARK RADCLIFFE, 59. The Lancashireborn DJ has worked for the BBC for more than 25 years. As a Radio 1 producer in 1983, he reluctantly agreed to book an interview with ‘a tiny girl with a bad Eighties-style curly mullet, leather jacket and moth- eaten leggings’, thinking her ‘some wannabe’. (She was Madonna).
BORN ON THIS DAY
NICOLE, DUCHESS OF BEDFORD (1920-2012). The French- born wife of the Duke of Bedford aided the French Resistance in World War II, taking messages and gun parts in her children’s pram. She helped her second husband turn Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire, into a tourist attraction, once covering the silk curtains with netting after a woman visitor cut pieces out of the silk curtains as souvenirs. ALAN BLUMLEIN ( 1903- 1942). The London-born engineer invented stereo sound recording in 1931, after getting frustrated that the sound from a single speaker at the cinema did not match the action on screen. He died at 38 in an aircraft accident, testing the H2S airborne radar system in World War II.
ON JUNE 29 ...
IN 1960, BBC Television Centre opened in West London. Its first studio production featured comedian Arthur Askey. IN 1967, American actress Jayne Mansfield died, aged 34, in a car crash in Louisiana.
WORD WIZARDRY
NEW WORD OF THE DAY
Menoporsche: When a middle-aged man tries to recapture his youth by buying an expensive sports car. GUESS THE DEFINITION Gibus (coined eponymous 1848) A) Opera or crush hat. B) Suit of the same colour throughout. C) Brown bowler hat. Answer below
PHRASE EXPLAINED
Doubting Thomas: A sceptic who needs evidence; from Thomas, one of Jesus’s 12 disciples, who refused to believe ten other apostles had seen the resurrected Jesus.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
LIFE is a gamble at terrible odds. if it was a bet, you wouldn’t take it. Sir Tom Stoppard, playwright
JOKE OF THE DAY
WHAT do you call a dog that does magic tricks? A labracadabrador. Guess The Definition answer: A