ON THIS DAY
JUNE 16, 2017
JUNE 16, 1945
FLYING bombs fitted with scythes to cut Allied bombers in two were one of the secrets uncovered by Britain’s ‘T’ force — the 5,000 men who raced forward with the advanced troops to prevent the destruction of Germany’s V-secrets. The bombs would have been piloted by a German fanatic who would bale out when the job was done.
JUNE 16, 1967
PRINCE PHILIP made fashion student laraine Hillier, 18, ‘blush like mad’ yesterday when he said: ‘Compared with the others, you aren’t showing enough leg.’ They met while he was touring the new Royal Technical College at Salford, lancashire.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
DAME EILEEN ATKINS, 83. The star of Cranford and Gosford Park grew up on a london council estate, the daughter of a gas meter reader and a barmaid. The co-creator of Upstairs, Downstairs (right) said she was sexually propositioned by actor Colin Farrell when she was 69 and he was 28. She turned him down, saying she was ‘too old and too married’. She was rewarded with The oldie magazine’s Refusenik of The Year award.
NEIL MACGREGOR, 71. The Glasgow-born former director of the British Museum and the National Gallery, who presented BBC Radio 4’s A History of The world In 100 objects, turned down a knighthood in 1999. Art historian and spy Anthony Blunt, who taught MacGregor (who’d already trained as a lawyer), called him ‘the most brilliant student I’ve ever taught’.
BORN ON THIS DAY
STAN LAUREL (1890-1965), right. The comedian from Ulverston in Cumbria — one half of laurel and Hardy — was born Arthur Stanley Jefferson but changed his surname after his girlfriend suggested that having a stage name with 13 letters was bad luck. Earlier this year, a Dutch ophthalmologist, who studied laurel and Hardy’s 92 films, concluded that they probably suffered 88 eye injures across their career, with laurel’s finger the most common cause, followed by his fist.
ON JUNE 16...
IN 1963, 26-year-old former textile worker Valentina Tereshkova, from the Soviet Union, became the first woman in space. IN 1976, a non-violent march by 15,000 students in Soweto, South Africa, turned into days of rioting when police opened fire on the crowd.