Word: devon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...jury of "the rather bizarre and surprising case," the presiding judge described the evidence against Thorpe as "almost entirely circumstantial." He made the point that the prosecution's case relied on the testimony of witnesses whose characters were less than trustworthy. Scott, who now trains horses in Devon, gave a highly emotional performance...
DIED. Eric Partridge, 85, indefatigable English lexicographer and student of the language's quirks and conventions; in Devon, England. Born in New Zealand and educated in Australia and at Oxford, the tall, spare Partridge abandoned a budding career as an English professor (he feared he would become "a bloody bore") to devote himself to publishing and writing. Though he once turned out a novel in a month for his Scholartis Press in London, he gave up fiction to make a profession of his passion: the study of words. Over five decades, he compiled 16 erudite lexicons devoted to slang...
What London's tabloid daily Sun unblushingly headlined as Britain's "trial of the century" had been postponed to allow Thorpe to run for re-election to the parliamentary seat he had held for 20 years. His North Devon constituency, however, turned him out with a humiliating 8,500-vote majority for a relatively unknown Tory candidate. Nationally, the Liberals slid from 14 to eleven seats. Analysts doubted that the Liberals' 1-million-vote loss was a direct result of the scandal. But Thorpe unhappily conceded that it was responsible at least for his own defeat...
...former airline pilot, Andrew Newton, 31, was offered $20,000 to carry out the killing. Thorpe, it was alleged in pretrial testimony, characterized the plan as not much worse than doing away with "a sick dog." In October 1975, Newton has admitted, he lured Scott to a lonely Devon moor and leveled a gun at him. But Newton apparently panicked and instead shot Scott's dog, a Great Dane named Rinka, then fled...
...Cabinet, former Education Secretary Shirley Williams, 48. Another loser, predictably, was onetime Liberal Leader Jeremy Thorpe, 50, who soon faces trial on charges of conspiracy and incitement to murder a man who claimed to be his lover. A Tory easily bested eight other candidates to take Thorpe's North Devon seat...