Cutting - Atlantic Rower (1969)

20th July 1969

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John Fairfax was the first person to row the Atlantic solo. He set off on January 20th 1969 and arrived in Florida 180 days later on July 19th. In 1971/2 he rowed, along with Sylvia Cook, the Pacific taking 361 days. He died in Nevada in 2012 at the age of 74.

Fuchs and Hilary at the South Pole (1958)

Daily Express dated Wednesday January 22nd 1958

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New Zealander Sir Edmund Hillary is, of course, most remembered for conquering Everest in 1953, but he was also the first man to have accomplished the 'big three' - stand at the South Pole , the North Pole and the top of Everest. In 1958 he led the New Zealand part of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition overland to the South Pole, where he is pictured meeting geologist and explorer Sir Vivian Fuchs, the overall leader of the Expedition, which as the name implies crossed Antarctica from coast to coast via the South Pole, a distance of 2,158 miles.

Mystery of Amundsen in the Artic (1925)

Sunday Express dated Sunday May 24th 1925

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On the January 25th 1912 Roald Amundsen had been the first man to reach the South Pole and by the mid-1920’s, when Frederick Cook’s 1908 and Robert Peary’s 1909 claims to have reached the North Pole were being discredited, he had set his sights on the Arctic.

In 1925 a 6 man team led by Amundsen took two Dornier flying boats to 87° 44′ north. It was the most northerly latitude reached by plane up to that time. The aircraft landed a few miles apart without radio contact, but the crews managed to reunite. One of the planes was damaged, so Amundsen and his crew worked for over three weeks to create an airstrip from the ice. During this time the outside World feared the worst. Finally all six crew members were packed into the undamaged plane and they flew back to their base and civilisation.

Amundsen survived that time but the Arctic would eventually claim his life. While flying on a rescue mission in 1928, he was killed when his plane crashed into the Arctic Ocean.

Our King is Dead - George V

Daily Sketch dated Tuesday January 21^st 1936

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George V came to the throne on the death of his father Edward VII in May 1910. He was a popular King with simple pastimes such as murdering wildlife and stamp collecting. After World War I his health deteriorated, mainly due to his heavy smoking habit, and he suffered from pulmonary disease and pleurisy. He died at 11:55pm on May 20^th some say with the help of his physician. I couldn't possibly comment.

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The new King was George V eldest son who reluctantly took on the role of Edward VIII. Of course he was never crowned because he abdicated before his coronation to marry Wallis Simpson (who was not Marge, Patty and Selma’s secret 4^th sibling).

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Lord Hewart served as the Lord Chief Justice from 1922 until 1940. He popularised the aphorism "Not only must Justice be done; it must also be seen to be done."

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Bertrand Russell is now best remembered (if at all) as an anti-war campaigner and pro-nuclear disarmament demonstrator, but he much more – a mathematician, philosopher, historian, teacher, TV celebrity (when that meant something), author and plane-crash survivor. He died in 1970 at the age of 97.

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From December 1934 until July 1935 Florence Blenkiron and her friend Teresa Wallack travelled from London to Cape Town on a motorcycle and sidecar combination with no support team, satnav and, for a lot of the time, no roads. When they reached South Africa they quarrelled and Florence made the return journey alone.

If you look this up online you will find Teresa taking all the glory mainly due to her still in print book of the journey ‘The Rugged Road’. I can’t find anything about Florence’s return trip, not even if she made it home safely.

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This Winchester By-Pass was the first all dual-carriageway by-pass in England and opened in 1940. Since the late 1960’s and before the co,pletion  of the M3 I used the By-Pass many many times on journeys between London and Dorset and ‘fondly’ remember the hours spent queuing for the lights at the junction with the A333 (now B3335).

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I didn’t realise that the old ‘canned’ laughter debate was this old. I’ve been in the audience for several TV recordings recently; and radio audiences back in the 1960’s, and it’s true that being there does make even the feeblest jokes funnier. Modern TV audiences are encouraged to laugh out loud at ‘something you would merely smile at when watching at home’.

Random Cutting - Strong Women (1926)

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Girl power 1920's style. Writen I imagine because in 1926 the only 2 succesful English Channel swims were by women - Gertrude Ederle and Amelia Corson. Prior to that 5 men had done it. By the end of the 1920's the score was 5 women to 11 men. In the whole 20th century there were 890 succesful solo crossings of which 294 were completed by 'the weaker sex'.

Mother of 2 Swims Channel

Sunday Pictorial dated Sunday August 29th 1926

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Clemington ‘Millie’ O. Corson swam from France to England in 15 hrs 23 mins. Richard Davey who swam it in 8 hrs 5 mins in 1988 holds the record for a crossing in that direction. The slowest time was 22 hrs 42 mins in 1979.

Comedian David Walliams swam from England to France in 10 hrs 29 mins.

All info from the Channel Swimming Association website.

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Slight personal interest here – I used to cross that pavement outside Stepney Green Station once a week for 5 years to catch the train to Fairlop where our school had its playing fields. Unlike the unfortunate George Holmes and A Everett I was never run over.

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Sadly that’s what comes of taking up with these new fangled American ideas.

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I am fairly sure this is the woman who came to be known as Anna Anderson who always claimed to be the daughter, Anastasia, of the murdered Russian Tsar Nicholas II. She didn’t come to England but did go to the USA in 1928. She died in 1984.

Her claim was finally refuted when DNA comparison with her tissue and the DNA of the Tsar and his family and surviving relatives, including the Duke of Edinburgh, found no matches.

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A coach doing 43 mph! I wonder what the motorist who clocked this ‘juggernaut’ would think if he could spend a few minutes on the M20 heading towards Dover and being overtaken on the inside by a 16 wheel artic doing 90.

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Adverts as postmarks! Whatever next? Is this the thin end of the wedge? Soon it will be whole envelopes covered in advertising bumph with ‘For the Attention of the Occupier’ as the address. The GPO would never let that happen. Would they?

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Gaston Guyot was a Frenchman who strangled his wife with one hand while driving and then stopped and put the body in a haystack, which he set on fire. Unfortunately for him 2 gendarmes happened by, tried to put out the fire and found the body. Guyot was tried and convicted of the murder and sentenced to death by guillotine, but due to a public outcry the French President reduced this to life imprisonment.

His previous 2 wives had committed suicide and he had a diary in which he recorded 737 previous lovers.

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Ivor Novello was a very successful singer and stage and film actor who died in 1951.

Sage advice from Mr Novello but some of it soon to be made redundant by the coming of the Talkies. His final sentiment, ‘… they must remember that nobody has ever got out of film acting more than they put into it’ – shows that he obviously he didn’t live to see any Steven Seagal films.

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This is the earliest use of the word ‘kinky’ that I have come across and, if it had the same meaning then as it has more recently, the mind boggles. I, for one, have never thought of short white socks, culottes and a Robin Hood hat as kinky.

Polly Ward went on to a fairly successful film and stage career that included co-starring in 2 George Formby films. She died in 1987.

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Note the picture top right from ‘That’s My Baby’ – the 'baby' is actually 24 year old Harry Earls who went on to play a Munchkin in  ‘The Wizard of OZ’, appear in Tod Browning’s controversial film ‘Freaks’ and the sound version of Lon Chaney’s ‘The Unholy Three’ having also appeared in the silent version in 1925.

Matt Moore (in the picture lower right) has 220 film appearances in the IMDb starting in 1912 through to 1958. Oddly the last 54, from 1941 to 1958, are listed as ‘uncredited’.

Mae Allison to Ian Keith – “I have to wear it or those CIA satellites will read my mind.”

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Both Miss Ivy Cummings and Hugo Urban-Emmerich crashed after 4 laps, George Eyston won in his Bugatti and a certain Englishman called Malcolm Campbell failed to start.

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Jack Hobbs played cricket for England 157 times between 1908 and 1930 and scored 61,760 runs for Surrey. No stats are available for the sparrow.

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To my untrained eye it looks like Parker, Millwall, is about to give Hannah, Norwich City, a bloody good kicking.

Chelsea seems to have a player that has a huge football for a head. Is this allowed? Must be, because an Arsenal player has one too.

Scott of the Antarctic's Tomb

The Daily Mirror dated Wednesday May 21st 1913

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We children of the 1950’s read about Scott of the Antarctica, Clive of India, Gordon of Khartoum, Livingtone, Nelson and Wellington in our Boys Own Book of British Heroes or in comic strip form in the Eagle.

Robert Falcon Scott had led a previous expedition to Antarctica using the ship Discovery (1901 – 1904) but the primary objective had not been to get to the South Pole. In June 1910 Scott set sail again, this time in the Terra Nova, and, after a stay in New Zealand, heavy storms and 20 days ice-bound, they arrived to set up a base at Cape Evans in January 1911. They were aware that the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen was camped along the coast and was preparing to head for the South Pole.

Scott and his party finally set out for the Pole on September 13^th 1911 and reached their goal on January 17^th 1912 only to find that Amundsen had beaten them by 34 days. They left for home the next day but never made it back to Cape Evans.

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The remaining members of the expedition who had waited at Cape Evans set up a search party. They finally found the bodies of Scott, Wilson and Bowers on November 12^th 1912 and erected the memorial shown on the front page. The Terra Nova arrived back in New Zealand in February 1913.

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There is an obvious attempt here to salvage some glory from the failed attempt to beat the foreigner Amundsen to the Pole by claiming Scott’s party actually got to the real location and the Norwegians didn’t.

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Captain Lawrence Oates was just 32 years old when he walked out into a blizzard with the words "I am just going outside and may be some time".

Aware that his ill health was compromising his companions' chances of survival he chose certain death. His body was never found.

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I can imagine Scott and his men huddled over cups of steaming Oxo and North Pole explorer Robert Peary scribbling away in his diary using a Koh-I-noor pencil but having Scott and Co laying Linola and admiring its pattern and hygienic qualities while a blizzard is trying to rip the roof off, is a bit harder to swallow.

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The close relationship between the British and German Royal Families dates back to 1714 when, instead of a Stuart King James III, the Act of Settlement gave us George of Brunswick the 1^st Hanoverian King.

Kaiser Wilhelm II was King George V’s cousin (Wilhelm’s mother was George’s father’s sister). The coming of World War I only 14 months after this visit strained the relationship and George, who had began his reign as a Saxe-Coburg thanks to his grandmother Victoria marrying Albert of Saxe-Coberg-Gotha, changed the family name to Windsor in 1917.

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As Germany built up her Navy in opening decade of the 20th Century, the Royal Navy were worried and set about gathering intelligence. In 1910 Lieutenant Brandon and Captain Trench were two spies that got caught in Germany and were sentenced to 4 years in prison. Captain Bertrand Stewart was caught spying while travelling in Germany in 1911. He was sentenced to 3 years.

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Surely these are just the sort of items that would have caught the attention of Sherlock Holmes if he hadn’t been too busy with his bees. The Adventure of the Clean Motor-Goggles and The Adventure of the Silk Hat. Read them first in The Strand Magazine.

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Leo Maxse was the editor of the Right Wing magazine National Review and supporter of the National Party, a splinter group who broke away from the Conservatives because they were too ‘liberal’. Maxse was 49 in 1913 and had been brought up reading the old Victorian papers that were predominantly solid blocks of type and reported such items as hour long political speeches verbatim.

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Wanna see the Bunny Hug, the Turkey Trot and the Tango? Not to mention the Castle Walk, Maxixe, Hesitation Waltz and The Toddle?  Are you prepared to be shocked by the outlandish behaviour of the young? Do you have the smelling salts ready? Watch this Youtube offering if you dare.

Let's Party like it's 2000

Millennium Daily Mail dated Saturday January 1st 2000

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There were many an hour wasted round the coffee machines of the nation discussing whether or not the new millennium started on 1^st January 2000 or 2001. Who cares – there goes another £10000 worth of fireworks, oooh, aaah.

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The Y2K Bug or Year 2000 Bug was the big media-driven scare of 1999. They predicted that at the stroke of midnight when the century changed from 19 to 20 computers controlling everything from your trusty video recorder to in-flight jumbo jets would crash.  The problem went back to the early days of commercial programming when computer memory and storage space was at a premium.  To save space most date fields in records were given just 2 bytes instead of 4 – i.e. yy instead off ccyy – i.e just the year without the century – i.e. 99 instead of 1999.

The news media decided that this meant that at the vital moment the computers would think it was 1900, and because the Wright Brothers hadn’t flown yet, all the planes would just drop from the sky.

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Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin became the first President of the Russian Federation (which replaced the old communist USSR) in 1991 and tried to convert the Russian state into a ‘free-market’ economy. The result was widespread corruption and inflation, not to mention personal unpopularity.  He finally resigned and his Prime Minister Vladimir Putin took over.

Yeltsin was an eccentric figure who enjoyed a drink of five – a sort of political Oliver Reed.

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Born when Rutherford B. Hayes was US President, Queen Victoria was on the English throne and Gladstone was Prime Minister, she was already 23 years old when the Wright Brothers pioneered powered flight. She lived through two World Wars, the proliferation of the motor car, the Stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing depression, the start of both radio and TV broadcasting, the rise and fall of Communism, the Cold War, the assassination of John F Kennedy, the coming and/or going of 24 Presidents and saw the first man walk on the Moon. Now that's what you call a life.

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Ex-Beatle George Harrison was stabbed in the chest by and intruder in the early hours of Thursday 30^th December.  The attacker, Mike Abram, was found to be insane and committed to a secure hospital but was released in 2002!

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As it says, predictions are pointless and a Happy New Year to one and all.