ON THIS DAY
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE DECEMBER 5, 1945
BECAUSE he ‘ran away during the 1940 bombing and let the district starve for fish and chips’, a tradesman who wanted to open a local chip shop was refused a licence yesterday by Coulsdon and Purley Food Control Committee in Surrey.
DECEMBER 5, 1961
WOMEN can now go to their doctors and ask for birth-control pills on the NHS. The Minister of Health, Mr Enoch Powell, ruled in the Commons yesterday that the country’s 23,000 family doctors are free to prescribe the pink anti-birth pill, which recently passed full-scale trials.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
SAJID JAVID, 49. The Rochdale-born Home Secretary is a former banker and self-made millionaire who reportedly took a 98 per cent pay cut to enter politics. The first asian man in the Cabinet, he is the son of a bus driver who came to the UK from Pakistan with £1 in his pocket. He has a portrait of Margaret Thatcher on his office wall. LEWIS PUGH, 49. The endurance swimmer from Plymouth, the un’s ‘Patron of the Oceans’ and a former maritime lawyer, swam the length of the English Channel (350 miles) this year to raise awareness of the threat to the UK’S coastal waters from climate change, over-fishing and plastic.
BORN ON THIS DAY
WALT DISNEY (1901-1966). The u.S. animator and filmmaker won 59 nominations and 22 competitive awards at the Oscars. The longstanding rumour that his body was frozen after death (and even that it is stored under the Pirates Of The Caribbean ride) was debunked by his daughter, Diane, who wrote: ‘There is absolutely no truth to the rumour that my father wished to be frozen. I doubt he’d ever heard of cryonics.’ CHRISTINA ROSSETTI (1830-94). The English poet, sister of Pre-Raphaelite painters William and Dante gabriel Rossetti, is best remembered for the Christmas carol In The Bleak Midwinter (with music by Gustav Holst). She once considered going to the Crimea alongside Florence nightingale, but was forced by illness to stay at home.
ON DECEMBER 5…
IN 1958, Britain’s first section of motorway, the eight-mile Preston bypass in Lancashire — with a hedge dividing its four lanes — was opened by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. It is now part of the M6.
IN 1974, the final episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus was aired on the BBC.
IN 2013, South africa’s first democratically elected president, nelson Mandela, died aged 95.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION: tussie-mussies (late Middle English) a) hiccoughs B) a rustic game in which one blindfolded player guesses which other struck him C) posies assembled from a selection of flowers and herbs ( Answer below)
PHRASE EXPLAINED
Not by a long chalk — meaning ‘by no means’ or ‘not at all’; it derives from scoring pub games using chalk; the phrase suggests a determined intention to continue despite your opponent doing well with a big score.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
THERE are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice Mark Twain, U.S. writer (1835-1910)
JOKE OF THE DAY
Who delivers Christmas presents to dogs? Santa Paws. Guess The Definition answer: C.