ON THIS DAY
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE OCTOBER 15, 1940
THE greatest salvage job in history was started in London yesterday. Five thousand ‘pick-and-shovel soldiers’ of the Auxiliary Military Pioneer Corps set to work to clear up five weeks’ accumulation of bombed buildings. Countless treasures lie beneath the wreckage, from office safes packed with cash to the thousands of little objects in humble homes.
OCTOBER 15, 1964
BRITAIN still holds the world’s teadrinking record. Yearly consumption is 9.7lb per head, says the International Tea Committee. Ireland and New Zealand came second and third respectively.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
ANTHONY JOSHUA, 29. The double Olympic goldwinning boxer from Hertfordshire retained his world heavyweight titles when he beat Russian Alexander Povetkin last month. The former bricklayer loves playing chess and says the tactics help his boxing. SARAH FERGUSON, 59. The former wife of Prince Andrew is a successful children’s author, having started the Budgie The Little Helicopter books more than 25 years ago. After their engagement was announced, Vanity Fair magazine described Fergie as ‘a jolly nice girl, supremely suited to the role of second-string daughter-in-law, horsey, bouncy, with an unthreatening IQ’.
BORN ON THIS DAY
P. G. WODEHOUSE (1881-1975). The Surrey-born writer was best known for his Jeeves books. But he also contributed many words to the English language, including shimmy (to dance) and whiffled (drunk). The UK’s only prize for comic fiction is named after him, and went unawarded this year because none of the entries was deemed funny enough. MARIE STOPES (1880-1958). In 1921, the scientist from Edinburgh opened Britain’s first family planning clinic, which gave free advice to married women and compiled data about contraception. She promoted compulsory sterilisation of anyone deemed unfit for parenthood and was so concerned about passing on ‘inferior’ genes that she disinherited her son when he married a woman with poor eyesight.
ON OCTOBER 15 . . .
IN 1946, Nazi Hermann Goering ended his life with poison hours before he was due to be executed. IN 1990, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION: Caucus (1763) A) A gathering to adopt a policy. B) A spur attached to a fighting cock. C) A blind person.
PHRASE EXPLAINED
I’ll have your guts for garters — meaning you are in big trouble with someone, metaphorically to the extent that they will disembowel you and use your intestines to hold up their stockings. It appears in Robert Greene’s The Scottish Historie Of James The Fourth, circa 1592, and owes its survival partly to its alliterative quality.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
IT sEEms that it is madder never to abandon one’s self than often to be infatuated; better to be wounded, a captive, and a slave, than always to walk in armour. Margaret Fuller, U.S. author (1810-1850)
JOKE OF THE DAY
WHY do bees hum? They’ve forgotten the words. Guess The Definition answer: A