ON THIS DAY
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE
OCTOBER 22, 1945 AS thousands of French women were going to the polls yesterday [for the first time], the Pope broadcast an appeal to women to play their full part in public life. He declared: ‘Women, your hour has struck. Public life needs you.’ OCTOBER 22, 1969 THe only woman in the Shadow Cabinet, Mrs Margaret Thatcher, was promoted last night to be the Tories’ spokesman on education. Mrs Thatcher, the 44-year-old MP for Finchley, is a barrister and taxation expert and is married with two children. She said last night: ‘I am very excited and cannot wait to get down to work.’
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
CATHerINe DeNeuve, 75. The French actress, star of Indochine and Belle De Jour, was once married to British photographer David Bailey. earlier this year, she attacked the # MeToo campaign, signing a letter calling it a ‘ witch- hunt’ against men. In 1971, she was one of 343 women who signed a declaration admitting they had an abortion when it was illegal. CHrISTOPHer LLOYD, 80. The American actor appeared in the Tv series Taxi alongside Danny de vito, but is best remembered for playing emmett ‘Doc’ Brown in the Back To The Future trilogy and uncle Fester in two Addams Family films. To prepare for his first movie role in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, he lived in a psychiatric institution for several weeks.
BORN ON THIS DAY
SArAH BerNHArDT (1844-1923). The French star was the first actress to play Hamlet on film, in 1900. She was said to have slept with leading figures including Les Miserables author victor Hugo and edward, Prince of Wales, while she married Aristides Damala — the man on whom Bram Stoker’s Dracula was modelled. Bernhardt had a menagerie of animals and slept with an alligator until it died from its diet of milk and champagne. DOrIS LeSSINg (19192013). The Persian-born British author was best known for her feminist novels, including The golden Notebook, published in 1962. She grew up in rhodesia, but said: ‘I felt as if my real life was beginning when I at last arrived in war-torn, grubby, cold england.’ In 2007, aged 88, she became the oldest ever person to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and only the 11th woman in 106 years.
ON OCTOBER 22…
IN 1884, the royal Observatory at greenwich was adopted as the site of the universal Time meridian of longitude. IN 2005, Waterloo by ABBA was voted the best song in the history of eurovision.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION: Emuscation (1664) A) A slight, tickling cough. B) removing moss from the bark of a tree. C) A vague unwell feeling; a moody depression; a hangover. Answer below
PHRASE EXPLAINED
Hocus-pocus — an exclamation used by magicians when invoking a change; it refers these days to meaningless talk designed to disguise what someone is really up to.