ON THIS DAY

March 7, 2022

FROM THE DAIL MAIL ARCHIVE

MARCH 7, 1957

THE end of petrol rationing was brought nearer last night by Syria’s decision to allow oil from Iraq to flow again. experts forecast a much bigger petrol allowance by the end of May and the end of rationing in June.

MARCH 7, 1974

THERE was nothing grand in the way Ted Heath’s piano made its exit from no10 yesterday [two days after he resigned as PM]. Steinways, the makers, sent six men and it was quite a performance. The Steinway Sextet took a deep breath then, one-twothree, heaved the 700-pounder on its side.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

SIR RANULPH FIENNES, 78. The Windsor-born former SAS officer is regarded as the ‘world’s greatest explorer’. He was the first man to cross both the polar ice-caps and climb everest, and the first to circumnavigate the globe via both the north and South Poles. In 2000, after returning home from an expedition with frostbite, he used a saw and a vice on his workbench to remove the fingertips from his left hand. SIR VIV RICHARDS, 70. The Master Blaster from Antigua and former West Indies captain was voted english county cricket’s greatest overseas player by readers of BBC Sport in 2020. Richards, who represented Somerset and Glamorgan, was named one of Wisden’s Five Cricketers of the 20th Century. Shane Warne, who died last week — and who was also on that list — described Richards in 2020 as ‘the best batsman I’ve ever seen’.

BORN ON THIS DAY

RIK MAYALL (1958-2014). The Young Ones and Bottom comedy actor was hailed as ‘an authentic comedy genius’ by his Blackadder co-star Stephen Fry. In 1998, Mayall was in a coma after falling off his quad bike. He said: ‘I beat Jesus Christ. He was dead for three days at easter. When I crashed it was the day before Good Friday, Crap Thursday, and I was technically dead until easter Monday — that’s five days . . . beat him 5-3.’ DAMe Margaret Weston (1926-2021). As director of the Science Museum, the Gloucestershire-born electrical engineer became the first woman in the uK to run a national museum. In 1940, aged 14, she detained a German pilot whose Junkers bomber had crashed nearby until her father, who was in the Home Guard, arrived to arrest him.

ON MARCH 7…

IN 1804, the Royal Horticultural Society was founded at a bookshop in London. IN 1973, Margaret Thatcher told a BBC audience of children: ‘I don’t think there will be a woman Prime Minister in my lifetime.’

WORD WIZARDRY

GUESS THE DEFINITION: Spry (c 1740s) A) The leather strap to bind a hawk’s wing. B) To cry as a quail. C) Active, nimble, agile, energetic, brisk. answer below.

PHRASE EXPLAINED

Apples and oranges: meaning either irreconcilably or fundamentally different; the phrase has its origins in north America with many variants across the world.

QUOTE FOR TODAY

Somehow a bachelor never quite gets over the idea that he is a thing of beauty and a boy forever. Helen Rowland, U.S. writer (1875-1950)

JOKE OF THE DAY

WHAT should you do when balloons get sick? Helium. Guess the definition answer: c.