ON THIS DAY
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE
APRIL 30, 1945 POLICE cars raced round Paris polling booths with orders from the Ministry of the Interior to tell voters the first ‘women suffrage’ election in France could continue for one-and-a-half hours after the pre-arranged closing time. Women voters outnumbered men in Paris by more than one-third. APRIL 30, 1993 THE Queen is to lift 200 years of royal secrecy by inviting the paying public into Buckingham Palace. She will declare open house for two months each year for the next five years to help pay the £40 million cost of restoring fire-ravaged Windsor Castle.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
KIRSTEN DuNST, 37. The u.S. actress (right) starred in Interview With The Vampire in 1994 aged 11 alongside Tom Cruise. In the film, she had to kiss Brad Pitt — 18 years her senior — and said she thought it was ‘disgusting’. Cruise still sends her a coconut cake every Christmas. ‘I call it the Cruise Cake,’ she says. ‘And it’s so good it gets eaten in a day.’ DICKIE DAVIES, 86. The moustachioed presenter of ITV’s World Of Sport started as head purser on the Queen Mary liner and had his first TV audition arranged by a passenger who liked the way he called the bingo. Beloved for a streak of white hair in his quiff, Davies switched names from Richard to Dickie on the advice of presenter Jimmy Hill, who ‘asked me if I didn’t think it was a bit pompous to call myself Richard’.
BORN ON THIS DAY
LESLIE GRANTHAM (1947-2018). The London-born actor played ‘Dirty’ Den Watts in EastEnders — performing the opening line of the soap’s first episode in 1985. Twenty years earlier, he had been convicted of murdering a German taxi driver while serving as a soldier, and spent more than ten years in jail where he joined a drama group. He insisted there was no mystique to acting. All he had to do was ‘walk and talk’. He owned up about his past to EastEnders producers, but they insisted it was a ‘Christian duty to forgive’. EVE ARDEN (1908-90). The American actress played Principal McGee, the headmistress in Grease and Grease 2. She started her career on Broadway in 1934, and was persuaded to ditch her real name, Eunice Quedens. She sought inspiration from her dressing table, taking her first name from [the perfume] Evening In Paris and the second from [cosmetics brand] Elizabeth Arden.
ON APRIL 30…
IN 1789, George Washington was inaugurated as the first u.S. president.
IN 1993, tennis player Monica Seles (right) was stabbed in the back during a match in Hamburg by a man determined to see Steffi Graf take her place as world No 1. Seles said: ‘It changed my career and irrevocably damaged my soul.’
GUESS THE DEFINITION: Hygge (2016)
A) Clean and tidy. B) Both tall and large. C) A quality of cosiness that engenders a feeling of well-being. Answer below
PHRASE EXPLAINED
Toodle-pip: Meaning goodbye; from P.G. Wodehouse — ‘pip-pip’ was the sound of the horn fitted to early bicycles and was slang for goodbye, and ‘toodle’ may come from ‘toot’.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
I hAve never run a car. I could say that this is because I have this extremely tender environmentalist conscience, but the fact is I hate driving. Sir David Attenborough
JOKE OF THE DAY
HOW do pigs get to hospital? By hambulance. Guess the definition answer: C.