Daily Mirror dated Wednesday 15th September 1982 Click to Enlarge Born into a rich Philadelphia family Grace Kelly took up acting at school. She went on to work in the theatre and first appeared on television in 1950. She made her film debut in ‘Fourteen Hours’ in 1951 and played Gary Cooper’s wife in ‘High Noon’ in 1952. She left TV acting behind when she took the role of the wife in Hitchcock’s ‘Dial M for Murder’. She went on to make only 11 films, the last being, appropriately, ‘High Society’, then she married Prince Rainier III of Monaco in 1956. See this post. Click to Enlarge It is believed that she had a stroke whilst driving on the twisting mountain roads, so the men from British Leyland could sleep easy knowing that the reputation of Rover was untarnished. Click to Enlarge John DeLorean formed his car company in 1975 and, with financial backing from the British Government, started producing the gull-wing DMC-12 in Northern Ireland in 1981. Within a year the company was in trouble. DeLorean himself was set-up by the FBI and the DEA who pretended to be investors with drug money to launder. He went to trial but was found not guilty due to entrapment. The car company went broke and into receivership. Click to Enlarge In 1982 the coal-miners accepted a 5.2% pay-rise and in doing so rejected their union leaders’, particularly Arthur Scargill’s, call to strike action. Two years later the announcement that 20 pits were to be closed triggered the 2 year long Miners’ Strike. Click to Enlarge On a family trip to Ayers Rock in Australia, 9 week-old Azaria Chamberlain disappeared. Her mother, Linda, claimed that a wild dog (dingo) had taken the baby. No body was ever found. Linda was tried for murder and her husband as an accessory after the fact. They were both found guilty with Linda getting life in prison and the father a suspended sentence. In 1986 a police hunt involved in a separate case found bits of Azaria’s clothing in a dingo lair at Ayers Rock. After further investigations both convictions were over-turned and Linda was released. Click to Enlarge The attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II had taken place in May 1981, in St. Peter's Square. The Pope was shot 4 times by Mehmet Ali Agca who was caught immediately, and later sentenced to life in prison. He was pardoned by the Italian president at the Pope's request and was deported to Turkey in 2000. As with all assassinations, conspiracy theories abound. Check out Wikipedia. Click to Enlarge Change the names and this could be from any decade since 1970. Click to Enlarge According the BBC Onthisday site – 19th June 1982 The body of a top Italian banker has been found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge in London. Known as God's banker for his links with the Vatican, 62-year-old Roberto Calvi was the chairman of Banco Ambrosiano in Milan and a central figure in a complex web of international fraud and intrigue. He had been missing for the last nine days before his body was discovered by a passer-by hanging from scaffolding on a riverside walk under the bridge. Police are treating the death as suicide. It was later revealed that Roberto Calvi was found with five bricks in his pockets and had in his possession about $14,000 in three different currencies. On 23 July an inquest jury returned a verdict of suicide. This was overturned in 1983 when a second inquest delivered an open verdict on the death. In October 2002 forensic experts appointed by Italian judges concluded that the banker had been murdered. They said his neck showed no evidence of the injuries usually associated with death by hanging and his hands had never touched the stones found in the pockets of his clothes. American Archbishop Paul Marcinkus was sought for questioning but was granted immunity as a Vatican employee. He retired in 1990 and died in 2006. In October 2005 five people went on trial in Rome. They were Sardinian financier Flavio Carboni, his former girlfriend Manuela Kleinszig, Roman entrepreneur Ernesto Diotallevi, Calvi's former bodyguard, Silvano Vittor and convicted Cosa Nostra treasurer Pippo Calo. They were acquitted in June 2007. Click to Enlarge Just an excuse to mention that I once shared a lift with Botham, who I believe was a cricketer, in the St John’s Wood Hilton. We were going down to breakfast and he had his own personal cameraman with him. Click to Enlarge Only one word – ‘Who?’