Mark Mason

Flavour of the month: November – Celebrity homes, the Tube and Disney romance

A selection of peculiar moments in history

  • From Spectator Life
The Dakota building on the Upper West Side, where John Lennon later lived (iStock)

This month’s crop of trivia includes a secret about the Tube map, the US state that’s named after Elizabeth I and something Jimi Hendrix had in common with Winston Churchill… 

  • 1 November 1947 – birth of Nick Owen. The television presenter and Luton Town fan has a lounge named after him at the club’s ground – to which he was once refused entry. ‘You can’t go in,’ said a steward. ‘It’s packed.’ Not being a ‘don’t you know who I am?’ type, Owen simply walked away. He heard someone say to the steward: ‘Don’t you know who that is?’ ‘Haven’t a clue,’ came the reply. ‘His name,’ the steward was told, ‘is in bloody great capitals above your head.’
  • 2 November 1889 – North and South Dakota are granted statehood in the US. The Dakota Building in New York, where John Lennon lived and died, got its name because when it opened there were few other buildings on the Upper West Side, so it bore the same relation to the rest of Manhattan as the Dakotas did to New York State.

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