June 22, 2022 ON THIS DAY
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE JUNE 22, 1970
IT WAS typical of Margaret Thatcher that she spent yesterday poring over problem letters from her constituents. Some other MP, housewife and mother who had just been appointed Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for Education and Science might have let such chores go hang. But Mrs Thatcher says firmly: ‘When I make up my mind to do a job, I like to stick with it.’
JUNE 22, 2000
THE Duchess of York returned to the royal fold last night. She danced the night away with guests at a Windsor Castle celebration to mark five royal birthdays — Prince William’s 18th yesterday, plus Fergie’s ex-husband Prince Andrew’s 40th, Princess Anne’s 50th, Princess Margaret’s 70th and the Queen Mother’s 100th.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
ERIN BROCKOVICH, 62. The U.S. legal clerk won £200 million for more than 600 people — the biggest single legal settlement in U.S. history — after taking on the Pacific gas & Electric company for contaminating groundwater near one of its plants. Brockovich was played by Julia roberts in a 2000 biopic, for which the Hollywood star won a best actress oscar. PRUNELLA SCALES, 90. The actress from Surrey played Basil Fawlty’s wife Sybil in Fawlty Towers, which she said was her career high point. The mother of actor Samuel West, she was diagnosed with dementia after her husband, actor Timothy West, saw her in a play ‘and I could see that she was having to think about the next line’.
BORN ON THIS DAY
CICELY SAUNDERS (1918-2005). The Hertfordshire-born nurse-turned- doctor founded the modern hospice movement with a legacy of £500 from a patient dying of cancer. Awarded a damehood in 1980, she said: ‘Hospice is about living until you die, and it may be much longer and hopefully very much better than you ever expected.’ She died at St Christopher’s in london, the first hospice she had founded. JOHN DILLINGER (19031934). A notorious U. S. Depression-era thief, within a year Dillinger and his gang killed ten men, wounded seven others and staged three jailbreaks. He underwent plastic surgery to change his appearance, but was nicknamed
Snake Eyes, the one feature he was unable to alter. Dillinger was fatally shot by police, who were tipped off by one of his ‘friends’.
ON JUNE 22…
IN 1948, the SS Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury Docks in Essex, carrying hundreds of passengers from the Caribbean hoping for a new life in Britain.
IN 1971, Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell released her album Blue.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION: Syncretism (c1610s) A) Combining different beliefs. B) A form of matrimony. C) A union of opposites.
Answer below
PHRASE EXPLAINED Cut and run:
To make a sudden departure from a tricky situation; an 18th- century nautical phrase that meant to ‘sever the anchor cable because of an emergency and set sail immediately’.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
I LOVE mankind — it’s people I can’t stand
Linus Van Pelt in Peanuts, written by Charles Schulz, U.S. cartoonist (1922-2000)
JOKE OF THE DAY
HoW do molluscs fight? They slug it out. Guess The Definition answer: A.