ON THIS DAY
September 15, 2021
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE
SEPTEMBER 15, 1981
MARCUS SARJEANT, the 17-year-old who fired blanks at the Queen from a replica pistol during june’s Trooping the Colour ceremony, had planned to assassinate the Monarch, the Old Bailey heard yesterday.
jailing Sarjeant for five years, Lord Lane, the Lord Chief justice, told him: ‘I have little doubt that if you had been able to obtain a real gun . . . you would have tried to murder Her Majesty.’
SEPTEMBER 15, 2007
A SHUDDER ran through the economy yesterday in the wake of the Bank of England’s emergency loan to keep Northern Rock afloat. Panicking customers queued in their thousands to empty savings accounts after Britain’s fifth-biggest mortgage lender admitted it was running out of cash. City analysts fear the global ‘credit crunch’ might affect other banks similarly.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
SOPHIE DAHL, 44. The ex-model and author is the granddaughter of writer Roald Dahl — who named the BFG’s main character after her. As a child, she was once woken by someone wailing ‘Ooooooh, wooooo, oooooh’ at her window. It was Roald, pretending to be the giant. Sophie called him Mold, as when being taught the Norwegian pronunciation of his name her ‘baby tongue couldn’t get to grips with it’.
TOM HARDY, 44. The London-born actor played ‘Britain’s most violent prisoner’ Charles Bronson in 2008 film Bronson (putting on 3st with chocolate and pizza) and Alfie Solomons in the BBC’s Peaky Blinders. On losing a bet with his The Revenant co-star Leonardo DiCaprio (who said Hardy would be Oscar-nominated for the film), he had to get a ‘Leo knows all’ tattoo.
BORN ON THIS DAY
MARGARET LOCKWOOD (1916-1990). The Indianborn English actress, known for a beauty spot painted high on her left cheek, starred in The Lady Vanishes and The Wicked Lady. The biggest Uk box office star of the 1940s, Lockwood once complained to studio head j. Arthur Rank that she was ‘sick of sinning’ after several bad-girl film roles.
FAY WRAY (1907-2004). The Canadianborn U.S. actress was in more than 70 films, but found fame as Ann Darrow in 1933’s king kong. Its director Merian C. Cooper told her she would star with ‘the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood’. Wray said: ‘Naturally, I thought Clark Gable.’
ON SEPTEMBER 15 . . .
IN 1938, prime minister Neville Chamberlain met Adolf Hitler at his holiday home in Berchtesgaden, Bavaria. IN 1984, Stevie Wonder’s I just Called To Say I Love you was at No.1 in the Uk.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION: Roustabout (coined late 1860s) A) An odd-job man. B) To mix words from different languages. C) An idler. answer below.
PHRASE EXPLAINED To not pull one’s weight: Meaning failing to take a share of the work. The phrase comes from the sport of rowing, when moving the oar through the water without putting your weight behind the stroke.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
Only the paranoid survive.
Andrew Grove, Hungarian-born U.S. computer engineer (1936-2016)
JOKE OF THE DAY
WHAT is a snake’s best subject? Hiss-tory. Guess The Definition answer: a.