ON THIS DAY
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE
JUNE 12, 1946
SCOTLAND Yard is searching suspected black market quarters following the theft of £10,000-worth of cosmetics from a factory in Tolworth, Surrey. Among articles stolen from Helena Rubinstein Ltd were 30,000 lipsticks, 7,500 containers of rouge and several hundredweights of jars of cosmetic creams.
JUNE 12, 1956
A Jury at the inquest on ten-year-old Tony Murphy, of Stepney, who died after he was mauled by a lion at Whipsnade Zoo, returned a verdict of misadventure. The coroner praised the actions of the Rev Ronald Aylward, Scoutmaster in charge of a party of Stepney boys visiting the zoo, who rescued Tony using an iron bar to fight the lion.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
RICHARD M. SHERMAN, 90. He and his late brother Robert were disney’s principal songwriters in the Sixties and Seventies, penning more tunes for films than any other team. Richard (right, with Julie Andrews) and his brother won two Oscars for Mary Poppins, which included Walt disney’s favourite song, Feed The Birds. They also wrote scores for The Jungle Book and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. MICHAEL FABRICANT, 68. The Brexiteer Tory MP for Lichfield, Staffs, was an extra, playing an MP, in the original BBC version of House Of Cards and acted as a consultant to the series. Last year, appearing on the TV show Celebrity First dates, he said: ‘Most people think I’m gay, but when you’re an MP, if I came out and said what I am, which is probably bisexual, people would say: “He’s greedy — he can’t make up his mind!” ’
BORN ON THIS DAY
REG PRESLEY (1941-2013). The Andoverborn singer was frontman of Sixties band The Troggs and had hits with Wild Thing and With A Girl Like You. He wrote the song Love Is All Around, which was covered by Wet Wet Wet and used in the film Four Weddings And A Funeral. Presley used the proceeds to pursue research into his main interest outside music — alien spacecraft, lost civilisations and crop circles. EGON SCHIELE (1890-1918). The Austrian Expressionist painter was once convicted of ‘public immorality’ and sentenced to three days in jail for possessing more than 100 pornographic drawings — and a judge burnt one of them inside the courtroom. He died aged 28 of Spanish flu, three days after his wife, who was six months pregnant.
ON JUNE 12…
IN 1942, Anne Frank (right) received a diary as a 13th birthday present in Amsterdam.
IN 1987, on a visit to Berlin, u.S. President Ronald Reagan told Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev: ‘Tear down this wall.’
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION: Splacknuck (1720s)
A) A swarm of bees.
B) A strange person or animal.
C) A pole slung across a stream to stop cattle passing.
Answer below
PHRASE EXPLAINED
That’s the way the cookie crumbles — a weary acknowledgement that a poor situation must be accepted. A modern variant of ‘such is life’. Alludes to a crumbled cookie that cannot be put back together.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
THE purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.
Pablo Picasso, artist (1881-1973)
JOKE OF THE DAY
WHY did the turkey cross the road? To prove he wasn’t chicken.
Guess The Definition answer: B.