ON THIS DAY

May 25, 2018

MAY 25, 1945

HEINRICH HIMMLER — Hitler’s Minister of the Interior and architect of the horror camps — committed suicide last night at British Second Army headquarters. He had managed to hide a phial of potassium cyanide in his mouth and bit onto it during a medical examination. He collapsed on the floor and died within 15 minutes.

MAY 25, 1964

SCREAMINg Lord Sutch plans to anchor a pirate radio ship, a 60ft trawler, 4½ miles off the Essex coast today. The beat musician, 23, who wears a top hat over 18in hair, is ex-plumber David Sutch. Apart from music, the station will broadcast late-night readings from Lady Chatterley’s Lover. [He later founded the Official Monster Raving Loony Party and fought 39 elections, losing his deposit each time.]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

CILLIAN MURPHy, 42. The Irish actor, famous for his piercing blue eyes, has starred in Batman Begins and Peaky Blinders (right). Famously private, he avoided live TV chat shows until 2010 and says his two children are unaware he is a film star and think that he unloads the dishwasher for a living. PAUL WELLER, 60. The Surrey born singersongwriter found fame with The Jam and The Style Council and has also had solo hits including you Do Something To Me. His eighth child (with second wife Hannah Andrews) was born last year and named Nova. Before the birth, he said: ‘you get certain people who go, “Ooh, seven children with four women” and all that. But I don’t care, man. I love all my kids.’

BORN ON THIS DAY

EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON (1803-1873). English writer, poet and Cabinet minister, who wrote a stream of best-selling novels and coined phrases such as ‘the great unwashed’, ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ and the well-known (and much-parodied) opening line from his 1830 novel Paul Clifford: ‘It was a dark and stormy night.’ MARGARET FORSTER (1938-2016). The Carlisle-born author wrote georgy girl, which was made into a hit film in 1966. She said the longevity of the book and movie was ‘like an albatross around my neck’ that ‘fills me with grief’. But she still wrote 24 other novels and 14 biographies.

ON MAY 25…

IN 2001, Erik Weihenmayer, 32, became the first blind person to reach the summit of Mount Everest.

IN 2011, The Oprah Winfrey Show finished after 25 years. The talkshow queen (right) said the ending was ‘all sweet and no bitter’.