Sunday 11 December 2011

Grace Kelly Weds

Daily Mirror dated Friday April 20th 1956



The elegant and beautiful actress Grace Kelly had a short but memorable film career from 1951 to 1956 that included such classics as High Noon, Dial M For Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief and High Society. In her penultimate film The Swan she played a Princess and in 1956 she became a real one when she married Prince Rainier of Monaco.  They were married for 26 years until 1982 when she died in a car crash.



Nikolai Bulganin, the Premier of the USSR, and Nikita Khrushchev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, visited England for 10 days in April 1956 , spending most of their time in London meeting with Prime Minister Anthony Eden and Labour Leader Hugh Gaitskill.  They had just completed triumphant tours of India and Burma, but they didn’t get the same enthusiastic welcome from the British public.
They had arrived by Soviet warships and it was revealed later that  
the CIA, MI6 and the Naval Intelligence were all involved in a mission to send divers under the warships at Portsmouth. One of the frogmen, Commander Crabb, vanished during the operation on the 19th April , forcing the British authorities to cobble together a hasty cover story. 


Exempting old age pensioners from the duty increase – could this be a plot to kill off the old folk and save on pensions?


The body of Ms Helen O'Reilly was found by a milkman at 6 a.m. on April 18th, 1956. She was lying outside number 15 Hume Street, Dublin, a silk stocking tied loosely around her neck. She was five months pregnant.
The woman the reporter spoke to turned out to be Mary Anne (Mamie) Cadden, a nurse who provided back-street abortion services. She had already served 5 years for a previous offence.  This time she was found guilty of murder and sentenced to hang, but this was commuted to life imprisonment. Shortly after she was declared insane and died in custody in 1959.


Driving with your left arm around your floozy is all well and good, but how are you going to text your wife to tell her you’ll be late home?


Press speculation in the run-up to the Cup Final between Manchester City and Birmingham City discussed which of Don Revie and Bobby Johnstone would be selected.  In the end both of them played. The match is remembered (by those interested in such things) as the one in which goal-keeper Bert Trautmann played the last 17 minutes with a broken bone in his neck.
Revie went on to manage Leeds and England.


If only I knew what a ‘liquid pencil’ was I’d be a rich man – or in prison.








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