Advert - Pro-Plus (1980's)

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As essential to the 1980's Young Urban Professional, or Yuppie, as his filofax and brick-sized mobile phone, Pro-Plus tablets kept him high on caffeine. These days it would be Red Bull.

Advert - Aspro featuring Dickie Valentine (1950's)

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Dickie Valentine had 14 Top 30 hits between 1954 and 1959 and was killed in a car crash in 1971. Aspro (Aspirin) may not harm the heart but if you are brave enough check the side effects online.

Advert - Zee-Kol Ointment (1934)

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1934 advert for Zee-Kol which claims to cure a range of horrible skin diseases in a night. According to Wikipedia (and therefore it must be true) George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon (1866 – 1923) was an English aristocrat best known as the financial backer of the search for, and the excavation of, Tutankhamun's tomb in the Valley of the Kings. His death from erysipelas led to the story of the 'Curse of Tutankhamun'.  He should have used Zee-Kol.

Random Cutting - Kennedy on crutches (1961)

June 9th 1961

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It is now common knowledge that John F Kennedy had suffered from back pain since 1938 and normally wore a corset or back brace, but this and other information about his health issues had been kept secret throughout his campaign and election to the White House. JFK also had Addison's disease and hypothyroidism.

Random Ad - Kalms (1980's)

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What better was to survive living in the 1980's and having to listen to The Smiths, U2, Pet Shops Boys, Prefab Sprout and Phil Collins, than to take Kalms containing a sedative made from the root of the Valerian plant?

Random Cutting - Professor Serge Voronoff (1936)

9th August 1936

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Due to the delicate language in the item it not immediately obvious that by monkey 'glands' it means testicles, and 're-energised' means able to perform sexually. Serge Voronoff had been grafting small amounts of monkey glands onto human 'glands' since 1920 and was claiming all sorts of benefits including longer life, improved eyesight and a better memory. He also operated on women with monkey ovaries. He was praised not only by the public but also the medical fratenity, but his methods slowly fell out of favour and by the time of his death in 1951 he was the subject of ridicule in the press. 

Random Ad - The Hystogen Institute (1930)

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A 1930 advert for 'plastic surgery' by the Hystogen Institute. A quick look online shows that the Institute went into voluntary liquidation in 1929, but apparently survived or was resurrected. They were also sued by an ex-employee who was talked into having unnecessary surgery and left scarred in 1927. So if you are looking for rhinoplasty (the phrase 'nose job' conjures up unwanted images) then beware.

Rommel Launches Big Blow at Americans

Sunday Graphic dated Sunday April 4^th 1943

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Big blow or not, a couple of days later (April 6^th) the Italians and German Afrikakorps were defeated at the Battle of Wadi Akarit and by May 13^th the German and Italian forces in Tunisia surrendered to the Allies.

Erwin Rommel was well respected not only by his own men, but, surprisingly, by his counterparts in the British and American armies. In 1944 he was involved in a failed conspiracy to overthrow Hitler and was forced to choose between being tried, convicted and executed along with his family or committing suicide. He chose suicide and was buried as a Nazi hero.

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Benito Mussolini had been politically insecure since the war in North Africa had started to turn against the Axis powers in late 1942. Unrest at home with strikes, inflated food prices and an unwelcome German army presence along with the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943 led to the Dictator being ousted and arrested. Unfortunately this didn’t mean that the Allies could just walk in and take over. There was another year of bitter fighting before the Germans were cleared from the country. 

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No trains, no petrol for cars and no extra buses, but apart from that, have a good Easter Holiday!

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70,000 children cannot be traced! Why isn’t this front-page news? Are they really lost or just not in London anymore? Are the ones ‘drifting back’ part of the 70,000? Were they ever found? Are they still out there? What is this snippet really about?

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Maybe this is where the 70,000 lost children have gone – to Lord Woolton’s agricultural holiday camps.  Lord Woolton became the Minister for Food in 1940 and it was because of his management of food rationing that on the whole the British people all got a fair share of what food was available. He even had a pie named after him, though I doubt you’ll find one in Tesco’s these days.

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This was a common type of wartime news item; quoting increased production figures to boost moral; rather in the style of the USSR Agricultural 5 Year Plan updates that peppered Russian news in the Communist era. 

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‘Failure to comply’ to the Nurses and Midwives Order 1943 was ‘punishable by fine, imprisonment or both’ Civil liberties? You must be joking – we’re at war, Love.

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In 1940 the clocks in Britain were not put back by an hour at the end of Summer Time i.e. not reset to GMT. From then until 1945 clocks continued to be advanced by one hour each spring and put back by an hour each autumn, so for these summers Britain was two hours ahead of GMT and operating on British Double Summer Time. Note the reminder on the front page.

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After World War I, Sir Percy Robert Laurie KCVO CBE DSO had been a Deputy Assistant Commissioner and an Assistant Commissioner in the Metropolitan Police. He retired in 1936 but was recalled in 1939 to be Assistant Chief Constable of the War Department Constabulary and then the Provost-Marshal of the United Kingdom until this little problem got in the way. His conviction was later quashed on the basis that ‘he had simply made a mistake’.

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King Feisal (or Faisal) II of Irak (or Iraq) succeeded his father just a month shy of his 4^th birthday. He was murdered during a coup in 1958.

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Orson Welles' ‘Citizen Kane’ has been long regarded as the best film ever made by those that should know, so it is interesting to see it referred to, along with his second film ‘The Magnificent Embersons’ (sic), as ‘badly received by the British public’.

Johnny Weissmuller (as Tarzan) and Maureen O’Sullivan (as Jane) had made 6 movies for MGM, but when this Tarzan-meets-the-Nazis propaganda flick was made at RKO Maureen bowed out. In the plot Jane is on holiday! She never returned to the jungle. Johnny did 5 more Tarzans plus 13 Jungle Jim films and a TV series.

‘Colonel Blimp’ has a well deserved reputation as a clever satire.  

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Scientists and MPs plan Britain’s post-War future based entirely on the ‘inexhaustible supplies’ of coal – oops! At least they correctly predicted the ‘electrification of the railways’.

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There must be hundreds of authors who were household names in their day, but who are now all but forgotten. Rex Beach was an American novelist, playwright and Olympic silver medallist water-polo player (1904 St Louis) who spent 5 years in Alaska during the Klondike Gold Rush and wrote several very popular novels in the Jack London idiom. His second, ‘The Spoilers’, was filmed 5 times. After the death of his wife he committed suicide in 1949.

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A lot of the older papers (1920’s-1930’s) I have blogged have had episodes of fiction serials in them, which I haven’t posted because 1 day’s excerpt of a story would be pointless, however this paper has this complete short story written by Wing-Commander (later Group Captain) Leonard Cheshire who went on to win the Victoria Cross in 1944. See this post for more on Leonard Cheshire.

The end of the Berlin Wall

Today dated Saturday November 11^th 1989

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For many years I didn’t realise that Berlin was actually 100 miles inside East Germany and thought that the Wall was just part of the East/West border. Actually its 96-mile length encircled West Berlin while the 866-mile border between West Germany and the German Democratic Republic ran from the Baltic Sea in the North to Czechoslovakia in the South. This border had been closed in 1952 and by 1960 the East German government had realised that the Berlin road and subway access to the West was a gap through which more and more of their citizens were ‘escaping’, so the work on building the Berlin Wall started in 1961.

In the summer of 1989 thirteen thousand East Germans fled across the open borders between Hungary and Austria to West Germany. In September the leadership of the Social Unity Party that ran the GDR started to give in under pressure from a growing protest movement and on November 9th 1989, the government relaxed travel regulations and allowed East Germans to cross directly from East to West Berlin. When hundreds of thousands of people gathered at the checkpoints in the Wall later that day and demanded to be let through, the leadership was unable to withstand the pressure, and the Berlin Wall was opened.

Over the following days the Wall was ‘occupied’ by both East and West Berliners and was breached in several places both unofficially and officially to create new crossings. The total demolition of the Wall followed in June 1990 and the reunification of Germany followed on October 3^rd 1990.

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Oops. Apparently the mistake cost about £180,000 in printing costs. I wonder if anyone kept one from being burnt. It would probably be worth a bob or two to a collector.

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I think there may be a printing error here – ‘£179.6’ – for what, a litre? A gallon? A tanker full? According to www.theaa.com the price in 1989 was about 185.8 new pence per gallon, so I reckon the above should read £1:79.6p a gallon or 39.5p a litre.

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The final paragraph of this article about Myodil is typical of the response from a big company like Glaxo – “we did warn you in the leaflet”. Who, when about to be injected by a nurse in prep for an X-ray asks to read the leaflet that was supplied with whatever is being administered? 

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What’s acid house music? Apparently it’s a variant of house music characterized by the use of simple tone generators with tempo-controlled resonant filters primarily using bass-line synthesisers and a drum track. It originated in Chicago and arrived in England in the late 1980’s. The word ‘acid’ doesn’t refer to LSD. Quite what it does refer to I can’t work out. The drug choice of Acid House fans was Ecstasy and it was the media fuelled moral panic over the use of this drug that led to the police raids and arrests of party organizers like Robert Darby.  Doncha just love it when someone in their late 60’s tries to explain youth culture? Almost as bad as some spotty TV presenter who was born this side of 1990 trying to tell us what it was like to live through the 1960’s.

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Maureen Lipman’s Beattie in the British Telecom (get it? Beattie – BT – British Telecom) adverts was for a while one of the most popular characters on TV and as instantly recognisable as Alexander the meerkat is now.

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An odd competition – win a house but, by the way, you’ll have to sell your own home to make up the £66,000 shortfall on the purchase price.

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The TV viewing charts and predictably the top 10 programmes by viewing numbers are all soaps. ‘Naked Video’ was not what it sounds like – this was the comedy sketch show that gave us Gregor Fisher’s Rab C Nesbitt and, my favourite, John Sparkes’ Welsh poet Siadwel.

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The puppet based satire show Spitting Image ran for 19 seasons between 1984 and 1996 and featured the voices of such household names as Steve Coogan, Alistair McGowan, John Thomson, Jan Ravens, Harry Enfield, Enn Reitel, Hugh Dennis, Phil Cornwell, Jon Culshaw, John Sessions, Phil Cool, Rory Bremner and Pamela Stephenson.

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Regular readers of this blog will realise that it isn’t the exploits of David Bryant or an interest in bowls but the drawing that attracted me to this item.

Cigarette Price Battle

Daily Mirror dated Tuesday September 24^th 1968

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When the front page of a newspaper features a story about a dancing mouse you can rest assured that no wars have broken out, no Popes assassinated, no famous film stars died and no planes have crashed. To a lesser degree the same can be said for a paper that leads with a headline about the price of cigarettes. Combine the two and you have a ‘slow news day’.

I’ve never been a smoker. I tried but nearly choking and watering eyes just didn’t appeal and, as my grey-haired old mother used to point out, I’ve always been ‘as tight as a mackerel’s arse’, so I didn’t see any sense in paying for the displeasure. The prediction that small shops would suffer from supermarkets’ price-cutting was true and still is.

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The Ford factory in Dagenham produced its first vehicle in 1931 and its last in 2002. Some say the Unions ruined the British car industry and some say the Unions were necessary because the employers put profits before people. I lived in Dagenham but never worked at Ford’s or in any other factory so I really couldn't comment. 

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Farmer John Derek James sought refuge in a derelict cottage near Weston-under-Redcastle, Shropshire, after being challenged by the police over the illegal possession of a shotgun. He took a woman hostage and held out against a combined force of police and soldiers for 17 days. The siege ended when the woman took the gun off him while he was asleep. At the subsequent trial he was sent to Broadmoor Mental Hospital.

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Dr Christian (or Christiaan) Barnard had performed the World’s first successful human heart transplant in 1967 on Louis Washkansky, who died 18 days later of pneumonia. I'm sure there is something to say about white South Africans receiving black South Africans' hearts but I'd rather not go there.

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Tony Blackburn and Ed Stewart posing with two young ladies. Let’s hope for the DJs’ sake the ladies are older than they look.

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British Rail and its French equivalent, SNFC, operated the Princess Margaret hovercraft from 1968 until 2000 jointly. The craft was seen in the Bond film ‘Diamonds Are Forever’. 

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These days I imagine that an insurance company setting a 25 mile limit on a driver would constitute a breach of human rights and be earning some lawyers a few bob in The Hague or Strasbourg. 

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In 1968 there were just over 18,000 drink-driving convictions in England and Wales. In 1988 there were over 105,000 but the figure has been stabilised at about 85,000 in recent years. Oddly the number of fatalities due to drink-driving dropped steadily between 1979 at 1640 to 430 in 2006, possibly due to a series of December TV campaigns have informed, cajoled and shocked drivers into not drinking and driving. 

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The General Certificate of Education exams were introduced in 1951 to replace the old School Certificate and Higher School Certificate exams. Results were originally graded 1 – 9 with 1 – 6 being passes, but this was later replaced with A – E for passes and U for fail. In 1988 the GCE’s were replaced by GCSE’s using A – G and U, but recently there has been talk of reverting to a number system of 8 – 1 with 8 being the top grade. Fun isn’t it?

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Jennifer Croxton only appeared in the 1 Avengers episode – she played Special Services agent Lady Diana Forbes-Blakeney in ‘Killer’ a story in the 1968/69 Linda Thorson season.

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Strange how our attitude to words change. The word ‘cripple’ would never appear in a headline these days and is even mildly shocking when seen in print, but in 1968 you, and I, would probably not have even noticed it. At least the policeman was convicted and received a jail sentence, which is surprising.

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This could well have been printed last September following the appallingly wet summer we had in 2012.

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Let me get this straight – printer Edward Wilson forged £1.25million to sell to Argentine rebels and planned to use the proceeds to help the needy in Nigeria, and was talked into this by a ‘total stranger’. Was Jonathan Routh doing ‘Candid Camera’ in 1968?

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The Larks, drawn by Jack Dunkley lasted from 1957 until 1985. I liked it because the father character looked just like my brother-in-law did at the time. Its demise can be added to the list of crimes committed by Robert Maxwell who took over the Daily Mirror in 1984.

I can’t find out anything about ‘The Flutters’ but I thought I’d give it an airing.

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The great Roy Kinnear who did everything from Shakespeare, Hammer Horror, ‘The Avengers, ‘That Was The Week That Was’, Sherlock Holmes, The Beatles’ ‘Help!’, Dickens, ‘Sparrow Can’t Sing’ and ‘Jackanory’ to ‘The Return of the Musketeers’ in 1988 during the filming of which he fell from a horse and died in hospital the next day. His son Rory Kinnear was in the recent Bond films ‘Quantum of Solace’ and ‘Skyfall’.

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In August 1968 the Soviet Union had invaded the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic because the Communist government of Alexander Dubček was contemplating liberal reforms. When there is nothing else you can do humour can help.

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The Queen’s sister Princess Margaret Rose had married the society photographer Anthony (or is it Antony?) Armstrong-Jones in 1960. They were divorced in 1978. 

Wikipedia calls him  ‘Antony’, the BBC ‘Anthony’, the Telegraph ‘Antony’, Pathe News ‘Anthony’.  All together now - “You say Antony, I say Anthony, You say Christian, I say Christiaan, Let’s call the whole thing off.”