ON THIS DAY
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE
APRIL 15, 1970 THEy’RE coming home! Early today the crippled Apollo 13 spaceship swung around the Moon and blasted itself homeward towards Earth. The rocket of the lunar landing craft Aquarius, used as an emergency ‘get you home’ engine, gave a short burst of power. It put the unlucky Apollo 13 astronauts — Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigart — on course for a splashdown in the Pacific at 7pm on Friday. APRIL 15, 1997 DAvID BECKHAM stood amid his fellow professionals, sheepishly holding the young Player of the year trophy. The eulogy came from Alan Shearer, the Player’s Player of the year for the second time in his career.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
ANTHEA REDFERN, 72. The former Bunny Girl co-hosted The Generation Game with Bruce Forsyth from 1971 (right). They had first met at a ‘Miss Lovely Legs’ competition and, after being paired on Tv, began an affair. They married on Christmas Eve in 1973 — five months after Forsyth’s divorce from his first wife Penny was finalised. The BBC was unhappy that a presenter of a family show was in a relationship with a co-star 20 years his junior and wanted to drop Redfern, but he said: ‘I told them if she went, so did I.’ SAMANTHA FOx, 54. The ex-glamour model, who at 16 became the youngest Page 3 girl, had wanted to join the police but was too short. She says she was sexually assaulted by The Partridge Family star David Cassidy in 1985 and defended herself by kneeing him between the legs.
BORN ON THIS DAY
BESSIE SMITH (1894-1937), right. The U.S. singer, nicknamed the Empress of the Blues, was widely regarded as the greatest female blues singer. Janis Joplin said: ‘She showed me the air and taught me how to fill it.’ Her parents died by the time she was nine and her husband, bootlegger Jack Gee, was shot and wounded on their first date. JOE DAvIS (1901-1978). The ‘grand old man’ of snooker won 14 consecutive world titles from 1927 and added a 15th in 1946 when the competition restarted after the war. Davis was the first player to record an official 147 maximum break and the first to have a televised century break. But he couldn’t focus with his right eye, so played by holding his cue to the left of his chin.
ON APRIL 15...
IN 1989, U.S. band The Bangles started four weeks at the top of the charts with Eternal Flame, their only British No 1.
IN 1998, the former Cambodian dictator, Pol Pot, responsible for the deaths of millions of his people, died of heart failure aged 72.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION: Hermeneutic (c1800)
A) Relating to a squirrel. B) Concerning interpretation, particularly of scriptures. C) Solitary. Answer below.
PHRASE EXPLAINED: Winter of our
discontent — a passing sadness; from the opening line of Shakespeare’s 1594 play, Richard III. The full line — ‘Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by this sun of york’ — confirms Richard’s unhappy times are in the past.