ON THIS DAY
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE
DECEMBER 18, 1970 MRS MAUREEN COLTON was mystified. Her teaspoons kept disappearing. A few days ago there were a dozen in her cutlery drawer. Yesterday, there were none. Till the missing spoons fell out of her five-year-old twins’ pockets, that is. The BBC’s top children’s TV programme, Blue Peter, is appealing for 200,000 old forks and spoons. It wants to sell them for scrap to raise money to buy three caravans to take under-privileged children on holiday.
DECEMBER 18, 1976 LENNY HENRY, 18, (right) the comedian who found fame in ITV’s new Faces, then starred in the series The Fosters, is Britain’s top non-smoker. He was voted no1 on a 1976 list issued by the national Society of non-Smokers and chosen because of his recent declaration that ‘smoking for young people is very unfashionable’.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
BRAD PITT, 56. The actor and ex-husband of Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie was also once engaged to Gwyneth Paltrow. He used to have a job ‘driving strippers around’ LA. One told him about an acting class she went to and he quit his job to begin training. He is Barack Obama’s ninth cousin.
LIZZIE DEIGNAN (nee Armitstead), 31. The English cyclist and former world road race champion (pictured) was nicknamed ‘Elizabeth the first’ after becoming the first Briton to win a medal (a silver) at London 2012. She was late to her own wedding ceremony when her vintage coach got stuck behind . . . a cyclist.
BORN ON THIS DAY
FRANZ FERDINAND (1863-1914). The assassination of the archduke and heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne in Sarajevo in 1914 led to the outbreak of World War I. It was five years to the day after his death that the Treaty of Versailles was signed, officially bringing the war to an end.
LORD BRAMALL (1923-2019). The Kentborn, Eton-educated former Armed Forces chief was a D-Day veteran, twice wounded in normandy before quickly returning to duty and being awarded the military cross. He later oversaw the Falklands campaign. He once said: ‘War settles nothing. It usually creates more problems than it solves.’
ON DECEMBER 18 . . .
IN 1983, rolling Stone Keith richards married model Patti Hansen on his 40th birthday. They are still together.
IN 2008, former FBI agent Mark Felt died, three years after revealing himself to have been ‘Deep Throat’, the anonymous informant at the heart of exposing the Watergate scandal.