ON THIS DAY
IT’S DAY 68 OF 2016
JUST over 68 million Penny Blacks, the world’s first adhesive postage stamp, were produced after its introduction in 1840. Most survivors sell for £3,000, but some rare specimens can reach more than £10,000.
AT LEAST 68,000 people died during the Great Plague of London in 1665. At its peak in August it claimed 7,000 lives a week.
SCOTTISH swimmer David Wilkie became the first man to win a swimming gold in the Olympics for Great Britain for 68 years when he triumphed in the 200m breaststroke at the 1976 Montreal Games. Wilkie celebrates his 62nd birthday today.
THERE ARE 298 DAYS LEFT
ALTOGETHER, 298 dogs were auditioned for the title role in the 1943 classic film Lassie Come Home, starring Roddy McDowall and Elizabeth Taylor. A male Rough Collie called Pal (right) was chosen to play the female dog. He would star in six more Lassie films and died in 1958 at the grand old age of 18.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
CHERYL BAKER, 62. Born Rita Maria Crudgington, the singer and TV presenter is best known as a member of Bucks Fizz who won the 1981 Eurovision Song Contest with Making Your Mind Up. She still has back pain from breaking three vertebrae when the band’s tour coach crashed in 1984.
GYLES BRANDRETH, 68. The Germanborn writer, broadcaster and former Conservative MP and wife Michele married at Marylebone Register Office in 1973 — then kept it a secret from both sets of parents for two years. They thought it a private matter.
GARY NUMAN, 58. The electro-music star behind the hit Cars (right) was a keen pilot and in the Eighties succeeded on a second attempt at flying round in the world in a small plane. On the first bid, he got as far as India before being arrested on suspicion of smuggling and spying.
BORN ON THIS DAY
JOSEPHINE COCHRANE (1839-1913). After her politician husband died, she threw herself into building a machine that could clean dishes, and with her first employee, mechanic George Butters, created the world’s first dishwasher, patented in 1886.
LYNN REDGRAVE (1943-2010). The actress, famous for films such as Georgy Girl, discovered in 1998 the boy she regarded as her grandson was actually her husband John Clark’s son. Clark had had an affair with Redgrave’s personal assistant, who later married their son Ben. Clark and Redgrave divorced.
BEATRICE SHILLING (1909-1990). The aero engineer received the thanks of thousands of RAF pilots during World War II when she invented a diaphragm which allowed fuel to get to an aircraft’s engine regardless of the plane’s violent movements, ensuring the engine wouldn’t stall.
ON MARCH 8...
In 1702, King William III died of injuries when his horse stumbled on a mole hill. His opponents toasted the mole as ‘the little gentleman in the black velvet waistcoat’.
In 1973, Paul McCartney was fined £100 for growing cannabis on his Kintyre farm.
In 1985, every Chinese child was ordered to give one Feng, roughly 2p at the time, to save the giant panda from extinction.
In 1790, the French government, with its new motto of ‘Liberty, Fraternity, Equality’, voted to keep slavery in its colonies.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
If you have a child, you’ll notice they’ll have two states, asleep or online.
Eric Schmidt (ex-CEO of Google)
JOKES OF THE DAY
WHY didn’t the coastguard go into the sea to save the hippies. Because they were too far out, man!