Thanks to Kruger for some chewy clues. I had absolutely no idea about the theme and made a complete horlicks of deriving the statement from the extra words (maybe my attempt would have worked in Finnish - but I suspect not!). However, enough of the unclued entries were sufficiently obvious and, fed into Google, gave me something that was plainly significant at the time but which had completely passed me by. There was, however, a slightly adjusted version which I did recall.