ON THIS DAY
AUGUST 1, 2017
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE
AUGUST 1, 1946 ALLEGATIONS that three women tried to aid the escape of German PoWs were made in a Birmingham court yesterday. Two of the women were Mrs Marion Cadbury, a member of the cocoa family, and her German maid, Christina Schmitt. The women, members of the Quaker community, were summoned for conveying rugs and blankets to the PoWs. AUGUST 1, 1958 THE Prime Minister has confirmed that the State Opening of Parliament will be televised for the first time. Mr Macmillan told the Commons: ‘The Government regards this ceremony as a State occasion, quite distinct from the day-to-day work of Parliament. They have no intention of proposing that the televising of those proceedings be allowed.’ [It would be 31 years before the televising of Commons proceeedings began.]
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
ADRIAN DUNBAR, 59. The actor from Northern Ireland has become an unlikely sex symbol as moralistic Superintendent Ted Hastings in BBC hit drama Line Of Duty. As drama students in London, he and classmate Neil Morrissey shared a flat. When Morrissey soon became a big TV star in Men Behaving Badly, Dunbar said: ‘I began to worry that stardom had passed me by.’ The two actors were reunited in Line Of Duty. AMBER RUDD, 54. The Home Secretary and former investment banker got into hot water on her last day at Cheltenham Ladies’ College by tying all the chair legs together in the dining room.
BORN ON THIS DAY
YVES SAINT LAURENT (1936-2008). At just 21, the Algerian-born Frenchman succeeded Christian Dior as the chief designer of the House of Dior in 1957. SaintLaurent (right) suffered depression — so much so that his lover and business partner, Pierre Berge, said he ‘was born with a nervous breakdown’. ALEXANDER OF GREECE (1893-1920). Alexander became king in 1917, when his father King Constantine was exiled. Alexander’s marriage to a commoner in 1919 caused a scandal that forced him, too, to leave Greece temporarily. Soon after his return, he was bitten by a monkey belonging to the steward of the palace’s grapevines and died of sepsis, aged just 27.
ON AUGUST 1…
IN 1774, English chemist Joseph Priestley identified a gas he called ‘dephlogisticated air’ — later named oxygen. IN 1936, 100,000 people saluted Adolf Hitler at the opening of the Berlin Olympics. IN 1981, MTV, the first 24-hour music TV channel, began broadcasting in the U.S.
WORD WIZADRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION Valgus (coined 1800) a) Calling of the hounds in hunting. b) Attract the opposite sex at breeding time. c) A type of club foot. Answer below
PHRASE EXPLAINED
Blackmail: Demand money from someone in return for not revealing compromising information about them, derives from the Anglo-Saxon ‘mal’, meaning rent tax; black is Gaelic for ‘to cherish or protect.’
QUOTE FOR TODAY
FOUR be the things I’d been better without: love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt. Dorothy Parker, U.S. critic (1893-1967)
JOKE OF THE DAY
WHAT is the difference between a tube and a foolish Dutchman? One is a hollow cylinder, the other is a silly Hollander. Guess The Definition answer: C