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.

Maggie at Number 10 (1979)

Daily Express dated Friday May 4th 1979 

and Daily Mail dated Saturday May 5th 1979

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The 1979 General Election was called by Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan after he lost the last of his small majority in the House of Commons when the Scottish Nationalists withdrew their support. It was a 2 horse race with the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher gaining an extra 62 seats (339) and Labour losing 54 (269). The Liberals lost 2 ending up with 11. As usual with General Elections more people voted against the winning Party than for it - in this case 3.8 million people.

Thatcher went on to rule Britain for 10.5 years and was either a saviour or the Devil incarnate depending on your point of view.

I can't work out what the numbers in the grid on the front of the Daily Express are meant to be. They don't seem to bare any resemblance to the results.

Sinking of the Ark Royal (1941)

Daily Express dated Tuesday December 2nd 1941

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The aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal had in fact been torpedoed by U-boat U81 two weeks earlier on November 13th 1941 while heading for Gibraltar after delivering some Hurricane fighters to Malta. She sank early the next morning about 30 miles off Gibraltar. Thankfully there was only one fatality, Able Seaman Edward Mitchell, who was killed in the initial explosion.

Hurricane in UK and Reagan's Revenge in Lybia (1986)

Daily Express dated Tuesday March 25th 1986

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This hurricane on March 24th 1986 was not the hurricane of October 15th 1987, which weatherman Michael Fish failed to warn us about, but was till pretty drastic. If you try to Google this 1986 hurricane all you get is references to 1987.

In 1973, Lybian Leader Kadhafi (now normally spelt Gaddafi) claimed much of the Gulf of Sidra to be within Libyan waters with an exclusiion zone of  62 nautical miles. Gaddafi declared it 'The Line of Death', the crossing of which would invite a military response. The US claimed its rights to conduct naval operations in international waters using the standard of 12-mile territorial limit. On March 23rd 1986 several US warships tested Gaddafi's resolve by crossing the Line. The ensuing skirmishes resulted in 35 non-US dead, a Lybian corvette and a Lybian patrol boat sunk. Some SAM missile sites on the mainland were also damaged.

Far East Crisis send Ike Home (1958)

Daily Express dated Thursday September 11th 1958

In January 1955, the U.S. Congress passed the “Formosa Resolution,” which gave President Eisenhower total authority to defend Formosa (now Taiwan) and the off-shore islands of Quemoy and Mazu. The Eisenhower Administration considered many options, ranging from convincing Chiang Kai-Shek to give up the islands to employing nuclear weapons against the People’s Republic of China. Luckily for World Peace and probably due to Russian pressure, China backed down and stopped bombing the disputed Island in the Formosa Straits. 

In 1958 the bombing resumed and President Eisenhower was concerned that the loss of the islands would hurt Nationalist morale and might be a precursor to the Communist conquest of Formosa. The United States thus arranged to re-supply the Republic of China garrisons on Quemoy and Mazu. This brought an abrupt end to the bombardment and eased the crisis. Eventually, the Communist and Nationalist Chinese came to an arrangement in which they shelled each other’s garrisons on alternate days. This continued for twenty years.

See also this post and this post.

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.

France signs Armistice

Sunday Express dated Sunday June 23^rd 1940

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What doesn't show on these scans is that between the top and bottom halves of the front page there are a couple of lines of text missing due to the fold being badly frayed and split. This is what happens when old papers, particurarly broadsheets, are stored folded.

Launched in October 1936, the Scharnhorst battleship was doing a lot of damage to allied shipping in the North Atlantic having sunk the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious on June 8^th. The Scharnhorst survived the attacks described above and was finally sunk on December 26^th 1943 with the loss of over 1900 lives.

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The German Army had marched into Paris on June 14th 1940 and on the 22nd an armistice was signed and France was divided into the Occupied Zone and the so-called Free Zone under the control of Marshal Philippe Pétain. The occupied zone covered most of Northern and Western France, which brought the German Army to within 22 miles of the English coast and a cross-Channel invasion was thought to be inevitable.

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Not as poetic as Henry V’s Agincourt speech but stirring words at a very dark time for Great Britain.

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Ernest Bevin was the Minister for Labour in Churchill’s all-party coalition government from 1940 until 1945. Due to the wartime special powers he had absolute control over the British workforce and he used it to concentrate the labour effort towards supporting the War. 

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The Krupp industrial empire dates back to 1810. Leading up to and during World War II they concentrated on military supplies including Panzer tanks and U-Boats. At the end of the War the company’s executives were put on trial for their use of slave labour in their factories. 

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His Majesty’s Trawler Moonstone was part of the 4^th Anti-Submarine Group in the Mediterranean before moving to Aden where she captured the Italian submarine Galileo Galilei, which was then re-christened HMS X2 and was then used mainly for training.

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Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s USSR had signed a non-aggression treaty in August 1939 but by June 1940 the cracks were beginning to show and twelve months later Germany invaded the USSR.

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Anderson shelters were made out of corrugated steel panels and they had to be buried in the ground and covered with soil to be effective against bomb blast damage. After the War many gardens, my parents’ included, sported sheds made out of dug up shelters. 

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If you want to know whether Hitler would have made a ‘good boss’ or not, read CJ Sansom’s latest novel ‘Dominion’, which uses the idea that Churchill turned down the offer to lead the country in 1940 and consequently Britain surrendered to Nazi Germany.

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I can see why the football and horse-racing stories were suppressed, presumably any mention of the current weather might help the enemy who might be listening in, but what was the problem with the Italian ship story and the, albeit over simplified, account of Churchill becoming Prime Minister. The Duke of Kent may have received a white feather but was actually an active member of the RAF and was subsequently killed in a Short Sunderland flying boat crash on his was to Iceland in 1942.

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In May 1940 Anthony Eden the Secretary of State for War announced the formation of the Local Defence Volunteers and in July 1940 Churchill had them renamed as the Home Guard.

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Somerset Maugham had lived on the French Riviera since 1926 but when the Nazi’s invaded France he sought refuge on a coal barge. It took him 20 harrowing days to get to England. After a short recovery he moved to the USA for the rest of the War.

Mary Borden was an American author and a quick look at Amazon shows only one book currently in print - The Forbidden Zone: A Nurse's Impressions of the First World War. In both World Wars she ran volunteer Ambulance services in combat zones. She died in 1968.

The other, and probably most famous, author to have been trapped in France at this time was P G Wodehouse as a recent TV play and a documentary showed.

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I’m not sure the headline is accurate- the families weren’t lost. They knew where they were – living in the Andes but cut-off from the civilised world, which given the situation at the time, was no bad thing. 

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Canada had its own fascists to worry about so I think the furthest West our internees travelled was to the Isle of Man. Sir Oswald Mosley was held in Brixton and then in a special co-habitation wing of Holloway with his wife, Diana Mitford.

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The Sunday Express showing its right-wing credentials with its choice of quotes about Conscientious Objectors. Unlike in the Great War the C O’s didn’t face automatic imprisonment but were given a choice of non-combat roles and many served as front line medical support and in bomb disposal units as well as essential war work on the Home Front. See the Peace Pledge Union website for historical and current information.  

Heat Wave Deaths

Sunday Express dated Sunday June 7th 1925

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Extremes of weather are nothing new but I notice that in 1925 there was no mention of Global Warming. Surely, though, in the good old days all summers were sunny, all Christmases were white and it never rained on Sundays.

19 year-old Nathan Leopold and 18 year-old Richard Loeb were wealthy Law students who decided to commit the perfect murder by kidnapping the 14 year-old son of a local Chicago millionaire, killing him and then requesting a ransom. They were caught despite their elaborate plans because Leopold lost his rather unusual glasses close to where they disposed of the boy’s body and the body had been found far quicker than they expected. They blamed each other for the murder but at their trial they were both sentenced to life plus 99 years. A fellow prison inmate murdered Loeb in 1936. Leopold was released on parole in 1944 and died in 1971.

Alfred Hitchcock’s film ‘Rope’ and ‘Compulsion’ starring Orson Welles were both inspired by the case.

I’m not sure why the paper is calling the Quakers’ limited support for artificial contraception ‘astonishing’. Is it because the Quakers would be expected to be against contraception or is it that anyone could possibly support contraception?

Pro-contraception campaigner Marie Stopes had opened Britain’s first birth control clinic in 1921, which helped to make both the use of, and the dissemination of information about, contraceptives acceptable.

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Continued from the front page -

Anti-foreign (i.e. anti-Eurpoean) feelings had been gathering strength and support in China in the early 1920’s until, in May 1925 a group of Chinese students were arrested in the British policed International Settlement in Shanghai on their way to a funeral. On the day the students were to be put on trial a large demonstration outside the British police station got out of hand and 9 demonstrators were shot dead. Strikes and riots spread across China for the next 6 months.

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Between the two World Wars Britain’s race courses were plagued by gangsters, particularly the Sabini mob from North London, who offered bookmakers and course owners ‘protection’ from trouble makers, who were actually the gangs themselves. The 1938 Graham Greene novel and the subsequent 1947 film ‘Brighton Rock’ featured the gangs’ methods.

The writer of this article, Edward Shortt, became the President of the British Board of Film Censors in 1929 and managed to ban a record number of films for sexual content during his ‘reign’. He’d probably have flogged film directors as well if they’d let him.

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On June 4th 1925 the ambassadors of Great Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, and Japan handed a note, detailing a series of German Versailles Peace Treaty disarmament provision violations, to the German Government The Allies demanded that Germany immediately fulfil all the conditions, otherwise any withdrawal from the Allied occupied Ruhr District would be further delayed. 

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An example of Old Testament Christian justice in a supposed civilized country. A truly horrific story.

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That’s what I keep telling my psychiatrist when we’re not doing ‘I think I’m a pair of curtains’ – ‘Pull yourself together.’ jokes.

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In 1925 there was no UK Driving Test, no traffic lights, no white lines in the middle of roads or at junctions, no minimum driving age, no MOT tests on vehicles and a 20mph National speed limit that everyone ignored.

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The special effects on ‘The Lost World’ were by the pioneer of stop-motion Willis H O’Brien who later mentored Ray Harryhausen who brought to life the dinosaurs that failed to spoil Raquel Welch’s hair and make-up in ‘One Million Years BC’.

‘The Phantom of the Opera’ was a classic of the silent cinema, based on the novel by Gaston Leroux.  This was long before Andrew Lloyd Webber got his grubby mits on it and turned it into a musical.

Gloria Swanson starred in silent films, talkies and TV from 1914 or 1915 until her final appearance in ‘Airport 1975’. She also found time to marry 6 times.

Beverly Bayne appeared in 158 films between 1913 and 1925. She only made 3 films after ‘The Age of Innocence’, 2 in 1925 and ‘The Naked City’ in 1948.

Michael Arlen created the character ‘The Falcon’ that appeared in 13 films in the 1940’s.

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Now there’s a question that needs answering – ‘Does the girl who is always knocking a ball about or riding something or killing something necessarily make a healthy mother?’ 

Mr Page really has a downer on athletic women. For a balanced view read John Betjeman’s poem ‘The Olympic Girl’.

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Move over James Bond, Jason Bourne et al; Harry Marlow’s in town.

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What an odd image for a 1920’s cigarette advert. He looks more like a 1950’s juvenile delinquent who, when asked “What are you rebelling against?’ replies ‘Whadda you got?’

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If you thought the previous image odd then this is plain freaky. What’s the kid doing with a 1970’s Afro? Or is that one of the ‘eruptions’ that Germolene can cure?

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“By Gad, Sir! The blighter’s taken his jacket off! When I was in Rangoon I was still in full dress uniform when it was so hot you could fry an egg on the thigh of a sultry young servant girl. I remember a young.. well.. I err… enough of that! Pass the toddy juice!”

U-2 Spy Plane Trial

Daily Express dated Thursday 18th August 1960

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On May 1, 1960 a United States U-2 spy plane was shot down over the airspace of the Soviet Union.

The United States government at first denied the plane's purpose was to spy on Russia, but was forced to admit its true role when the Soviet government produced its intact remains and surviving pilot, Francis Gary Powers, as well as photos of military bases taken by Powers.

A couple of weeks later the Paris Summit meeting between president Dwight Eisenhower (USA), Nikita Khrushchev (USSR), Harold Macmillan (UK) and Charles de Gaulle (France) collapsed, mainly because Eisenhower refused to apologize to Khrushchev for the incident. The Russian leader left the talks in a huff.

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At his trial Powers pleaded guilty and was convicted of espionage on August 19^th. He was sentenced to three years imprisonment and seven years hard labour. He served one year and nine months of the sentence when, on February 10, 1962, he was exchanged for the Russian spy known as Rudolf Abel who had been arrested in 1957 and was serving a 45 year sentence.

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Formerly a member of the Nazi party, a commissioned Sturmbannführer of the paramilitary SS and decorated Nazi war hero, Werner von Braun was responsible for the deadly V-2 long-range rocket during World War II. 

After the war, he and some of his team of scientists were spirited away to the United States as part of the then secret, and highly controversial, Operation Paperclip.

Von Braun worked for the US Army and later  NASA, under which he served as director of the newly formed Marshall Space Flight Centre and as the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle that propelled the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon.  He died in 1977.

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1960 was the year my parents first had a TV.  I was 14 and had been brought up listening to the radio, and, looking at the programmes on offer on the Home and Light services, I imagine the TV was a Godsend.  Two TV programmes I would definitely have watched that evening were ‘The Adventures of Hiram Holliday’ a comedy starring Wally Cox, and ‘No Hiding Place’ a Scotland Yard crime show starring Raymond Francis.  I also note ITV at 4:15 was showing the series ‘Ivanhoe’ which starred someone called Roger Moore.

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So this was what he was doing before he came up with Lord of the Dance etc.

I like the idea that the clothes drier not only dries and airs clothes but also ‘dries the pots’ and ‘warms the room’.  What more could you ask for and just 1 penny under £6 (or a week’s wages for many people).

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I can remember when we only ate chicken at Christmas but can’t remember when eggs came without shells. Maybe that was before my time. 

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That’s 9 week’s wages and no HD!

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This is before the James Bond films started which may explain why Bond looks more like Bill Haley (with his ‘kiss-curl’) than Sean Connery.  I assume the villain is the eponymous Dr No.

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Anyone who has followed this blog will realise that I know nothing about football. I can now reveal that I know even less (if that’s possible) about cricket. I don’t even understand the scoring, so this chart might as well be in Chinese.  Someone might find it interesting though.

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The book “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” by D H Lawrence was originally published in 1928 in Italy but banned in the UK.  It tells of Lady Chatterley's passionate affair with Mellors, the family gamekeeper, and details their erotic meetings.

In 1959 the UK Government introduced the Obscene Publications Act that said that any book considered obscene by some people, but that could be shown to have "redeeming social merit", might still be published.

In 1960 the publishers Penguin printed and stored 200,000 copies, sending 12 copies to the Director of Public Prosecutions and challenging him to prosecute. He did.

The six-day trial at the Old Bailey began on 27 October. The defence produced 35 witnesses, and the prosecution was unable to make a substantial case against the novel.

Famously the prosecution counsel Mervyn Griffith-Jones shocked the jury by asking: "Is it a book you would wish your wife or servants to read?"  It goes unrecorded whether he prefixed this question with “By Gad, Sir...”

The jury returned a verdict of ‘not guilty’ and the book went on sale officially on the 10^th November 1960 amid a great deal of publicity.

The 12 books sold in August in Nottingham must have come from the 200000 copies stockpiled by Penguin pending the trial. If the buyers had some proof that the books were bought when they were, I reckon they’d be worth a bit on E-bay by now.