Word: scarborough
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Caught In the Closet. Charles Laughton's love of the theater took a quarter-century to find its outlet. He was born in 1899 in the Victoria Hotel in Scarborough, a resort town on the east coast of England. As the eldest of the three sons of hotel-owning Robert and Elizabeth Laughton, he was supposed to follow in their footsteps. But Charles showed his inclination early. He played endlessly with a toy puppet show until his brother Tom, who had built a guillotine out of a camera shutter, beheaded the marionettes. Laughton's next theatrical disaster came...
...Stonyhurst College, Charles landed a part in a school play. His first press notice read, in its entirety: "We hope to see some more of Mr. Laughton." Others hoped to see less. A Scarborough neighbor described the adolescent Charles: "He was one of the most ungainly schoolboys I ever saw, very fat, with a huge head, and a little cap. We should dearly have liked to have kicked...
...managed to see Chu-Chin-Chow 13 times. In World War I, Laughton was a private by choice ("Something told me I might not be the kind of fellow to take command of men under fire"), was gassed and invalided home. He spent the next five years in Scarborough, ostensibly working in his family's hotel; actually, he was hanging about amateur theatricals. His persistence paid off. His family gave in, and made him a small allowance. Charles went to London again and enrolled in the Royal Academy of Dramatic...
...military medicine led to his development (with Dr. Alexis Carrel) of Dakin's solution, a sodium hypochlorite wound antiseptic which saved hundreds of lives in World War I, won him the grateful thanks of France when he was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor; in Scarborough...
Labor's façade of unity was a sham, as everyone in Britain knew. As the Scarborough conference broke up, Laborite Rebel Nye Bevan-who hopes to be Britain's next Prime Minister but one-bested all comers in the constituency polls for a new National Executive Committee of the Labor Party. Three of his disciples, including fiery Mrs. Barbara Castle, were elected to serve alongside him on the 25-man committee. Defense Minister Manny Shinwell was beaten. Attlee's moderates, with the powerful bloc votes of the trade unions, still held control of the party...