Daily Mirror dated Thursday May 13th
1937
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The King who shouldn’t have been. May 12th 1937
was to have been the Coronation of Edward VIII but when George V eldest son
chose marriage, to the divorcee Wallis Simpson, over the Crown, the succession
passed to the second son - Albert, Duke of York. He became a surprisingly
successful and popular King but ill health cut his reign short in 1952.
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A possible question for ‘QI’ – how many Queen Elizabeth’s
have we had? Allen Davis senses a trap and refuses to answer.
First time contestant Ami Childs buzzes in, “There was,
like, Queen Elizabeth but that was, like, ages ago, you know, like Shakespeare
and all that.”
Ross Noble bites the bullet. “Two”
Klaxon sounds.
Stephen
Fry looks smug. “No. At least 3 and by some accounts 5. Queen Elizabeth 1 and 2
and GeorgeVI’s wife Elizabeth. Edward VI and Henry VII were also married to Elizabeths.”
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Being of the peerage doesn’t make you immune to life’s
troubles. Gustavus’ wife Joan died the following year and he was killed in
action in France in 1940. The surviving son Gustavus Michael became the 10th
Viscount Boyne.
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£4000 is the equivalent of about £150,000 now. I thought the
‘take no responsibility for your actions and sue’ culture was something new.
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This 4 week long strike was protesting about conditions of
work for London bus drivers and conductors, notably hours of work, rates of pay
and a proposed speed-up of London buses. Failure to involve the Underground and
Tram workers was blamed for the failure of the strike.
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Maureen O’Sullivan shot to fame as a very
scantily clad Jane to Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan in ‘Tarzan the Ape Man’ in
1932. She went on to appear in another 50 or more films and to do a lot of TV
work over the next 62 years. She died in 1998.
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King Alfonso XIII left Spain in 1931 after the country had
been proclaimed a Republic and his eldest son, also Alfonso, took the title
Count of Covadonga.
In May 1937 the ex-King Alfonso severed relations with the
Count, blaming him for making public assertions that he still considered
himself legitimate heir to the Spanish Crown.
He married Marta Rocafort-Altuzarra in July 1937 but they
were divorced in January 1938.
In
September 1938 the Count was being driven home from a party in Miami when the
car crashed. He died six hours later.
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Popeye had first appeared as a character in the
American syndicated newspaper strip ‘Thimble Theatre’ in 1929 and this is his
introduction to the UK newspaper print, although he had been seen over here in
cartoon films.
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They certainly took their comic strips seriously
in the 1930’s, and with the quality of ‘Jane’, ‘The Ruggles’, ‘Belinda Blue
Eyes’, ‘Buck Ryan’ and ‘Gordon Fyfe’ I’m not surprised.
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For ‘candid camera pests' read ‘paparazzi’. New York Mayor
Fiorello H. La Guardia was re-elected and in fact held that office from 1934
until December 1945. William Griffin was all for keeping the US out of World
War II and narrowly missed being put on trial for subversion in 1942.
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One definition of ‘to croon’ is ‘to sing popular songs in a
soft, sentimental manner’. So a crooner is someone, usually a man, who croons.
With the advent of the microphone it was no longer necessary from a singer to
sing loudly or project his voice to be heard at the back of a theatre, so a
quieter more intimate style of popular singing developed as epitomised by Bing
Crosby, Rudy Vallie and Frank Sinatra.
