ON THIS DAY
October 16 2020
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE OCTOBER 16, 1951
THE face of Viscount Samuel, 80-year-old Liberal peer, was seen on Britain’s television screens last night. He spoke for 15 minutes on the General Election. It was the first time television had been used for a party political broadcast. Viewers all agreed that TV will be a great force in bringing general elections into the home.
OCTOBER 16, 1993
THE Nobel Peace Prize was handed yesterday to the leaders of the world’s most violent nation. Nelson Mandela and President F.W. de Klerk were said to have opened the road to reconciliation in South Africa. The Nobel committee split the £558,000 prize between the ANC leader and the chief of the National Party, which invented apartheid, in the hope that their example can help end factional violence that threatens to rip apart hopes for democracy.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
DAME CRESSIDA DICK, 60. The first female and openly gay commissioner of the Metropolitan Police is the country’s most senior officer. She used to work in a fish and chip shop — with a man who kept a ‘very large’ baseball bat behind the counter to break up fights. DAME ANGELA LANSBURY, 95. The Londonborn actress (right) starred in Murder, She Wrote. She was Oscar-nominated at 19 for her screen debut, 1944’s Gaslight, which gave us the word gaslighting (‘ to manipulate a person by psychological means into questioning his or her own sanity’). In 1961’s Blue Hawaii, Lansbury played Elvis Presley’s mother.
BORN ON THIS DAY
OSCAR WILDE ( 18541900). The Irish writer (right), who penned The Importance Of Being Earnest, lived his later life in poverty after being jailed ( 1895- 97) for ‘ gross indecency’. In 2017, he was posthumously pardoned when the Turing Law exonerated 50,000 men convicted of homosexuality crimes. TONY ROLT (1918-2008). The racing driver from Hampshire was commissioned into the Rifle Brigade in 1939. He was taken prisoner by the Nazis and made a number of failed escape bids, before being sent to Colditz, a maximum security POW camp for officers. While there, he organised the construction of a glider to help two prisoners escape, but they were liberated by the u.S. Army before it could take off.
ON OCTOBER 16 . . .
IN 1908, Wild West showman Samuel Cody became the first person to pilot a powered and sustained flight in Britain. IN 1989, the BBC sitcom Birds Of A Feather, starring Pauline Quirke and Linda Robson as sisters Sharon and Tracey, was first broadcast.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION: Recreant (14th cent) A) Backward; retarded. B) A one-way peephole in a door. C) Cowardly or craven. ( Answer below) PHRASE EXPLAINED To separate the sheep from the goats: meaning to divide good from bad; it comes from the Gospel of Matthew, where sheep are depicted as meek followers of Christ and goats are unruly outcasts.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
Love’s a disease. But curable Rose Macaulay, English novelist (1881-1958)
JOKE OF THE DAY
MY KIDS say I’m hopeless at fixing appliances. Well, they’re in for a shock. guess The Definition answer: C