ON THIS DAY
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE
NOVEMBER 22, 1948 BRITAIn’S baby boom is over. Births are fewer every week. Housing problems, shortage of perambulators and rationing did not stop the birth rate soaring in the post-war years. But the latest returns of the Registrar General show that up to last weekend, 362,587 babies were born this year — 57,066 fewer than in the same period last year.
NOVEMBER 22, 1962 An UnUSUAL £1 note which turned up in a Sunderland pub led police more than 200 miles . . . to Broadmoor psychiatric hospital in Berkshire. There, a patient was happily running off £5 and £1 notes on a printing machine, a court heard. Mr R. Castle Miller, prosecuting, said: ‘One might say it was a kind of occupational therapy.’
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
BILLIE JEAn KInG, 75. The American former world no1 tennis player (right) won 39 Grand Slam titles and founded the Women’s Tennis Association in 1973. Her famous match against Bobby Riggs in the same year, dubbed Battle of the Sexes, is the subject of a 2017 film of the same name. Sports Illustrated magazine said in 1975 it was ‘very likely that Billie Jean Moffitt King will go down as the most significant athlete of this century’. GEORGE ALAGIAH, 63. The Sri Lankanborn BBC newsreader was sent to a Catholic boarding school in Portsmouth at 11. He grew up with four sisters and used to sew clothes for their Barbie dolls. Alagiah revealed this year his bowel cancer, first diagnosed in 2014, had returned and he had just a ten per cent chance of surviving the next five years. He campaigns for screenings at age 50 for all.
BORN ON THIS DAY
PETER TOWnSEnd (1914-1995). The Battle of Britain pilot (right) was known for his romance with Princess Margaret, which she was forced to call off because he was divorced. Group Captain Townsend wrote: ‘She could have married me only if she had been prepared to give up everything — her position, her prestige, her privy purse. I simply hadn’t the weight, I knew it, to counterbalance all she would have lost.’ WILEY POST (1898-1935). The U.S. aviator in 1931 was the first to fly solo around the world, which he did in eight days and 15 hours. He had lost his left eye five years earlier in an oil field accident, and used part of his payout to buy his first plane. He died when his plane crashed in Alaska.
ON NOVEMBER 22…
IN 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, age 46, in dallas, Texas.
IN 2003, a northern hemisphere nation won the Rugby World Cup for the first time when England beat Australia.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION: Smombie (2018) A) Posting photos of oneself in odd places. B) A pedestrian distracted by their mobile phone or electronic gadget. C) Someone dozing at a keyboard. Answer below PHRASE EXPLAINED
Touch wood: Phrase used to ward off bad luck, which may echo pre-Christian rituals involving sacred trees such as oak and ash.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
I’M frightened all the time. But I never let it stop me. Never!
Georgia O’Keeffe, American artist (1887-1986)
JOKE OF THE DAY
WHAT is a litigious cook called? A sous chef. Guess The Definition answer: B.