August 12, 2022 ON THIS DAY
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE aUGUST 12, 1950
BIggER crowds than ever assembled yesterday at Clarence House, where Princess Elizabeth awaits the birth of her second child. The King and Queen motored from Buckingham Palace, and stayed with the Princess for an hour and a half. [Anne was born on August 15.]
aUGUST 12, 1986
ToP gun is this summer’s surprise box office blockbuster that has put U.S. Navy pilots in the spotlight. It is centred around the real-life training camp for its top pilots who are schooled in combat and dog-fighting. The film’s leading man, Tom Cruise, has been almost neglected in the critics’ rush to praise the aerial acrobatics.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
CARA DELEvINgNE, 30.
The model and actress from London, who has nearly
43 million followers on Instagram, has been described as ‘the woman who single-handedly sold bushy brows to the masses’.
In 2018, it was revealed that her greataunt, socialite Lady Doris Castlerosse, had had an affair with Winston Churchill. FRANCoIS HoLLANDE, 68. The former French president was revealed to be cheating on the ‘ First girlfriend’, valerie Trierweiler, when Closer magazine pictured him outside the apartment of actress Julie
gayet (whom he married this year). Trierweiler also said in a tell-all book that he ‘despises the poor’ — a claim he rejected.
BORN ON THIS DAY
NoRRIS (1925-2004) and Ross McWhirter
( 1925- 1975). The Middlesex-born twins were sports journalists who set up an agency ‘ to supply facts and figures to newspapers, yearbooks, encyclopaedias and advertisers’. They wrote the guinness Book of Records, which was first published in 1955. Both brothers stood unsuccessfully as Tory parliamentary candidates. Ross was assassinated by IRA gunmen at his home. MARgARET BURBIDgE (1919-2020). The Stockport-born U.S. astronomer, nicknamed Lady Stardust, was rejected for a fellowship at a Californian observatory because women were not permitted to use its telescopes. She said: ‘Men making the rules somehow developed the idea that the wives of the astronomers would not like the thought of their men working with women “during the night”!’
ON AUGUST 12...
IN 1851, Isaac Merritt Singer patented his domestic sewing machine — the first to allow continuous and curved stitching.
IN 1953, the Soviet Union conducted secret tests of its first hydrogen bomb in Siberia.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION: Ichnite (1850s)
A) Tawny, yellow tinged with red.
B) A fossil footprint.
C) Without thought, headlong.
answer below.