ON THIS DAY

1888: The English Football League was formed by 12 clubs meeting at a hotel in Fleet Street, London. 1895: The first celluloid film was presented to an invited audience by Auguste and Louis Lumiere in Paris. 1896: Thomas Hughes, lawyer, author and Liberal MP, died. He was involved in the formation of some early trade unions and wrote Tom Brown’s Schooldays. 1907: The first cabs with taxi meters began operating in London. 1945: The Arab League was founded by seven Middle East countries. 1958: Showman Michael Todd, husband of Elizabeth Taylor, died when his light aircraft iced up and crashed into mountains in New Mexico. The plane was called Lucky Liz. 1963: John Profumo denied having an affair with model Christine Keeler. The Secretary of State for War later resigned admitting he had lied to parliament. 1979: The British ambassador in Holland Sir Richard Sykes was shot dead by two IRA gunmen who opened fire outside his home in The Hauge. 1996: The war crimes tribunal in The Hague made its first indictment of three Muslims and a Croat for the torture, rape and murder of Serb prisoners. BIRTHDAYS Stephen Sondheim, songwriter, 86; William Shatner, actor, 85; M Emmet Walsh, actor, 81; Roger Whittaker, singer/songwriter, 80; George Benson, guitarist, 73; Lord (Andrew) Lloyd Webber, composer, 68; Matthew Modine, actor, 57; Beverley Knight, singer, 43; Reese Witherspoon, actress, 40. QUOTES OF THE DAY “Marriage is like a game of chess, except the board is flowing water, the pieces are made of smoke and no move you make will have any effect on the outcome” – Jerry Seinfeld “As we count down to our first show, in May, the seemingly inexhaustible stream of ‘insider’ stories keeps on coming, my most recent favourite being about how ‘unprofessional’ I have been behaving ‘on set’. We don’t actually have a set yet for me to misbehave on” – Chris Evans on the new version of Top Gear. “What you wind up doing when you are not good enough at something else” – Oscar-winner Dustin Hoffman on acting. “I’m like every other woman: a closet full of clothes, but nothing to wear: So I wear jeans” - Cameron Diaz “In order to avoid the addition of a metre to Ordinance Survey maps and an expensive reprint, wouldn’t it be cheaper for someone to go up with a geologist’s hammer and knock a bit off the summit?” – Bill Tarver, of Wokingham, Berkshire, in a letter to the Daily Telegraph about the discovery that Ben Nevis is one metre higher than at the previous survey.