ON THIS DAY
January 15, 2020
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE
JANUARY 15, 1943
A U.S. soldier in Britain has married an American Red Cross nurse 3,000 miles away — over the trans-ocean radio-phone. The couple were Technical Sgt. Thomas J. Conlan, aged 24, and Miss Elizabeth L. Izat, both from New York. Conlan was in a room in a West of England town at U.S. Army headquarters. The bride was in Washington.
JANUARY 15, 1970
PRINCESS ANNE ( pictured) notched up another first yesterday — she represented the Royal Family for the first time on her own [aged 19]. The occasion was the charity premiere of the Hollywood musical Paint Your Wagon in London. The Princess wore a full-length dress of off-white Thai silk.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
FRANK BOUGH, 87. The retired TV presenter from Stoke-on-Trent was known for his comforting presence and eclectic range of jumpers as host of the BBC’s Grandstand and Breakfast Time, but was sacked when it emerged he’d taken cocaine with prostitutes in a Mayfair brothel. In 2001, he had a liver transplant after being told a tumour meant he had only weeks to live.
CLAUDIA WINKLEMAN, 48. The Strictly Come Dancing and Radio 2 presenter (pictured) is the BBC’s highest-paid woman, at £375,000 a year. She has called herself a ‘walking fringe’ and jokes: ‘I basically want to look like Jack Sparrow [Johnny Depp’s Pirates Of The Caribbean character]. I’m two minutes away from getting a parrot.’
BORN ON THIS DAY
IVOR NOVELLO (1893-1951). The Welsh songwriter and playwright was born David Ivor Davies. He was also a matinee idol, appearing in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger and Noel Coward’s The Vortex, and a Hollywood writer for films including Greta Garbo’s Mata Hari and Tarzan The Ape Man (writing the line ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane’, which, incidentally, he hated). During World War II he was caught misusing petrol ration coupons and trying to bribe a policeman and sentenced to eight weeks in jail. HUGH TREVOR-ROPER (1914-2003). The historian from Northumberland made his name with his 1947 book The Last Days Of Hitler after being asked by the intelligence services to find out what had happened to the Fuhrer. Ennobled in 1979, he later gained equal fame for authenticating the fake Hitler diaries, making what one obituary described as ‘an egregious ass of himself’.
ON JANUARY 15…
IN 1759, the British Museum opened at a converted stately home on London’s Great Russell Street (Buckingham House, later Buckingham Palace, had been rejected).
IN 1961, The Primettes signed for Motown Records on the condition they change their name — to The Supremes.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION: Layette (c1830)
A) A vessel for incense. B) A horse dumping its rider. C) Articles for a newborn child.
Answer below
PHRASE EXPLAINED
Not a dicky bird: Meaning silence; the phrase alludes to the fact that ‘dicky bird’ is Cockney rhyming slang for word; a ‘dicky bird’ was a generic term for any little bird common in England in the 1700s.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
JOKE OF THE DAY
WHY was Cinderella thrown off the football
team? She kept running away from the ball. Guess The Definition answer: C.