ON THIS DAY
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE NOVEMBER 17, 1939
SHOP windows may be lit up for Christmas despite the blackout. Aerial observations will be made to see if lighting experiments being carried out in Edgware Road, West London, will make this possible in wartime.
NOVEMBER 17, 1965
A ROBOT is bombarding electricity board officials with telephone calls. Sited in an unmanned sub-station at Haverthwaite in the Lake District, it is only supposed to call once a day to report how the sub-station is working. An official explained: ‘The robot has its own number. It responds when board officials ring up. But if anyone else calls it still rings the control office.’ Someone seems to have discovered its number.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
FENELLA FIELDING, 90. The English star of Carry On Screaming (pictured in 1966), is said to have ‘a larynx that oozes sex’. In her new autobiography, she says of co-star Kenneth Williams: ‘He was quite happy to steal the good lines I made up and use them before I could say them.’ DAVID EMANUEL, 65. The Welsh fashion designer created Princess Diana’s wedding dress with his then wife Elizabeth. Emanuel, 2013 runner-up in I’m A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here!, says of Prince Harry’s girlfriend Meghan Markle: ‘She would be absolutely delicious to dress . . . If she asked me to design her wedding dress, of course I’d absolutely love to do it.’
BORN ON THIS DAY
JEFF BUCKLEY (19661997). The u. S. singersongwriter (right), famed for his cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, was said by Rolling Stone magazine to have a voice that is ‘one of those indications that the human race isn’t all bad and life is worth living and there is beauty and brilliance in humanity’. He drowned, age 30, while swimming fully clothed in a river. AUBERON WAUGH (1939-2001). The writer and son of novelist Evelyn Waugh was badly wounded in an accident during his National Service when a machine gun fired several shots through his chest. Known for his acerbic journalism, he called Winston Churchill ‘a war criminal, mass murderer and persecutor of P.G. Wodehouse’, Harold Wilson an ‘old crook’ and Barbara Castle ‘revoltingly ugly’.
ON NOVEMBER 17
IN 1973, u.S. President Richard Nixon told journalists: ‘People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook.’ IN 2013, British author Doris Lessing died aged 94, six years after becoming the oldest winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION Tirocinium (coined from Latin 1651) A) Gift given to a guest. B) A soldier’s first military service. C) Song sung at a banquet. Answer below.
PHRASE EXPLAINED
To l ay i t on with a trowel: Gross exaggeration, from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, when Celia says to Touchstone: ‘Well said, that was laid on with a trowel.’
QUOTE FOR TODAY
SOMETIMES i think that not having to worry about your hair any more is the secret upside of death. Nora Ephron, writer of When Harry Met Sally (1941-2012)
JOKE OF THE DAY
DOCTOR, doctor, my l eg won’t stop mooing. ‘i think you’ve got a calf injury.’ Guess the Definition answer: B.